Slash vs Same-sex pairings

[aadler]

 
Last week, frogfarm and I did a brief exchange of e-mails, discussing various aspects of our attitudes toward fandom in general and fanfiction in particular. With that individual’s permission, I’m posting my last note, as illustrative of part of my outlook.

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I offered to explain why your preferred pairing [frogfarm is an inveterate Faith/Willow ’shipper] didn’t fall within the category of things I dislike. You expressed interest in my opinion. That follows.

There is a tendency to interpret opposition to slash — not just “not to my taste”, but actual opposition and rejection — as indicative of or synonymous with that dread thing, “homophobia”. (A term I despise and the foundations of which I utterly reject. The word is just a way of saying, “Anybody who disagrees with me on this issue is stupid and wrong and repressed and hateful and bigoted and evil, and I don’t even have to prove those things because just applying the label automatically invalidates everything they say and everything they stand for and HA HA I WIN.”)

No, when I speak of disliking slash (and I truly do), I’m not talking about same-sex pairings per se, but using shorthand for something a bit more specific and limited. What I actually dislike and oppose, and for which I see no justification whatsoever, is the habitual, systematic, gratuitous, and artificial homosexualization of canonically heterosexual characters, for no good purpose. (Maybe the first time it was done, it was “breaking new ground”. Now it all seems to fall under self-titillation, pandering, jumping on the ho-yay bandwagon, or even deliberately designed to offend those benighted knuckle-draggers who dislike slash.)

Because of this, I don’t apply the same objections to Willow/Tara. Or Willow/Kennedy. Or even Willow/Faith. This is because those pairings are neither gratuitous nor artificial. Tara apparently was genuinely same-sex oriented. Willow (whether fundamentally lesbian, or a bisexual who thought it necessary to expunge any twinge of opposite-sex-attraction from her personality) was nonetheless canonically shown as part of two separate same-sex relationships. Faith, for all the fact that every bit of her demonstrated sexual activity was aggressively heterosexual, put out some deliberate and explicit overtures toward Buffy in Season 3. (Even if it could be argued that she didn’t mean it, and was just doing it as a kind of personal power-play, the fact remains that she did those things.)

As far as same-sex pairings are concerned, Willow is canonical. Tara is canonical. Kennedy is canonical. Faith is canonically plausible. I’m still not crazy about the whole business — for that matter, specific focus on ANY ’ship is boring to me — but those, and perhaps others, don’t require that familiar characters be twisted into knots to accommodate someone’s agenda.

So, no, I don’t have a lot of patience with femslash or any slash. For that matter, I have no interest in any story, same-sex or opposite-sex, that centers the story around sexuality; I have better things to do with my time. The [Willow/Faith] pairing you favor, however, while it doesn’t intrinsically appeal to me, doesn’t automatically trigger “don’t read” status.

And that’s where I come from.

Comments

[valyssia]

Funny, what you said about genres. Homoerotic fiction (note that a kinder term exists) is the one 'genre' that can encompass all of the genres you listed and more. I write romance. I write tragedy. I write horror. I write fantasy. I write adventure. I've not written a western yet, though that could be fun.

No matter.

I was given a history lesson about you. You are a former BNF who raised a stink 'back in the day' about gay people being represented in any fashion at cons. You believed that this sullied what should be a family affair and that it might taint the minds of young children who attended the con.

You are no longer of any consequence and this makes you a bitter man who is filled with hatred for something you don't understand. You beat your little drum from time to time and drive even more people away.

It was put to me that you refuse to except the label 'homophobe' because the suffix indicates that you might fear gay people. It can also be said that for someone to hate something they don't understand so openly there must be some element of fear.

Such the pity as hatred begets hatred and the cycle continues.

You cannot wish us out of existence because we just are. We will always be. The predilection is as natural as the occurrence of blonde hair or green eyes. That would be why over many thousands of years of recorded history 'faggots' and 'dykes' have appeared to trouble 'clean living' people such as yourself.

You can't beat us out of being. If you eliminate one, another is born. In these more civilized times, you can send us off to your little boot camps to be conditioned into normalcy. The end result is that we'll either be gay or miserable. Such the expression of love to send someone to be tortured into behaving the way you expect them to. What a marvelous way to show your children the approval, attention and affection they crave.

You will have no further trouble from this little lesbian. You no longer exist to me.

Keep running your mouth and there'll be no one left to listen.

[aadler]

May I note that your being ‘given a history lesson’ about me entailed you hearing someone else’s version of my statements and activities? We’ve never met, and our discussion — while we clearly disagree on several points — was civil. You’re under no obligation to check factual histories before deciding you no longer want to communicate with me, but you really should check before passing judgment on me and signing off with a flurry of insults.

– So, I was once a BNF? I’m happy to hear that, since no one let me know I had ever held such a status.

– All this time, we’ve been talking about slash, and suddenly it’s about what we weren’t talking about, to wit, homosexuality in society. If I ever feel like arguing about that subject, I’ll open a post on that subject. This one was about fanfic, and it wasn’t me who changed the discussion.

– I don’t hate anybody. (Except jihadis, and I generally reserve that sentiment for when I’m in a combat theater, or when they’ve once again demonstrated their moral superiority by murdering a bunch of civilians.)

– I have no desire to wish you out of existence.

– You were not troubling me, so long as we were engaged in a civil exchange of views on aspects of fanfiction.

– And, if I ‘no longer exist’ for you, does that mean you’re trying to wish me out of existence? since, apparently, you regard that as a bad thing.

You might want to reserve your passion for people who are actually taking part in the argument, because this one was never mine.