Icky Slash

[erda]

I keep seeing posts where people complain about, or outright sneer at, slash that falls into heteronormative tropes, where one of the guys is feminized and treated exactly like we object to women being treated.


I don't myself particularly care for excessive feminization of male characters, but I don't in any way look down on it. The thing is, some women maybe want to do stuff that is typically feminine. Maybe they want to, I don't know, take a flower arranging class, make a candlelit dinner for their loved one, be dominated sexually or whatever. So why do it with slash, when there are plenty of hetero romance novels that allow women to vicariously experience this stuff?

Maybe women would like to do these things the way a man can do them. A man can be a total bottom in bed, can love candles and pretty things, and generally do all sorts of things we think of as female, but the second he stops doing those things, puts his guy self back on and heads out into the world, he reclaims all of his power and privilege. That, I think, is the attraction for some women. They have a kink for bottoming or submitting, but it's a sexual thing, and they can't feel comfortable with it because it too closely reflects our true position of lessness, less power, less privilege, out in the real world. But experiencing those things as a man allows them to wallow in it to their hearts content, enjoy it without any reservations, while retaining the self respect and world respect that men are freely given, and I have no problem with that. It's the way the world ought to work.

We ought to be able to be as dominant or submissive as we like sexually, we should be able to pursue
whatever interests or talents we have, and still have respect, power and privilege equal to that which white men experience every day. Until we do, women will find ways to meet their needs, and I am going to do my best to support rather than shame them for it.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

THANK YOU!

[erda]

Hee! You're welcome. :-)

[facetofcathy]

You should have known I'd respond to this.

I try, and sometimes fail, when I'm complaining about heteronormative slash to make it clear that what bothers me is not that someone writes a story that pulls a bunch of behaviours, tastes, traits and physical attributes out of the box society has labeled feminine and puts them on a man, while decorating the other guy out of the masculine box. What bugs me is if that is written as if that is the natural order of things for all people all the time--with the implication that if you dump both boxes out on the floor stir the stuff together and pick what you want you're weird.

There, I think I finally said that (fairly) succinctly. Although there is another aspect to it that creeps into some fic and that's the gay=feminine<masculine--you're not gay unless you bottom--the top is still a proper hetero man that the writer/reader can swoon over--and that really is not cool, but not all stories labeled heteronormative are coming from that place. Okay, so much for succinct.

A long time ago on a journaling service far away, I wrote a post about sex roles in m/m slash and got taken to task, rightly, for some lazy language in the post. The person who complained about me equating top with dom and bottom with sub, and who loudly expressed displeasure at the very idea that being on the receiving end of m/m anal sex automatically makes someone feminine and/or submissive, went on to use the exact same conflation and assumptions about het relationships in the same damn post. It bugs me even more when heteronormativity is assumed to be innate to het relationships--and I see this idea underlying some of the complaints about slash tropes and in the way a lot of fans talk about female characters vs male characters--Neal Caffrey is a pretty little submissive bottom, you can tell by looking, but it's terrible that the show has Elizabeth serving coffee to guests in her own home.

I don't want assumed heteronormativity in any relationship, but I don't want to get told that only behaviour that subverts the heteronormative is okay either. I think both points of view are coming from a place of imposing ideology on individual preferences and I can't see much difference between them.

[pixel]

So much THIS.

[torachan]

Yes, this. It's the normative part that's bad. It's assumptions about how the world is/should be.

[erda]

Not sure we are speaking about the same thing here. I'm thinking more of these stories as a kind of kink fic, where the lizard brain responds, and naturally that tends to fall out along the heteronormative lines we've all been schooled in.

As far as normativity, I think if I understand you correctly, we are in agreement. I am endlessly aggravated by the way that the Stargate teams can visit so many different places that all map out identically to us gender-wise, or support our gender norms by reflecting them exactly through the to me ridiculous reversal trope of having women in charge and men the oppressed "weaker" sex. Yes, that drives me insane. Can they not even imagine any different ways that a society could be constructed?

[facetofcathy]

Yeah, a fic kink definitely.

For me the kink is separating all the traits out from each other, but for some people the kink is just taking gender out of the mix and mapping it onto men only. Which is totally good, and is exactly the fic you describe. But claiming that either trope is the only way people are or should be, or saying one is okay in het but not slash, is equally problematic for me and criticizing normative fic on those grounds is fully legitimate.

[dodificus]

A man can be a total bottom in bed, can love candles and pretty things, and generally do all sorts of things we think of as female, but the second he stops doing those things, puts his guy self back on and heads out into the world, he reclaims all of his power and privilege.

I think I want to marry this sentence.

[erda]

Hee! Also, in case it wasn't obvious, I'm quite pissed off that I don't have the same privilege.

[lisztful]

Yay I so like the way you've put this! It's always great to see someone speaking up and saying, lets support the ways that women find empowerment, even if it's not the way that I personally find empowerment. This is exactly the sort of community building idea that I think is super important.

Now, I agree that no matter how honorable an idea is, there's infinite potential for it to be handled in a way that is ultimately derogatory toward any number of groups. However, that's sort of true of any genre of writing, including all of the genres I've written, so I think it's right to point out that there's room for appropriation and subversive readings of stereotypically feminine behavior, and that sometimes it doesn't even need to be appropriated. Sometimes that's just what a person wants the freedom to explore, and It's good to support that self-exploration.

[erda]

Thank you, dear. Yes, there are a lot of things I don't like in fic, but what I do value above all is the freedom to explore.

[orbitaldiamonds]

(deleted the original because it went in reply to a comment and not the entry)

Right on!

I don't want assumed heteronormativity in any relationship, but I don't want to get told that only behaviour that subverts the heteronormative is okay either.

TRUE THIS. I actually have the opposite problem. I'm a queer (more or less cisgendered) woman who is married to an exclusively heterosexual cis man. And people just assume we're both straight. (Then again, he's military, so it's not like we can talk too much about our efforts to bring another woman into our relationship. :P)