Entries tagged with my issues

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Squeeing wrong

I’ve been thinking a lot about that 0.0001% post, and why I felt so hurt by it (before it got turned into the next round of Sherlock fandom wank).

So, I was having a tough week. It would have been Michael’s 41st birthday, and both the anniversary of his death and his birthday are always hard. And it’s getting to the point where I don’t really know how to memorialize him anymore. I cannot imagine what he would have been like at 41. I’m not really what I imagined. And a surprising number of the people we used to get high with are still alive, so maybe, in some alternate universe, he could still be alive. But then I would have had to figure out how to break up with up, because our relationship was so toxic, I can’t imagine either of us figuring out how to adult if we’d still been together.

And I had just started seeing all these posts about Richard Siken, and went looking for his poetry and was blown away by Crush, and I’m not usually a big poetry reader.

For me,Crush is about being young and a big slutty mess. (See also Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl.) And then you throw being queer into the mix, and all the internalized issues about being monstrous and evil, and you basically get my late teens/ early 20s. And this is a time in my life that I have been trying to write about, and it’s really fucking hard. I was a total idiot who put myself in the worst, scariest situations, that at the time seemed perfectly normal. It’s very hard to talk about that time without being super judgey and condescending and over-analytical of a bunch of crap that you couldn’t pay me enough to do now. And Crushcaptures that passion and irrationality. Perfectly.

And all the stuff about dreaming about his dead boyfriend? And how to work through all the unresolved crap with a fucking ghost? I was sitting in my car crying.

And, like, I understand that men get a lot more attention and prestige in publishing than women do, even from women readers, and that basically all of fandom’s brushes with famous people seem to put fandom in an even worse light.

And I make an effort to buy and read work by women and promote them on my main (more literary) Tumblr. A post I made quoting Chris Kraus talking about women’s confessional writing has, like, 200 notes (which, for me, is a lot).

And I’m not convinced that Siken is going to write very good Johnlock. Slash has it’s own tropes and rhythms and pacing, and writing explicit fanfic is very different than writing other genres, and especially poetry, where you can say “the dirtiest thing you know,” and leave it at that.

But I read the 0.0001% comment as saying that my heartfelt squee about an author I had discovered because of the squee of other Tumblr fangirls was evidence of internalized misogyny. And I know that hottest of my hot button issues are always about being a bad feminist and a bad queer women.

I know that it is important to have our biases and blind spots brought out into the light, because without self-awareness, you cannot improve. But also sometimes I just need the space to enjoy the things that give me pleasure.

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Notes on Why Slash?

So, I’m leery of any and all explanations of why women like m/m slash, particularly because they tend to get thrown back at us is demeaning ways, but also because I think desire and sexuality are very hard to “explain” (just look at the crazy shit Freud came up with). But here’s a rundown of various theories.

M/F romance has been ruined for women by all the terrible tropes in pop cultures, and M/M romance is able to remain purely fantasy
M/F romance has been ruined for women by their own lived experiences, and M/M romance is able to remain purely fantasy. There’s two ways to read this one – either women have had so many terrible experiences that they are traumatized by M/F sex, or that women have more of a general understanding of what real M/F sex is like, and cannot suspend their disbelief for fantasy sex scenes.
Women are obsessed with cock and M/M slash has twice as much cock
Women are buying into the harmful stereotype that gay men are lustful cock monsters
Women find it very difficult to imagine women as active agents of their own desire, so if you want two people who are totally hot for each other they need to both be men
Pop culture (particularly several shows that happen to come up when you google queerbaiting) are so focused on the men that it is very hard to fantasize about the women. The shows build up all this UST between the main characters, and women write fanfic to resolve it. Women characters don’t get enough screen time to develop any UST.
Because of internalized misogyny, women think pussy is gross
Women are jealous of other women and don’t want to think about them having sex with their favorite boys (this is a genderswapped version of the most common explanation for why men watch lesbian porn)
Fanfic writers like to throw lots of obstacles into their stories to ramp up the UST, and gay sex is seen as having the most obstacles, particularly since all these characters are assumed to be straight in canon

I think that covers most of the explanations I’ve heard.

Basically most of them boil down to objectifying gay men or internalized misogyny, which can be a heavy burden to put on something that seems otherwise fun and mostly harmless.

The gentlest explanation is that m/m slash can remain pure fantasy. And honestly, there is only so much time one can spend flagellating oneself for one’s inconvenient desires.

I’m actually really interested in pre-“world wide web” M/M slash (or more broadly women reading gay male erotica). There is now a robust online slash community, but it’s not like this is a new phenomenon.

When I was a teenager (late 80s, early 90s), I read:

Storm Constantine’s Wraethu (a sort of proto-omegaverse)
John Rechy’s City of Night (memoir of pre-condom gay circuit, kind of an overwhelming avalanche of cock)
William S Burrough’s Junky and Naked Lunch (maybe more titillating than an actual turn on, and also just weird)
Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (no sex, but blood-drinking as sexualized exchange of bodily fluids)
One of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books (which was very important for me in coming to terms with feeling guilty about being attracted to my friends, but in retrospect really gross in light of MZB’s defending of her husband’s sexual abuse of children)
Orson Scott Card’s Songmaster (though I got creeped out as soon as I figured out how homophobic Card was)
The High Risk anthology
I think there is at least one M/M story in Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts
And I think there is M/M content in Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women

The first porn movie I saw was gay porn at an 18 plus gay club in Berkeley (I was 17, but they didn’t card). It wasn’t really a turn on. Just weird and intense, and i was trying really hard to seem cool and grownup. But, in my early 20s, I was dating a bisexual man who watched a lot of porn, and he was actually kind of disturbed by how hot I found gay porn (I found het porn and any F/F porn created for men fake and annoying).

I lived in a university town and spent a lot of time in book stores as a teenager, so I read a lot of weird stuff.

Mainstream filmed porn is such a thorny feminist issue. It just seems easier to avoid it, particularly since so much of it doesn’t really work for me.

At university, my roommate wrote a women’s studies essay on woman-produced porn, so I ended up watching a bunch of porn with her. The only one I actually thought was hot was Bathroom Sluts (Fatale Productions, 1991) which was very punk and DIY. Years later a friend of mine was in Christopher Lee’s Sex Flesh in Blood (1999) but it was just weird watching it, because I had heard her talk about it so much, like where she got the body paint for one scene, and how she thought the camera angles for the sex scenes were really trashy and how she was holding the boom in the bathroom scene and dislocated her shoulder.

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In response to Three Patch Podcast #33

http://three-patch.com/2015/02/01/episode-33/#more-1620

There were so many good and important points in the femslash discussion, but still I ended up feeling like I was going to cry. There are many kinds of criticism that I am getting better at accepting gracefully. But the idea that my pleasures are wrong, and (especially in queer women’s circles) not woman-oriented enough, hits so close to my heart. To so many fights with my ex-girlfriend about the books I read and the music I listened to. To public comment on my dyed hair, my plucked eyebrows, my shaved legs, the length of my skirt, what I like in bed, whom I’m attracted to.

Can I just say I’ll try. Rec something you love and I will check it out. And I will try to put all my baggage aside, and not feel like I’ve failed if I don’t like it.

Don’t ask me to justify what I find so appealing about M/M slash, and I won’t pull an insulting and insufficient excuse out of my ass. Because just knowing my desires and fetishes are socially constructed (and informed by all the worst biases and stereotypes of our culture) doesn’t mean I can dictate them. I can interrogate them, but I cannot bear to do it every minute. My world of acceptable pleasures is already so circumscribed by responsibility (to myself, to my children, to my husband, to my parents).

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my issues

New rule

People who make me cry three times get Tumblr Saviored

One more time and I unfollow.

I can’t decide if I’m being oversensitive or not curating my dashboard carefully enough.

And it’s always shit about being a bad queer woman. Which, like, duh. This is not news to me.

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(no subject)

I was going to reblog to the post this actually about, but I so do not have the energy to get into an internet argument with anyone. So, it’s passive aggressive vague blogging for me.

To make a long story not so long, the issue is the erasure of F/F relationships throughout all of time, including in fandom, even though fandom doesn’t have any of the various “excuses” that for-profit pop-culture falls back on.

But I just don’t have the energy to be berated right now.

Is it possible to just say, I’m trying. To think about things critically. To be self-critical and push beyond my comfort zone in any number of ways.

But there are so many other things I should probably be doing other than reading slash (including publishing a scientific paper on mouse immunology and writing a creative nonfiction piece on postpartum depression).

And I know there are so many things wrong with M/M fic from stereotyping gay men to erasing women. And those are just the legitimate problems. There’s also a whole world of cynical media attention focused on humiliating women fans.

And I think it’s possible to say that mainstream and pop culture have a big impact on what you find desirable without abdicating all responsibility for self-improvement.

But, like, desire is not always what you want it to be. There has always been someone who has found something wrong with my desires.