lunabee34

I know what you mean.

I got into fandom via the Buffyverse and began by reading almost exclusively Spike/Xander. Spander was (and I'm assuming still is) pretty kinky. Pairings with vampires tend to be kinky, I believe. But there was this real fetishization of penetrative sex in the fic written for that ship. An author might include other kinds of sex but always, always the story included anal sex. And dude, anal sex is awesome and I like to read and write it. But most people also have sex in other ways sometimes and blow jobs and hand jobs and etc are just as fun TO DO and read about. There was one author at the time (glossing) who was writing this really long series that I don't think had any penetrative sex in it at all and I found that very refreshing.

For me, I think those lables aren't terribly useful because there's a real disconnect between what people who have been in fandom for a long time think a word means and what newbies often think they mean. For instance, when I got into fandom, I interpreted slash to mean--contains same-sex attraction and behavior. So Willow/Tara is slash and so is Giles/Ethan. It wasn't until that definition was firmly engrained for me that I realized that traditionally slash has not included canonical same sex pairings and that it has all these other conventions attached to it that I really don't care for.