There's something I'm trying to put into words,
about the discomfort of straight women who are very into slash and yaoi. It's been bothering me in a quiet way for a while, and then over the weekend it exploded, and I'm trying to pick my way through pain constructively.
There's a couple of things.
~*~
Point zero is that desire is good, actually, and so is fantasy. Keep this in mind, we'll come back to it.
~*~
The first thing is shame. People who are choosing to approach their own desire from the side, not willing to recognise their own bodies or vocalise their desire in their own voice, or think about sex in which their bodies participate. People who are too afraid to work on their own liberation, so take yours.
After all, feminist sexual writing is a whole genre and tradition. The only reason why queer men's liberation feels appealing to these women is that they have nothing at stake in it: it's fantasy, it's safe, it's nothing to do with or about them.
For actual queer men, the process of liberationary sex writing is - of course - mortifying; or there is a stage of mortification and pain one experiences in approaching it. It is not, and never will be, your safe space; that's why you're trying to transform it into one.
~*~
The second thing is privacy. I'd wake up and log on and there would be a full-flown gigglefest about sex in slash, and not being able to quite put my finger on how to say - this is making me feel bad and weird. And in retrospect, this picks up on point 1. Whose bodies are we sexualising in this space. I want to go back and start a conversation about how I prefer girl-on-top and how people who read missionary fic are gross, and hey when you read Barbie/Ken fic, do you see them mostly doing it doggy style?
Because I think that would make-it-real, for these women to feel their own bodies are at stake and being scrutinised in the conversation.
Making my morning coffee, I wonder what kinds of sexual relationships these women have, and if they know that "gay missionary" isn't this abstract concept that appears in fanfiction but a kind of sex they have all the right anatomy to experience for themselves. I suspect they would not like that, and that also the purpose of these conversations is specifically so that nobody envisages them having sex, or being sexual beings.
~*~
The third is experience.
A. thinks that it's a problem that teenagers watch gay porn. (A. wrote her dissertation on gay porn.) A has never had her rights removed on the basis that the world must be made "safe for children".
B thinks there's too much gross stuff in fanfic and it should be banned. B has never experienced fanfic archives removing LGBT material under the aegis of child-protection and removing what is "gross". B has never experienced a reasonable-sounding expansion of anti-kink laws being used in the vaccum where anti-gay laws once stood, the way they disproportionately target queer porn, or are used to harass sex workers, or arrest queer people.
C thinks that anyone who has a gross fantasy, is a hair-trigger away from actually hurting somebody. C is cisgender, and will never be arrested in a bathroom or have her body regarded as inherently a gross sexual fetish. C does not date women, and has never come to learn that a fist may be more easy to take than a kiss, when you are made to feel disgusting for desiring love. C is also asexual - the shame associated with having a sexual expression of any kind is not on her radar. C does not experience gender dysphoria, and had to wrestle with the downright odd things you brain does to manage a libido and an incoherent body all at once. C has never dated someone who survived the peak of AIDS, and has formed intimate connections between blood and sex and death, forged by decades of homophobic media and law. C. cannot tolerate the concept of erotic horror because she has never been made to experience her own body and desires as horrifying.
All these women spend all their free time making stories about imaginary gay and crossdressing men, talking about drag race, and sylvester.
This is not dissonant to them. As we have said, these women see queer man culture as a a place of safety - an escape from patriarchy and their own discomfort. They are unable to comprehend queer expression as a thing that is not safe.
They are very certain that they can tell the difference between a sexual expression that is gross and nongross; and hurting the gross is therefore OK, because punishing perverts will never be co-opted in their soft-focus world of tender coffeshop AUs and gentle longing and having the right kind of gay sex that is photogenic for women to consume.
~*~ A corollary: these things are not for you. What if we defined queer media - one of many possible definitions - as a thing that excludes. Their defining quality is a conversation between queer artist and queer listener, drawn from the conversations the artist had with their friends and lovers, or conversations with the world which anyone within the wall will find familiar.
I am suddenly, humbling-ly and viscerally aware of where the *don’t like white people who like ballroom culture* people are coming from
~*~
The fourth thing is that broader conversation about women with privilege (whiteness, class, straightness), being unable to consider that their behaviour could ever be dangerous or destructive.
Their own narrative of sexual victimhood and shame is central in their own hearts, and they are incapable of adopting an intersectional perspective which adds nuance to their experiences.
~*~
And the fifth is how much they hate you when you try and bring actual queer politics into their fragile world.
Simultaneously asking, on the one hand - could we make this space safe for work again, so it feels a little less like it does now? and being howled at, as if that's an outrageous restriction on their right to talk about pornography.
And on the other, if we are to be a porn conversation place, can we try and rethink the judgemental "anyone who likes weird sex is a threat" attitudes that come up over, and over, and over again.
Needless to say, the needle for "this man is a sexual predator" fired in under 30 seconds and, shortly after demanding I leave the community I established, nobody has spoken to me since.
~*~
There's a particular soreness, I think, of being around people who want to casually chat about drag and feel like Born This Way is theirs and want to PM you about their dissertation on gay porn studios of the 1970s and stan the Marquis de Sade
but cannot take the reality of being around queer people or their lives.
An ugliness, a grossness, a grossness that compounds the passively "being treated like a sexual object" into an active bar on having sexual subjectivity. A be seen but not heard of the bedroom: be seen, a Bowie-chiselled Velour-glamoured Cowley-sparkling Velvet Goldmine vision;
but not heard, as in, don't ever cross that line into talking about real sex in our fantasies (even when our fantasies are your real sex), and don't ever make us consider that our words have weight.
I'm spending time in a little world with women who like Interview with a Vampire, the Company of Wolves, David Lynch and the Marquis de fucking Sade, and who are so fragile around their own fears of desire that they cannot tolerate someone saying - it's fine to be into stuff, and not be ashamed.
This odd middle space, where on the one hand I am comfortable in spaces which are sexually silent - where the horror and challenge of my body and life never come up; and on the other, I am comfortable in spaces which are radically sexually open, in which no-one need feel afraid or judged.
These women, on the other hand, want something else: this desire to talk about sex billowing out of them, irrepressably, but also to use that freedom to box other sexualities down tight - to judge, to shame, to define themselves coyly by describing others as disgusting, to feel that urge spilling into view only to publically run away from it and demand others do the same.
Erotica, without wanking. Desiring men, without women. Thinking about the sex lives of your toy dolls, but not being into that weird stuff. Fantasies, with no bodies. Male sexuality, with no actual men in it.
~*~
I am the last of three queer people who has left that community; and still, I imagine, the "define our own sexuality in coded ways by judging things we are not as gross, and creating in the gaps around our own bodies and desires a world of gay men who are like I wish to be" conversations are going on; but unobserved by any actual queers who might break the fantasy.
And reader, I liked these people. I'm heartbroken.
