Today in "Generalizations Make for Bad Argument/Off My Side, Dumbass"

[lifeonqueen]

We have this article about how slash keeps the wimyns down (by way of cofax).

I've plumbed this particular argumentative vein before and in broad strokes, I agree with the author's - "Dissenter" - basic thesis that:

what slash writers are actually doing is merely recognising the homosocialism that exists in film and literature, as well as everywhere else in our society. To say they are drawing out a ‘gay subtext,’ and to attempt to attach revolutionary potential to this act is highly inaccurate, since homosocialism is one of the foundation stones of male supremacy, and fanfic authors who endorse and strengthen the homosocial relationships of male fictional characters by portraying them as homosexual are committing an act in support of patriarchy, not against it.

Admittedly, my perspective is slightly different - my concerns are more culture/economic than political (although these factors exist in relation to one another and are not separable entities). I believe that a fan culture that embraces slash or "homosocial" characterizations of male characters in genre texts a la Supernatural or Stargate rather than demanding equal time and weight be given to female characters (particularly problematic in genre ensembles) reward texts that marginalize or ignore female characters. This annoys me as both a writer and a woman who likes stories about/involving interesting women because it diminishes the economic marketplace for the stories I like to tell and those I like to consume. Where's the incentive to create an interesting plotline for Chloe on Smallville when the fangirls are doing their nut over Clark/Lex?

And yes, I am one of those people who is not satisfied with the exceptions to this dynamic (Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and recently Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) . I'm glad they exist - ecstatic - but I will always want more. Or at least equal time.

So that's my opinion on boy slash. I tend to be more forgiving towards femslash - in part because of the inherent gynocentricism but also because I find the focus on female relationships exclusive of men more genuinely transgressive than m/m fic where you have two socially and narratively dominant characters going at it. Then again, my first spontaneous "OMG, SLASHIEST THING EVER" moment was in response to an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles and if Sarah and Cameron aren't both narratively and socially dominant characters in the 'verse, I don't know what they are - which is another way of saying that fanfiction tends to address emotional subtexts of a given narrative rather than the text itself.

That those emotional currents tend to resonate most strongly between male characters reflects what I believe is a larger problem with the status of women in pop culture today rather than something intrinsicly wrong with fandom or fanfiction itself. Fan culture is both extremely mutable and extremely reactive to environment, evolving in response to the stimuli presented - from X-phile (and/or Xenite) to Buffista to Scaper to whatever the Supernatural fen call themselves. But the point Dissenter seems to miss in her essay is that these are, in many cases, the same women; that the woman who writes Supernatural slash today wrote about Buffy, Scully and Aeryn Sun kicking ass and taking names yesterday (and will probably write about Sarah Connor tomorrow) and would probably like to take Dissenter behind the woodshed to explain their displeasure at being characterized as part of a

conservative genre written by women who conform to patriarchal ways of thinking, and which is characterized by lesbophobia, homophobia, woman-hatred and severe phallocentricity, both in terms of its erotic content and intellectual ideas.

Or, to put it another way, writing slash is not a political act (except when it is but that's a post for another day).

It is, even when you don't like the (potential) sociocultural/political/economic implications (and I don't), about story and character. The most interesting characters get the most attention and when those characters are male, slash results. But at all times commentators should keep in sight that fanfiction arises from the same impetus towards storytelling as folklore and oral tradition - stories that were once passed around by firelight are now transmitted digitally. Because when you don't, you get bullshit like this:

The psychology of how and why women come to write slash fanfiction goes something like this. There are thousands of women, all over the world, who, thanks to our wonderful friend male supremacy, cannot relate to themselves as women. They can only relate to men, because only men are considered to be fully human. So they fall in love with the heroes of film and literature, and the ‘geniuses’ who create these texts, and they fool themselves into believing that these men speak universal truths, that they are speaking to everybody and about everybody, women included, when of course they are not, they are only speaking to men in the language of male supremacy that is death and poison to women.

In the cases of some women, usually educated, western women, this worship takes the form of fanfiction, even slash. Imagine it. Thousands of women, all around the world, writing millions of words about the trials and tribulations of men, laying their offerings humbly at the feet of their hundreds of male cultural gurus. Truly it is a terrifying thought.

Slash comes about because women under patriarchy cannot recognise their own sexual desires, or the possibility of a female-centric sexuality, and they therefore take to writing erotic stories about homosexual men as a way to deal with and relieve all of those sexual desires they supposedly don’t have, though of course, the very existence and popularity of slash proves the existence of female sexual desire, albeit a female sexual desire that is still trapped within patriarchal (non)understanding.

Let's see: ad hominem argument (they aren't just keeping the womyns down, they're sexually dysfunctional), sweeping generalization ("thousands of women, all over the world") and a soupcon of general anti-male wank. Fail, fail and fail.

And then there's Dissenter's description of slash fic itself:

Sex is generally portrayed pornographically, with an emphasis on penetration, force and pain, and the overwhelming/uncontrollable need the masculine character has for the feminine character, and the feminine character’s need to be needed by the masculine character in order to have a legitimate identity. Descriptions of sex tend to focus only on the physical side of the encounter, using an excess of violent imagery, and with characters often reduced to a collection of sexualized body parts devoid of emotions or humanity.... It is evidence of in-built lesbophobia and homophobia, since this use-by date mentality means that same sex relationships in slash are generally portrayed as being illegitimate, transient, unstable, and not able to last.

I find this last bit particularly hysterical, given that my first experience of both fanfic and slash was through Xena: Warrior Princess. I wonder what it does to Dissenter's thesis that her characterization of slash as "generally portrayed pornographically, with an emphasis on penetration, force and pain, and the overwhelming/uncontrollable need the masculine character has for the feminine character, and the feminine character’s need to be needed by the masculine character in order to have a legitimate identity" applies to at least half of all XWP fic I ever read, which was written by gay women for gay women (seriously, if the straights wanted to play, we played by queer rules or not at all). "Lesbophobia"? Not so much.

In her dogpiling on slash and slash writers, Dissenter entirely misses the point - that these stories and their prevalence is a reflection of the truly shit state of women in genre these days. From the heights of 3rd wave pop culture feminism in the 90s (the era of riotgrrls and Buffy, the days before Courtney Love became a sad punchline) the Noughties have plunged us into a deeply patriarchy era - whether backlash or, as Susan Faludi opines, reaction to 9/11. Women, even where they do kickass, must still conform to the male ideal of female physical attractiveness. If Aliens were made today instead of 20 years ago, would Ripley still go through the movie without makeup, brushing her hair or a push-up bra?

Rather than subverting or transgressing their expected culture roles a la Buffy, todays genre heroines tend to reinforce the accepted order. Of the last decade, the most high-profile female character in genre is arguably Keira Knightley's Elizabeth Swann in The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy - her motivation? To escape the society's strictures to marry her (male) sweetheart. For her part, Sarah Connor kicks ass all over the place but she does it to protect her son, humanity's future messiah. I love these characters like family but they're not exactly upending any apple carts in terms of redefining women's roles.

Finally, we get to the heart of Dissenter's essay where she defines "radical feminist rewriting" aka "why the shit Dissenter writes isn't actually fanfic but is actually socially important and OMG so special and necessary":

taking characters, events and/or scenarios from literature, history and/or legend which are portrayed misogynistically, and rewriting and reimagining those characters and/or events in a radically feminist way. Radical Feminist Rewriting differs essentially from fanfiction and slash fanfiction in that it critically engages with the original text, for example by denouncing patriarchal assumptions, reclaiming poorly portrayed female characters, reinterpreting the meaning of events and situations in the text in feminist ways, and reclaiming male characters by making them the allies of women and feminism.

Or what fanfiction has always done - reclaim characters, plots, relationships from the dustbins of canon and reinterprete them according to the needs and desires of the authors. Only in Dissenter's case, writing fanfic is a political act. And bully for her but as a rule, pissing on someone else's work does not make yours more worthy. You actually have to create something worth reading.

There is an interesting question in all of this, albeit one Dissenter doesn't actually raise - should women direct their fannish activities proactively towards models that (arguably) empower women rather than those that (arguably) reward male-dominated narratives? For all my philosophical problems with slash, the reason I don't read it is that I'm not interested in the characters (Supernatural) or for whatever reason, the text in question doesn't inspire me to be fannish (Torchwood). I try to be a discerning consumer but I also want to be entertained and, within reason, when spending my entertainment dollars or my time, I invest first in what interests me - often in spite of my philosophical concerns, which is how a card-carrying Liberal, feminist, union-girl owns a complete set of Frank Miller's Sin City stories. While sexism (even by omission) and misogyny in narratives shouldn't be celebrated, it also need not and should not be the only measure of a narrative's value.

The fact is that we live in a culture that has learned to monetize female competition. From Vogue to news coverage of Hilary Clinton, we live in an environment that not only encourages women to tear each other down but profits from it. There is nothing particularly radical or feminist in Dissenter's attack on female fan-culture, in tearing down the creative works of other women to raise the prestige of her own. It is at its heart the same anti-woman screed fans have heard from commentators who want to dismiss and devalue fanworks time and again. The ongoing marginalization of fan-culture and the characterization of fanworks as aberrant cannot, in my mind, be divorced from the predominantly female population of media fandom. For all her "radical feminist" reading of fanfiction, Dissenter is just one more woman supporting the patriarchy by tearing down other women.

In such an environment, is it any wonder that men - who need only compete with other men - continue to dominate the mainstream?

eta: as is common after I spend two hours marshalling my intellectual powers on a subject entirely not worthy of the effort, I realize that there's a much shorter version. To whit - irony much, beeyotch?