Thoughts

[alixtii]

This post from metafandom is making me feel very, very young.

*

The problem with lumping both femslash and m/m slash under the same "slash" label isn't only that somehow femslash always seems to end up dropping out of the discussion altogether (no matter how much some might protest that they really do mean both brands of slash), but that the grouping just plain doesn't make much sense. In addition to the gender of the objects of desire (a not insignificant difference, obviously!), the tropes, the communities, the ethoses (ethoi?), and the dynamics of the fic are all so incredibly different that one can't help but ignore one or the other when using the term "slash"--the two types of fic are just too disparate to fit comfortably under one label. A generalization about "slash" is hardly ever going to speak in any meaningful way to the situation in femslash. The differences between the two genres are legion. (This may vary from fandom to fandom, but in my experience femslash has never been as OTP-oriented, for example, as either m/m slash or het.)

The only thing we're left with is that both types of slash involve same-sex encounters. And while at one point in fandom, the "ooh!" of same-sex sex might have been important enough to link these two within a same genre, I don't think that's the case anymore. We categorize fics now based on the genders of the objects of our desire more than on the dynamics of the relationships involved, I think, and so femslash and m/m slash end up becoming more diametric opposites than anything else.

Of course, there's also still the "saying 'femslash' is like saying 'female doctor'" problem, which is why I try to make a habit of never using the term "slash" unmodified at all.

Comments

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

[I think the plural of ethos is ethos.]

This is also a problem with the lesbian and gay community--or rather, the lesbian and gay communities, because most lesbians and gay men have nothing in common except that homophobes hate both of us, and funding groups won't fund us separately.

I prefer to reclaim the word gay in general usage (when coming out to complete strangers, for example), so I would probably be wont to use the "generic" slash when talking to people who've never heard of fanfic. On the other hand, I've recently taken to using f/f, m/m, and f/m when indulging in meta (unless I'm ranting about slash or het fans).

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of the lesbian/gay parallel, but now that you mention it it makes a whole lot of sense.

[katieliz.livejournal.com]

Re: the female doctor problem.

In my gender studies class we read a article (written in the 80s) that's main point seemed to be the female doctor problem. Only I have never in my life heard someone call a woman doctor that. Maybe its because I'm a female so people would be nervous about saying that in front of me?

Is it still a big issue?

The point I made was that I hear male nurse all the time, but I don't think I've ever heard "female" in front of a profession, so sexism in that way still exists, its just different than we expect.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, I concede the point that the "female doctor problem" isn't so much of a problem as regards actual female doctors, but you instantly knew what I meant when I mentioned it and was able to connect it to a body of academic literature, so that's probably the best name to call the issue by.

As more women move into male-dominated fields (thank god! now only if we could get rid of the glass elevator and glass ceiling....) the female doctor problem probably is and will be lessened in terms of the need to have special terms for females in those professions. As you point out, the flux of men into traditionally female professions has gone off quite so well, though.

I think it's still an issue in that people outside blue state NJ (and Philly) might not be so careful to be PC. I'd very easily believe that in the 80's things would have been different even here. And of course one has to go even farther back to find sincere uses of, say, "poetess." So things are definitely getting better.

Also in the plethora of things, like slash, which by default would be assumed to be associated with one gender unless explicitly modified otherwise, with the assumption that the default is more natural or otherwisely superior. And thelastgoodname brings up the parallel with lesbian/gay above, which I think is a good point.

And I feel like there are professions today for which the default would still be considered "male," but the only one I can think up off the top of my head would be priest.

So: no, I don't think there's still all that much problem with female doctors per se, but the phenomenon itself is still very much alive and an active part of the way systemic inequities are built into our language.

[msilverstar]

Combat military personnel are almost entirely male. Used to be so for fighter pilots but it's getting better :-/

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine calls female restaurant managers manageresses, and while I'd never heard it before, no one else seems to notice when he does it. He does not call female doctors doctresses.

And an extension of the female doctor problem that no one ever seems to notice is the distinction between actors and actresses.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Oh, I totally notice when someone uses "actress" outside the context of the Academy Awards. Although I suppose I only find the usage surprising in cases when the gender truly is irrelevant--if an actress were to call herself an actress rather than an actor I'd be surprised, but not so much if she or someone else were stresssing the femaleness--because no one says "female actor." When I talk about female actors I find hot, I'd say "the hottest actress" even if I were complimenting say Summer Glau's acting skills I'd say she was a good actor.

In both cases, the problem isn't so much with the forms "female doctor" or even "actress"--there are plenty of reasons why the gender of a performer or medical professional might be relevant--but that the "default" forms are understood to denote males.

[gloss]

In addition to the gender of the objects of desire (a not insignificant difference, obviously!), the tropes, the communities, the ethoses (ethoi?), and the dynamics of the fic are all so incredibly different that one can't help but ignore one or the other when using the term "slash"--the two types of fic are just too disparate to fit comfortably under one label.
See, I really kind of disagree with all of this. I don't dispute your experience, of course, but I also don't think things are (or need to be) quite so disparate/polarized as you're portraying them here. So please take the following comment as an attempt to sort out my own experience and expectations.

I mean, I'm coming from a fandom context where most people write boyslash, het, girlslash, and threesomes; there's not the divide there that one might find elsewhere, and its absence is probably one of the things I like most.

My disagreement falls into a couple of slots:
- gender of the objects of desire (a not insignificant difference, obviously!): It's not a big difference for me, nor for a lot of writers I like. I kind of wish you'd qualified this statement more.

- the tropes, the communities, the ethoses (ethoi?), and the dynamics of the fic - I'm not quite sure what you're describing here, and probably need some textual evidence in order to understand; I'm particularly interested in what you mean by the tropes differing. I had something of a personal breakthrough, writing-wise, a couple years ago when I realized that essentializing the differences in gender dynamics was silly, and started trying to write girlslash as I would boyslash and het. I think my fic improved, but that's a personal opinion, of course. (Ethoi is the plural that ethos would take if it were masculine; there's also ethe as a possibility.)

- This may vary from fandom to fandom, but in my experience femslash has never been as OTP-oriented, for example, as either m/m slash or het.
This surprises me, if only because Buffy/Faith, Cass/Steph, and Inara/Kaylee are *so* popular in their respective fandoms.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

It's not a big difference for me, nor for a lot of writers I like. I kind of wish you'd qualified this statement more.

I'm not claiming that people don't base their reading and writing on enjoying a specific type of relationship (i.e. queer), because I know that plenty of people in fandom do, but I think basing it on the presence of the gender(s) to which one is attracted is more common. Furthermore, I'm making the argument that since so much f/f and m/m isn't about "gayness" as we know it in RL, and because same-sex relationships are generally less subversive both in terms of society and specific fannish texts, there's less of an impetus for a fanwriter/reader to say "I like reading/writing about same-sex relationships" rather than "I like reading/writing about men/women/both/neither/&c." If you ask the average m/m writer why she slashes, I'd expect she'd put forth men as the objects of her desire first, before any other explanations. (IOW, the "one man good, two men better" argument never falls out of favor.)

I'm not quite sure what you're describing here, and probably need some textual evidence in order to understand; I'm particularly interested in what you mean by the tropes differing.

I've never seen a femslash "We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other" fic. I don't think I've even seen a femslash genderswap fic. I know fpreg exists, but it's not exactly as common as mpreg, even proportionally to the amount of femslash written. Wingfic? So many of the tropes and formats and other elements that someone like cathexys might put forward as typical of m/m slash are commonly absent in f/f, or at least the f/f I've read. F/F writers don't need to work out body issues stemming from projecting themselves onto a body of the opposite sex (unless they're me, or another het f/f writer, who are in the vast minority). There's no exploration of masculinity, and less of a need to explore feminity because most of the writers are already female. There's less fear and hatred of Mary Sues, I think. Certainly there's less negative knee-jerk reactions against female characters in general. And also there's less discomfort with the notion of homosexuality. The list really goes on, I think, but I'd really need to compare it with someone entrenched in m/m slash fandom.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I had something of a personal breakthrough, writing-wise, a couple years ago when I realized that essentializing the differences in gender dynamics was silly, and started trying to write girlslash as I would boyslash and het. I think my fic improved, but that's a personal opinion, of course.

First off, I agree that essentializing gender differences is silly, and I don't know if your writing improved, but I've loved most of the femslash of yours I've read, so I think you're definitely doing something right. But I have to wonder how much of your boyslash was, to begin with, necessarily representative of the genre as it was (rather than how, perhaps, how it should be). I'm trying to describe my experience in fandom, doing my flawed best to look beyond my flist; if I were trying to prescribe what type of fic should be written (which of course I would never do) my exemplars would be much different--albeit much closer at hand. I don't recommend anyone try and write the "quintessential" m/m or f/f fic if they are striving for literary quality; but from a fanthropological standpoint I think it is useful to extract what those qualities would be in this sociohistorical location.

When I write a fic, I too try to write the fic as my muse demands, but I do recognize that my situatedness will inevitably reveal itself. And as a fanthropologist I look to how the situatedness of others reveals itself in their fannish endeavors, as a purely descriptive project always. (As a het male guest in a female space, I'd tread very lightly to do anything more.)

This surprises me, if only because Buffy/Faith, Cass/Steph, and Inara/Kaylee are *so* popular in their respective fandoms.

It never seemed to me that Inara/Kaylee was all that much bigger than, say, Kaylee/River. Obviously there's some selection bias going on (I like Kaylee/River better than Inara/Kaylee), but it's not like there wasn't over a year in which I read the_cortex regularly. (Lately I've had it filtered out.)
And there will always be a steady stream of Buffy/Faith, but it never seemed to me that it had even close to the market share occupied by a McShep, Blake/Avon, or even Kirk/Spock, and that even XF m/m was much more dominated by a single pairing (M/K) than Buffy femslash is. Xena/Gabrielle is an outlier, but then my understanding is that fandom is unique in more ways than one. (I'm going by hearsay on a lot of this, so I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to be proven wrong about the rôle of OTPs in m/m slash, but again I followed the su_herald for long enough to feel like I'm on firm ground re: Buffy/Faith.) I can't speak for Cass/Steph, although I've read the pairing; I'm just glad I know who they are, and would like one day to know them better.

Have I been clear at all?

[executrix.livejournal.com]

When I was a tiny wee pervert, I lived in Boston, which at that point had mixed gay bars, and I always think about events as occurring at LGBT center or under LGBT auspices. I think it's fair to say that lesbians have done a damn sight more for AIDS issues than gay men have done for any women's health issue, but in a homophobic world (real or fictional) hanging together beats hanging separately. (OB Disclaimer: yes, I think slash is about exclusively gay characters and bisexual characters.)

BtVS fandom has always had approximately a bazillion pairings, but then so does BtVS canon (and some of them actually coincide!) I know that Buffy/Faith is a popular pairing, but my limited experience with Buffy fandom is that it's fairly civilized vis a vis pairings, and nobody will poison your dog just because you write stories that break up their OTP. (I could be wrong about this, of course.) I've never seen any OTP-related wank in Firefly fandom.

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

This post is once again making me think about how odd it is that I, a dyke, tend to find myself so much more drawn to m/m slash than f/f. I *like* f/f slash, but I don't get obsessed with it the same way. I had always tended to attribute that to my general liking for m/m porn and sexual fascination with queer masculinity: for me the queer is way, way more important than the masculinity, and when I desire a male body it's usually through identifying with another male body. Plus there's the fact that I know what lesbian sex is like and if the porn doesn't read pitch-perfect hot to me I drift off into thinking about other personal sexual matters...

Anyway, my point is that the generic differences you've highlighted in your post give me another potential lens through which to read my preferences. I'm generalising, given that I have read a relatively small amount of f/f compared to the quantity of m/m I've devoured, but I haven't seen in f/f many of the things that in m/m are totally compelling to me, in fact are guilty pleasures in my oh-so-nonheteronormative life. The emoporny explorations/subversions of masculinity, h/c romance, even genderswap (which I often do not like at all, but am kind of fascinated by); these seem to come out of the cross-gender writing that m/m slash usually is, and they're the tropes I find in m/m slash that I feel I can't get (satisfactorily) anywhere else. Of course they're far from the only things I read fic for... but I do always go back to them.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

here from metafandom--and oh, wow, I'm writing a paper on this very issue to give at a conference soon, and want to talk more when I am not nearly crashing from tiredness, because I'm voicing some of the same ideas.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I'd love to hear your thoughts when you're not crashing!

[thirdblindmouse.livejournal.com]

The differences between the two genres are legion.

Besides the OTP issue, what are these? They are not immediately obvious to me. I've always considered the boy- and girlslash two sides of the same thing, and in many ways the same as UC het pairings. I'm not saying there aren't differences between all three, but I'd like to know which ones stand out for you.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, on the face of it, in the abstract (where I work best, unhampered by pesky facts!) it makes sense that writing about women (as they exist in our society) would be different than writing about men (as they exist in our society), and that (mostly) women writing about their own sex would be different than (mostly) women writing about an opposite sex.

I do want to reiterate, for you and for anyone else who might read this comment, that I'm not talking about inherent differences in the genres. For one thing, the entire notion of inherent characteristics seems rather against the very notion of a genre: a genre is made up of evolving conventions with fuzzy borders.

My problem here is that I'm not well-acquainted enough with m/m slash to speak authoritatively on how they are different. But relying on hearsay, mpreg and genderswap are elements of m/m that don't seem to be replicated in f/f. Issues of identitity, of power relations, and of all other sorts of things are handled when its women writing women instead of women writing men. The moments of WTF that m/m has produced--wingfic, faeriefic, animalfic--don't seem to be reproduced in femslash, which might have its own moments of wTF. (I'm really not being judgmental!)

It's annoying that I can only make frustratingly vague generalizations, but I don't have the m/m evidence to back up the claim!

Here via metafandom

[zyna-kat.livejournal.com]

Firstly: as someone who's interested in m/m pairings, and not at all in f/f or f/m pairings, I tend to agree with you.

Now: I notice the people who disagree with you here refer to male/male as "boyslash". Personally, I don't call male/male "boyslash", and I don't think it fits with what I read/write/enjoy in fandom. I tend to prefer men, usually men in their late 20s, 30s and 40s. Calling these men "boys" just seems odd to me. (When I see the term "boyslash", I tend to think of--rightly or wrongly--teens, boybands, and/or anime.)

It may just be semantics, but there may be more to it. YMMV, and all that. Interesting post!

Re: Here via metafandom

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Typing "boyslash" into LJSeek didn't exactly confirm my own suspicions--it turns out that it is used beyond the femslash community which I've seen use it (because that's where I hang out). It seems to be pretty strongly a media fandom term, not a popslash one--so Buffy, Farscape, Supernatural, Harry Potter, Firefly, Torchwood and Doctor Who, House, Studio 60, etc.--and certainly not just about teens or characters we would typically think of as boys.

Part of the appeal of the term "boyslash" might be that demeaning character of "boy" might be seen to parallel any demeaning character found in the term "femslash." I know there have been plenty of people who have objected to the supposed implications of the affix "fem" in femslash. but I agree that boyslash as a term for m/m slash is problematic (although probably no less so than femslash as a term), but part of the problem is that saying "m/m slash" or even just "m/m" all the time can seem sort of clunky.\

But in general, the only generalization I'd make about people who use "male" is that they all find the way the term "slash" is used in fandom to be problematic, and (probably) that they find other possibilities (manslash, m/m, male/male, whatever you might call it) too lack, say, poetic ring?

Not to butt in or anything :P

[thirdblindmouse.livejournal.com]

I use "boyslash" because it specifies what I'm talking about and has a straightforward parallel in "girlslash". Perhaps calling grown men and women "boys" and "girls" sounds odd, but a lot of people refer to their favourite characters that way ("I love to see my boys get up close and personal," etc.).

Re: Here via metafandom

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Also let me point out that I don't think that it's significant that those who are disagreeing with me call m/m boyslash--I think there are also people who would agree with me and who would also use that term. Which is not to say that the use of the term doesn't apply all kinds of other interesting things about their subject-positioning--as we have been discussing to such great and fascinating end!

[somercet.livejournal.com]

there's also still the "saying 'femslash' is like saying 'female doctor'" problem, which is why I try to make a habit of never using the term "slash" unmodified at all.

I think the attempt to propagandize 'slash' into a sex-neutral form is anti-historical and anti-woman.

God only knows if the Greek women asked the bard for more of that Achilles/Patroclos dialog, which is simply another way of saying "Who knows how much history is gone?" in a world where over seventy Sophoclean plays and almost all of Sappho's poems are forever lost. Almost worse, though, is the lost work we'll never even know is lost.

Bad enough it happened. Better to never repeat it.

Using "boyslash" or "m/m slash" to more precisely define your subject is great. Using "slash" to include the whole gay/lesbian/other spectrum is okay. But I think the persistent efforts to retcon "slash" into "boyslash" to "more properly" compensate women is about as acceptable as whites in the '20s thinking up new names for that swinging music, since "jazz" is, after all, a silly, made-up word with connotations that some people would like to forget.

You weren't there. You didn't make it up. You don't get to change it. Kleenex, iPod, band-aid: only the bold deserve the fair. (And the naming rights, if they're quick about it.)

The problem with lumping both femslash and m/m slash under the same "slash" label isn't only that somehow femslash always seems to end up dropping out of the discussion altogether

Let's us tackle this as a physics thought problem. 1,000,000 fan fics of, say, Harry Potter exist on the net. (Or it is 1969 and there are 1000 fan fics in the xeroxed (oh, look, another one) 'zine community. Whichever.)

900,000 of those fics are both 'ship and non-'ship gen, written mostly by teenagers, with girls heavily overrepresented. I am terribly uninterested in these stories, for the most part.

90,000 of the rest are hetero, 'shippy/non-'shippy, pr0n or R-rated stories, mostly by adults, mostly women. Men make a significant bump here, though.

9,000 are m/m slash (both pr0n and gen), almost exclusively written by straight women.

900 are femmeslash.

100 are simply scary, incoherent, unclassifiable, or some mix of the three.

Allow me to make two points.

One: in modern America, women are better pr0n writers than men. No one knows why. This has been obvious since Nancy Friday's great sexual fantasy collections. The women's fantasies are simply more complete, more fleshed out, more… well, story-ish. They are better reads. I find as much sexual titillation in Men in Love as I do Women on Top or Forbidden Flowers, but the women's stories are simply, well, chewier.

Is it all the romance fiction they read? (Slash, of course, is romance's red-headed stepchild.) You might be surprised that my answer is, yeah, I think so. Practice, practice, practice. And you may point to Excellent Writer X and say, well, she says she never read romance novels, but I rejoin, did she get feedback from lots of women who have?

Two: note the nearly solid front of estrogen in the above statistics. Of course, this is HP fandom we're talking about, not Star Trek's, which would be comparatively male-heavy and slightly older. Now compare the fanbase for Xena: my personal experience (at a remove) with Xena fandom numbers would skew more significantly to straight male and lesbian or bi female femmeslashers.

If gays and lesbians are three, maybe five percent of the population, then 5% of the 90,000 should be 4,500. But my fake HP statistics above have double that for slash and far less for femmeslash. (I also think my silly power of ten divisions underrepresent cheesy, teen girl gen boy slash, which is a pity.) Why the difference?

Because the overwhelming majority of fic is written by straight women.

(cont.)

[somercet.livejournal.com]

(cont.)

Allow me to be blunt. You can try 're-educating' women (90% straight, 5-7% bi-favorable, 3-5% lesbian) into writing femmeslash. Uphill all the way, high energy, low reward.

Or you can turn to straight guys.

Not all guys are into lesbians, or have especially girl-friendly views. But you can say the same thing about straight women. (I can think of a few divorced women I know who I think would rather write Clive Barker horror about guys than romance stories.) But the fact remains: straight males are a talent pool far in excess of that which lesbians and re-educated straight women can muster. And how do you tap this strength?

Make romance fiction cool again. In the old days, Jimmy Cagney could tap dance, box and wield a Tommy gun to defend his gang turf. The challenge now is not to get guys to abandon their obsessions with, say, cars and guns, but to add to them.

Slash, I think, is already a far distance there. Mainstream romance fiction is stale. Slash is a fresh view of romance, I think, not because of homosexuality, but because the feedback of amateur slash is so direct and blunt. Like all true revolutions, it is strictly bottom-up. (Heh.) The slashy community may be more daring, with worse failures and more inspiring highs, but no one can prove that gay male sexuality causes that. Rather, I think people posting in slashy communities are more willing to put their wilder fantasies out there simply because slash communities are already breaking rules. (Not a cause, but a concurrent relationship.)

the tropes, the communities, the ethoses (ethoi?), and the dynamics of the fic are all so incredibly different

I agree.

Some slash fics overfeminize their characters. It's never offended me. Some girls write girly guys? Wow. Let me find find my Outrage Hat, it's around here somewhere. Some slash is too feminized to be enjoyable; I pass over those silently. (In general, if Harry is cutting himself, you know you're reading a cry for help.)

Some gays on LJ seem to have a problem with women "objectifying" men. These guys have never struck me as anything but whiny little bitches who think they should get entree to the slash comms based upon little more than their cocks, not their writing talent.

No gay guy has ever written a fic like helenish's Close Enough (http://www.helenish.net/closeenough.shtml). None, I think, could. Nor could a guy write Flame and Shadow (http://www.lasairandmaya.com/flameshadow.html), a Ron/Pansy hetslash fic. (I call it 'hetslash' because the pairing is extremely counter-canonical, with two characters who, in canon, probably could not stand each other.) But both of these fics have given me insight into myself. How I handle romantic attraction, conflict, intimacy. I value that.

Similarly, allow me to point out that if you want lots of stories about women struggling with stoicism, intimacy, violence and authority, you could not do better than to get a crowd of guys writing femmeslash with you.

[somercet.livejournal.com]

ARGH. I lost this thought:

Allow me to note that the numbers of straight women, writers and readers, give not only a quality, but a critical mass to the slash community that sustains it even between slashy fandoms. Straight guys would give lesbians those kinds of numbers.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I'm confused. Not once did I say that there wasn't enough femslash written or that there weren't enough femslash writers. I would never complain about that--I'm a firm believer in "if you want something written, you should write it yourself."

What I did complain about was what I saw as a nonsensical classification system which tended to render femslash invisible as a genre. I'm trying to read your comments as in some way responding to that complaint, but I'm actually having some difficulty. Perhaps you could elaborate in some way, or explain it again for the confused?

Sorry.

[projectjulie.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this issue, and was just poking at the relevant qfs post.

I agree in large part. in fact, thank you, because I hadn't fully conceptualized this problem. but I also believe that, as in queer culture at large, there's something to be said for the project of building solidarity across gender. it's important for boyslash and girlslash factions to recognize their affinity, if not their equivalence. that said, the (boy)slash as unmarked term problem does bother me (and again, this problem is not unique to fandom -- somehow lesbians are always erased in discussions of gayness at large, which is why "gay" has fallen out of use as an umbrella term). I tend to handle this by presenting girlslash as if it's the norm. I talk about (girl)slash a lot, both personally and professionally, so it's really a rather devious approach. I don't know if this is an effective strategy by any criteria, but it makes me feel better.