Oh hey guys
Hi everyone! I'm busily "working on my essay and revising for my exams" (read: eating Pringles and surfing the net), but I found this article which I think is really interesting: Why do lesbians love gay porn?
I think the last theory is the one that applies most to me, especially as the other arguments don't really cover written erotica and are pretty much exclusively about photographic/video porn. I was reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (of Dykes To Watch Out For) over Christmas and she mentions being obsessed with masculine imagery as an adolescent, but she was driven by envy rather than lust - she didn't want those men, she wanted to BE them. I had similar feelings as a very young child - I got a (very ugly) boy's haircut. My two best friends between the ages of four and around seven were boys; we used to play "let's pretend" games in which I was almost always a boy (I also had a couple of dresses which they wore more often than I did - we were a pretty queer little group). Anyway, I'm wondering if part of the whole lesbians-liking-slash thing is to do with some kind of desire for the appropriation of men's bodies?
Of course, this wouldn't necessarily preclude an appreciation for het amongst lesbians, with the reader projecting themselves into the 'male' role. I can't speak for anybody else, but I think there are several reasons why het rarely does it for me: firstly, I rarely find female characters on TV especially interesting, and therefore I don't find them attractive. For example, I find Lisa Edelstein attractive. I can't say the same about Cuddy (Stacy is a different matter - I genuinely liked that character and went through a House/Stacy phase during series 2). This isn't a universal rule - I think pretty much all of the female characters on BSG are astoundingly well-written, and the same goes for Jordan from Studio 60, most of the female characters on Mad Men, and Betty Suarez (to give a few examples). However, I have no desire to slash those characters - I've read some BSG fanfic, and pretty much all of it was het. I think the main reason for this is that where there are well-written female characters there tend to be well-written heterosexual relationships, and because - for me - fic is pretty much about subversion and wish-fulfillment*, I don't really feel the need to read or write fic about those characters. The show does the work for me. On a show like House, though - my main fandom, fic-wise - I feel that the women are rarely well-rounded enough for me to want to read about them, whereas the House-Wilson dynamic is so obviously homoerotic that slash just takes the relationship to its logical confusion in a way that the show refuses to do. It's kind of a lose-lose situation as far as female characters go - if they're good, I don't need to read fic about them, and if they're bad I don't want to. In my first fandom, QAFUK, I read fic because the sexual tension within the show was never resolved, and though I respected that decision in terms of canon, I still wanted to read about Stuart and Vince getting it on. Another reason I don't read het, I suppose, is that there just isn't enough het out there that I find well-written enough to hold my interest (although, to be fair, I don't look very hard).
As for why I don't read femslash, I think a similar rule applies - the well-written female characters tend to be paired up, in canon, with plausible heterosexual partners, and I don't care enough about the badly-written ones. Also, I think, where there is homoerotic subtext on TV it is nearly always between male characters, and I need the subtext to be there before I can appreciate the fic - sure, I could slash Jordan and Harriet, Betty and Francine or Starbuck and Six, but there isn't enough basis in the canon for me to want to do that.
Or maybe I'm just a bad lesbian/bisexual type. Who knows.
*This is obviously not all there is to fic - it can be full of ideas, and it can have true literary value. However, those are a bonus for me, they are not the REASON I read fic.
Right. That's probably enough procrastination for now. One of these days I'm going to do some damn work.
I think the last theory is the one that applies most to me, especially as the other arguments don't really cover written erotica and are pretty much exclusively about photographic/video porn. I was reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (of Dykes To Watch Out For) over Christmas and she mentions being obsessed with masculine imagery as an adolescent, but she was driven by envy rather than lust - she didn't want those men, she wanted to BE them. I had similar feelings as a very young child - I got a (very ugly) boy's haircut. My two best friends between the ages of four and around seven were boys; we used to play "let's pretend" games in which I was almost always a boy (I also had a couple of dresses which they wore more often than I did - we were a pretty queer little group). Anyway, I'm wondering if part of the whole lesbians-liking-slash thing is to do with some kind of desire for the appropriation of men's bodies?
Of course, this wouldn't necessarily preclude an appreciation for het amongst lesbians, with the reader projecting themselves into the 'male' role. I can't speak for anybody else, but I think there are several reasons why het rarely does it for me: firstly, I rarely find female characters on TV especially interesting, and therefore I don't find them attractive. For example, I find Lisa Edelstein attractive. I can't say the same about Cuddy (Stacy is a different matter - I genuinely liked that character and went through a House/Stacy phase during series 2). This isn't a universal rule - I think pretty much all of the female characters on BSG are astoundingly well-written, and the same goes for Jordan from Studio 60, most of the female characters on Mad Men, and Betty Suarez (to give a few examples). However, I have no desire to slash those characters - I've read some BSG fanfic, and pretty much all of it was het. I think the main reason for this is that where there are well-written female characters there tend to be well-written heterosexual relationships, and because - for me - fic is pretty much about subversion and wish-fulfillment*, I don't really feel the need to read or write fic about those characters. The show does the work for me. On a show like House, though - my main fandom, fic-wise - I feel that the women are rarely well-rounded enough for me to want to read about them, whereas the House-Wilson dynamic is so obviously homoerotic that slash just takes the relationship to its logical confusion in a way that the show refuses to do. It's kind of a lose-lose situation as far as female characters go - if they're good, I don't need to read fic about them, and if they're bad I don't want to. In my first fandom, QAFUK, I read fic because the sexual tension within the show was never resolved, and though I respected that decision in terms of canon, I still wanted to read about Stuart and Vince getting it on. Another reason I don't read het, I suppose, is that there just isn't enough het out there that I find well-written enough to hold my interest (although, to be fair, I don't look very hard).
As for why I don't read femslash, I think a similar rule applies - the well-written female characters tend to be paired up, in canon, with plausible heterosexual partners, and I don't care enough about the badly-written ones. Also, I think, where there is homoerotic subtext on TV it is nearly always between male characters, and I need the subtext to be there before I can appreciate the fic - sure, I could slash Jordan and Harriet, Betty and Francine or Starbuck and Six, but there isn't enough basis in the canon for me to want to do that.
Or maybe I'm just a bad lesbian/bisexual type. Who knows.
*This is obviously not all there is to fic - it can be full of ideas, and it can have true literary value. However, those are a bonus for me, they are not the REASON I read fic.
Right. That's probably enough procrastination for now. One of these days I'm going to do some damn work.