Girliness ....
Okay, I have to write about girliness, girliness and slash and fandom. The incentive for this is a comment cesperanza made in chat after reading my last post, the one about obsession and pairings (and my obsession with certain pairings). In that post I talked a bit about how I'm kind of embarrassed about, ashamed to reveal, the depth of my obsession. I mean, I love it - but it's also a bit scary, to know how invested I am in this fictional world, how it has the power to affect my mood and my state of mind so strongly. I wonder sometimes whether I live too much in fictional worlds - and yet I don't want to change it. Fiction - and particularly, relationships in fiction - and even more particularly, m/m relationships, whether sexual or not - these have always had the power to knock me on my ass. I often wonder if this makes me hopelessly weird and neurotic, or pathetic (or makes me look that way) - like I can't face real life, like I have to (or at least would almost always prefer to) retreat to a fictional world.
When I found fandom, for the first time I realized that enthusiasm for and emotional investment in fictional characters is ... well, shared and understood. And yet I'm still a bit embarrassed to express it, I still feel like my enthusiasm, my emotional investment, is so much bigger than everyone else's; that if people really knew how much I was invested in it they'd look at me funny, it would be just too much - and that expressing it, talking about it as much and in as impassioned a manner as I really want to, would be overwhelming and offputting. So I always have to pretend just a little bit that I care just a little less than I do, pretend to be much more mature and reasoned about it than I am, suppress - or at least moderate - the squeeing fangirl inside.
But the question is, why am I ashamed of my enthusiasm, why do I feel so embarrassed to express it? imkalena, in a comment to my last post, suggested that maybe I'm embarrassed because deep down, I think fannishness is "girly" - and acting girly, acknowledging that there are parts of me that are girly, embarasses me.
Okay, then, the next question is, why am I so embarassed about girliness? Why have I always rejected all things girlie, and all the girlie parts of myself? And I know I'm not the only slash-girl who's done this.
This leads me back to Ces. Her theory doesn't answer this question of why - but it does go to the related and really interesting issue of the relationship between our rejection of all things girlish and our slash obsessions and interactions in the fannish community.
Ces said: "the curse of the 'smart girl' (or the geek girl, I suppose) is that she has to cut herself off in some way from 'girlish' blithering, the very girlish blithering that constitutes so much of childhood 'friend' relationships, and that creates a profound kind of loneliness." And oh my god, this is me. I've always been one of those uber-accomplishers, academically. For a whole variety of reasons I completely rejected anything that smacked of "girliness" - or even "girlness" for that matter. From a very early age I associated "girliness" with "weakness" - I had nothing but disdain for the idea of being "weak" enough to need people, or being girly in any way whatsoever. I always had one or two female friends, but I revealed only limited bits of myself to them. I never had a gaggle of girlfriends with whom I chattered and gossipped and complained about my life - I kept that all inside, never turned to people for anything (that weak neediness again). I sure never had a picture of Leif Garrett on my wall - nothing so girly as that for me! I never went shopping with girlfriends, never talked about the guys I had a crush on.
In Ces's words: I felt like I had to cut myself off from "girlish blithering." I took a perverse kind of pride in being female (I was never a tomboy, never wished I was male) without ever being a "girl" in any way, shape or form. And I convinced myself I didn't want or need anything even remotely girlie. I see now that part of that was a kind of defensive reaction - I was never ostracized by my peers, but I was an odd, too-smart kid, a bit of a loner, ferociously insecure about my worth as a human being. I never attracted a lot of girlfriends; they weren't falling in my lap - it's a lot easier to scorn something, to say "I don't want that anyway," than to admit you want it and then deal with the pain of not having it, not getting it.
And then later, when maybe I could have gotten it - the patterns were too ingrained. By that point I couldn't let myself blither; I was afraid, I was embarrassed.
So: that's been most of my life, probably a lot like many of you other smart-girl slashers out there, cutting myself off from "girlish blithering," feeling like I had to cut myself off, feeling deeply scornful of girls who blithered even while I longed to be one of them, and feeling like I wasn't allowed to blither, blithering was for other girls, for "real" girls, not for me - thereby cutting myself off from so much of what constitutes a girl's childhood friendships - and thereby resulting in a deep, profound kind of loneliness.
Now let me take that next step to the role of slash in all this. My previous post was all about how I'm more strongly drawn to a pairing the more I get the feeling that the two guys are almost totally alone, and figuring they'll always be alone, without much promise of or hope for anything else - until they find each other. I'm a sucker for the idea of scarred, damaged, lonely guys finding "soulmates" who give them everything they need - no need to go outside the relationship for anything. And I'm clearly not alone in that.
So - is this not, really, as Ces went on to postulate, a replication of the "profound loneliness" that we felt as girls because we cut ourselves off from the girlish blithering that was the basis of most girl friendships? We pick up on the elements of our slashed characters that suggest that loneliness; we are drawn to that, and then we build on and magnify it, so that our slash pairings reflect the loneliness we feel ourselves.
And then we cure it - we cure the loneliness. How? Well, as I said in my previous post, by letting the characters discover each other - and then be everything to each other. Ray had no one, nothing; he was alone - but then he found Fraser, and now Fraser is everything he needs - friend, confidante, partner, lover. No need to go outside the relationship for anything. The two of them are "self-contained" - it's the Canadian shack relationship model. And oh man, that pushes all my buttons.
The easy interpretation of this obsession is that this is what I want for myself - one person who is everything to me, who meets all my needs. But here's where Ces's real brilliance kicks in - she pointed out that my actions as a slasher belie this conclusion! Because I'm not out there searching for a single person to be everything for me - no, I'm coming online and LJing and MLing and chatting and talking about it with a multitude of other women - with all of you! I don't want a single self-contained relationship, really - I want a wide, supportive community of people with whom to interact. That's why I'm here!
So we set up our characters to reflect our loneliness, in a kind of parallelism. But then we cure their loneliness in a way that would never cure our loneliness - and thereby cure ours! The key, as Ces said, is not to confuse the form with the substance. In substance the parallelism is there - loneliness/cure, for them and us. But the form of cure that we give the characters, that we want for the characters - ie, self-containment in a Canadian shack - isn't the form that we want for our own cure. The cure we offer them is a more typically "male" cure - one-on-one in a Canadian shack. It's men who typically, generally, want that dynamic. What we really want is that girlish connection, that multivalenced community, that network of interconnections, rather than a single person as a solution to all our loneliness. And we get this by writing about and reading about and then talking about two men alone together in a Canadian shack. We cure ourselves by talking about them and their loneliness and how they cure their loneliness together - not by striving for the actual thing that we give them as cures for their loneliness.
I mean, look at our community. It's incredibly interactive; roles are fluid and constantly shifting. In fandom, the author whose work you are reviewing/critiquing/discussing today becomes tomorrow the reader who is reviewing/critiquing/discussing your work. People are readers and writers and betas and critics; thoough at any moment one hat might be predominant, most of us wear a number of them and move easily among them. And this is an incredibly "female" model - community, equality, shifting roles, mutual suport - as opposed to a more traditionally "male" hierarchical, highly structured, one-on-one model. We want this fluidity, this interconnectedness, this network, not to be spirited away to a Canadian shack to live alone with one person for the rest of our lives, no matter how wonderful that one person might be.
So writing about two men in a Canadian shack is a way of getting that girlish blithering connection many of us missed, and thus of curing the loneliness caused by its lack. We're not writing about what's actually happening to us - do we really want to read about ourselves, about smart women curing the loneliness that dates from their girlhood by reconnecting with their female friends? What we write about - two men being the sole and total cure for each other's loneliness- is a more foreign, and therefore more exotic and interesting, proxy, a symbol, a representation, of what we want for ourselves: a cure for our own loneliness. It's the very act of blithering with other women about these men that is the cure for ours.
I have no idea whether I've managed to state this coherently - I have a distinct feeling that Ces could say it far more effectively in fewer words. This is where my lack of critical academic background hurts me, I think - I don't quite have the words to articulate what I can so clearly see. I find the theory fascinating - and it definitely helps me understand my obsession with the Canadian shack model a little better, though I don't think it fully explains it.
I do think, though, that there's another really vital underlying point here, besides the whole Canadian shack thing: that many of us cut ourselves off from girlish friendships, with loneliness and isolation the result, and our participation in slash fandom is, or can be, the cure (or at least part of it) for that profound loneliness. We are the girlish friends, the high school friends, we never had - with my slashy friends I chatter, I gossip, I shop, I squee about the fictional characters that are really the equivalent of other girls' teen icons - Leif Garrett, Shawn Cassidy (in my generation, at least!); I talk about sex - all the things I never, ever did, even with my one or two close women friends; all the things I scorned and rejected and then pretended I didn't miss. True, it's smart-girl blithering - slashers are a remarkably literate bunch, which is not surprising, I suppose, since their chosen hobby involves reading and writing! There's not a lot of truly vapid girliness. But it's about as girly as many of us - me, definitely! - have ever allowed ourselves to be. And it's wonderful. It's the most wonderful, amazing feeling to gradually, tentatively accept that that girlishness is a part of me, to indulge that part, embrace it even, and not to have to apologize for that - to recognize that if I limit myself to traditionally male patterns of interaction, I will always feel like something's missing.
But - I still do put limits on myself. Not as strict as they were before - but I still stop myself from expressing all the enthusiasm I feel, from blithering to the extent I want. There is still that residual shame and fear that if I let myself blither as much as I want, I'd drive everyone away. I don't completely understand where that comes from, or how to get rid of it. Maybe the only way is to keep taking gradual steps and taking comfort and confidence from the fact that, so far at least, each one has only brought me closer, made me more a part of, my fannish community.
Hmmm. Lots of thoughts on a day I should be working - inspired by Ces's always fascinating insights. And I have many more thoughts - but for once, I'm whipping this post off in a single afternoon and then posting it without futher ado - I refuse to let it fall victim to my perfectionist obsession! I'm just gonna go wild - press that post button, and typos and sentence fragments be damned! *g*
When I found fandom, for the first time I realized that enthusiasm for and emotional investment in fictional characters is ... well, shared and understood. And yet I'm still a bit embarrassed to express it, I still feel like my enthusiasm, my emotional investment, is so much bigger than everyone else's; that if people really knew how much I was invested in it they'd look at me funny, it would be just too much - and that expressing it, talking about it as much and in as impassioned a manner as I really want to, would be overwhelming and offputting. So I always have to pretend just a little bit that I care just a little less than I do, pretend to be much more mature and reasoned about it than I am, suppress - or at least moderate - the squeeing fangirl inside.
But the question is, why am I ashamed of my enthusiasm, why do I feel so embarrassed to express it? imkalena, in a comment to my last post, suggested that maybe I'm embarrassed because deep down, I think fannishness is "girly" - and acting girly, acknowledging that there are parts of me that are girly, embarasses me.
Okay, then, the next question is, why am I so embarassed about girliness? Why have I always rejected all things girlie, and all the girlie parts of myself? And I know I'm not the only slash-girl who's done this.
This leads me back to Ces. Her theory doesn't answer this question of why - but it does go to the related and really interesting issue of the relationship between our rejection of all things girlish and our slash obsessions and interactions in the fannish community.
Ces said: "the curse of the 'smart girl' (or the geek girl, I suppose) is that she has to cut herself off in some way from 'girlish' blithering, the very girlish blithering that constitutes so much of childhood 'friend' relationships, and that creates a profound kind of loneliness." And oh my god, this is me. I've always been one of those uber-accomplishers, academically. For a whole variety of reasons I completely rejected anything that smacked of "girliness" - or even "girlness" for that matter. From a very early age I associated "girliness" with "weakness" - I had nothing but disdain for the idea of being "weak" enough to need people, or being girly in any way whatsoever. I always had one or two female friends, but I revealed only limited bits of myself to them. I never had a gaggle of girlfriends with whom I chattered and gossipped and complained about my life - I kept that all inside, never turned to people for anything (that weak neediness again). I sure never had a picture of Leif Garrett on my wall - nothing so girly as that for me! I never went shopping with girlfriends, never talked about the guys I had a crush on.
In Ces's words: I felt like I had to cut myself off from "girlish blithering." I took a perverse kind of pride in being female (I was never a tomboy, never wished I was male) without ever being a "girl" in any way, shape or form. And I convinced myself I didn't want or need anything even remotely girlie. I see now that part of that was a kind of defensive reaction - I was never ostracized by my peers, but I was an odd, too-smart kid, a bit of a loner, ferociously insecure about my worth as a human being. I never attracted a lot of girlfriends; they weren't falling in my lap - it's a lot easier to scorn something, to say "I don't want that anyway," than to admit you want it and then deal with the pain of not having it, not getting it.
And then later, when maybe I could have gotten it - the patterns were too ingrained. By that point I couldn't let myself blither; I was afraid, I was embarrassed.
So: that's been most of my life, probably a lot like many of you other smart-girl slashers out there, cutting myself off from "girlish blithering," feeling like I had to cut myself off, feeling deeply scornful of girls who blithered even while I longed to be one of them, and feeling like I wasn't allowed to blither, blithering was for other girls, for "real" girls, not for me - thereby cutting myself off from so much of what constitutes a girl's childhood friendships - and thereby resulting in a deep, profound kind of loneliness.
Now let me take that next step to the role of slash in all this. My previous post was all about how I'm more strongly drawn to a pairing the more I get the feeling that the two guys are almost totally alone, and figuring they'll always be alone, without much promise of or hope for anything else - until they find each other. I'm a sucker for the idea of scarred, damaged, lonely guys finding "soulmates" who give them everything they need - no need to go outside the relationship for anything. And I'm clearly not alone in that.
So - is this not, really, as Ces went on to postulate, a replication of the "profound loneliness" that we felt as girls because we cut ourselves off from the girlish blithering that was the basis of most girl friendships? We pick up on the elements of our slashed characters that suggest that loneliness; we are drawn to that, and then we build on and magnify it, so that our slash pairings reflect the loneliness we feel ourselves.
And then we cure it - we cure the loneliness. How? Well, as I said in my previous post, by letting the characters discover each other - and then be everything to each other. Ray had no one, nothing; he was alone - but then he found Fraser, and now Fraser is everything he needs - friend, confidante, partner, lover. No need to go outside the relationship for anything. The two of them are "self-contained" - it's the Canadian shack relationship model. And oh man, that pushes all my buttons.
The easy interpretation of this obsession is that this is what I want for myself - one person who is everything to me, who meets all my needs. But here's where Ces's real brilliance kicks in - she pointed out that my actions as a slasher belie this conclusion! Because I'm not out there searching for a single person to be everything for me - no, I'm coming online and LJing and MLing and chatting and talking about it with a multitude of other women - with all of you! I don't want a single self-contained relationship, really - I want a wide, supportive community of people with whom to interact. That's why I'm here!
So we set up our characters to reflect our loneliness, in a kind of parallelism. But then we cure their loneliness in a way that would never cure our loneliness - and thereby cure ours! The key, as Ces said, is not to confuse the form with the substance. In substance the parallelism is there - loneliness/cure, for them and us. But the form of cure that we give the characters, that we want for the characters - ie, self-containment in a Canadian shack - isn't the form that we want for our own cure. The cure we offer them is a more typically "male" cure - one-on-one in a Canadian shack. It's men who typically, generally, want that dynamic. What we really want is that girlish connection, that multivalenced community, that network of interconnections, rather than a single person as a solution to all our loneliness. And we get this by writing about and reading about and then talking about two men alone together in a Canadian shack. We cure ourselves by talking about them and their loneliness and how they cure their loneliness together - not by striving for the actual thing that we give them as cures for their loneliness.
I mean, look at our community. It's incredibly interactive; roles are fluid and constantly shifting. In fandom, the author whose work you are reviewing/critiquing/discussing today becomes tomorrow the reader who is reviewing/critiquing/discussing your work. People are readers and writers and betas and critics; thoough at any moment one hat might be predominant, most of us wear a number of them and move easily among them. And this is an incredibly "female" model - community, equality, shifting roles, mutual suport - as opposed to a more traditionally "male" hierarchical, highly structured, one-on-one model. We want this fluidity, this interconnectedness, this network, not to be spirited away to a Canadian shack to live alone with one person for the rest of our lives, no matter how wonderful that one person might be.
So writing about two men in a Canadian shack is a way of getting that girlish blithering connection many of us missed, and thus of curing the loneliness caused by its lack. We're not writing about what's actually happening to us - do we really want to read about ourselves, about smart women curing the loneliness that dates from their girlhood by reconnecting with their female friends? What we write about - two men being the sole and total cure for each other's loneliness- is a more foreign, and therefore more exotic and interesting, proxy, a symbol, a representation, of what we want for ourselves: a cure for our own loneliness. It's the very act of blithering with other women about these men that is the cure for ours.
I have no idea whether I've managed to state this coherently - I have a distinct feeling that Ces could say it far more effectively in fewer words. This is where my lack of critical academic background hurts me, I think - I don't quite have the words to articulate what I can so clearly see. I find the theory fascinating - and it definitely helps me understand my obsession with the Canadian shack model a little better, though I don't think it fully explains it.
I do think, though, that there's another really vital underlying point here, besides the whole Canadian shack thing: that many of us cut ourselves off from girlish friendships, with loneliness and isolation the result, and our participation in slash fandom is, or can be, the cure (or at least part of it) for that profound loneliness. We are the girlish friends, the high school friends, we never had - with my slashy friends I chatter, I gossip, I shop, I squee about the fictional characters that are really the equivalent of other girls' teen icons - Leif Garrett, Shawn Cassidy (in my generation, at least!); I talk about sex - all the things I never, ever did, even with my one or two close women friends; all the things I scorned and rejected and then pretended I didn't miss. True, it's smart-girl blithering - slashers are a remarkably literate bunch, which is not surprising, I suppose, since their chosen hobby involves reading and writing! There's not a lot of truly vapid girliness. But it's about as girly as many of us - me, definitely! - have ever allowed ourselves to be. And it's wonderful. It's the most wonderful, amazing feeling to gradually, tentatively accept that that girlishness is a part of me, to indulge that part, embrace it even, and not to have to apologize for that - to recognize that if I limit myself to traditionally male patterns of interaction, I will always feel like something's missing.
But - I still do put limits on myself. Not as strict as they were before - but I still stop myself from expressing all the enthusiasm I feel, from blithering to the extent I want. There is still that residual shame and fear that if I let myself blither as much as I want, I'd drive everyone away. I don't completely understand where that comes from, or how to get rid of it. Maybe the only way is to keep taking gradual steps and taking comfort and confidence from the fact that, so far at least, each one has only brought me closer, made me more a part of, my fannish community.
Hmmm. Lots of thoughts on a day I should be working - inspired by Ces's always fascinating insights. And I have many more thoughts - but for once, I'm whipping this post off in a single afternoon and then posting it without futher ado - I refuse to let it fall victim to my perfectionist obsession! I'm just gonna go wild - press that post button, and typos and sentence fragments be damned! *g*