Sex, desire and fanfiction
Thanks to squibstress for the link to a quite good and thought-provoking article by Foz Meadows on sex, desire and fanfiction.
Meadows' article is in rebuttal to this piece in The Guardian, which attempts to be a sort of primer for the fanfic novice by defining some common terms. It gets some of them right but some of them laughably wrong, such as attributing the origins of Mary Sue to someone named, of all things, Paula (???), alleging that the Futurians had fascist tendencies, and defining slash as "a sub-genre in which buddies from classic TV become gay lovers." Er, huh? Also his punctuation is atrocious (yes, Ewan, it's a blog but that doesn't excuse you from knowing how to use commas and remembering to pair your parentheses). Several of the comments, notably the several by EllaLeigh, are far more scholarly and intelligent than the article itself.
Meadows' article, on the other hand, though equally casual in tone, makes some singularly cogent points about the role fanfic plays for women in particular, and why it's an important one:
...while an undeniably massive proportion of fan fic deals with romance, relationships, non-canonical or otherwise impossible pairings and -- yes -- spectacularly detailed pornography, the titillating novelty of this fact is such that few people often bother to stop and ask why this is...Culturally, we've spent thousands of years either denying, curbing or vilifying the female sex drive, to the point that even now, the idea of pornography geared towards a female audience is still fundamentally radical...[and] the rest of the world still tends to find [it] ridiculous: Romance novels have always been sneered at, while the new vogue for disparaging various sexy, successful books as 'mommy porn' always makes me want to stab things -- not necessarily in defense of the books themselves, but in outrage at the need to establish adult female desire, and particularly the desires of mothers, as being somehow comic, diminutive, novel. It's a species of sexual condescension -- oh, you're 40, female and fond of orgasms? how quaint! (or how disgusting, depending on the level of misogyny involved)...
One of her most interesting points, and one I haven't seen made elsewhere, is that fanfic works for women because women want emotional investment and desire, not just the mechanics of inserting tab A into slot B. With fanfic the characters are already drawn and the emotional investment is already present -- you know who they are, you've been through adventures with them, you care about them -- which means as a writer/reader you can skip straight to the smut without the pages of buildup that a romance novel requires. I'd never thought of it that way but it makes sense:
These aren't just strangers we're perving on purely because we like their bodies (although that can certainly still be part of it); they're characters to whom we feel a strong emotional connection and in whose relationships we're invested, such that watching them have sex, regardless of the quality of the prose, is guaranteed to be about a thousand times more arousing than the sight of yet another anonymous blonde get screwed by some faceless, grunting goon on the internet.
Meadows' article is in rebuttal to this piece in The Guardian, which attempts to be a sort of primer for the fanfic novice by defining some common terms. It gets some of them right but some of them laughably wrong, such as attributing the origins of Mary Sue to someone named, of all things, Paula (???), alleging that the Futurians had fascist tendencies, and defining slash as "a sub-genre in which buddies from classic TV become gay lovers." Er, huh? Also his punctuation is atrocious (yes, Ewan, it's a blog but that doesn't excuse you from knowing how to use commas and remembering to pair your parentheses). Several of the comments, notably the several by EllaLeigh, are far more scholarly and intelligent than the article itself.
Meadows' article, on the other hand, though equally casual in tone, makes some singularly cogent points about the role fanfic plays for women in particular, and why it's an important one:
...while an undeniably massive proportion of fan fic deals with romance, relationships, non-canonical or otherwise impossible pairings and -- yes -- spectacularly detailed pornography, the titillating novelty of this fact is such that few people often bother to stop and ask why this is...Culturally, we've spent thousands of years either denying, curbing or vilifying the female sex drive, to the point that even now, the idea of pornography geared towards a female audience is still fundamentally radical...[and] the rest of the world still tends to find [it] ridiculous: Romance novels have always been sneered at, while the new vogue for disparaging various sexy, successful books as 'mommy porn' always makes me want to stab things -- not necessarily in defense of the books themselves, but in outrage at the need to establish adult female desire, and particularly the desires of mothers, as being somehow comic, diminutive, novel. It's a species of sexual condescension -- oh, you're 40, female and fond of orgasms? how quaint! (or how disgusting, depending on the level of misogyny involved)...
One of her most interesting points, and one I haven't seen made elsewhere, is that fanfic works for women because women want emotional investment and desire, not just the mechanics of inserting tab A into slot B. With fanfic the characters are already drawn and the emotional investment is already present -- you know who they are, you've been through adventures with them, you care about them -- which means as a writer/reader you can skip straight to the smut without the pages of buildup that a romance novel requires. I'd never thought of it that way but it makes sense:
These aren't just strangers we're perving on purely because we like their bodies (although that can certainly still be part of it); they're characters to whom we feel a strong emotional connection and in whose relationships we're invested, such that watching them have sex, regardless of the quality of the prose, is guaranteed to be about a thousand times more arousing than the sight of yet another anonymous blonde get screwed by some faceless, grunting goon on the internet.