~~ self-consciousness and porn.
Jul. 5th, 2003 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reenkahonestly, this is kind of frightening. i'm away (to see ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ethrosdemon!! mwuahahah!) and... well... no email, since out since morning till night and my mom sleeps early and anyway who cares... and like, 6 people friend me. i'm scared to even -read- how many posts have been made. do i even want to know? -.-
i'm considering a new policy where i pretend the friending and unfriending process just isn't real and does not happen-- true, it may disturb me to advance that much closer to complete dementia, but otherwise i just kind of sit there and go, "whu--? eh--? wheeh--??" which... is confusing all by itself. so yes. figuring out why anyone reads me makes my brain hurt, since i never knew rambling meta was in demand by people who don't produce it themselves. well, i mean, back when i recced things and linked things a lot and stuff, that was different, i was useful. but now i'm like this old strangely obsessed person on the park-bench, muttering about "and then harry said to draco, `you do realize we're just symbolic representations of the writers' need for an unrealistic complementary union of mirror halves, fraught with existential friction, don't you?'" and so on.
in my own little world, the only person interested would be the old lady knitting socks for her imaginary dobby, sitting at the opposite park-bench. she'd say, "to which draco replied, `you're getting wonky in your old age, forgetting the more essential friction of randy boys groping each other furiously without lubrication in dark corridors.'" which is of course very true. h/d is all about the lack of lubrication and the intense need to romanticise that uncomfortable sensation when you sit down across from that really hot guy who annoys you so much you want to bite his nose off, except you want to give him a blow-job at the same time. existential horniness, baby.
i'm giddy at being at a computer again. also, while i was out i wrote this entry in my notebook about porn, but... eh, what the hell.
~~
while this may not come as a surprise to some of you-- and may seem rather out of the blue to others-- i have just now decided thatfabularasa is, apparently, brilliant (albeit regrettably biased against my dear harry), upon reading this interview. so i'm going to ramble on in response to stuff she said, because um-- well, why not.
I love the idea of all passions as interrelated. There's a reason I had a sudden pang for mint chocolate chip ice cream as we were sitting here talking about stories about sex. And for me, any strong passion feeds back to a sexual response, and I don't think I'm that different from the rest of humanity in that.
talking about the sorts of things one wants to explore in one's fiction, this definitely sets off resonances for me. actually, i didn't ever think of things i wanted to explore in fiction, and my understanding of love has always been largely intuitive. but there must be a reason that i'm so fascinated with the thin boundaries between it all-- love and anger and need and hate and every other passion, and all the ways the feed into each other. there seems to be a sort of resonance between passionate writers of particular sorts of pairings, and there are definitely parallels between sirius/snape and harry/draco in hp. though strangely enough, i never felt like shipping sirius/snape, but that's mostly because of my low level of interest in the adults, probably-- i only ship sirius/remus because of one fanfic, anyway. but yes, nothing useful to say except that there must be something of every emotion caught in another powerful emotion, and in that space where the boundaries blur, perhaps that's where we see the truth of ourselves as human beings in all its contradictory insanity. when one lets go of the need for binary yes/no responses, perhaps one can approach the actual complexities of our relationships to one another.
talking about writing slash as a female writer, she said,
the "male" model of writing uses writing as an expression of knowledge, and what I call the "female" model uses writing as an avenue to knowledge, and is necessarily more open-ended.
i really like that, because that's definitely what i do-- i write as a process of discovery, as a non-linear, rambling journey where i allow thoughts to find me. most often, i get a more positive response when i express some sort of supposed knowledge of my subject matter-- if anything, then people can agree or disagree, i guess. but the interesting thing for me is the process of questioning, imagining this new world into being, and it's telling me the story just as it unfolds. it's an interesting approach, seeing there being polar opposites here-- a masculine and a feminine, although i suppose not entirely surprising. i think i've heard (or made, can't remember) the argument that fanfiction and the shared world mentality in general is more "feminine", less patriarchal. oh yes, i was thinking that when i was discussing that essay in class on a new matriarchal form of art. i was thinking that the open-endedness and subvertive-yet-supportive nature of fanfic was quite novel in that respect.
about the uses of fanfic writing, she said,
And maybe most importantly, it makes one a better reader, with a wider range of imaginative response to a text and a greater imaginative vocabulary.
surprising, i think, but definitely true. i've found my readerly response has shifted as i began to write and read fanfic, as much as (or even more than) my writing style. i've tried to talk about this before, but i don't know if i quite got to the point. i'd found myself being much more attentive to the smoothness of the surfaces in non-fanfic texts, the polish and the higher level of difficulty in penetration, in terms of knowing all the devices and so much of the commonly used structure as with fanfic. often enough, i can see right -through- fanfic-- i am almost as familiar with the world and the characters as the writer themselves are, which isn't usually the case in original fiction, is it.
i think i've become a more -conscious- reader-- because the snags are much more obvious in fanfic for the fandom i'm writing in, and because there is so much repetition of them, it's hard not to be, really. especially with harry/draco-- i feel like i've been almost -drilled- in them in a way only the most anal of writers drill themselves on the particulars of their characters. i could -easily- make character sheets, make up aspects of their back-story, tell you what they'd say in any given situation and so on. and the interesting thing is that this helps me with reading more than writing-- i can spot errors much easier than i can create some sort of holy-grail-of-characterization fic myself (sadly enough).
but yes, a greater range of imaginative response-- one learns to pay -attention- to more of the landscape, inner and outer, after having it be presented in so many different ways. i think this is a related phenomenon to why people say that ootp had seemed like "just another fic" to them. because they've acquired this new way of responding to this world, and fiction written in it, and once acquired, it's rather hard to return to one's former ignorance. we -know- things about it now, have thought about it maybe nearly as much as the -author-, which is rather unheard-of, isn't it. i was actually surprised at all the ways in which jkr was still several steps ahead of me (and most everyone else, actually), personally, with characterization and the world, because it should be quite difficult at this point.
not because people haven't written a better snape or a better remus or what have you, but because of the way she -didn't- play favorites and basically kind of managed to gather all these different threads together in some semblance of over-arching order. and having read fanfic gave me a much greater appreciation of that, too, and made me more self-aware of the trust i usually place in authors, and the ways in which it can be rewarded.
she also said something i can go on quite some time about, and haven't seen anyone else mention that much:
One of the things I like the most about writing slash -- or any graphic erotica -- is that the curtain is never drawn. There is no barrier between character and author, or between author and reader, for that matter, or between character and reader.
i think i've said before, that sometimes i feel a little -too- aware of the fact that i'm writing erotica for a semi-known audience of women. there is definitely something tittilating and sexually transgressive about getting off on your own characters-- and yet they're not quite your own-- you're always watching, and so is the other participants in this fantasy-- not just readers, but co-creators. because the "fanon" lives of these characters are so communal-- like one whole collective sexual fantasy of a gorgeous bastard, and we all interpret him differently, yes, but in the end we commonly lust after someone who could be recognizably called 'draco' or 'snape', and at the same time we're -together-, watching together and writing together and reading together, and it's quite a bit more kinky than it seems at first.
so basically, the question for me is, is the sharing of written porn fic between a knowing reader and a writer a form of sexual interchange.
there's also several other questions this implies--
- does it depend on the intent-- i.e., the amount of personal emotion that went into writing the porn?
- does it depend on the reader's level of rapport with the scenario?
- does it also depend on the writer's level of desired feedback depth?
if all these aspects are present, would this mean the mere act of reading a friend's erotic piece is equivalent to a sexual interchange?
does the casualness of this interchange mean sexuality is more open and fluid than we are consciously aware of, then? because it doesn't appear to have lasting consequences on the relationship between the reader and the writer (assuming a relationship exists).
is it a form of sexuality, or does sexuality necessarily exclude friendship, taken alone?
is there a boundary depending on the scope of the intended audience for the erotica?
is there a distinction to be made between the intimacy in public stories vs. privately told or shown stories vs. stories given one for editing?
perhaps this private story sharing circle model is then based on reciprocation-- you'll each make the other feel better in the interchange, and the writer knows or believes in the existence of a positive response. instead of the public writing, which is more like exhibitionism-- perhaps the slight erotic charge of the risk involved in making one's sexual imagination public.
in the "private story", then, there's also the intimacy created by the writer knowing that this reader will "take it the right way", producing a sort of safe space to imagine without restriction or embarrassment. does this implied greater trust of the audience make the storytelling different in kind from the publically available erotica from the same author?
and where does the embarrassment factor come in in all this, especially in terms of response to the "wank fic", i.e., gratuitous sex blatantly meant to be taken that way and appreciated physically, one imagines. i myself have never been comfortable with the imagining aspect, and i don't know if erotic writers -do- imagine the story's actual reception at all, usually. it could be a source of pleasure or a source of discomfort, which i would guess depends on the writer. obviously, i have issues with porn written by members of a community-- not that i don't enjoy it, but the awareness of actual wanking crosses some sort of line where it becomes a sexual interchange in my mind, if there's a dialogue involved in the reading. i would have to have a level of trust with the writer as a reader, to read their erotica if we know each other, because in this case it seems to me that the exhibitionism goes both ways.
with a lessening of embarrassment achieved, this would make it related to intimacy, since embarrassment often disappears with pleasure.
as a writer of porn, for instance, i don't want to hear about readers' visceral reactions to it, to make that connection, 'cause it feels like at that point it starts a sexual interchange between reader and writer. in my mind there's a separation: they're not my friends, they're just the readers of my fics and if they were my friends, it would get weird for a different reason. in that case, it's almost too intimate, suddenly.
and yet it's just a story, it's not like you're having "actual" sex. but at what point does it -become- sexual? does the excitement have to be mutual? does the story have to be told -to- you? or is the mere awareness of the audience make the telling a form of a sexual act somehow? or can this all be attributed to self-consciousness-- the self-consciousness being what gives the reader or writer that tinge of tension, of awareness, which makes anything charged with sexuality?
well, if it's self-consciousness or awareness of the boundaries between self and other, i guess this sheds new light on the concept of "mental masturbation", which would be a direct result of of self-consciousness itself. and thus i go in circles. sigh.
ethrosdemon!! mwuahahah!) and... well... no email, since out since morning till night and my mom sleeps early and anyway who cares... and like, 6 people friend me. i'm scared to even -read- how many posts have been made. do i even want to know? -.-i'm considering a new policy where i pretend the friending and unfriending process just isn't real and does not happen-- true, it may disturb me to advance that much closer to complete dementia, but otherwise i just kind of sit there and go, "whu--? eh--? wheeh--??" which... is confusing all by itself. so yes. figuring out why anyone reads me makes my brain hurt, since i never knew rambling meta was in demand by people who don't produce it themselves. well, i mean, back when i recced things and linked things a lot and stuff, that was different, i was useful. but now i'm like this old strangely obsessed person on the park-bench, muttering about "and then harry said to draco, `you do realize we're just symbolic representations of the writers' need for an unrealistic complementary union of mirror halves, fraught with existential friction, don't you?'" and so on.
in my own little world, the only person interested would be the old lady knitting socks for her imaginary dobby, sitting at the opposite park-bench. she'd say, "to which draco replied, `you're getting wonky in your old age, forgetting the more essential friction of randy boys groping each other furiously without lubrication in dark corridors.'" which is of course very true. h/d is all about the lack of lubrication and the intense need to romanticise that uncomfortable sensation when you sit down across from that really hot guy who annoys you so much you want to bite his nose off, except you want to give him a blow-job at the same time. existential horniness, baby.
i'm giddy at being at a computer again. also, while i was out i wrote this entry in my notebook about porn, but... eh, what the hell.
~~
while this may not come as a surprise to some of you-- and may seem rather out of the blue to others-- i have just now decided that
fabularasa is, apparently, brilliant (albeit regrettably biased against my dear harry), upon reading this interview. so i'm going to ramble on in response to stuff she said, because um-- well, why not.I love the idea of all passions as interrelated. There's a reason I had a sudden pang for mint chocolate chip ice cream as we were sitting here talking about stories about sex. And for me, any strong passion feeds back to a sexual response, and I don't think I'm that different from the rest of humanity in that.
talking about the sorts of things one wants to explore in one's fiction, this definitely sets off resonances for me. actually, i didn't ever think of things i wanted to explore in fiction, and my understanding of love has always been largely intuitive. but there must be a reason that i'm so fascinated with the thin boundaries between it all-- love and anger and need and hate and every other passion, and all the ways the feed into each other. there seems to be a sort of resonance between passionate writers of particular sorts of pairings, and there are definitely parallels between sirius/snape and harry/draco in hp. though strangely enough, i never felt like shipping sirius/snape, but that's mostly because of my low level of interest in the adults, probably-- i only ship sirius/remus because of one fanfic, anyway. but yes, nothing useful to say except that there must be something of every emotion caught in another powerful emotion, and in that space where the boundaries blur, perhaps that's where we see the truth of ourselves as human beings in all its contradictory insanity. when one lets go of the need for binary yes/no responses, perhaps one can approach the actual complexities of our relationships to one another.
talking about writing slash as a female writer, she said,
the "male" model of writing uses writing as an expression of knowledge, and what I call the "female" model uses writing as an avenue to knowledge, and is necessarily more open-ended.
i really like that, because that's definitely what i do-- i write as a process of discovery, as a non-linear, rambling journey where i allow thoughts to find me. most often, i get a more positive response when i express some sort of supposed knowledge of my subject matter-- if anything, then people can agree or disagree, i guess. but the interesting thing for me is the process of questioning, imagining this new world into being, and it's telling me the story just as it unfolds. it's an interesting approach, seeing there being polar opposites here-- a masculine and a feminine, although i suppose not entirely surprising. i think i've heard (or made, can't remember) the argument that fanfiction and the shared world mentality in general is more "feminine", less patriarchal. oh yes, i was thinking that when i was discussing that essay in class on a new matriarchal form of art. i was thinking that the open-endedness and subvertive-yet-supportive nature of fanfic was quite novel in that respect.
about the uses of fanfic writing, she said,
And maybe most importantly, it makes one a better reader, with a wider range of imaginative response to a text and a greater imaginative vocabulary.
surprising, i think, but definitely true. i've found my readerly response has shifted as i began to write and read fanfic, as much as (or even more than) my writing style. i've tried to talk about this before, but i don't know if i quite got to the point. i'd found myself being much more attentive to the smoothness of the surfaces in non-fanfic texts, the polish and the higher level of difficulty in penetration, in terms of knowing all the devices and so much of the commonly used structure as with fanfic. often enough, i can see right -through- fanfic-- i am almost as familiar with the world and the characters as the writer themselves are, which isn't usually the case in original fiction, is it.
i think i've become a more -conscious- reader-- because the snags are much more obvious in fanfic for the fandom i'm writing in, and because there is so much repetition of them, it's hard not to be, really. especially with harry/draco-- i feel like i've been almost -drilled- in them in a way only the most anal of writers drill themselves on the particulars of their characters. i could -easily- make character sheets, make up aspects of their back-story, tell you what they'd say in any given situation and so on. and the interesting thing is that this helps me with reading more than writing-- i can spot errors much easier than i can create some sort of holy-grail-of-characterization fic myself (sadly enough).
but yes, a greater range of imaginative response-- one learns to pay -attention- to more of the landscape, inner and outer, after having it be presented in so many different ways. i think this is a related phenomenon to why people say that ootp had seemed like "just another fic" to them. because they've acquired this new way of responding to this world, and fiction written in it, and once acquired, it's rather hard to return to one's former ignorance. we -know- things about it now, have thought about it maybe nearly as much as the -author-, which is rather unheard-of, isn't it. i was actually surprised at all the ways in which jkr was still several steps ahead of me (and most everyone else, actually), personally, with characterization and the world, because it should be quite difficult at this point.
not because people haven't written a better snape or a better remus or what have you, but because of the way she -didn't- play favorites and basically kind of managed to gather all these different threads together in some semblance of over-arching order. and having read fanfic gave me a much greater appreciation of that, too, and made me more self-aware of the trust i usually place in authors, and the ways in which it can be rewarded.
she also said something i can go on quite some time about, and haven't seen anyone else mention that much:
One of the things I like the most about writing slash -- or any graphic erotica -- is that the curtain is never drawn. There is no barrier between character and author, or between author and reader, for that matter, or between character and reader.
i think i've said before, that sometimes i feel a little -too- aware of the fact that i'm writing erotica for a semi-known audience of women. there is definitely something tittilating and sexually transgressive about getting off on your own characters-- and yet they're not quite your own-- you're always watching, and so is the other participants in this fantasy-- not just readers, but co-creators. because the "fanon" lives of these characters are so communal-- like one whole collective sexual fantasy of a gorgeous bastard, and we all interpret him differently, yes, but in the end we commonly lust after someone who could be recognizably called 'draco' or 'snape', and at the same time we're -together-, watching together and writing together and reading together, and it's quite a bit more kinky than it seems at first.
so basically, the question for me is, is the sharing of written porn fic between a knowing reader and a writer a form of sexual interchange.
there's also several other questions this implies--
- does it depend on the intent-- i.e., the amount of personal emotion that went into writing the porn?
- does it depend on the reader's level of rapport with the scenario?
- does it also depend on the writer's level of desired feedback depth?
if all these aspects are present, would this mean the mere act of reading a friend's erotic piece is equivalent to a sexual interchange?
does the casualness of this interchange mean sexuality is more open and fluid than we are consciously aware of, then? because it doesn't appear to have lasting consequences on the relationship between the reader and the writer (assuming a relationship exists).
is it a form of sexuality, or does sexuality necessarily exclude friendship, taken alone?
is there a boundary depending on the scope of the intended audience for the erotica?
is there a distinction to be made between the intimacy in public stories vs. privately told or shown stories vs. stories given one for editing?
perhaps this private story sharing circle model is then based on reciprocation-- you'll each make the other feel better in the interchange, and the writer knows or believes in the existence of a positive response. instead of the public writing, which is more like exhibitionism-- perhaps the slight erotic charge of the risk involved in making one's sexual imagination public.
in the "private story", then, there's also the intimacy created by the writer knowing that this reader will "take it the right way", producing a sort of safe space to imagine without restriction or embarrassment. does this implied greater trust of the audience make the storytelling different in kind from the publically available erotica from the same author?
and where does the embarrassment factor come in in all this, especially in terms of response to the "wank fic", i.e., gratuitous sex blatantly meant to be taken that way and appreciated physically, one imagines. i myself have never been comfortable with the imagining aspect, and i don't know if erotic writers -do- imagine the story's actual reception at all, usually. it could be a source of pleasure or a source of discomfort, which i would guess depends on the writer. obviously, i have issues with porn written by members of a community-- not that i don't enjoy it, but the awareness of actual wanking crosses some sort of line where it becomes a sexual interchange in my mind, if there's a dialogue involved in the reading. i would have to have a level of trust with the writer as a reader, to read their erotica if we know each other, because in this case it seems to me that the exhibitionism goes both ways.
with a lessening of embarrassment achieved, this would make it related to intimacy, since embarrassment often disappears with pleasure.
as a writer of porn, for instance, i don't want to hear about readers' visceral reactions to it, to make that connection, 'cause it feels like at that point it starts a sexual interchange between reader and writer. in my mind there's a separation: they're not my friends, they're just the readers of my fics and if they were my friends, it would get weird for a different reason. in that case, it's almost too intimate, suddenly.
and yet it's just a story, it's not like you're having "actual" sex. but at what point does it -become- sexual? does the excitement have to be mutual? does the story have to be told -to- you? or is the mere awareness of the audience make the telling a form of a sexual act somehow? or can this all be attributed to self-consciousness-- the self-consciousness being what gives the reader or writer that tinge of tension, of awareness, which makes anything charged with sexuality?
well, if it's self-consciousness or awareness of the boundaries between self and other, i guess this sheds new light on the concept of "mental masturbation", which would be a direct result of of self-consciousness itself. and thus i go in circles. sigh.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re:
Date: 2003-07-05 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-05 10:07 pm (UTC)...and stuff -.-
Re:
Date: 2003-07-05 10:09 pm (UTC)THEIRLOVEISSOFREAKYANDSLIMY.
Hey, who am I to look down my nose at gropes and giggles? ;;)
no subject
Date: 2003-07-05 10:21 pm (UTC)...and now i have graphic visuals....
and thinking, man, there's more demand for this than for the meta-sex discussion, isn't there. there needs to be more squicky sex and blowjobs on this journal... also, hats.
hermione would approve.
Re:
Date: 2003-07-05 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-05 10:57 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-07-05 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-05 11:03 pm (UTC)and now we have initiated each other into one of the Mysteries of Cassie's People that no lesser mortals would be able to understand >:D
sort of like the secret handshake that gives one house-elf vision. that's what it's all about, really~:">
(and that's a house-elf smilie... it's the nose, really...)
Re:
Date: 2003-07-05 11:28 pm (UTC)