Fail, Slash Fangirls, Fail

[redbrunja]

You know what I keep hearing? What pisses me off like no other?

The slasher pov that it is impossible to write a male/female relationship that is equal.

Fuck that.

If you want to write about boys sexing each other, fine, but don't flat-out state that it is impossible for a fictionally heterosexual relationship to ever be equal, as well as implying that every single real world straight relationship is inequal to boot.

Comments

[a-lifestyle.livejournal.com]

Gah! All your posts today just leave me with the same feeling.

...what!?

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

I KNOW!

IT'S LIKE, PEOPLE! STOP SUCKING SO MUCH!

[the-sun-is-up.livejournal.com]

That actually made me lol, because it's just so dumb! Slash fangirls, just because you're too shitty at writing to write an equal m/f relationship, that doesn't mean that the rest of us have the same problem.

[ivy-chan.livejournal.com]

*mind asplodey*


(...Although, I kind of want to ask those people why they don't do FEMMESLASH too, if the male/female supposed inequality is their hang-up.)

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Since the writers of the canon don't give the same attention to the female characters and female relationship, writing femmeslash is just too hard.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Well said.

[ivy-chan.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. How could I forget about female characters just being too uninteresting to write about. *loads the Failgun*

[wicked-seraph.livejournal.com]

What?

People put too much stock into gender and sex to begin with, and unfortunately it tends to be particularly bad with yaoi and slash; there's this ridiculous expectation that one partner HAS to be "the woman" of the relationship. I don't know which is more offensive: assuming that there HAS to be a submissive partner in the first place, or that such submission is a "female" quality. :/

[birdsarecalling.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, of course. Because slashers love perfectly equal relationships, and would never write massive power imbalances for titillation except when they do that constantly.

[plural-entity.livejournal.com]

Waitwaitwait.

Impossible to write something? Nothing in writing is impossible. The huge abundence of slasher fans should be proof enough for that. Because about a decade (or so, don't quote me =P) ago, they would have been strung up in the street if they even so much as thought about slasher communities. The possibilities of writing, and what people can write and make good, are limitless. No matter race, gender, sexuality, or intended audience.

[meitah.livejournal.com]

Yes!

Ladies, teh cock is not that magical. It's not even strictly necessary for sex. Just because your daddies never loved you because you weren't born with a y-chromosome, doesn't mean that you or the rest of us women are inferior. And, for the love of god, keep your paternal abandonment issues out of my fandom.

[mistaria.livejournal.com]

Thank you! ::claps::

[qualapec.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

I have no idea what the connection is between not having a healthy relationship with your father and a mystification with men = depletion of personal female value.

Maybe the reason the penis is so mysterious is because it's an image that girls are sequestered from on cultural reflex?

[mistaria.livejournal.com]

You said this perfectly and I share your sentiments. I can't usually read/watch slash/yaoi because of how often this is the case.

[wicked-seraph.livejournal.com]

It seems that many writers get hung up on what would be a "good slash fic" or "good yaoi fic", rather than remembering that they're writing with characters, not tropes. Two men, two women, a man and a woman, or anything in between - their biological sex isn't as important as how they relate together.

Why can't "romance" or "smut" be sufficient?

[qualapec.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's kinda fail to think that a het relationship can't be equal. Fuck, the only good ones ARE ones based in equality. Unfortunately, I see it everywhere. I can't count on two hands all the girls I see at school who pour out EVERYTHING for these douche boyfriends without understanding that it will never be a healthy relationship if he doesn't bring anything to the table.

Even once you take the slash element out of it, it's something that's still very prevalent in YA culture. That doesn't make it any less disturbing, but I think it provides context.

[mistaria.livejournal.com]

So very true. It just makes me think, like you said, of how much stock is put in gender and sex. And how freaking annoying it is.

[meitah.livejournal.com]

Maybe the reason the penis is so mysterious is because it's an image that girls are sequestered from on cultural reflex?

Definitely.

And the father thing is basic Freudian psychology. Our opposite-gender parent gives us our picture for what people of that gender are supposed to be like, and supposedly defines our self-image a bit more than the other parent. So women whose fathers were misogynistic and dismissive towards them are more likely to have those (skewed) values and to view themselves and all women as being less than men. These women are also more likely to look for similar values in potential mates.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

I have to say, I get really, really nervy about talking about people's probably relationships with their fathers based on fandom opinions.

[terenewen.livejournal.com]

Just thought I'd let you know I found this interesting steampunk-style webseries called Riese. I've only seen one episode (they're all on the site), but it looks interesting, and I thought you might be curious.

http://riesetheseries.com/html/index.html

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

My comp froze and my long reply was eaten. To summarize.

People should stop trying to devalue the thing they don't like just to justify what they do like. I can say,

"Football is fucking boring as shit and the people who play it aren't true athletes, just a bunch of money-hogs who dope up and for what? Bad rerun tv. Now, ice hockey...ice hockey is AWESOME and you can see how hard it is, how much skill that it takes. That's a much better game."

Except saying that doesn't make me a thoughtful analyst. It makes
me an asshole.

I feel this way about het v. slash discussions. It's all whiny hypocrisy and blindness. About the only thing I don't feel guilty about looking down my nose at is RPF. I honestly think that is demented and no long, eloquent essays are ever going to cure me of the gut reaction that screams out against it. If people who write slash feel the way about het that I feel about RPF, then I guess I can understand why they feel a need to describe how twisted it is. Or vice versa with slash. But even so...I may think RPF is messed up b.s., but I'm not going to write a long essay about why it's inferior and less complex emotionally and then make long posts about it. I'm content to let them do their thing, I just won't read it. This is fandom! Who even cares if someone else doesn't like what you like. Another someone always does.

[strange_quark]

Which is why they're also writing so much femmeslash, right? I mean, a lesbian relationship must be as equal as a gay one, right?

I must admit, watching people try to justify their ingrained misogyny is pretty entertaining. In that 'my God you make me want to rip my hair out by the roots' kind of way.

[strange_quark]

Not to say, of course, that people who like and/or write slash must be misogynists. Just that when I'm usually seeing such a justification for why slash is better than het, I'm usually seeing some form of misogyny in there too.

[nimblnymph.livejournal.com]

Ah... there's the icon! I like that one.

Anyway, on topic.

Here's the really sad, stupid thing: I bet if you were to ask those same slasher fans if they assigned their characters seme and uke roles in the story, most of them would probably say yes.

And THAT, my friends, is irony because seme/uke doesn't mean dom/sub. The concept translates more closely as male/FEMALE.

Which means that even though they're writing about a homosexual relationship because they believe it's more functional/equal than a heterosexual one, THEY ARE STILL TECHNICALLY WRITING A RELATIONSHIP BASED OFF OF HETEROSEXUAL DYNAMICS.***

This is exactly why so many bandwagon yaoi fans drive me up the fucking wall. They don't KNOW the history behind why yaoi was created or what it's really about. All they know is *squee* they can put to hot men together in bed.

As you know, I like my yaoi as much as the next slash fan girl, and it bothers me to no end that people don't understand WHAT it is that they're sooooo into. They keep forgetting that Japanese culture has NOT always been comparable to Western and that homosexuality has been more acceptable than a woman stepping outside her traditional role. Yaoi was used as a way for women to EXPRESS themselves as equals through art.

Okay, I'm stopping here for now. I'm tired and I've probably garbled something somewhere. Expect to see this revised/revisited in the near future.

***ETA: This is based off of traditional Japanese male/female dynamics and is not a reflection of my own personal views on said dynamics.

[yukitheawesome.livejournal.com]

What. I. What.

*groan* It's things like this that make me genuinely embarrassed to be a slash fan. BRB, paying a visit to the Utena and Iron Man fandoms to cleanse my soul.