Thoughts on slash writing
For reasons best known to herself, my pirate!slash muse put in an appearance yesterday. Not that we reached the interesting bits, but after having had 2 paragraphs of a vignette sitting in a file for oh, 4 months, it's kind of nice to suddenly have 2 pages.
When the traffic got too busy for dictating, I let my mind wander and had some thoughts about motivation to write slash. I don't remember seeing ever this idea offered as an explanation (which is not to say it hasn't, just that I haven't seen it). It occurred to me that there is an attitude among some feminists (however one defines them) and enshrined in some feminist writing, that pornography is BAD by definition, and most especially pornography that degrades women in any way. If one has been influenced at all by feminism, this is an idea that might linger in the back of the brain - and writing M/M slash gets around that problem, since no women are involved at all.
Now, I'm a feminist in only a mild sort of way, but unlike some I do think that there are still profound inequalities in the treatment of men and women in many areas and that we can't just sit on our hands. I certainly knew, especially back in my undergrad days, plenty of people who argued that any pornography was terrible. But I didn't entirely agree with that even then. I don't like pornographic photography, because too often I know that the people posing are under duress of some sort, even if only that they desperately need money and this is the easiest or only way to get it. But fiction is a bit of a different matter. Nevertheless I wonder if the fact that I write very little explicit stuff that involves women is affected by that idea.
When the traffic got too busy for dictating, I let my mind wander and had some thoughts about motivation to write slash. I don't remember seeing ever this idea offered as an explanation (which is not to say it hasn't, just that I haven't seen it). It occurred to me that there is an attitude among some feminists (however one defines them) and enshrined in some feminist writing, that pornography is BAD by definition, and most especially pornography that degrades women in any way. If one has been influenced at all by feminism, this is an idea that might linger in the back of the brain - and writing M/M slash gets around that problem, since no women are involved at all.
Now, I'm a feminist in only a mild sort of way, but unlike some I do think that there are still profound inequalities in the treatment of men and women in many areas and that we can't just sit on our hands. I certainly knew, especially back in my undergrad days, plenty of people who argued that any pornography was terrible. But I didn't entirely agree with that even then. I don't like pornographic photography, because too often I know that the people posing are under duress of some sort, even if only that they desperately need money and this is the easiest or only way to get it. But fiction is a bit of a different matter. Nevertheless I wonder if the fact that I write very little explicit stuff that involves women is affected by that idea.