Prejudice and Slash

[rochvelleth]

It's interesting what people are prejudiced about, isn't it? I was just thinking about sexism because of a certain post I was replying to, and about having been bullied for being northern. And this morning I caught a bit of that morning debate show (the one Richard Dawkins sometimes turns up on), and they were talking about religion discriminating

Comments

[rochvelleth]

The reasons I've heard given by people who find slash offensive (or wish to ban it in some circumstances) are:

1) that in the original fandom the characters are not gay (and I assume there's quite a lot of emotional attachment to the characters as heterosexuals and so on that goes hand-in-hand with this)

2) that the community they are involved in is family-friendly, and so potentially anything could be seen by children - and slash isn't appropriate for children (I assume this also means that all explicit sexual references of any kind are unwelcome, otherwise it is obviously biased against homosexuality)

I can understand the second reason, as long as it does apply to everything - though I'm not saying that I think children should be protected from things like slash (I'm not sure of my exact opinions there, though I'm inclined towards full openness).

But the first reason, I'm just not sure. Is it offensive to say that someone heterosexual is otherwise? Indeed, is it offensive to say that someone of any sexuality (and I'm against labels anyway for obvious reasons) is of another sexuality? If it were a real person, would that be offensive? If it's a fictional character does it matter? That's what I can't quite get my head round, so I'm just posing the question.

P.S. But yes, I agree with what you say - if the reason behind not liking slash is based on thinking that homosexuality is somehow wrong, then it can't be anything other than homophobia.

[naath]

Well obviously many people are very OTP about certain pairings. If you say Harry/Ginny is your OTP and that seeing Harry/anyone-else is something that you don't want... then that's not homophobic. But still, that's not an argument for people to not write Harry/Draco (or Harry/Hermione)... it's an argument that people should clearly label their fic so that people don't read things that they don't like!

I think saying "but X isn't gay OMG" is very annoying; mostly because people are annoying when they do it. I have a problem with people who have a problem with the idea that Harry Potter might be attracted to men (but not with people who claim that Harry Potter is a paragon of monogamous virtue who would never cheat on Ginny) because I find the idea that "heterosexuality" is a Massively Key aspect of a character in a novel (especially in a novel where the character's sexuality is largely irrelevant to the story at hand) very distressing.

I was especially angry when people were all "ZOMG Dumbledore wasn't gay!" inspite of JKR's explicitly saying that he was. Clearly they were *wrong* when they assumed he was heterosexual. This kind of highlighted for me the stupidity of people saying "ZOMG so-and-so can't be gay!" - that is, that they often make those assumptions (about sexuality) from very little on-screen/paper evidence about the sexuality of the character. And I think that challenging those assumptions is fairly important - because they do carry over into the real world where real people suffer real discrimination because of stupid assumptions.

I think that in terms of REAL people then it's offensive to claim that this person "is actually" straight when they say that they are gay (or v.v. natch). That of course doesn't stop me from *imagining* that they are straight (or gay) in my head; just like nothing is going to stop me imagining that they are going to marry me so we can live happily ever after in a fairytale castle...

2)Explicit sex, violence, drug-taking etc. can be a problem with children. Yes. Slash is, in this respect, no worse than het I think. Also I think it's important for people to realise that *not all slash is explicit* - there's a lot of slash out there that is no more explicit than a Disney film; and I think that saying "OMG you can't let children know about teh gay" is horribly homophobic.

[cartesiandaemon]

2. I think there's an overlap. There's certainly a tendency for slash to be associated with particularly explicit stuff, which there are natural reasons to be uncomfortable about. But there's also certainly a tendency for people to feel that gratuitous exposure to gay stuff is bad, which understandable or not, only stems from the idea there's something wrong with it.