Het vs. Slash, round 3,482
Mar. 30th, 2005 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiThe title of this post is fair warning, I think.
There have been a number of thoughtful and interesting posts on the meaning of both "het" and "slash" recently (all linked via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metafandom), mostly spinning off a post a few days back which postulated a category of "queer het." Which I kind of get, but also find insulting, because hello? The fact that you feel that you are a member of a politically marginalized group does not give you carte blanche to make reductionist arguments about everyone else.
But instead, I thought I'd try for "dull" rather than "offensive." What follows is more about me, and what interests me as a reader of fanfiction, especially erotic fanfiction, which is unlikely to be wildly fascinating to anyone else.
Once upon a time, I used to read a lot slash; these days, nothing makes me quicker to delete a story than an m/m NC-17 categorization. Well, OK, poor formatting and spelling errors, but those are quality-related issues, rather than category-related issues. Granted, I'm not reading very much fanfiction at all, due to time constraints--but my own lack on interest in m/m slash is strange, because as reader I know I do sometimes subscribe to the notion that slash stories are slightly more likely to be better written than het stories. (Whereas as a writer, I'd disagree strenuously.) The thing is, it isn't all slash that I delete, only m/m. If the story is f/f or het, I'll give it a try, at least.
So it occurs to me: there are people who read m/m slash nearly exclusively because they find it easier to read sex-scenes without a female body with which to compare themselves. I must be the opposite--I need there to be at least one female body in the scene to find it exciting. I think male bodies are just too alien to me--I have no idea how it feels to experience sex in a male body, and I'm not entirely sure that it can be explained to me, or that I really want it to be. (What I mean is, I care on a personal level in the "does this feel good?" kind of way, but that's about giving someone else pleasure, and not about feeling pleasure in a different body. When I'm reading fanfic, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
twinkeldru just said, I'm really thinking about my own pleasure, and that happens in this body, not some other body with different equipment.)
I think I've become more prudish, as well: these days, detailed descriptions of anal sex just make me roll my eyes, and not in the good "yes! yes! yes!" kind of way. In fact, most explicit erotica leaves me cold. I like stories for characterization and emotion, which I suspect is a typically feminine point of view--or at least I've been told it is. And it occurs to me that if there is such a category as "queer het" than the slash I prefer to read is "het slash." Not in the sense that it's hetero-normative, because very little is more off-putting than seeing a slash relationship squeezed into some kind of "butch/femme" stereotype (let us all pause, think of stories like this, and say as one, "yuck"), but rather that the focus is on emotion rather than physicality. The focus isn't on how the two characters would get together, but why this particular character and that particular character (who happen to be men) would become lovers. And this is the kind of piece I tend to find in het writers who have turned to slash, or authors who write both het and slash--they're interested in human beings rather than men.
To be honest, I suspect that, as one of the commenters to the "queer het" post pointed out, our prejudices are shaped by the circles in which we read -- that is, I have a high opinion of authors who write both het and slash because that's the circle I've been reading in for years now, and I've figured out what and whom I like.
Also, I think it's amusing that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
twinkledru has commented on the matter just now as well, although with a slightly different focus.
There have been a number of thoughtful and interesting posts on the meaning of both "het" and "slash" recently (all linked via
metafandom), mostly spinning off a post a few days back which postulated a category of "queer het." Which I kind of get, but also find insulting, because hello? The fact that you feel that you are a member of a politically marginalized group does not give you carte blanche to make reductionist arguments about everyone else.But instead, I thought I'd try for "dull" rather than "offensive." What follows is more about me, and what interests me as a reader of fanfiction, especially erotic fanfiction, which is unlikely to be wildly fascinating to anyone else.
Once upon a time, I used to read a lot slash; these days, nothing makes me quicker to delete a story than an m/m NC-17 categorization. Well, OK, poor formatting and spelling errors, but those are quality-related issues, rather than category-related issues. Granted, I'm not reading very much fanfiction at all, due to time constraints--but my own lack on interest in m/m slash is strange, because as reader I know I do sometimes subscribe to the notion that slash stories are slightly more likely to be better written than het stories. (Whereas as a writer, I'd disagree strenuously.) The thing is, it isn't all slash that I delete, only m/m. If the story is f/f or het, I'll give it a try, at least.
So it occurs to me: there are people who read m/m slash nearly exclusively because they find it easier to read sex-scenes without a female body with which to compare themselves. I must be the opposite--I need there to be at least one female body in the scene to find it exciting. I think male bodies are just too alien to me--I have no idea how it feels to experience sex in a male body, and I'm not entirely sure that it can be explained to me, or that I really want it to be. (What I mean is, I care on a personal level in the "does this feel good?" kind of way, but that's about giving someone else pleasure, and not about feeling pleasure in a different body. When I'm reading fanfic, as
twinkeldru just said, I'm really thinking about my own pleasure, and that happens in this body, not some other body with different equipment.)I think I've become more prudish, as well: these days, detailed descriptions of anal sex just make me roll my eyes, and not in the good "yes! yes! yes!" kind of way. In fact, most explicit erotica leaves me cold. I like stories for characterization and emotion, which I suspect is a typically feminine point of view--or at least I've been told it is. And it occurs to me that if there is such a category as "queer het" than the slash I prefer to read is "het slash." Not in the sense that it's hetero-normative, because very little is more off-putting than seeing a slash relationship squeezed into some kind of "butch/femme" stereotype (let us all pause, think of stories like this, and say as one, "yuck"), but rather that the focus is on emotion rather than physicality. The focus isn't on how the two characters would get together, but why this particular character and that particular character (who happen to be men) would become lovers. And this is the kind of piece I tend to find in het writers who have turned to slash, or authors who write both het and slash--they're interested in human beings rather than men.
To be honest, I suspect that, as one of the commenters to the "queer het" post pointed out, our prejudices are shaped by the circles in which we read -- that is, I have a high opinion of authors who write both het and slash because that's the circle I've been reading in for years now, and I've figured out what and whom I like.
Also, I think it's amusing that
twinkledru has commented on the matter just now as well, although with a slightly different focus.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-31 09:39 am (UTC)Huh. Don't know if I've ever come across this one before. I think this is also dangerous because it causes people to have a needlessly dismissive view of feminism. Which calls to mind...oh, I can't remember who is was. You'll remember what I'm talking about if you were around LJ then - that post awhile back about what it meant to be a feminist. "If you've ever done [blank], then you are a feminist."