Цитатки из мелкой, но зело просвещающей дискуссии с ФэндомСикретс на интереснейшую тему "why lеsbians get off on slash". Меня этот вопрос всегда ставил в тупик и нагонял тоску, и ассоциировался со словом "мизогиния" невольно, тут представлены попытки объяснить. Сохраню, осмыслю, может, чего занудное напишу на тему.

альбионский1. By taking the girl out of sex and having it be two men, lesbian writers are creating a total escapism fantasy because there is no woman for them to project themselves on to or identify with physically. Being lesbians, male/female sex isn't something they enjoy participating in and reading or writing male/female sex may not be attractive to them because they might instinctively identify with the woman, but that doesn't mean they dislike all penetrative sex.
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2. We're conditioned to believe that only women want to talk about their feelings and that men don't. So writing a male/male relationship allows women to explore the idea of men sharing their feelings where they're not being coaxed to by a woman. Because the idea that our gender should get used to not being allowed to share our feelings with men isn't a pleasant one. This applies to all women, not just lesbians, because we (nearly) all have men in our lives who we wish would communicate with us about personal issues more clearly.

3. Penetrative sex involves the woman being penetrated (ignoring pegging here for the sake of argument). We're both conditioned to believe our role in life is to have children, yet informed that we shouldn't be openly sexual because it's not ~ladylike (slut shaming, basically). While this is something we (women) are informed is our lot in life, for men they're conditioned to believe they should be the ones penetrating during sex (meaning the images we're bombarded with of sex are nearly entirely heterosexual). So seeing a man being in the 'submissive' position in bed allows women to explore their expected role from a different perspective.

1. Women (IN GENERAL) find the relationship and emotional dynamics of sex far more sexy than representations of the act.
2. Male characters generally are more developed than female characters by writers, and so the audience is more invested in and in tune with their personalities.
Therefore, lesbians read slash fic because it is easy to find the relationship dynamic sexy.

I'm not a huge fan of porn, but I prefer it when the characters are ones who are well-developed, regardless of their gender/sex. This, unfortunately, means that most of the porn I'm willing to read is centered around two dudes because they tend to be more developed in both canon and fanon, even though I never want to sleep with a man myself.

I was a lesbian who loved m/m, for a very long time. It was the same sex relationship dynamics/penetration without the squicky relating to the woman being penetrated by the man (pegging is fine). But then I had a girlfriend who realized he was actually my boyfriend who loved slash because he identified with the guys.
Boy.
My abstract interest in fictional men just died. Give me the femslash, please. I want to relate to it all the way, not just part of the way.

Я понимаю аргументы про эмоции и отношения, и про абстрактность тоже понимаю, но я также понимаю, что это палка одного конца. Мужчинам-геям плевать на женщин в принципе, и лесби-порно они не смотрят, и фемслэш не пишут. В то время как многие лесбиянки - убежденные слэшеры.
Какбэ гендерная дисгармония.

февральский UPD.
новые цитаты из очередной дискуссии.Well, slash and femslash are written really differently. I've noticed with femslash that there's a lot more hesitation towards extended sex scenes, having the characters come out or even be explicitly not straight, breaking up canon het ships, and often even labelling what they're doing as a relationship. There's also this lack of... ugliness, I suppose? that's found in slash. In slash you might have two characters that love each other and hate each other at the same time, that rage, that fight and scream and just... they don't wear their feelings on their sleeves, but they're not passive-aggressive about it. You rarely see sex that's sort of hatesex but also really not, and most of the time it's left infuriatingly open ended. Femslash can be really complicated in ways slash is oversimplified, and very simple in ways that slash is complex and interesting. And maybe part of that is the canon characters we get to work with, or the gender baggage that people bring in while writing and reading it.
idk, I'm not really as into M/M as I used to be, in reasons that have a lot to do with this secret. I like women. I want to read about women being interesting. I used to be able to look at an M/M ship and relate to it as a gay person, even if I couldn't as a woman. And now I'm not really able to do that anymore. But I really miss the way that slash was commonly written, and how it played on so many kinks that I didn't even realize I had until I found myself more interested in F/F pairings! The fic is so boring compared, at least to me. It's probably really subjective.

In my case, I tend to prefer pairings in which there's a certain degree of tension between the characters - be it rivals or actual enemies or even just people with clashing personalities/ideas. It doesn't necessarily have to a dysfunctional relationship, but I absolutely love fighting and shoving each other against walls and getting all up in each other's face (just to make some examples). Idk, I guess that this boils down to the fact that I love that "physicality" and directness of feelings when it comes to m/m pairings, if you know what I mean (and I kind of hope you do, because I really can't explain it better :|).
That's exactly what I have trouble finding in femslash... the girls are usually either the "adorable bffs" type (which is actually what I go for when it comes to irl relationship) or, if there's some kind of tension between them, it usually ends up in bitchiness and pettiness and I can't stand that D: I often find myself thinking that femslash usually lacks that sort of "epic" feel m/m romances (at least the ones I go for) seem to have, and then I feel horrible because it's like implying that women can't be badasses together and have epic relationship and and I don't even know what I'm saying anymore.

In my own fandom there are so many bi girls and yet everything they do is writing and talking about and drawing dicks.
The common excuse is always "well, the girls are badly written/boring" and at the same time they pick the most obscure background chars for elaborate fanfics and fanart.
They can do what they want, but it's annoying when even bi and gay girls only focus on the dick. Sometimes I feel very alone with my f/f pairings.

I'm really guilty of not wanting to bother with writing, drawing, or reading femslash, even though I love the female characters so much (I tend to prefer het). Evidently, I'm not the only one who does this. If there's a driving force to this phenomena, I think that it's because we are socialized to think that male characters are more interesting than female characters. I think that this is something that is deeply ingrained in many of us. It's our responsibility to change the way that we think.

LOL at all the "but women are just written worse!"

oh fuck off. plenty of popular as shit fandom pairings and works involve underdeveloped/minor/badly written main guys. It's really not as big a factor as I think some people think. You're not obligated to like or write female characters (especially when it's for porn). But if you only have interest in the male characters and never girls and find them sort of distateful maybe that requires further analysis that "eh, they're all written shit anyway" which is hyperbole at best.

girls are getting better written, btw. if you don't take every woman to be THE REPRESENTATIVE OF EVERYTHING WOMAN and nitpick everything into SJ oblivion, there are actually quite a lot of decent female cahracters. I understand why people prefer reading/writing queer relationships because it's an escape from all the socialized bullshit of heterosexual relationships. And again I understand why they'd stick to men (other than orientation reasons) because there's much less socialized politicized bullshit there as well. Just cut all this bullshit about it totally not being you but being the evil men that run and write everything.

I think the big reason for me I find it hard to write femslash is the reason some anons listed above - femslash pairings tend to lack conflict and bromance. Idk if that's just because that's how they tend to get written in fiction or because relationships between women are fundamentally different in that way.
Also slash kind of has a lot of juggernaut momentum, you know? You write it because everyone else is doing it and you get ideas from what has been done. The dearth of femslash means you have to start from scratch. It's hard to know where to begin because of the comparative lack of conventions.
The personal aspect is really strong, too, imo. Femslash seems like 100x more intimate than slash, emotionally and physically. It's hard to distance myself from the content and write the characters instead of my own experiences.
Also even if a canon has one great female character she often lacks another great female character to interact with. I would LOVE some Ghost in the Shell femslash (and Motoko is canon bi!) but there's like no other major female cast members. Everyone else on her team is male. This kind of problem is rather endemic, imo, and you can only avoid it by deliberately seeking out girly shows. Your Star Treks and your Batmans and you Inceptions don't have a wide enough female cast.

Я чувствую мысль, и она где-то рядом, но недостаточно, чтобы выразить ее путем полноценного текста. Буду дальше собирать статистику и думать.

@настроение: всерьез подумываю о PhD по gender studies

@темы: slash/ het/fem, Фанфики