Love and Sex and Faith and Fear: It's not misogyny: sexwriting and the gender politics of slash
Anyone who looks at the stats on fanfiction can see that male-male slash makes up a striking majority. Discussion of these stats gets very, um, heated; I myself had blocked a number of meta tags, because this conversation runs roughshod right up my alley. So I want…
Perhaps one way to rebalance at least in part, is to write female characters (in my source material, ACD canon, usually as clients whether original or OC, but Mrs Hudson is a great option) with agency, complexity and inner lives who are not necessarily (or not long term) sexually involved with either of the main pair? That’s how I try to increase representation - also, I enjoy writing those characters.
In terms of my personal desire, (boring monogamous straight cis woman of a certain age) men do it for me [athough in past fandoms I wrote mostly het due to main pairing interests]. Repressed men discovering passion do it for me in spades (British, too!). Friendship becoming love is another kick.
In terms of society, exploring how women who did not, or did not want to, conform to narrow stereotypes and expectations negotiated the spaces of late Victorian England is fascinating to me, just as how men who desired men did so. I see the two groups as somewhat analogous.
This. And to be perfectly honest, my initial reaction to the idea that slash writing is a sign of misogyny was a very emphatic “WTF?!”. The second was that I do wonder whether or not the assumption that most slash readers and writers are straight or bisexual women is correct, because that’s what my limited experience would suggest, and I think there’s data on the subject, so I’ll go and do a systematic search.
Because, really. There are a million reasons to like slash. Misogyny isn’t the first that comes to my mind.
(via tweedisgood)