What annoys me about fanfic meta about itself

[alias_sqbr]

(separated out as a tangent from Old school fandom: Can we fix it?)

There's a difference between "here are some flaws in X group"/"Here are some awesome things about my group" (both of which are valid) and "Let's think about the differences between X and my group. Well.. X has all these flaws. And my group is awesome. Because we are awesome people, and they are flawed people (apart from the ones who eventually realise how awesome we are and change sides)."

There is a jump from "there is an undertone of misogyny to some slash"/"There is an undertone of homophobia to some non-slashers behaviour" to "slashers are misogynistic"/"non-slashers are homophobic" to "If you really cared you'd write (fem)slash"(*).

One of things which made me feel excluded from fanfic fandom for years was this attitude that "A lot of fanfic works this way"->"This is What Fanfic Is"->"Everything that is not This sucks and is probably written and enjoyed by misogynistic and/or dull men". Yes, a lot of fanfic takes canon characters and puts them into a romance, but that doesn't mean that I'm Missing The Point of fanfic if I take the setting and write gen about some original characters. And the fact that male dominated fandom tends to be sexist and dismissive of fanfic doesn't mean there's a direct correlation between having tastes in line with conventional fandom and being sexist/narrowminded. Acting this way means female fans with "male" tastes get treated badly in both fandoms.

I'm not sure I've ever seen any "Let's compare stuff from fanfic fandom to equivalent stuff made by people outside" meta that didn't spend every second paragraph talking about how much more awesome and creative and feminist and postmodern "our" stuff is.

One of the things about online fandom (especially on lj) is it's much bigger and more finely delineated which makes it easier to avoid really obnoxious people and create your own space but also makes it easy forget that your like-minded friendslist is not all there is to fandom. When I see a comment like Ursula LeGuin fans could demonstrate a little of the progressive social values of Stargate:Atlantis fans I have to wonder if they count all the fans in mainstream male dominated fandom who think Teyla is hot and enjoy the explosions or whatever. And if they don't count, why don't I get to redefine "Ursula LeGuin" fans the same way? (And here I start shading into my next post :))

nb: I realise one of things fanfic meta does is tend to focus exclusively on fanfic (and specifically, boyslash) to the exclusion of other sorts of fannish creativity and I've kind of done that here. I guess I can't break out of the very mindset I'm criticising!

(*)These arguments annoyed me a lot less once I wrote some femslash, since now I'm one irrational-smug-moral-superiority level above the smug m/m slash writers :)

Comments

id

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be a lecture on 'how dare you not remember what 'id' means', but more my mind meandering around how complicated 'id' is, and no wonder it's hard to keep a grasp of!

***************

I've had a bit of a think and I'm not sure you can get a grasp on the wider cultural usage of "id", or at least that it'd be a consistent concept you were grasping. It comes from Freud, who divided the personality into id, ego, superego, which I've heard described as child, adult, parent. Or alternatively, id are the "base emotional urges" unfiltered by civilisation and culture. In ellen_fremedon's usage, I think she's particularly thinking of raw sexual desire, selfish and untrammeled by what is "right and proper".

But there's at least two assumptions here I have problems with. Firstly, to assume that the 'base emotional urges' of a human being are entirely selfish (which is what most uses of 'id' seem to me to assume) - it seems to me that it's a very basic human emotional urge to interact with other humans, seek connections and relationships; and secondly that, for example, 'base sexual urges' aren't strongly influenced by upbringing, culture and civilisation. For example, ellen_fremedon describes the effect on her of Hawkeye/Mulcahy fic, which means nothing to me because I've never watched an entire episode of M*A*S*H. (I know enough to recognise the names and be aware of the cultural importance of the show to many other people.) And it's going to then become very hard to compare ellen_fremedon's 'base sexual urges' with my 'base sexual urges' and determine that, at base, they are somehow unaffected by culture, when to even evoke them strongly seems to require incompatible cultural references. (I admit I don't know what fic might surf the Id Vortex of my sexual desires. But I'm guessing it wouldn't do It for her, just like this fic doesn't do It for me.)

And yet I feel I get what it is ellen_fremedon is trying to point at when she talks about surfing the Id Vortex, and the writing techniques she describes (in the follow-up post) sound exactly right, like "yep, I must be thinking of much the same thing she's thinking of if these are techniques for doing it".

I think alias_sqbr is talking about a related, overlapping issue - our sexual desires are what they are, and for most of us are hard to change even if they're not PC or feminist or otherwise "desirable". And for example lesbian feminists insisting other women aren't real feminists as long as they're sexually attracted to men - those other women are going to take that pretty hard, right? Particularly in a culture where the mainstream is only aware of male sexual desire and it's often a long hard slog for women to connect with their own sexual desire and reclaim it, and themselves as sexual beings, not just objects of sexual desire to men.

And then other women come in and say to them "your reclaimed sexual self is distorted by your years of only experiencing yourself as a sexual object" (which is actually close to my gut feeling about at least some m/m fic) and yeah, no wonder outside observers wonder if feminists can ever change the world when we're so busy arguing amongst ourselves about fundamental issues of self-identity and self-acceptance.

I think "messy" is really the important word here :-).

Re: id

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Ah yes, now I remember why I can never get a handle on the whole id, ego, super-ego thing - it's because the whole thing bears no resemblance to my world view. The closest I can get to the idea of an id might be some sort of time-scale thing, whereby humans or primates or whatever had particular instincts and behaviours earlier than others, but all that does is beg the question of what is the cut off date? And I agree, there are enough studies showing the advantages of cooperation as a behaviour, as well as numerous examples showing cooperative behaviour in other primates, to reject the idea that everything primitive must be selfish.

I took ellen_fremedon's 'Id Vortex' to be referring to fic kinks, and possibly their interaction with squicks, and she was making some nice points about how fic writers can be better at writing that stuff than pros because we have developed a toolbox for doing so. Whether kinks are primitive sexual urges (whatever that might mean) or modern cultural accretions would be pretty irrelevant to her argument.

I'll let alias_sqbr explain for herself what she meant in her own comment, should she so wish, but to address the points in your own:

our sexual desires are what they are, and for most of us are hard to change even if they're not PC or feminist or otherwise "desirable". And for example lesbian feminists insisting other women aren't real feminists as long as they're sexually attracted to men - those other women are going to take that pretty hard, right? Particularly in a culture where the mainstream is only aware of male sexual desire and it's often a long hard slog for women to connect with their own sexual desire and reclaim it, and themselves as sexual beings, not just objects of sexual desire to men.

Well, when I was describing my own writing as sexist I wasn't actually thinking in terms of sexuality which is a slightly different kettle of fish. I was mainly talking about how I started out writing from a male POV, which incidentally marginalised women, and worrying about it; and now I have gone to a place where I very deliberately marginalise the female characters, pushing to see just how far I can marginalise them and take away their place in the society I am creating. This is partly done as a historical exercise (I write Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic set in the late nineteenth century, focussing on the vampire characters) so I am matching the female roles to existing historical stereotypes (wife, mother, daughter, charity worker, socialite, whore etc.). And it is partly because it is fun. It is relaxing away from the requirement to make every female character a powerful women with agency, individuality and intentions. It allows me to give my male characters some downright misogynistic lines, which is huge fun when you are identifying with them, and generally lets me let rip.

And what is fascinating is that in the process my female characters have come more alive and achieved far greater focus (and there are also numerically more of them) than there were when I was nominally at least nodding to the PC rules and worrying about 'neglecting' them. They have also achieved a surprising amount of power and agency for themselves that they never had before - but it is a far far more historically accurate form of power and agency.

This probably mainly goes to show that writing is a freaky business.

no wonder outside observers wonder if feminists can ever change the world when we're so busy arguing amongst ourselves about fundamental issues of self-identity and self-acceptance.
I just started to say some very rude things, but have reined myself in and am leaving this quote here as a memo to myself not to indulge even if the conversation continues.

Re: id

[alias_sqbr]

I think there's definitely a place for fiction which explores and maybe even celebrates "bad" stuff like sexism etc without explicitly hitting the reader over the head with "THESE ATTITUDES ARE NOT ENDORSED BY THE AUTHOR". That said I think it can be done badly, and think a lot of authors do it too unthinkingly so that it feels like they're saying "These attitudes ARE endorsed by the author". But not having read your fic I'll just assume it's the sort I like :D

Re: id

[alias_sqbr]

See above: I think my definition of "Id" is a loose, poorly defined cousin of the technical one :) But otherwise, yes that's pretty much what I'm saying.