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Apr. 8th, 2021 01:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hoisinsauce posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
secretfanspaceA space to chat fandom! Anon!
Got a WIP you're excited about? Want to rave about your fave? Or is your fandom absolutely in love with a character who detracts from every scene they bumble into, and you need somewhere to vent? You're in the right place!
(start a comment thread by replying to this post)
Got a WIP you're excited about? Want to rave about your fave? Or is your fandom absolutely in love with a character who detracts from every scene they bumble into, and you need somewhere to vent? You're in the right place!
(start a comment thread by replying to this post)
Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 06:37 pm (UTC)::high fives::
I keep HTP fic and Dworkin side-by-side on my Kindle. I feel no shame in that. Even with the madness going on right now, I am always going to feel protective of fandom, and I am always going to be frustrated by the simplistic outsider POV of what’s going on right now. (No, slash didn’t cause this, FFS. No, it’s not just straight girls fetishizing m/m. Half my friends are old enough to have been from the ‘zine days. Many of them are lesbians or have been in serious same-sex relationships. Most of them strongly prefer m/m. Curiously, none of them have been hit with a case of the genders, even though they’re pretty much all down with the BS.)
Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 06:52 pm (UTC)Yeah, also something I found lurking on ffa was that... most of the people there are still pretty sane, they just have no idea what's going on and are trying to be nice. Of those identifying as nb, many are in the 'don't realise that nonbinary isn't going to work politically and don't realise that all their media is lying to them' camp. Fairly recently there was a thread where some tra mentioned they hated keira bell and everyone else was like 'who is keira bell?'; the tra tried to bullshit but didn't really get the response they wanted. I actually think the pro-TRA stuff on there is mostly a couple of loud anons who spam... but people are still trying to be nice and haven't twigged that it's not a legit civil rights movement yet. And I completely understand fandom women feeling ill-at-ease in what tend to get marketed as women-only spaces, when they tend to have a culture that is totally alien to those of us with geeky interests... and I totally get thinking 'there is a difference between those women and me'. There being a difference doesn't mean you're a man. But they're not imagining that they do not click with these women.
And yeah, anyone who uses the term 'fetishising gay relationships' goes on my red flag list, lol. It's a completely different dynamic to men fetishising lesbians to the point where r/lesbians is a porn sub for men and lesbians can't get a space without it being banned by men who want to be them. I think slash is going to contribute inasmuch as it's encouraging girls to imagine themselves as men (IN A CULTURE WHERE THEY ARE BEING TOLD THEY CAN BE MEN THAT IS THE IMPORTANT BIT) but it's like, 'have you thought about where this line of thought leads? you want to ban people from imagining being someone else? do you want to ban fiction?' -- And that's exactly the same attitude as the extreme socjus stuff that's like 'you may not write this unless you have lived it, and then it must be ~responsible~. Just, fuck off, all'o'ya. It's not feminism, it is the very same bullshit mindset that's causing these problems in the first place. And plus we all know it's because they, personally, do not like slash, and they can't handle the idea that morality doesn't have to map 1:1 with whatever they personally like and dislike. They'd have all been homophobes a few years back because they think their kneejerk reactions are a god-given guide to what's right.
Well, that's my rant.
Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 07:19 pm (UTC)Counterpoint: I like some slash, I like some yaoi, I have geeky interests, but I am absolutely turned off by the extreme focus on m/m in fandom. I don't understand why there isn't more decent m/f, and I think the focus on m/m relationships is less healthy and interesting than writing good, dynamic m/f relationships. I'm not out to ban anything, people can like what they like, but the focus on m/m has made me shy away from fandoms where I like the source material. I'm not going to stand out there and preach to anyone about their personal fandoms or fic, but if we're having meta discussions about fandom, overfocus on m/m IS a huge red flag to me.
Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 07:36 pm (UTC)I find it a bit funny that I end up arguing for slash and yaoi so much because I personally cannot stand yaoi, I think it is based on a lot of sexist tropes, and slash generally bores me. I don't like men's bodies and don't much want to picture them. I mostly write gen. So I suspect I recognise the feelings that are motivating those who are stridently against it, but to me the issues with yaoi are a symptom of deeper cultural issues, and those who treat it as the *cause* are just displacing anger they should be directing at men onto other women. And I'm very very glad I didn't fall into that trap because I could see past-teen-me going along with it because it matched up with my personal tastes. And I'm glad I met women who liked it so I got to find out that some people just like it, instead of wasting time psychoanalysing how they had acquired their preferences or assuming they couldn't think critically. :P
Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 07:51 pm (UTC)I don't think should slash be blamed for transing people without looking at the general culture, and liking dark fic doesn't make you degenerate, but... man, I've seen fic writers go down a path: start out writing slash that's only remarkable because it's higher quality than usual, start including more non-con, then some incest, fast forward and everything is bdsm or piss fetishes or similar. I don't know, maybe you can keep a Chinese wall between that and the rest of your life, I don't know these writers offline, but that's a progression that does make me worried/concerned, and I've never seen it go the OTHER direction.
Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 08:04 pm (UTC)Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 08:04 pm (UTC)Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 09:51 pm (UTC)I have also been in dark fic Discords and have seen that writing progression. It’s generally a case of like-minded people egging each other on like a bunch of edgelords, though you have enough people in fandom who are also in the kink scene that there’s bleedover from that when they realize there’s an audience for writing what they know, but in the latter case, the kink scene involvement is usually preexisting and the writing (or at least the author’s notes) is usually a lot preachier.
Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 09:55 pm (UTC)Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-11 02:17 am (UTC)Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 10:11 pm (UTC)Have any of you guys read the manga My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness? There's this part where she's trying to figure out sex with a woman, but suddenly realizes that all of the porn she's read has been about the "yaoi hole" - that she kind of hid her fear about sex by reading m/m that had no relation to the real world or real bodies at all. It freaked me out when I read it, because that's pretty much exactly how I got into m/m - when I first read m/m, it grossed me out! I hate penises! But I got into it, and eventually found it hot. Only I realized that it was hot to me as men-who-were-basically-women, written by women. Slash ended up basically being a coping mechanism for me so I didn't have to think about RL sexuality, in a way. I mostly ship f/f now and it feels more natural to me (just wish there was all the fic and porn that m/m got, LOL).
Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 10:25 pm (UTC)I tend to fantasise about het but I can't tell if that's cultural conditioning or not, since I find men's bodies kind of repulsive visually and prefer to look at women, and I don't feel attracted to anyone. I don't read much f/f but again idk how much of that is conditioning. When I fantasise, I've noticed I put myself in the shoes of one of the women in f/f scenarios whereas I watch f/m scenarios from the outside. I can occasionally make myself fantasise about m/m but it's a struggle. Like, two men, why would I wanna look at that? There's nothing to look at! Whereas I absolutely *know* what kind of dynamics I like, scenario-wise, emotion-wise. So I wonder if I just put men in them because those are the characters who are depicted as having certain emotions and it's hard to imagine a female version that isn't a dorky created-by-a-man implausible kind of thing. And then it's not like fandom is rushing to supply good f/f/. It's interesting seeing how different different people's experiences are.
Re: Every time someone bashes yaoi...
Date: 2021-04-10 11:08 pm (UTC)It's fantastic and brutally honest. I feel like I might get backlash if I recced it in radfem spaces because the author talks about hiring an escort and that's obviously a hot topic.
I feel the same way about dynamics influencing your ships. It's so hard to find what I want in f/f, and genderswap doesn't work for me. Once I started really searching out canons with a ton of female characters, though, it got a bit easier.