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I've been rereading one of my favorite books of all time, Riki Anne Wilchins' Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Eroticism: On the Uses of Difference," in which she argues that our cultural system of erotics is based not on sensation but on meaning, designating certain sites, acts, and bodies as erotically significant, while rendering others erotically unintelligible. It's a very interesting argument (one that she uses to account for the intense displacement of transpeople and transbodies from the hegemonic erotic economy), but the following caught me for another reason:
What is the social utility of promoting a traffic in meaning rather than in sensation? To begin with, sensation is an inherently unstable foundation for such an enterprise: it's private, difficult to code into words and images, and it doesn't travel very well. [...] Meaning, on the other hand, has every advantage: it is part and parcel of words and images, and can be completely public, mass-produced, and mass-distributed. And unlike sensation, which requires all the enormous bandwidth of human contact, you can get an entire meaning into a word, a sentence, a single picture. Meaning is particularly well-suited for our electronic world.
[...] Looking at the congestion of sexualized images we now inhabit, it may be that as a culture we have reached some kind of developmental apex in detaching pleasure from sensation, while simultaneously saturating our semantic environment with the pleasures of meaning. One wonders if we have not begun to take pleasure simply in desire itself, rather than its satisfaction, a desire which, since it lacks any attachment to satiation, is infinitely manipulated, massaged, and magnified (165-166).
I read this again, and for the first time thought about it in the context of romantic and/or sexual fanfiction (in all fandoms and genres), and went, Yes. That's it exactly. I mean, what are we doing if not engaging desire over and over again, as readers and writers, in every guise we can think of? For every story that's smut all the way through (and there are a lot), the stories that I see mostly widely pimped, praised, marvelled at and compulsively reread are those who focus most intently on the color, texture, and path of the characters' desire, where their satiation occurs (if it occurs) only at (or after, haha) the climax. And not solely physical desire. Many of them contain frequent interspersed sex acts, which may lead the characters to orgasm but leave their (more emotional) desire unsated, and when those desires are finally fulfilled (if they are), sexual satisfaction is absent or merely secondary. It's the story of desire we're writing, and any physical gratification most readers choose to participate in is distinctly secondary to (and, being fantasy-based, engendered by) the mental pleasure these stories offer. Technically, it's easy to get two characters to fuck. Write a porn formula, insert the appropriate names and body parts in the blanks, and you'd have it every time. But that's not what we're after, because the challenge (especially with any non-cannon pairing) is to get the characters to want it. It's the shape and intensity of their desire that compells a reader to return to a story, and not generally the insert-tab-A-into-slot-B of their potential release.
If you accept Wilchin's assertion (it's funny, as personal a writer as she is, I always want to call her Riki Anne) that, in fact, our entire erotic economy uses meaning (not sensation) as its primary currency, that certainly supports my argument during the post-Catalyst wankfest that "it's possible to view the writing, posting, and reading of sexually explicit material as a kind of protracted sexual act (or series of acts)." If it's meaning that ultimately turns us on (and thereby enables us to get off), then the mere lack of any sensory contact between the parties involved doesn't make the involvement any less sexual. It also suggests some interesting explanations for other aspects of fannish response.
The topic that springs immediately to mind is squicks. While many squicks are undeniably personal (hurt/comfort, for some reason, really makes me wince), larger patterns suggest there's some semantic drift at play. Wilchins points out that if you get off on something that's not an accepted part of our mainstream sexual economy, "you'll have plenty of trouble finding partners, or even naming and explaining your pleasures. This is not because of the activity in which you engage, but because only some acts and signs are allowed to qualify as erotic" (166). So while some genres get readers up in arms because they're overtly condemned by the hegemonic culture (chan, let's say, or incest, and even slash), others may receive responses of disbelief, bewilderment, or revulsion because they involve erotically queered bodies (mpreg, androsmut) or because they involve acts on the edge of our erotic lexicon (tentacleporn). I wonder if all sexual backlash comes down to a semantic struggle, with one group arguing that the desire or act in question is either wrong or not erotic, and the other arguing just as vehemently that it's erotically meaningful and (in the way that all signs are arbitrary) not inherently better or worse than any other bit of our erotic currency.
What is the social utility of promoting a traffic in meaning rather than in sensation? To begin with, sensation is an inherently unstable foundation for such an enterprise: it's private, difficult to code into words and images, and it doesn't travel very well. [...] Meaning, on the other hand, has every advantage: it is part and parcel of words and images, and can be completely public, mass-produced, and mass-distributed. And unlike sensation, which requires all the enormous bandwidth of human contact, you can get an entire meaning into a word, a sentence, a single picture. Meaning is particularly well-suited for our electronic world.
[...] Looking at the congestion of sexualized images we now inhabit, it may be that as a culture we have reached some kind of developmental apex in detaching pleasure from sensation, while simultaneously saturating our semantic environment with the pleasures of meaning. One wonders if we have not begun to take pleasure simply in desire itself, rather than its satisfaction, a desire which, since it lacks any attachment to satiation, is infinitely manipulated, massaged, and magnified (165-166).
I read this again, and for the first time thought about it in the context of romantic and/or sexual fanfiction (in all fandoms and genres), and went, Yes. That's it exactly. I mean, what are we doing if not engaging desire over and over again, as readers and writers, in every guise we can think of? For every story that's smut all the way through (and there are a lot), the stories that I see mostly widely pimped, praised, marvelled at and compulsively reread are those who focus most intently on the color, texture, and path of the characters' desire, where their satiation occurs (if it occurs) only at (or after, haha) the climax. And not solely physical desire. Many of them contain frequent interspersed sex acts, which may lead the characters to orgasm but leave their (more emotional) desire unsated, and when those desires are finally fulfilled (if they are), sexual satisfaction is absent or merely secondary. It's the story of desire we're writing, and any physical gratification most readers choose to participate in is distinctly secondary to (and, being fantasy-based, engendered by) the mental pleasure these stories offer. Technically, it's easy to get two characters to fuck. Write a porn formula, insert the appropriate names and body parts in the blanks, and you'd have it every time. But that's not what we're after, because the challenge (especially with any non-cannon pairing) is to get the characters to want it. It's the shape and intensity of their desire that compells a reader to return to a story, and not generally the insert-tab-A-into-slot-B of their potential release.
If you accept Wilchin's assertion (it's funny, as personal a writer as she is, I always want to call her Riki Anne) that, in fact, our entire erotic economy uses meaning (not sensation) as its primary currency, that certainly supports my argument during the post-Catalyst wankfest that "it's possible to view the writing, posting, and reading of sexually explicit material as a kind of protracted sexual act (or series of acts)." If it's meaning that ultimately turns us on (and thereby enables us to get off), then the mere lack of any sensory contact between the parties involved doesn't make the involvement any less sexual. It also suggests some interesting explanations for other aspects of fannish response.
The topic that springs immediately to mind is squicks. While many squicks are undeniably personal (hurt/comfort, for some reason, really makes me wince), larger patterns suggest there's some semantic drift at play. Wilchins points out that if you get off on something that's not an accepted part of our mainstream sexual economy, "you'll have plenty of trouble finding partners, or even naming and explaining your pleasures. This is not because of the activity in which you engage, but because only some acts and signs are allowed to qualify as erotic" (166). So while some genres get readers up in arms because they're overtly condemned by the hegemonic culture (chan, let's say, or incest, and even slash), others may receive responses of disbelief, bewilderment, or revulsion because they involve erotically queered bodies (mpreg, androsmut) or because they involve acts on the edge of our erotic lexicon (tentacleporn). I wonder if all sexual backlash comes down to a semantic struggle, with one group arguing that the desire or act in question is either wrong or not erotic, and the other arguing just as vehemently that it's erotically meaningful and (in the way that all signs are arbitrary) not inherently better or worse than any other bit of our erotic currency.