~~ I slash because I dare....?
Nov. 12th, 2005 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reenkaThis guy sitting by a single computer in the lab with his girlfriend, it seems like, checking out livejournal & chatting about the size of his friends list (....)-- oh man, it kind of freaks me out ^^;;; Heh.
...I mean, partly it's the coupley thing and partly the omg-lj-in-the-real-world thing, but partly it's the whole 'easily sharing a computer with another person' thing. Not just when you -have- to, either, but enjoying it. Like, you can watch a TV together because you're -watching-, not participating, not typing, etc. But this is much more more like sharing a single handheld game or a typewriter-- kinda. o_0 I mean, I realize I'm the weird one here, but. Possibly this is just a level of geeky possessiveness (...) most people don't reach--? Yes, my computer is MINE MINE MINE MINE!!1 (...mine.) I also feel like this about my books. Anything else, go ahead and take, ahahah. -.-
~~
I remember not really checking![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
scans_daily much because well, sexualizing comics isn't my thing, quite, but at the same time there were too many 'mainstream' posts somehow. This sort of gives me a different perspective on the whole 'fandom as female space' vision of things.
Actually, I consider my own attitude to the community an interesting aside, because in some ways you could say I "don't like slash" because I tend to be so picky about who I want to see slashed and how, etc, and I also don't get off on superhero types in suits and their manly needs or whatever. Though I do have plenty of pervy moments where it's like 'snog already' (your average fighting game being one example-- show me two guys fighting and I'm like SEX! SEX! SEX! possibly moreso than if they're hugging... but that's neither here nor there, except perhaps I haven't seen enough comicbook villain/hero slash-- but still, the muscles... eh). Anyway, you could say that I'm still not the target audience of scans_daily, whatever the case.
On the other hand, I'm female, in fandom in large part because I feel two cocks are better than one, like romance with non-stereotypical power-balances or sex-roles, and am naturally drawn towards stories about boys' relationships, platonic or not. So in a real enough sense I'm a typical slasher fangirl.
I'm not mainstream in any normal sense but close enough to it from a girl-geek sense. And I tried to imagine a slash fandom full of men in vaguely equal number to women and felt... odd. I mean, I'm absolutely certain it will never happen no matter how comfy men get with homosexuality because the -type- of stories in their approach-- ie, romance-- have never been the sort most guys liked. I'm not trying to perpetuate stereotypes so much as say what's been my experience with people who identify as male. The separation is more about types of stories than gender, it seems like, with gender being correlated. It's just that of course people would -care- more about gender issues; even the slash vs. non-slash kerfuffles often come down to issues of identity and sexuality rather than storytelling philosophies per se. I should say though, that most people's storytelling philosophies are actually related to their sense of identity, of course, and so it gets hopelessly mixed up.
A het/gen community might coexist more easily than a gen/slash comics scans one only because het has natural dominance of sorts over het in overall media and people tend to accept it as 'normal'. I think it's a delicate balance of power with het-gen & slash that was always easily tipped by people with differing preconceptions.
Actually, even the gay/straight males I know of in HP slash fandom: Abaddon, Copperbadge, Alex Malfoy-- look at their work. Plot and/or action-heavy even when it's romance, though of course it's hard to draw real conclusions because the sample-size is so small; naturally there's a large percentage of women who also write plot-heavy stories, but I'm just saying -all- the male writers in fandom write them, it seems like, except for Aidan Lynch and his 'Unthinkable Thoughts'. And the ones who write smut write pretty hardcore porn it seems like, rather than the sort of character-driven romances that also have smut girls write heaps of.
In this case I'm not even generalizing but genuinely thinking of all the male slash writers I can think of at the moment. So basically what I'm saying is, it becomes hard to say how much of the 'oppression' is actually the product of natural tendency-- in terms of women not shutting guys out of fandom but guys actually avoiding because it's not their thing for reasons other than pure homophobia.
And I say this as someone who actually has a knee-jerk 'you homophobic asshole!!!' reaction when someone says they don't like slash. I seriously feel like that even if someone says reasonably 'but I'm not homophobic' or whatever, and I'm like 'yeah, you don't sound like it, but there's still something wrong with you!!' ahahaha, though I know it's just that they could not like to mess with canon or they don't like romance or it's just physically unappealing like uh, goat-sex. -.- I also feel uncomfortable about the girls in fandom who do like het romance but not slash because of the whole 'but I'm interested in -women's- bodies & issues' thing, which is a positive and healthy enough thing but it still bothers me they're not interested in males-- like, there seems something wrong with that--? But I'm not saying this isn't wild bias, because it is; though a part of me still whispers 'you should fix that, try to widen your perspective'. Knee-jerk, as I said.
So yeah, my weird feelings when imagining a huge influx of men into slash fandom weren't because I don't want a guy to read my fics or I actually consciously write -for- other girls-- I mean, the only person who's read all my fics is my best (non-fandom straight guy) friend. Yes, I've made him read them all, he didn't read the porny bits of his own free will-- but the point is, I don't feel weird about (straight or otherwise) guys reading my fics or talking to them about slash and I enjoy the largely outside perspective-- that's partly why I made my guy friend read my slash fics, after all.
The weirdness is all because of my awareness that as a -group- exceeding some intimate small number, the dynamics of the community would change in an uncomfortable direction for us-- because while it -is- possible to have a unisex space, online or otherwise, that unisex quality in -itself- is a different nature to fandom as it currently exists. It would mean significant change, though the impact is negligible until there's something like a statistical shift.
Their priorities would be as out of place as a bunch of gen fans sharing slashers' space to the point of not just coexisting (which obviously happens just fine), but actually influencing what sort of things get written/posted/discussed-- which is what happened-- was always in potential of happening-- in scans_daily. To me, the separate-but-equal thing is really about the divide between those different fic philosophies; and perhaps, in some as-yet non-articulated way, I am saying slash is a philosophy itself, a way of interacting/looking at fiction. Hmm.
...I mean, partly it's the coupley thing and partly the omg-lj-in-the-real-world thing, but partly it's the whole 'easily sharing a computer with another person' thing. Not just when you -have- to, either, but enjoying it. Like, you can watch a TV together because you're -watching-, not participating, not typing, etc. But this is much more more like sharing a single handheld game or a typewriter-- kinda. o_0 I mean, I realize I'm the weird one here, but. Possibly this is just a level of geeky possessiveness (...) most people don't reach--? Yes, my computer is MINE MINE MINE MINE!!1 (...mine.) I also feel like this about my books. Anything else, go ahead and take, ahahah. -.-
~~
I remember not really checking
scans_daily much because well, sexualizing comics isn't my thing, quite, but at the same time there were too many 'mainstream' posts somehow. This sort of gives me a different perspective on the whole 'fandom as female space' vision of things.Actually, I consider my own attitude to the community an interesting aside, because in some ways you could say I "don't like slash" because I tend to be so picky about who I want to see slashed and how, etc, and I also don't get off on superhero types in suits and their manly needs or whatever. Though I do have plenty of pervy moments where it's like 'snog already' (your average fighting game being one example-- show me two guys fighting and I'm like SEX! SEX! SEX! possibly moreso than if they're hugging... but that's neither here nor there, except perhaps I haven't seen enough comicbook villain/hero slash-- but still, the muscles... eh). Anyway, you could say that I'm still not the target audience of scans_daily, whatever the case.
On the other hand, I'm female, in fandom in large part because I feel two cocks are better than one, like romance with non-stereotypical power-balances or sex-roles, and am naturally drawn towards stories about boys' relationships, platonic or not. So in a real enough sense I'm a typical slasher fangirl.
I'm not mainstream in any normal sense but close enough to it from a girl-geek sense. And I tried to imagine a slash fandom full of men in vaguely equal number to women and felt... odd. I mean, I'm absolutely certain it will never happen no matter how comfy men get with homosexuality because the -type- of stories in their approach-- ie, romance-- have never been the sort most guys liked. I'm not trying to perpetuate stereotypes so much as say what's been my experience with people who identify as male. The separation is more about types of stories than gender, it seems like, with gender being correlated. It's just that of course people would -care- more about gender issues; even the slash vs. non-slash kerfuffles often come down to issues of identity and sexuality rather than storytelling philosophies per se. I should say though, that most people's storytelling philosophies are actually related to their sense of identity, of course, and so it gets hopelessly mixed up.
A het/gen community might coexist more easily than a gen/slash comics scans one only because het has natural dominance of sorts over het in overall media and people tend to accept it as 'normal'. I think it's a delicate balance of power with het-gen & slash that was always easily tipped by people with differing preconceptions.
Actually, even the gay/straight males I know of in HP slash fandom: Abaddon, Copperbadge, Alex Malfoy-- look at their work. Plot and/or action-heavy even when it's romance, though of course it's hard to draw real conclusions because the sample-size is so small; naturally there's a large percentage of women who also write plot-heavy stories, but I'm just saying -all- the male writers in fandom write them, it seems like, except for Aidan Lynch and his 'Unthinkable Thoughts'. And the ones who write smut write pretty hardcore porn it seems like, rather than the sort of character-driven romances that also have smut girls write heaps of.
In this case I'm not even generalizing but genuinely thinking of all the male slash writers I can think of at the moment. So basically what I'm saying is, it becomes hard to say how much of the 'oppression' is actually the product of natural tendency-- in terms of women not shutting guys out of fandom but guys actually avoiding because it's not their thing for reasons other than pure homophobia.
And I say this as someone who actually has a knee-jerk 'you homophobic asshole!!!' reaction when someone says they don't like slash. I seriously feel like that even if someone says reasonably 'but I'm not homophobic' or whatever, and I'm like 'yeah, you don't sound like it, but there's still something wrong with you!!' ahahaha, though I know it's just that they could not like to mess with canon or they don't like romance or it's just physically unappealing like uh, goat-sex. -.- I also feel uncomfortable about the girls in fandom who do like het romance but not slash because of the whole 'but I'm interested in -women's- bodies & issues' thing, which is a positive and healthy enough thing but it still bothers me they're not interested in males-- like, there seems something wrong with that--? But I'm not saying this isn't wild bias, because it is; though a part of me still whispers 'you should fix that, try to widen your perspective'. Knee-jerk, as I said.
So yeah, my weird feelings when imagining a huge influx of men into slash fandom weren't because I don't want a guy to read my fics or I actually consciously write -for- other girls-- I mean, the only person who's read all my fics is my best (non-fandom straight guy) friend. Yes, I've made him read them all, he didn't read the porny bits of his own free will-- but the point is, I don't feel weird about (straight or otherwise) guys reading my fics or talking to them about slash and I enjoy the largely outside perspective-- that's partly why I made my guy friend read my slash fics, after all.
The weirdness is all because of my awareness that as a -group- exceeding some intimate small number, the dynamics of the community would change in an uncomfortable direction for us-- because while it -is- possible to have a unisex space, online or otherwise, that unisex quality in -itself- is a different nature to fandom as it currently exists. It would mean significant change, though the impact is negligible until there's something like a statistical shift.
Their priorities would be as out of place as a bunch of gen fans sharing slashers' space to the point of not just coexisting (which obviously happens just fine), but actually influencing what sort of things get written/posted/discussed-- which is what happened-- was always in potential of happening-- in scans_daily. To me, the separate-but-equal thing is really about the divide between those different fic philosophies; and perhaps, in some as-yet non-articulated way, I am saying slash is a philosophy itself, a way of interacting/looking at fiction. Hmm.
