alias_sqbr

Hmm. This complexifies.

I noticed the essay you linked to links to this post (http://community.livejournal.com/fanficrants/1313922.html) where some guy complains about the treatment of men in fandom. More accurately, it links to the braindead first response to that post. To be honest, my reaction to the post itself was quite favourable. Or at least, if there are sections of the fanfic community that:

"... will talk and talk about men. And they'll subtlely bash my wonderful gender. They'll say that isn't it wonderful that women can identify with characters regardless of gender and men can't do that."

then I question their purposes. You've got to suspect anyone when they're wandering around normalising the crassest of crass generalisations as hard fact.

Speaking as a guy I think I understand why some men might get upset with the prevailing norms of the fanfic community. After all, everyone's always been fairly accepting of the idea that slash gained popularity because it subverted the gender roles of the transformed works (buff male protagonists become gay, etc. etc.). It confronts the dominant view by flipping the table over. But if you spend your entire time within that confrontative space, it acquires its own offensive normativity which you're then inflicting on others.

And so some gay men object to having sexual acts that, in some sense, "belong" to them cheapened in slash fic in much the same way as I've heard lesbians rant about the wholly inaccurate treatment of lesbian sex in male-oriented porn. And why shouldn't they? It probably is rather offensive to them to have the scope of their sexuality abused by women who feel like blowing off steam about their own, sometimes queer but mostly hetero (sorry for the crass generalisation, but I'm reasonably certain it's accurate), lives, loves and sexuality.

The argument seems to go back to whether anti-discriminatory / liberation movements in general should allow themselves to become a reflection of what they were fighting against. If fanfic is a dialectic antithesis of the thesis presented by mainstream texts, is there enough synthesis going on that actual progress is occurring?

(Well, actually, I'd say there is because we now see the values of fanfic constantly re-reflected in mainstream TV etc., but eh. I'd guess there are some within the fanfic community who are interested in re-contributing their ideas to the mainstream, and others who want it to be, ideologically, an unchanging walled garden.)

Of course, as soon as one leaves the confines of fanfic one is back in the heavily male-dominated wider world. So it isn't reasonable for men within the community to pretend there's no oppressive external context for the playfulness of slash-fic.

I think part of the trouble is that on the internet, everyone's mandatory return across that boundary (fic-space --> "real world") is not apparent. Those encountered within the community of fanfic are generally never encountered outside it, so it's a struggle to contextualise the viewpoints they're bringing to discussion.

I probably shouldn't comment further because I don't really spend time reading fanfic. But if one reappraises polemic like:

"It should not be seen as "anti-male" to admit that I'm mostly writing for other women. And we shouldn't have to keep fighting for the spaces that, I have to say yet again, we made for ourselves."

from the obvious other-perspective of a man, it's quite clear that it can be expected to offend some men to the point of objection, in much the same way as, say, the male-oriented domain of TV sport tends to rile women. And yet, when confronted by women (my mother, maxfenig, random women with whom I've discussed my affection for sport) I don't defend my enjoyment of football on TV by saying "men created this space for ourselves and shouldn't have to fight for it". Usually I say "yeah, it is a shame it's so male-centric, because I don't think I enjoy it just because it's a guy thing, if you know what I mean". To me that particular gender boundary is mostly quite regrettable ...