#fandom natterings

[fatalism-and-villainy]

This is a quality of trans embodiment and trans sexual practice that I would have found beneficial to have de-mystified for me, so - something I wish more people were aware of is that it is very, very common for trans people who were afab to be more inclined towards vaginal penetration after being on testosterone. More arousal concentrated there, more craving for stimulation there, and more pleasure and more ease in orgasming from that kind of stimulation.

This is not universal by any means, but it is extraordinarily common. I've experienced this and know others who have; I brought it up at a medical appointment and the NP I was seeing immediately cut in and said "oh yeah, that's very common. I talk to a lot of people about this and it's very common."; if you search on r/ftm you can easily find other people attesting to this experience. Even people who previously hated the idea of vaginal penetration or PIV sex, who found it either dysphoric or physically uncomfortable, can be found saying "oh my god, I love it so much now, it's crazy."

I haven't done much digging into why this happens, though I suspect it's a result of bottom growth extending internally as well, as well as prostate tissue growth. But while I do see a lot of acknowledgement that eg. transmascs can enjoy vaginal penetration, I think there's a tendency to assume that this is just a vestige of previous interest, or a natural extension of having a "woman's body," and not an actual physiological change that a "masculinizing" hormone can instigate. Which is pretty cool, and has some interesting disruptive implications for how we conceptualize gender.

All of this is to say, I understand the context behind why people lament the prevalence of trans guys vaginally bottoming in erotic fanfic - its overrepresentation in filmed commercial porn, the default expectation from real life sexual partners that being transmasc automatically indicates an interest in that kind of sex, etc. - but I really, really, really would like people to be a bit more careful in how they approach this topic and bear in mind that this is not only a real preference that people can have, but one that can feel specifically trans- or masculine-inflected to those people. And that this preference is already a cause of significant dysphoria and shame for many.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I'm very grateful for this insight about intense and rigid defensiveness as itself being a paranoid critical mode, because I see that reflected so often in fandom and media discussions on here. (Funnily enough a lot of said defensiveness gets expressed through the rejoinders of others for engaging in paranoid reading, because this eagerness to root out paranoid readings and expose them via Farquaad_pointing.jpg "paranoid reading!" exposure is, guess what, also a paranoid practice!)

Because the fact of the matter is that this very absolutist designation of eg. media as "good objects," and the preemptive dismissiveness towards any dissenting opinions, is just as paranoid as the inverse. There is a really pervasive habit of declaring some piece of media intrinsically and uniformly anti-racist, or feminist, or queer positive, or what have you, and then preemptively staving off criticism via this reflexive, preemptive assumption of sinister motives on the part of said critics. This too is reflexive, anticipatory paranoia!

This is also why I drifted away from "shipping discourse" debates, because while I've made my general disdain for what we might call "fandom anti" culture pretty clear over the years, I grew increasingly jaded with a lot of "anti-anti" or "pro-shipping" spaces, because I found them incredibly stifingly reactive. People in these spaces were not only more committed to digging up the most egregious or risible or offensive "anti" sentiments and displaying them in order to make a mockery of their ideological enemies than they were to engaging in actual in-depth, thoughtful analysis, they were actually imitating the terrain of the debate as established by their ideological opponents. (That's mimesis!) They designated very rigid and limiting parameters of acceptable behaviour, and reflexively dismissed anything outside of those parameters as ideologically tainted, rather than opening their minds to other possibilities and alternate priorities. These discursive spaces were - to borrow from the premises of Sedgwick's argument - heavily guarded against surprise of any kind, and they became calcified and anti-intellectual because of it.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

My other frustration with how D/s gets discussed in fandom is that, yes, sometimes people can be overly prescriptivist and essentialist in how they argue for their headcanons about characters' role preferences. Or they just conflate the external kayfabe of a given role with a character's overall personality (there are many doms who are shy and neurotic, lol. Just for one example).

But this sort of thing gets conflated with having literally any character-based justification for imagining them preferring a given role (or actively disliking another one). No, there's no particular "type" of person who enjoys dominance or submission, but there's also no particular "type" of person who enjoys, idk, hockey, or scrapbooking. People come up with headcanons for characters' other hobbies or interests all the time, and will use traits or preferences that they show in canon to justify them. Why is it suddenly off-limits to take into account how a character interacts with others, what they desire from relationships, or what their overall fantasies are when imagining how they might relate to kink? People's sexualities are generally not separable from their entire self, or how they process or relate to people and objects in a non-sexual context.

Or why is it permissible to do that but only if you're open to seeing them in either role? Sure, many of the same inclinations and preferences in their abstract form can manifest in either dominance or submission, but this varies greatly from person to person. Part of the process of coming up with headcanons is imagining a character as a specific person, rather than an abstract construct or cluster of signifiers, and thus a specific manifestation of a wide array of potentialities. "I think they'd find this unpleasant, unfulfilling, or boring, for xyz reasons" can be just as meaningful character work as "Here's a way they could possibly be into this."

A specific subset of my frustration with this sort of thing as well is the subtext I sometimes pick up on that the only reason you'd imagine a character as dominant is because you're horny for them, and giving them the "chance" to be submissive is the only way of bestowing care or vulnerability or interiority in general onto them. (And thus the idea that imagining both characters as switches is the only way for them both to get their needs met.) And I really wish people would stop framing things this way.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

This is a bigger problem in the fanfic realm as well, because I have recently frequently been running into the problem of being drawn in by shippy fanfics that involve things like captivity, enslavement, and other scenarios that inherently constitute reduced autonomy and thus dubious (at best) consent, but actively refuse to engage with those implications.

And it's frustrating, because these are scenarios that I find compelling, and that have the potential for very rich emotional work. I like the juxtaposition of physical pleasure or emotional fulfillment with feelings of fear and violation, and the shame and self-blame that those feelings bring about. And I like digging into an experience of love and desire that is frighteningly selfish in its negligence towards the personhood of its object.

But I see so many of these fics that are explicitly framed as seeking to avoid these story elements - they'll have an author's note or something at the beginning with something like "I know this is problematic, but I've tried to mitigate the dubcon elements as much as I can!" And I find this... deeply frustrating! Because it's seeking to ameliorate the very dynamics that make this sort of story interesting to me!

And by the refusal to engage with the inherently nonconsensual aspects of these premises, I'm not necessarily referring to fantasy romance plot scenarios in which the characters overcome the violence of their initial dynamic to live happily ever after in a more egalitarian relationship. I can understand that these plots are living inside a sort of non-diegetic BDSM fantasy bubble, and they are still engaging with and deriving their initial eroticism and intimacy from violence implicit in their premises, while using the fantasy aspect to mitigate the actual "realistic" consequences of that violence. (I read some danmei novels that did this in ways I found really enjoyable; I think Hannigram also arguably fits into this mold in certain ways, especially considering that it is a fantasy about the parts of abuse that can feel intensely thrilling and that can make you feel recognized and known in ways no one else can.) What I'm referring to is, well, a refusal to engage at all with that violence and violation; an implementation of these premises that feels like just another pretext for introducing the characters and getting them into a relationship, without attentiveness to the implications of the specific pretext in play.

And there's something worth probing at with these kinds of authors' notes in the sense that... there's a lot of concern in fandom nowadays about "romanticizing" rape and abuse, and the seeming necessity of portraying perfect negotiation and consent in fanfic. And yet these sorts of paratextual framings seem to me to be dangerously mistaken about what consent even is - to be conceiving of it as a magic script with no interpersonal or situational antecedents, one that intrinsically smooths over systemic power differentials or lack of personal trust.

I wonder also if that's actually related to the simplistic approach to textual criticism that I sometimes call "checklist criticism" - the idea that a text can be deemed harmful or not, problematic or not, -ist or not, simply by going through a list of "is x present? check yes or no" bullet points, rather than taking a more holistic approach to the relationship between textual production and broader systems of power, being attentive to the specific premises and genre/stylistic aims of a text, etc. Possibly that's too much of a reach for what is ultimately a complaint about the difficulty of finding really juicy darkfic, but it's worth considering.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I don't care one little bit for the messaging in circulation right now that the people for whom slash fanfiction is "for" or who are the "best" at writing it are people who aren't actually attracted to men

[fatalism-and-villainy]

There's a lot I find impoverished about popular etiologies for orientation towards certain kinks on this website, but I think they especially fail to account for interest. I'm not drawn to torture and interrogation and abusive dynamics because of past trauma or unmet emotional needs, I'm drawn to them because they're interesting to me. Intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, and culturally interesting. It's not a stretch that what I find erotically interesting is linked to what I find interesting in general.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

As a gay transmasc, the resurgence of messaging in fandom spaces about how you have to ~critically examine~ why you’re more drawn to depictions of gay men than of lesbians feels like people are trying to enact fucking conversion therapy on me

[fatalism-and-villainy]

And while I do lean on "some of us are gay" as one explanatory factor for personal preference for m/m shipping, I also think it's fine for eg. a queer woman to be more interested in m/m than f/f, or invest more time and creative energy into it. In fact, as a trans person who's largely disinterested in trans interpretations of characters, and prefers to write about cis (or just non-explicitly trans) queer men, it actually makes perfect intuitive sense to me why someone might feel that way. Sometimes what we want from stories is a refraction of our own personal experience, something that has some similar qualities but is ultimately adjacent to our identities, rather than a direct, one-to-one reflection of them.

One could argue that such a preference is ultimately just a result of internalized lesbophobia, or transphobia, and that's possible - I have wondered sometimes if there is an element of transphobic bias on my part here, especially since my preferences seem to be so unusual among trans people in fandom. But frankly? I ultimately don't give a shit, because I'm not actually harming anybody, and neither is our hypothetical queer woman; and because there is no way to definitely prove that we don't have some underlying sinister motive. (There's also, by the way, no way for me to definitively prove that my being trans at all isn't a product of internalized misogyny; I'm much more certain of myself in that regard, but in the eyes of your typical feminist transphobe, there's no heuristic that would allay that suspicion.)

Feminist consciousness raising had its value, but one of its failure modes - at least in how that approach is commonly adopted - is the kind of infinite regress that Sedgwick, in her "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading" essay, identified as a quality of paranoia. "You can never be paranoid enough" - and by the same token, you can never be self-aware enough. No amount of soul-searching will fully root out the extent of one's unconscious bias. And I don't think this process of self-interrogation and self-exposure is ultimately the most productive or useful means of challenging misogyny or transphobia, at least not in this context.