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So, um, anyone who has known me for a long time (a few of you on my friendslist) knows one of my fannish philosophies is "Slash can be feminist, but isn't INHERENTLY feminist." I've said it so often that I haven't felt the need to say it for a really long time. Plus, I hadn't written any fanfics since 2006. But now I am writing again, and some of the comments of geek blogosphere feminists got me thinking about it once more.
I'd thought about it first when I read one wanky feminist (from the radical side of the spectrum, I say this as a qualifier -- not as a judgment on radical feminism) whose name I don't want to repeat saying that slash wasn't feminist because the female writers repeated the violence often seen in mainstream pornography, and that they were turning men into sex objects. Another, more mainstream feminist also repeated the violence complaint.
I thought of addressing their arguments, but decided eventually to let it go and forget about it. Mostly because of this. But then I read this, which is about Twilight but reminded me of some of the more annoying "slash is feminist" arguments.
This last part is one of my favorite things about the books. They’re all about female desire. Teenage female desire. Yes, there’s an underlying message that abstinence is the only safe way to handle sexuality–vampirism and werewolf-ism both being metaphors, mostly, in these books, for male sexuality–but Bella is the one who pushes for premarital sex, both literally and in the metaphoric sense, premarital vampirism.
These may sound like two divergent topics, but they tie together, I swear.
The common argument for slash being inherently feminist is that it's a celebration of female desire. Or, to put it in more pretentious bullshit language, turns the male gaze that makes women into sex objects and turns it back to make men into the objects of desire ... yeah.
I don't have a whole lot of respect for this argument, as you can probably tell. Part of it is I do sometimes worry about the "Do I fetishize gay men?" (and then I figure I don't think I treat any actual gay men with any squee/entitlement so I just try to be good and do my thing). Most of it, however, is that quite often the results just don't add up. I've seen so many slash fanfics where the women are demonized -- either through mis-characterization or the other characters' verbal abuse, or the awesomeness of gay sex is illustrated by the characters thinking of how much sex with women sucks, or any other manner of things that just made my feminist self feel really icky when I read them. And I haven't even gone into the far-too-many essays that say slash is feminist because it allows women to identify with the well-written, good male characters and not the awfully-written, worthy of contempt female characters because those make me choke on my own spit.
An individual writer, of course, can write a feminist slash fanfic, or at least a slash fanfic with strong female characters, or at the VERY FUCKING LEAST something that's feminist neutral. (And I do recognize the pitfalls of the "Yenta" Sue - a female character who exists to get the two men together, by the way. I've seen writers move beyond that, such as a fanfic I read recently that broke up the m/f couple but the female half got back together with her ex and gained phenomenal cosmic powers). Many individual writers do and I am grateful, but those works, of course, are feminist/not sexist by the grace of their writers, but not their genre.
The same is true, by the way, of ANY female-written work. I haven't read Twilight (although I did see the movie), but I'll be honorable and not use that series as an example. Instead, I'll use the Anita Blake/Merry Gentry series, of which I've read the earlier parts.
Laurell K. Hamilton's later work (which I haven't read) has a lot of sex. Merry Gentry Book One (which I did read) had a sex scene just about every chapter, each with a different guy, each with long, involved descriptions of how beautiful each one was and what they were wearing and so on. While the earlier Anita Blake books mostly involve Anita dealing with her sexual attraction to the two men in her life while remaining true to her principles (PARALLEL! Although it's more like Edward than Bella, I think.), Hamilton has said that a heroine who is able to be sexually free was a long-time goal of hers. From the Wiki ...
I started reading a lot of hardboiled detective fiction—Robert B. Parker in particular—and I read a lot of strong female protagonists. But there was one problem, a difference between the male and female protagonists of the different series—even the strongest of the women did not get to do some of the things the men got to do. The men got to cuss, the women rarely; the men got to kill people and not feel bad about it, if the women killed someone they had to feel really, really bad about it afterward and it had to be an extreme situation; the men got to have sex, often and on stage and very casually, but if the women had sex it had to be offstage, very sanitized. I thought this was unfair.
I think Hamilton came at the idea for her series at a good place, and I do think she's more feminist than any of Meyer's "But Bella has the CHOICE to die for her vampire baby! How can you be feminist and not respect her CHOICE?" bullshit I've seen from her interviews. Nevertheless, Hamilton's series still have sexist elements despite her good intentions. I'm not even talking about the constant sex, here. I'm talking about how pretty much every other "good" woman other than Anita and Merry are victims (The prostitute in a wheelchair! Dead female police officer! Anita's friend/vampire victim! Merry's abused grandma! Merry's friend who stays with an abusive spouse! C'mon, you can think of more!) or significantly weaker than the main character (Ronnie). Any strong female characters are villainous and pretty much worthy of contempt and don't have very much personality behind that (Dominga Salvador, Andais - especially Andais, waaaah! I wanted to see her shine on like a crazy evil diamond!).
So, yeah, chicks getting their hormones on =/= feminism.
That being said, one thing that is really, really nice about the slash community is that it does sort of allow for a female fandom "safe space." This was a benefit I didn't quite realize until I'd tried to re-enter the more mainstream comics fandom after spending time in the slash sections. While the slash and yaoi communities are far from utopias -- in addition to some of the sexist assumptions there's also a fair share of homophobes and other problems -- it's really nice to squee over characters and not have to deal with the bizarre worship/flirting/entitlement/anti-women joke bullshit that's more common in mainstream parts of fandom. And women sharing thoughts on what they love and being fans on their own when the mainstream media often likes to ignore them as a purchasing/fan power is just cool in general.
Side note: Is this the time to address the "slash is lesbian" theory? Hey, it is! BECAUSE I SAID SO. Anyway, there's a theory going around that despite being made up of stories of men together, slash is actually lesbian because it's all about women writing things to turn on other women. I don't disagree with the theory, even though it's a bit reductive (mostly because the writer's benefit to turning on the other women in question isn't her own sexual arousal but a sense of personal accomplishment, I would wager) but I question why this is supposed to be a bad thing. I also question how it's any different from mainstream, men-writing-for-men porn. I mean, for every Jenna Jameson, there's a man behind the camera trying to take her picture in the perfect way to get other men off.
Okay, sorry about that digression but it's been bugging me for a long-ass time.
And now onto the issue of the violence and other nasty stuff inherent in slash. Ahem ...
Basic answer: FUCK OFF! WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW?
Actual serious answer: I'm rather pissed at the assumption that nobody in the slash fandom has ever thought of this ever or is not still thinking of this currently or that the whole "list warnings" good faith measure wasn't created to address this issue. Yeah, you've got a couple of dipshits who won't do that stuff or will deliberately act like shits to other slashers. (I'm thinking of a kerfuffle on fandom_wank where one writer in a gift exchange wrote a fanfic for someone else using all of the person's squicks, basically because she disagreed with the receiver's preferences and decided to be an asshole about it.) But those people are called out as dipshits, because ... hey, slashers are able to criticize each other.
Slashers have debates about what's acceptable a LOT, even if the general consensus pretty much always comes back to "Write what you like, read what you like." I remember not too long ago there was a debate on whether or not slash fanfics should actively support and demonstrate safe sex. It didn't go much of anywhere (probably for the best), but it also shows that these issues are important, and that there are many times that "Women did it! It's OK!" isn't acceptable. So, yeah, slashers can be morons, but they can think seriously about important issues, as well.
But before I wrap this up, I do want to address the issue of violence and other unpleasantness in slash fanfics. I can see where it would be a problem for some people. Hell, I was recently triggered by a fanfic and didn't react very well. On the other side of the spectrum, I write BDSM fanfics that some of my friends -- one of them one of my betas -- have told me they don't care for, and I respect that.
I also think a good amount of mainstream porn is ... I don't like to use "degrading," because that word's meaning has become far too muddled and loaded and seems to carry an implication that sex itself lessens a human being, which I don't believe it does. However, I do think some porn is dehumanizing. Defining dehumanizing takes that "I know it when I see it" eye, but I tend to just define it as anything that not only wants to possess the person of desire but also utterly destroy him or her, either physically and/or emotionally. I remember in History of Feminism reading an essay by Andrea Dworkin. At the time I was anti-Dworkin, and still sort of am, but when I read her critique of a Hustler picture of a woman tied up to the front of a truck driven by two men with a caption that read "They've gone beaver hunting," I had to nod and go, "Yeah, you've got a good point."
I won't say with authority that no dehumanizing fanfics written by women exist, but I do think they're a pretty rare beast in slash communities. And I don't think hurt/comfort fanfiction, which is where most of the violent and unpleasant fanfics tend to reside, is a part of that dehumanizing tradition. Hurt/comfort fanfiction tends to break characters down only to bring them up again, often through the power of love/buttsex. Unrealistic sometimes? Yes. But it comes from a different place than a simple getting off on violent sex.
Although even love of violent sex or BDSM may not come from some need to control and break people down. People have darkness in their hearts for a variety of reasons, writers, even amateur writers, are no exception. Even good Mormon Stephenie Meyer ended her saga with a bizarre, violent birth scene. That doesn't mean anyone's above criticism, even if, say, they like to write about rape because they were once raped and this is their way of controlling their situation, or whatever, but I do think expecting slash to be free of violence and unpleasantness is unreasonable and unfair, especially if the writer is responsible about it.
I'd thought about it first when I read one wanky feminist (from the radical side of the spectrum, I say this as a qualifier -- not as a judgment on radical feminism) whose name I don't want to repeat saying that slash wasn't feminist because the female writers repeated the violence often seen in mainstream pornography, and that they were turning men into sex objects. Another, more mainstream feminist also repeated the violence complaint.
I thought of addressing their arguments, but decided eventually to let it go and forget about it. Mostly because of this. But then I read this, which is about Twilight but reminded me of some of the more annoying "slash is feminist" arguments.
This last part is one of my favorite things about the books. They’re all about female desire. Teenage female desire. Yes, there’s an underlying message that abstinence is the only safe way to handle sexuality–vampirism and werewolf-ism both being metaphors, mostly, in these books, for male sexuality–but Bella is the one who pushes for premarital sex, both literally and in the metaphoric sense, premarital vampirism.
These may sound like two divergent topics, but they tie together, I swear.
The common argument for slash being inherently feminist is that it's a celebration of female desire. Or, to put it in more pretentious bullshit language, turns the male gaze that makes women into sex objects and turns it back to make men into the objects of desire ... yeah.
I don't have a whole lot of respect for this argument, as you can probably tell. Part of it is I do sometimes worry about the "Do I fetishize gay men?" (and then I figure I don't think I treat any actual gay men with any squee/entitlement so I just try to be good and do my thing). Most of it, however, is that quite often the results just don't add up. I've seen so many slash fanfics where the women are demonized -- either through mis-characterization or the other characters' verbal abuse, or the awesomeness of gay sex is illustrated by the characters thinking of how much sex with women sucks, or any other manner of things that just made my feminist self feel really icky when I read them. And I haven't even gone into the far-too-many essays that say slash is feminist because it allows women to identify with the well-written, good male characters and not the awfully-written, worthy of contempt female characters because those make me choke on my own spit.
An individual writer, of course, can write a feminist slash fanfic, or at least a slash fanfic with strong female characters, or at the VERY FUCKING LEAST something that's feminist neutral. (And I do recognize the pitfalls of the "Yenta" Sue - a female character who exists to get the two men together, by the way. I've seen writers move beyond that, such as a fanfic I read recently that broke up the m/f couple but the female half got back together with her ex and gained phenomenal cosmic powers). Many individual writers do and I am grateful, but those works, of course, are feminist/not sexist by the grace of their writers, but not their genre.
The same is true, by the way, of ANY female-written work. I haven't read Twilight (although I did see the movie), but I'll be honorable and not use that series as an example. Instead, I'll use the Anita Blake/Merry Gentry series, of which I've read the earlier parts.
Laurell K. Hamilton's later work (which I haven't read) has a lot of sex. Merry Gentry Book One (which I did read) had a sex scene just about every chapter, each with a different guy, each with long, involved descriptions of how beautiful each one was and what they were wearing and so on. While the earlier Anita Blake books mostly involve Anita dealing with her sexual attraction to the two men in her life while remaining true to her principles (PARALLEL! Although it's more like Edward than Bella, I think.), Hamilton has said that a heroine who is able to be sexually free was a long-time goal of hers. From the Wiki ...
I started reading a lot of hardboiled detective fiction—Robert B. Parker in particular—and I read a lot of strong female protagonists. But there was one problem, a difference between the male and female protagonists of the different series—even the strongest of the women did not get to do some of the things the men got to do. The men got to cuss, the women rarely; the men got to kill people and not feel bad about it, if the women killed someone they had to feel really, really bad about it afterward and it had to be an extreme situation; the men got to have sex, often and on stage and very casually, but if the women had sex it had to be offstage, very sanitized. I thought this was unfair.
I think Hamilton came at the idea for her series at a good place, and I do think she's more feminist than any of Meyer's "But Bella has the CHOICE to die for her vampire baby! How can you be feminist and not respect her CHOICE?" bullshit I've seen from her interviews. Nevertheless, Hamilton's series still have sexist elements despite her good intentions. I'm not even talking about the constant sex, here. I'm talking about how pretty much every other "good" woman other than Anita and Merry are victims (The prostitute in a wheelchair! Dead female police officer! Anita's friend/vampire victim! Merry's abused grandma! Merry's friend who stays with an abusive spouse! C'mon, you can think of more!) or significantly weaker than the main character (Ronnie). Any strong female characters are villainous and pretty much worthy of contempt and don't have very much personality behind that (Dominga Salvador, Andais - especially Andais, waaaah! I wanted to see her shine on like a crazy evil diamond!).
So, yeah, chicks getting their hormones on =/= feminism.
That being said, one thing that is really, really nice about the slash community is that it does sort of allow for a female fandom "safe space." This was a benefit I didn't quite realize until I'd tried to re-enter the more mainstream comics fandom after spending time in the slash sections. While the slash and yaoi communities are far from utopias -- in addition to some of the sexist assumptions there's also a fair share of homophobes and other problems -- it's really nice to squee over characters and not have to deal with the bizarre worship/flirting/entitlement/anti-women joke bullshit that's more common in mainstream parts of fandom. And women sharing thoughts on what they love and being fans on their own when the mainstream media often likes to ignore them as a purchasing/fan power is just cool in general.
Side note: Is this the time to address the "slash is lesbian" theory? Hey, it is! BECAUSE I SAID SO. Anyway, there's a theory going around that despite being made up of stories of men together, slash is actually lesbian because it's all about women writing things to turn on other women. I don't disagree with the theory, even though it's a bit reductive (mostly because the writer's benefit to turning on the other women in question isn't her own sexual arousal but a sense of personal accomplishment, I would wager) but I question why this is supposed to be a bad thing. I also question how it's any different from mainstream, men-writing-for-men porn. I mean, for every Jenna Jameson, there's a man behind the camera trying to take her picture in the perfect way to get other men off.
Okay, sorry about that digression but it's been bugging me for a long-ass time.
And now onto the issue of the violence and other nasty stuff inherent in slash. Ahem ...
Basic answer: FUCK OFF! WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW?
Actual serious answer: I'm rather pissed at the assumption that nobody in the slash fandom has ever thought of this ever or is not still thinking of this currently or that the whole "list warnings" good faith measure wasn't created to address this issue. Yeah, you've got a couple of dipshits who won't do that stuff or will deliberately act like shits to other slashers. (I'm thinking of a kerfuffle on fandom_wank where one writer in a gift exchange wrote a fanfic for someone else using all of the person's squicks, basically because she disagreed with the receiver's preferences and decided to be an asshole about it.) But those people are called out as dipshits, because ... hey, slashers are able to criticize each other.
Slashers have debates about what's acceptable a LOT, even if the general consensus pretty much always comes back to "Write what you like, read what you like." I remember not too long ago there was a debate on whether or not slash fanfics should actively support and demonstrate safe sex. It didn't go much of anywhere (probably for the best), but it also shows that these issues are important, and that there are many times that "Women did it! It's OK!" isn't acceptable. So, yeah, slashers can be morons, but they can think seriously about important issues, as well.
But before I wrap this up, I do want to address the issue of violence and other unpleasantness in slash fanfics. I can see where it would be a problem for some people. Hell, I was recently triggered by a fanfic and didn't react very well. On the other side of the spectrum, I write BDSM fanfics that some of my friends -- one of them one of my betas -- have told me they don't care for, and I respect that.
I also think a good amount of mainstream porn is ... I don't like to use "degrading," because that word's meaning has become far too muddled and loaded and seems to carry an implication that sex itself lessens a human being, which I don't believe it does. However, I do think some porn is dehumanizing. Defining dehumanizing takes that "I know it when I see it" eye, but I tend to just define it as anything that not only wants to possess the person of desire but also utterly destroy him or her, either physically and/or emotionally. I remember in History of Feminism reading an essay by Andrea Dworkin. At the time I was anti-Dworkin, and still sort of am, but when I read her critique of a Hustler picture of a woman tied up to the front of a truck driven by two men with a caption that read "They've gone beaver hunting," I had to nod and go, "Yeah, you've got a good point."
I won't say with authority that no dehumanizing fanfics written by women exist, but I do think they're a pretty rare beast in slash communities. And I don't think hurt/comfort fanfiction, which is where most of the violent and unpleasant fanfics tend to reside, is a part of that dehumanizing tradition. Hurt/comfort fanfiction tends to break characters down only to bring them up again, often through the power of love/buttsex. Unrealistic sometimes? Yes. But it comes from a different place than a simple getting off on violent sex.
Although even love of violent sex or BDSM may not come from some need to control and break people down. People have darkness in their hearts for a variety of reasons, writers, even amateur writers, are no exception. Even good Mormon Stephenie Meyer ended her saga with a bizarre, violent birth scene. That doesn't mean anyone's above criticism, even if, say, they like to write about rape because they were once raped and this is their way of controlling their situation, or whatever, but I do think expecting slash to be free of violence and unpleasantness is unreasonable and unfair, especially if the writer is responsible about it.
