Pretty Boys
Once again, people are writing essays in my comments. One of them is easier to read here. The two previous entries which have attracted so much interest are The Morality of Reading and Agendae, but I’ll recap. In the first entry, I made an argument about why reading slash was not a moral issue in the way reading smut (of any orientation) could be - not even if the reader finds homosexuality itself immoral. I went over what being slashy says to me as a non-slasher. My second entry was directed not so much at the commenters but at some stupid remarks that were made at fandom_wank about my manifesto. I defined “gender politics” and fic agendas, and said that women writing gay male erotica was weird. My general point in all three entries is that people can dislike slash as a genre for literary, as opposed to moral or visceral, reasons.
So, on to the comments. There isn’t really a thread of argument in them, but they are interesting in their own right (and long), so I’ll address the bits that stood out. First and foremost is the “good for the gander” argument - that it’s not unusual for women to like m/m slash because it’s not unusual for men to like f/f pornography. However, men and women are different. Men fill the jails, and women fill the fanfic mailing lists. What men see in f/f videos is not, until proven otherwise, what women see in m/m fanfic. If you went out and polled a hundred non-fan men and women about their interest in homosexual erotica involving the opposite gender, you would not get the same results for both sexes. Mainstream women are not consuming m/m erotica in any appreciable numbers, while f/f pornography is a large part of the porn industry. So when I say that women writing m/m erotica is weird, and that the “pretty boys” explanation doesn’t explain anything, that’s what I’m basing my ideas of what’s unusual upon - the mainstream population. Why do slashers like pretty boys in such greater numbers than average women?
Likewise, the percentage of homosexuals in the population has been estimated at 1.5% for women and 3.5% for men. So in real life, one can assume that most people are not gay unless they indicate that they are, by word or deed, and be right most of the time. Likewise, in fiction one can assume that most characters are not gay, unless TPTB say otherwise. In fact, in most fanfictional universes there is no stigma attached to being gay, so there is even less reason to assume that a character who isn’t gay in canon is anything but heterosexual - especially since most characters are given heterosexual backgrounds in canon. For instance, every main and recurring character on Voyager except the Borg Queen was known to have had heterosexual relationships, many of which occurred on-screen. No homosexual relationships were ever mentioned or shown for any of them.
Nothing I’ve said implies that women should not or cannot write homosexual characters, or male characters, if they need to - say, if they’re writing about a canon Willow. The question is why slash writers “overpopulate” the fictional world with gay characters. Clearly, as I said, it’s not because the m/m writers are homosexual men, which would be the most obvious explanation.
By the way, by slash I mean the fanfiction self-identified as slash. Like science fiction, it’s a known and well-understood term in that sense, even if in my mind real sci-fi has more stringent requirements.
Fay said: If you are determined to believe that all slash is simply “weird” porn, or that it is all Harlequin-level writing, then I suppose you will continue to believe this whatever I say. In this you will be sorely mistaken, but perhaps it is more comfortable to cling to a preconception than it is to question its validity and risk having to reassess one’s stance.
I never said that all slash was weird porn or bad writing. I reassess my stance every time someone makes a logical argument against it. The most irritating thing about discussing slash is how it always comes back to the assumption that slash is somehow a challenge to the morality or “preconceptions” of everyone who’s not interested in it. Slash, as I’ve said before, is just another fanfic agenda. If you told me there was a wonderful subgenre out there where canon characters were suddenly Mormon, or handicapped, or axe-murderers, or gourmet chefs, I would find the existence of such a subgenre interesting, but not the fic.
Go ahead, start complaining about my preconceptions about Mormons.
April 6th, 2003 at 5:18 am
Likewise, the percentage of homosexuals in the population has been estimated at 1.5% for women and 3.5% for men.
Really? I’ve heard an estimation of 10%. I’ve also heard that the Kinsey scale puts genuine homosexuality as not much less common than genuine heterosexuality, and that both are a lot less common than some sort of middle ground. I have a feeling no one has ever come up with any stats that are entirely unquestioned.
Likewise, in fiction one can assume that most characters are not gay, unless TPTB say otherwise. In fact, in most fanfictional universes there is no stigma attached to being gay, so there is even less reason to assume that a character who isn’t gay in canon is anything but heterosexual - especially since most canon characters are given heterosexual backgrounds in canon.
That something hasn’t been shown on screen isn’t really a good argument, since that reflects *our* society rather than the one portrayed. For example, women played a significantly smaller part in the original Star Trek series than in the new ones ñ because the times were different. The time portrayed on the *series* was still the future, but the view of that future changed. It could change still. Voyager shows women in important positions, but not homosexuals. Is it because these homosexuals don’t exist, or is it due to non-diegetic reasons of society?
Of course, this could be an argument *against* writing slash in fandoms that have shown gay characters. I think to a certain degree, one must accept a character’s view of themself. If a non-repressed character from a gay-friendly show declares themself straight, I think it’s quite likely they are. But quite a few people in life as in fiction don’t declare themselves anything.
And then there’s the Buffyverse, where every relationship is played as if it were romantic (yes, that’s the actual direction), and thus the subtext can go much too thick to ignore, even though we have our gay couple and should be happy with that…
The question is why slash writers “overpopulate” the fictional world with gay characters.
But surely each story must stand on its own? I can understand that from a non-slasher’s perspective, it may seem as though “everyone is gay”, but unless those stories take place in the same series, that is not actually true. If one person writes a story of, say, Janeway/Seven, and another person (or even the same person in another story) writes Paris/Chakotay, that isn’t overpopulation in my mind, because it’s still just one gay couple *per story*. There are stories out there in which everyone *is* gay, and those stories are usually quite hard to believe, but they’re in clear minority.
You’re obviously not under any obligation to like slash. But most ficcers out there are first and foremost fans, after all, so you can hardly expect to go unquestioned if you claim that slashers have less grasp of canon and characterisation than other ficcers.
April 6th, 2003 at 6:25 am
you can hardly expect to go unquestioned if you claim that slashers have less grasp of canon and characterisation than other ficcers.
Sorry, but anyone who writes canonicaly straight characters in a gay relationship does *not* have a grasp of canon. Nor much sense of characterization if xe persists in writing them contrary to the way they have been portrayed. Even AU stories have to have some foundation in canon.
April 6th, 2003 at 10:53 am
Sorry, but anyone who writes canonicaly straight characters in a gay relationship does *not* have a grasp of canon. Nor much sense of characterization if xe persists in writing them contrary to the way they have been portrayed
How do you reconcile this with the writers of BtVS deciding to write canonically straight Willow into a gay relationship? Seriously - why doesn’t this bug you? I mean, it doesn’t bug me because I think it’s a perfectly reasonable development of character, just as having Faith written into a gay relationship would be a perfectly reasonable development of character. But you seem to feel - forgive me if I’m misunderstanding you - that having had heterosexual relationships should preclude non-heterosexual impulses.
April 6th, 2003 at 12:59 pm
That something has been shown on screen makes it canon. That someone has had only heterosexual impulses on screen doesn’t preclude homosexual impulses in principle - it only precludes them in canon. Maybe in principle the future ought to have more homosexuals, but in canon it doesn’t.
While in life people can be “asexual” in your personal experience, in canon, their sexuality is defined by what has been seen on-screen. When a show runs long enough, like Voyager or Buffy, every character’s sexuality is touched on eventually. Willow went from being heterosexual to bisexual in canon. That makes Willow gay, but it doesn’t make other characters canonically gay. If you want to say that Buffy characters are canonically ambiguous, I’d consider that a stretch in and of itself, but even accepting that interpretation does not make the characters canonically gay - it just makes strictly canonical fic sexually ambiguous to the same extent as the show.
But surely each story must stand on its own?
No. I’m talking about the lack of appeal of slash as a genre, where the defining element is non-canonical homosexuality. Once people decide to read or write only one kind of fic, it becomes a subgenre, whether it’s slash or angst or a particular pairing. You may not like the fact that people create these subgenres, but it is a fact of fandom.
I never said slashers don’t have a grasp of canon or characterization (and I’ve turned off anonymous commenting since it’s confusing). I wouldn’t put it that way, since I’m sure slashers have as much of a grasp of canon as, say, Janeway/Chakotay writers. But they use their grasp of canon to write non-canonical fic. Like Janeway/Chakotay writers, they seem a little obsessed by the idea that what they’re writing is really canon, in some strange sense the rest of us just don’t understand. It’s not.
Changing canon sexual orientations in a postulated canon “future” is analogous to the writers making Willow gay mid-series. While this is not as egregiously non-canonical as say, Chakotay/Paris slash that makes them uniformly gay from Season One despite several on-screen heterosexual relationships, it is still non-canonical. Changing someone’s sexual orientation makes for a very particular kind of fic (known, generally, as slash), and I’m not interested in that kind of change to the character, any more than I’d be interested in their becoming Mormons. It’s not what I read fanfiction for.
April 6th, 2003 at 2:02 pm
Like Janeway/Chakotay writers, they seem a little obsessed by the idea that what they’re writing is really canon, in some strange sense the rest of us just don’t understand. It’s not.
I find this particularly interesting, because I agree with you - to a point. I don’t believe the majority of slash writers are obsessed with believing they write canon, but I have seen people bemoan the fact that show creators ‘aren’t giving us the slash!’, as if TPTB should be providing material for the slashers to work with - and this has puzzled me.
Part of the appeal of writing slash, to me, is exactly what you mention here: it’s not canon. The hunt for subtext, and the extraction and development of small things in canon (comments, actions, moments with emotional significance or resonance) that can be interpreted through the lens with which one views the show, is extraordinarily fun for me. It’s a challenge for the writer to balance the attributes seen in canon, and yet redefine certain crucial elements of relationships in the process. There are shows where the subtext is virtually text, because some of the subtextual cues are so blatant even the non-slashers pick up on them - Smallville and due South, for instance. It may be that when slashers don’t have to search quite so hard for the subtext that fuels slash, they forget it’s not the norm.
What’s the attraction? When slashers say that it’s pretty boys, the answer answers nothing at all - it only shows that they’re so into the fad that they cannot see that it’s unusual.
I think there may be a definite shift in perception among some folks who write slash, and the younger folks in particular - they want their genre to be accepted because they accept it so completely, and some don’t understand why anyone outside the slash realm sees the act of writing slash as strange or bizarre. They feel slash is much more mainstream than the mainstream feels it is. In other words, some slashers see the act of writing slash through their own filters, rather than through the filters of those who don’t get the phenomenon.
I’ve always been of the opinion that people are either hardwired to like/see slash/subtext, or not. I’m a straight woman who has “seen” slash in buddy shows since I was a child. Slash is a reinterpretation of canon; it pushes against the boundaries of what can be commonly agreed upon as canon. For me, it’s not about pretty boys, it’s about subtext in relationships, and exploring the parameters of those relationships in different ways. I suppose that’s not a very eloquent explanation, but - it’s the best I can do in a small space. *g*
April 6th, 2003 at 3:02 pm
Once people decide to read or write only one kind of fic, it becomes a subgenre, whether it’s slash or angst or a particular pairing
Fair enough. I don’t have much experience of that, myself; I read and write het, gen and slash (m/m and f/f) in various fandoms as the impulse takes me, usually more in response to the source material than particular trends, and most of the people whose fiction I follow are similarly flexible. I realise that this isn’t always the case. That may be part of the reason we have different takes on this, perhaps.
From what you’ve said here, I’m getting the impression (perhaps mistakenly?) that you feel any take on characters or situation that is not explicitly backed up by canon is a distortion? And hence invalid?
Gosh.
That’s quite a different take on the phenomenon of fanfic from my own. I get a real kick out of being shown things from a new point of view - the sort of process that goes on with Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead or Wide Sargasso Sea , that kind of thing. And I also accept that things happened to the characters before the start of canon and that they must do things between the gaps in canon - that they eat and sleep and go to the loo and write letters home and feed the cat, slay vampires, carry out away missions, go on dates, make bad choices, all that kind of thing. And, in my arrogance, I feel that fanfic writers as storytellers , if not legally, can fill in the blanks, or use canon as a jumping-off point, with as much narrative validity as the people who are being paid to do it. I mean, that’s a lot of what interests me in fanfiction - seeing where other people will take the characters I like. Seeing it all as a game of shared narrative built around one common source.
Anyway you’ll doubtless be horrified to hear that you’ve provoked me to another essay-length reply - sorry about this, but I’m, er, not good at brevity. [/understatement]
here
April 6th, 2003 at 3:23 pm
Likewise, the percentage of homosexuals in the population has been estimated at 1.5% for women and 3.5% for men.
Really? I’ve heard an estimation of 10%. I’ve also heard that the Kinsey scale puts genuine homosexuality as not much less common than genuine heterosexuality, and that both are a lot less common than some sort of middle ground. I have a feeling no one has ever come up with any stats that are entirely unquestioned.
Both of you are right, and strangely enough they’re both numbers that come from the Kinsey Report and are pretty questionable. They’re different interpretations of the same data, 10% was Kinsey’s interpretation, but pretty generous one according the data. Of course this was data taken in the 1950s, not exactly a time of sexual liberation for women or gays, so one does have to wonder how it might change today.
First and foremost is the “good for the gander” argument - that it’s not unusual for women to like m/m slash because it’s not unusual for men to like f/f pornography. However, men and women are different. Men fill the jails, and women fill the fanfic mailing lists. What men see in f/f videos is not, until proven otherwise, what women see in m/m fanfic. If you went out and polled a hundred non-fan men and women about their interest in homosexual erotica involving the opposite gender, you would not get the same results for both sexes. Mainstream women are not consuming m/m erotica in any appreciable numbers, while f/f pornography is a large part of the porn industry. So when I say that women writing m/m erotica is weird, and that the “pretty boys” explanation doesn’t explain anything, that’s what I’m basing my ideas of what’s unusual upon - the mainstream population. Why do slashers like pretty boys in such greater numbers than average women?
I tend to think (though admittedly with no data to back it up) that m/m erotica is gaining popularity amoung straight women. There has always been a larger stigma attached male homosexuality than female (probably because women’s sexuality isn’t taken as seriously and the long held belief that lesbians can’t really “do” anything, but that’s whole other issue). And of course nice girls don’t consume porn or erotica. Perhaps if you went out and asked people today you might not get a big response from women in favor of m/m erotica, but I’d be willing to bet that there would be a bigger response than you would have had 10 years ago. There is less pervasive homophobia and more importantly, far more easily accessable options.
This is not to that women who don’t consume m/m erotica are homophobic, just that women who might potentially enjoy m/m erotica aren’t exposed to it. Pretty much everyone knows of the existance of f/f porn. You don’t have to be introduced to it by a friend or stumble upon it by accident, it’s just a generally accepted part of our culture. This isn’t true of m/m erotica. But this doesn’t mean it will always be the case.
April 6th, 2003 at 3:35 pm
From what you’ve said here, I’m getting the impression (perhaps mistakenly?) that you feel any take on characters or situation that is not explicitly backed up by canon is a distortion? And hence invalid?
Yes, mistakenly. Any take on major points of character, such as sexual orientation, that is contrary to all evidence in canon, is, therefore, not canonical. If you wish to refer to it as a distortion, that’s fair but those aren’t my words. I don’t know what “invalid” is supposed to mean in this instance. All I said was that it wasn’t canonical and I wasn’t interested in it, and that I can, and do, have a literary disinterest in it. I guess the use of “literary” in this context needs another essay.
April 6th, 2003 at 4:33 pm
Slash, Canon, and Shades of Grey
Before I go into this, it may be a good idea to read all of Jemima’s posts on the subject
April 6th, 2003 at 9:40 pm
>>>From what you’ve said here, I’m getting the impression (perhaps mistakenly?) that you feel any take on characters or situation that is not explicitly backed up by canon is a distortion? And hence invalid?
This is a valid enough stance. For myself, the more fanfic I read, the more I require the fic to be as close to canon as possible. So what you’re saying (please correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t mean to put words in your mouth) is that you view all Buffy/Spike fic in which they have sex, set before “Smashed”, as being uncanonical? Or perhaps a better example is, any B/S fic in which Buffy shows romantic interest in Spike before “Once More, With Feeling” is uncanonical? Or Spike showing romantic interest before “Out Of My Mind”?
Hope you don’t mind my questions. I’m just not sure exactly how you define canon. Would you say extrapolating from later seasons to hint at character traits in earlier seasons to be breaking from canon? For example, a Willow fic set before “New Moon Rising” in which she shows gay tendencies (i.e., if Willow had decided she was attracted to Buffy in Season 3). Would this story be uncanonical?
Also, just wanted to say this is a fascinating debate you’ve got going. I’m learning a lot from reading it. Thanks!
April 6th, 2003 at 11:31 pm
The case of Buffy/Spike having sex before “Smashed,” or of Spike showing romantic interest in Buffy before his pivotal nightmare, would be clearly counter-canonical events. The other examples - Buffy showing interest in Spike before OMWF, or Willow showing gay tendencies before getting involved with Tara, could be done a filling-in-the-gaps way, but it would probably have to be fairly subtle.
However, the question of whether a story is canonical is different from the question of whether a characterization is canonical. You can give canon events a non-canonical reinterpretation on the level of character (say, a secret Spike/Xander affair on the side), or you can put the canonical characters through non-canonical events (Anna’s Season Noir). One is the arena of slash, and the other of AU’s. Or you can do neither, and be 100% canonical, or do both, depending on your tastes.
April 7th, 2003 at 8:37 am
What puzzles me still (although I think that I understand your stance on slash a lot more clearly now that you’ve stated that you simply don’t believe in subtext) is what you would consider NOT to be non-canonical, short of copying out the scripts verbatim.
Might you be able to point me at some typical examples, so I better understand the distinction?
(If it’s too much trouble, then no worries. I’m just curious.)
April 7th, 2003 at 8:55 am
However, the question of whether a story is canonical is different from the question of whether a characterization is canonical. You can give canon events a non-canonical reinterpretation on the level of character […], or you can put the canonical characters through non-canonical events […]. One is the arena of slash, and the other of AU’s. Or you can do neither, and be 100% canonical, or do both, depending on your tastes.
Thanks, this coupled with your no-subtext stance clears up most of my confusion. I guess we just have different takes on how far “canon” can be stretched and still remain (somewhat) canonical.
In this case, please ignore my post to your “On Genre” entry! Sorry for the long ramble there, LOL!