buffer-overrun

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.

https://theivorytowercrumbles.tumblr.com/post/35380914795/the-well-of-loneliness

“If you are personally uncomfortable with your own body …”

So, yes, internalized misogyny is a real problem.

But it is not something I can fight every fucking minute.

When I was pregnant and spent 8 months sick as a dog, when I had a miscarriage and spiraled into postpartum depression, when I got a write-up from my boss for not spending enough time at work because of juggling child and health care issues, the worst, stupidest, tropeyest, most melodramatic m/m slash was a refuge for me.  Just something dumb and pleasurable and unreal. And it made all the actual gross misogyny in my life a little easier to bear. And not because I hate my body or think pussy is gross.

And I do write explicit femslash. Maybe because I’m a bisexual in a monogamous relationship with a man, and I need to indulge those fantasies? I have no idea, and I don’t really care. I am deeply suspicious of simplistic explanations of female desire. Whether they’re coming from evolutionary psychologists, or people concerned about my internalized misogyny and false consciousness.

http://professorfangirl.tumblr.com/post/102971112229/a-subject-responds-to-fandom-meta

Thank you so much to professorfangirl and gascon-en-exil!

This is an extremely long text post, so I have put most of it behind a [read more]

I have pulled out one key paragraph, but one should really read all of it.

professorfangirl: (submission from gascon-en-exil)

As you pointed out, one cannot underestimate the significance of contemporary fandom culture, yaoi and slash included, in providing a space and much-needed visibility for women exploring and expressing themselves (relatively) free from patriarchal dismissals of the value of - and in extreme cases even the existence of - female sexual desire and gratification.  Be that as it may, however, when that expression manifests itself as M/M fanwork produced by and for a (mostly heterosexual) female audience the result is, to put it bluntly, inherently no different from straight men jacking off to lesbian porn.  It can contribute to greater sympathy for and more willingness to contribute positively to issues relevant to the people being objectified, but it certainly doesn’t have to, and you’ll always have to contend with the specter of queer fetishization waiting to make an appearance whenever the subjects of your erotica find it and are made uncomfortable by the realization that people who do not and will never share their sexual experiences are nevertheless deriving erotic satisfaction from exactly those kinds of experiences.

I have to admit that I get really defensive at any suggestion that women writing slash (which I use to mean M/M erotica regardless of the canonical sexuality of the characters) is homophobic (i.e. objectifying, fetishizing, perpetuating stereotypes, appropriative, silencing, etc.).  Which probably means there’s something there.

I don’t know why slash is so appealing to women in general, and to me specifically. I think trying to create coherent explanations for desire is probably futile (exhibit A: Freud).  Maybe, for me, heterosexual erotica is tainted by real life gender roles and is therefore not as good fodder for fantasy.  In my early 20s I had a bisexual boyfriend who watched a lot of porn.  And I found the mainstream F/M and F/F porn to be so distractingly fake that it was really hard to see it as even vaguely sexy.  And of course the M/M porn was also fake, but it seemed less fake, more like it was populated by actual humans who were actually hot for each other (and the guys were way cuter than Ron Jeremy). [Incidentally, my boyfriend was kind of uncomfortable with how hot I found it, and that was pretty much the end of us watching porn together.] I’m not actually that upset about straight men watching F/F porn (though it would be lovely if some of the profits went to support homeless queer youth, for instance) but I can get pretty pissed of about toxic queer tropes in mainstream media, and I’m not really sure where to situate slash in that spectrum.

But, I am also really interested in the ways that the (predominantly) women writers explore what it might be like to be a man, some very specific man that we are otherwise only seeing from the outside.  What is it like to have sex as a man? Many of us know about giving a blow job or a hand job or being the penetrated partner or being queer as a woman, and the ways those things are socially constructed.  And we see how masculinity seems to be constructed around gay and straight men, and the ways that shame and grief play out in that context, but I’m sure we miss the mark a lot. [And I wonder if this is why you don’t see a lot of gay hook up culture represented.  I’ve read a lot of queer theory about public sex, but I still find it really hard to imagine what it would be like to masturbate in a porno theater while a stranger was watching, or how Grindr dates actually play out. Though Neville in Chase820’s Miracle Year and Draco in emmagrant01’s Left My Heart ring true to me.]

I also really love the counterfactual aspects of fanfic. If a character that canonically has sex with lots of women (Kirk, Bond, Watson) also had sex with men, would he risk being seen as a slut? If Sherlock were a woman, could she still get away with being such a dick?  If Irene’s role were played by a man, would I feel less pissed off by the characterization? (In splix’s If you can’t move heaven, raise hell, and Chryse’s A waste of breath, the answer is a resounding yes.)