slash and porn and yet again *waves at metafandom: hit me, babes*

[lobelia321]

While typing a response to ithiliana, it occurred to me that I wished to compose a post about it.

So: the interesting thing about slash is that we (wimmins) imagine what is hot and what turns on men, and how men work, and how their genitalia work. It is all about us in the emotional sense but not about us in the body sense.

Gay porn is about men's bodies and men's lusts and addressed to men's bodies and men's lusts.

Straight porn is addressed to men's lusts, ostensibly, though it also shows women, lots of them. But they rarely have orgasms. I have seen a female orgasm once in a porn film, and that was a film made in the 1920s when perhaps conventions hadn't hardened yet (as it were). And don't tell me you can't see a woman's orgasm: you most certainly can!

So, men come for men in porn. Men come for women in slash.

Now, I also like looking at the wimmins in porn-for-men although they don't have orgasms. So what is that all about? That is swimming in the interstices, perhaps, reading against the grain? Or not, who knows. And the men in fanfic turn me on a hell of a damn lot but the men in porn leave me quite cold. They are, in fact, vile. From taking my pulse while watching a porn video, you'd never know I was 95 per cent straight.

But that's the thing about slash: writing about bodies that aren't our own. And that's yet another reason why men can't write slash. Unless it be about women, haha.

I must go and muse about femslash. Because that doesn't fit in, does it? Any ideas on that one?

NOTE: Please do not metafandom this. I mean, I can't stop you but please. *offers cake*

Comments

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Um, if you don't want to be metafandomed, perhaps you should take out that wave in the title, because it's possible that a compiler might see the title and misread your note at the bottom, because the title says to me, "Please metafandom this!"

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Heh, yes, you are absolutely right. I started typing this with my head in one direction and ended the post with my head in another and never went back but just hit 'post'. So it goes. *sigh* Anyway, the danger seems to have passed, I have escaped unscathed! Maybe the sekrit is just to be very, very boring..? *gg*

[freyafloyd.livejournal.com]

I'm too narrowminded to know what metafandom means. If it is meant to mean that I shouldn't comment, then you shouldn't have posted. It is like waving a red rag at a bull and expecting not to be trampled.

I was discussing the whole slash thing with Mr Floyd, who brought the subject up in a negative and perplexed way.

Of course you don't like the men in men's porn. Men often seem to think women are too repressed and that is why they don't get into typical porn, so.. Let's reverse the typical mean's porn genre..

Two good looking young men with nice bodies are getting off with each other. They are wearing ludicrous underwear and touching each other in a very unnatural and exhibitionistic way. A very ugly, old, flabby woman with excessive body hair appears, and performs painful sexual acts upon both of these men, who behave as if the aforesaid acts are in some way pleasant.

How many straight men would be prepared to watch such a film?

Just because you don't like the look of some vile man in a porn film, it doesn't follow that you are unsure of your sexual identity.


In straight porn, women are the object. In slash, men are the object. But of course, it is all about the woman's gaze. I couldn't care less what men really think. Slash characters should think what I want them to think, for my reading pleasure. It doesn't make the characters into women; it just makes them into a more sexually appealing version of men.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is all very navelgazey and directed at people who have been obsessively reading nought but my LJ these past weeks, hah. I posted something about slash being for and by women and how men couldn't write it and someone linked that to a community called metafandom and all sorts of people I'd never heard of came in and disagreed with me and lorded it all over my LJ and I got traumatised! But I will continue to wave red flags and not flock and just hope no Danes come in to burn my flag.

Your description of reverseporn: *falls off chair laughing like a cackling cow* Oh, that is so priceless! I so want to see that film! Er, I'm already fantasising about who the men could be, and even who the woman could be...

Oh, I am completely sure of my sexual identity. I am so very, very straight with maybe 5 or 7 per cent of irregular waves of womanish lust passing through my life.

I couldn't care less what men really think.
This is just what I said in my metafandomed post, and people got really annoyed at that!!! Pish.

And yes, yes, to everything about sexually appealing men you just said. Gimme.

I read a fic the other day which had a spinning penis in it and was ludicrous. Yesterday I re-read Fabula_Rasa's Repechage, and it has men in it who come in 'fountains' and that is also ludicrous yet the fic is also hot as flames. Which just goes to show.

[alisdair-m.livejournal.com]

I suppose this means I will have to now dutifully scroll through your livejournal and find the terrible fight you have caused.

Did I split an infinitve there?

To dutifully scroll?

I am just trying to cause more trouble, it would seem.

[alisdair-m.livejournal.com]

Have read your journal fight. I think the point is that slash, overall, is a culture created by women. It doesn't really matter if a few men do it. It may matter in the future if a lot of men start doing it; that would change the culture.

Slash is not like football, the game. It may be rather like the fan culture of watching football. Football as a game has little inherent gender bias, but its fan culture does.

To suggest that slash has not come into existence as a result of gender or developed as a result of gender would be very odd.

The fact that some individual men now slash is neither here nor there.

Going off at a tangent...

Brokeback mountain isn't really slash as they shag in canon. Slash has to be an alternative telling of a canon. It cannot be the canon itself. Mary Renault is a slasher because she describes sexual acts between characters from history that were not known to have been sexually involved. History is the canon and she is the paid slasher. I suppose the only way in which BBM could be described as slash is that the overall canon of real life cowboy culture is homoerotic.

Men are often the people who set up a slashy (slashable, I suppose I mean) canon. Women are then the ones who usually slash it.

Some gay porn is derived from homoerotic subtext, just like slash. The difference to me is that gay porn writers notice the characters may be gay due to the subtext and then writes them as gay characters. Slash writers notice the homoerotic subtext, keep it in the slash fic, but add in sex.

So the men in slash don't behave like gay men. They behave like two straight men who have a homoerotic subtext going on (just like in the canon) and add in sex.

If we were interested in gay men, we'd write about real gay men all the time. It is the subtext that is sexy. That is why Brokeback Mountain is enjoyable to some extent - the subtext is never thrown away - the characters to some extent keep up the pretence of straightness.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Football analogy: very interesting! And topical as I am abject World Cup watcher and desperately trying to organise tickets. Football is actually slightly different. Slash seems to be globally feminine. Football in the UK is associated with working-class men. In Germany (where I am from although I now live in the UK), football is absolutely not class-restricted; every man can be a fan. And although it is largely a male culture in Germany, women participate heaps more than they do here in the UK. But then remember the last world cup where the Asians, unfamiliar with the Euro conventions, all turned out, with thousands of women cheering, and the stadium actually sounded different with so many female voices shouting? Everybody remarked on it.

Um, I digressed because you said 'football'.

To suggest that slash has not come into existence as a result of gender or developed as a result of gender would be very odd.

The fact that some individual men now slash is neither here nor there.

Oh you see, I completely agree with this! And this is what I said, is it not, and people got so annoyed by that! I am still learning how to handle this internet think, despite being around here for 4 years now.

Men are often the people who set up a slashy (slashable, I suppose I mean) canon. Women are then the ones who usually slash it.

I love this!!!

Mary Renault is so totally a slasher. I'd forgotten her!

The difference to me is that gay porn writers notice the characters may be gay due to the subtext and then writes them as gay characters. Slash writers notice the homoerotic subtext, keep it in the slash fic, but add in sex.

I don't get this. Can you explain again?

They behave like two straight men
Oh now I get it!!! Yes!! Absolutely! This is so interesting.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

There is no terrible fight. That is so not me. There were some people who challenged my views and even that form of mild disagreement totally threw me and made me retreat into offline life (!!!). *is delicate snail in shell*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

It is not even a terrible fight. It's just some people disagreeing with me and me going into a spin because it appears that my skin has the thickness of a diaphanous membrane. *tells self to get over it already!*

[freyafloyd.livejournal.com]

I must add a book review. It is the first het that I have read that didn't make me want to vomit into a bucket. Although, the het is rather secondary to the book's overwhelmingly homoerotic overtones.

Shockingly, this book was written by a man. It really needs to be slashed. If you read it, I will slash it.

I really wanted to shag the main character (That would make a fine review for them to print on the back cover). The boys are called Hugh (the brunette) and Aaron (the blonde).

It is called White Male Heart. It is by Ruaridh Nicoll. It is set in the highlands.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Hugh. Aaron. Ruaridh. Got it.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

I read that. Though what I chiefly remember is some fairly grisly gralloching of deer, which frightened this delicate vegetarian sensibility half to death. Clearly must re-read for Other STuff.

[msilverstar]

I agree you should change the title...

Did you ever look at kyuuketsukirui's list of snippets of gay porn written by women and men? I'm not saying "slash" because that's an issue.

What does "slash" mean to you?

Some people think that slash is only gay porn based on a story/life.

Others limit it to subtext: gay porn where there isn't any in the original. Therefore, QaF fanfic can't be slash because it's not based on subtext, it's all explicit in the source fiction. Presumably my Alan Cumming porn wouldn't be slash either, cos he's out as bi.

Others limit it to only female-written gay porn.

I think that men can write good homoerotic porn. Even straight men. I can write good lesbian porn, and I am pretty straight though not entirely. I can also write gay porn, straight porn, and I am working on orgies. Does that make me not a "slasher"? Is what I write not "slash"? What about the m/m stories? I tend to the wider and more inclusive view of the whole thing.


PS: your use of the word "wimmin" bothers a lot of people -- it's a bright flag to them about your world-view and says a lot about your assumptions of both the world and your audience.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Well, I seem to have escaped the wrath of metafandom so the title can stay. I think the key may be to be very boring. *g*

I've been meaning to email you to ask how you are getting on! I just never get round to email but been thinking of you. And yours.

I haven't looked at kyuuuki-whoever's snippets because I was traumatised by her and other metafandommers whom I don't know. Do you know her? Is she okay? Now that you've recced it, I may link. *holds onto your hand*

your use of the word "wimmin" bothers a lot of people -- it's a bright flag to them about your world-view and says a lot about your assumptions of both the world and your audience.
Whom does this bother? Nobody has said. My world-view as pertaining to my use of this word is this:
a) irony
b) age and being imprinted with feminism in the 1970s (I even remember it being called women's lib -- hah, as no doubt do you!)
c) the need to distance myself from that past in the present
d) um, something else that I can't remember now because too tired

See, I don't mind if you tell me critical things or questioning things because I know you and you know me. It's with these strangers that I get frightened and defensive.

[msilverstar]

Thanks for keeping an open mind. This stuff is hard, and I hope there's some mutual learning going on.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

By 'this stuff', do you mean internet communication? I'm not sure it's too hard but you're right, it does need to be figured out. I have a very firm view about web etiquette and I briefly posted my own guidelines on my userinfo but it looked woefully waspish and dogmatic and nobody would pay heed, anyway, because everyone has their own rules so I deleted it again. It's good, though, to be reminded of it because there was one case where I did go against what I have since discovered are my web etiquette ethics and I regret having done that. It's easy to be childish online. But I will not have my free speech muffled, especially if it is responsible free speech, that is, not harming anybody.

Now free speech...! There's another hot topic! I have also been thinking about that, well, how can one avoid it with recent Danish and otherwise events.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Okay, I just scrolled up to check how I had used 'wimmin'. I haven't, in fact, I used 'wimmins' which is like saying 'febulous' instead of 'fabulous'. I was talking about women in porn so the word 'girlie' is perhaps more usual in that context but I didn't want to use girly, I wanted to use something ironic to show that I also have a distance towards these porn representations; I could have used ladies, I guess, but that seems *too* incongruous. And wimmins has the nice touch of being 1970s/80s feminist spelling and being applied to porn I find that funny because 1970s/80s feminism tended to be anti-porn, that porn oppresses women.

Um, it's kind of belabouring to explain a joke so elaborately but thus are the traps of the written text as opposed to the spoken word exchanged in banter, I supppose!

[msilverstar]

More in the other post than this one, and yeah, it's one of those things people can miss the irony :-(

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I treat LJ as my personal little corner of the internet. I hardly ever friendslock, and I forget that what I am posting is, in fact, not just said to my little flock of Friends on my Default Friends list but to the entire world. So what shocked me most about that other post was that the entire other world suddenly appeared there. It was a reality check. I suppose it's good to pull oneself up every now and again and remember that this stuff is actually viewable by all and sundry plus their lame donkey as well. But I still want to treat LJ as my little corner because that's what I like about it, a little comfy space to chat freely and not have to self-censor about porn, teh pretteh and so forth! It's a balance, I guess, that each of us learns to negotiate on her own terms. Because it is semi-performative, as sophrosyne was saying. Which is also what's so moreish about it. I am allergic to diary keeping; I haven't kept a diary since my early 20s and when I used to re-read those, it sank me into week-long depression, so now I live in the present and filter the past. LJ is a good compromise for me; a half-way house because it is not private and there is the opportunity for exchange. I just sometimes forget that people whom I don't know can exchange with me. I've been thinking about why I don't want to flock.