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executrix posted the HANDOUT for the panel on the personal politics of slash that she and beanside moderated, and after I got over my, "OMG OMG OMG beanside! Who makes Jeffrey Dean Morgan do it with Chad Michael Murray! (It's the three names; they belong together)," I was all, "Oooooh, intriguing questions."
The one that caught my eye immediately was the following:
3. M/m slash and f/f slash: more similar than different, or more different than similar?
And BTW, I love how all of these questions are essentially unanswerable except in a very personal, subjective way.
So here's my personal and very subjective answer.
More different than similar. For me.
The first and major difference is that femslash is too close, too personal, too all up in my business. I love femslash; some of the first kinky sex I ever read was lesbian sex (thank you, Rosemary Rogers!) and I still enjoy reading it now. However, I don't write a whole hell of a lot of femslash and the simple truth behind that fact is that it feels too much like I'm gossiping about myself.
Um, this is becoming rather more inarticulate than I intended.
Let me put it this way. Het sex doesn't ping me the same way. I've been doing it with guys since I was fifteen, so pretty much exactly half the time I've been alive and so even though when I write het sex, I am usually writing about sexual activities in which I have participated, there's some several guys who share the glory so to speak.
I've experienced very little same-sex action and what I did experience ultimately came to a completely craptacular end, so when I write about stuff I did with a girl, it feels weird and awkward and *wrong*. I've spoken to other people who are heterosexual who feel this same way about writing het sex or about reading certain kinds of het kink--it just feels too personal and too uncomfortable and horribly familiar.
In other news, I also feel that femslash is different in that it doesn't have this whole *handwavy thing* past to deal with. And of course, what I have just said is patently untrue, y'all. Of course femslash has a past and literary antecedents and even fannish ones, but the truth of the matter is that people are not meta-ing and ficcing and writing in general about chicks doing it the way they are about dudes doing it. Ask any m/m slasher worth hir salt to describe the history of slash and you'll get some Star Trek and some Starksy and Hutch and some H/C and some smarm and most importantly some We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other. But the femslash I've read (DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NOT READ ALL FEMSLASH) is largely devoid of We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other. That trope does not seem to be vital to the genre the way it is to m/m slash. I can't think of a single femslash fic I've read where that trope applied.
Finally, I think the most obvious and quantifiable difference between femslash and boyslash is that more people in fandom read boyslash than femslash. There is a definite difference in audience. I don't know why that is. I know lots of people have made arguments for female characters on TV being less interesting than male characters or other arguments that I didn't read. LOL But the porn industry seems to do super well with lesbian sex scenes in videos intended for a het audience (and everyone in porn videos is always Supremely Uninteresing, except for the Professor of Languages, who is too interesting for her own good), so I don't know what's up with that.
executrix posted the HANDOUT for the panel on the personal politics of slash that she and beanside moderated, and after I got over my, "OMG OMG OMG beanside! Who makes Jeffrey Dean Morgan do it with Chad Michael Murray! (It's the three names; they belong together)," I was all, "Oooooh, intriguing questions."The one that caught my eye immediately was the following:
3. M/m slash and f/f slash: more similar than different, or more different than similar?
And BTW, I love how all of these questions are essentially unanswerable except in a very personal, subjective way.
So here's my personal and very subjective answer.
More different than similar. For me.
The first and major difference is that femslash is too close, too personal, too all up in my business. I love femslash; some of the first kinky sex I ever read was lesbian sex (thank you, Rosemary Rogers!) and I still enjoy reading it now. However, I don't write a whole hell of a lot of femslash and the simple truth behind that fact is that it feels too much like I'm gossiping about myself.
Um, this is becoming rather more inarticulate than I intended.
Let me put it this way. Het sex doesn't ping me the same way. I've been doing it with guys since I was fifteen, so pretty much exactly half the time I've been alive and so even though when I write het sex, I am usually writing about sexual activities in which I have participated, there's some several guys who share the glory so to speak.
I've experienced very little same-sex action and what I did experience ultimately came to a completely craptacular end, so when I write about stuff I did with a girl, it feels weird and awkward and *wrong*. I've spoken to other people who are heterosexual who feel this same way about writing het sex or about reading certain kinds of het kink--it just feels too personal and too uncomfortable and horribly familiar.
In other news, I also feel that femslash is different in that it doesn't have this whole *handwavy thing* past to deal with. And of course, what I have just said is patently untrue, y'all. Of course femslash has a past and literary antecedents and even fannish ones, but the truth of the matter is that people are not meta-ing and ficcing and writing in general about chicks doing it the way they are about dudes doing it. Ask any m/m slasher worth hir salt to describe the history of slash and you'll get some Star Trek and some Starksy and Hutch and some H/C and some smarm and most importantly some We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other. But the femslash I've read (DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NOT READ ALL FEMSLASH) is largely devoid of We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other. That trope does not seem to be vital to the genre the way it is to m/m slash. I can't think of a single femslash fic I've read where that trope applied.
Finally, I think the most obvious and quantifiable difference between femslash and boyslash is that more people in fandom read boyslash than femslash. There is a definite difference in audience. I don't know why that is. I know lots of people have made arguments for female characters on TV being less interesting than male characters or other arguments that I didn't read. LOL But the porn industry seems to do super well with lesbian sex scenes in videos intended for a het audience (and everyone in porn videos is always Supremely Uninteresing, except for the Professor of Languages, who is too interesting for her own good), so I don't know what's up with that.
