Does m/m slash empower women?

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Title:	Does m/m slash empower women?
Creator:	partly bouncy
Date(s):	May 25, 2005
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Women and Slash
External Links:	Does m/m slash empower women? archive link
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Does m/m slash empower women? is a 2005 post by partly bouncy at slashphilosophy.

The original poster includes eleven hyperlinks in the last paragraph, some are to journals that have been purged and deleted; see the original post for these links. The links used here on Fanlore are internal ones to the wiki.

The Essay

I have a question regarding slash. I've seen and heard the argument in a number of different fan spaces that m/m slash was empowering to women on a fannish whole (as opposed to isolated author feels empowered just through the process of writing) and I was curious if other people had any thoughts on this?

I know generalizations in fan fiction communities are dangerous because, well, they don't seem to stand up to scrutinity... but... well:

Does m/m slash empower women?

Does m/m slash depower/marginalize women?

Does m/m slash having nothing to do with gender or neither empowers women nor marginalizes them?

And why do you feel that way? I'm curious because I've heard that empowerment issue brought up but not much discussion on how it empowers women...

... and in light of some of the recent discussion about anal sex and some of the fannish reactions in terms of how men are treated in the fan fiction community and slash being defined as m/m or involving anal sex, I'm just a bit curious. :)

A Response Post

• My first ever slash manifesto. (Also titled: A Comment Gone Horribly Awry)

The Comments at the Post

[wordsaremyfaith]:

Personally, I don't think it does either - it doesn't have to do with women. I mean, it does because they're (mostly) the ones writing it, but I think that's a bit irrelevant. I like slash because I find m/m and f/f pairings simply more interesting (and hotter, but again, irrelevant) than m/f - possibly because straight pairings are so overdone. That's just my reasoning, personally, but what do I know? I get really annoyed when people define slash as m/m. Sure, most of what's out there is, but I thought slash meant any gay pairing. Which includes f/f as well. I think women as a whole do get marginalized this way - people forget/don't notice that there's girlslash out there, too.

[partly bouncy]:

I get really annoyed when people define slash as m/m. Sure, most of what's out there is, but I thought slash meant any gay pairing. Which includes f/f as well. I think women as a whole do get marginalized this way - people forget/don't notice that there's girlslash out there, too. Which is why I defined it as m/m slash as opposed to slash... because I have that problem to. :/ I feel the marginalization a lot and have been told "It is empowering." I don't get it. And I see a lot of stuff that comes off as woman hating from women directed at other women and I don't really see that as empowering or helpful...

[blackjackrocket]:

I think that if someone sees slash--or any other genre--as empowering or marginalizing, they have too much time on their hands. I just can't understand that view. I mean, they're stories.

[partly bouncy]:

I don't get that.

WHY is it to much time on my hands to wonder about it? Academics spend a lot of time thinking about it and writing about it. Should the fan community sit back and ignore those critiques and accept them as valid?

And if you think we have too much time on our hands that we ask these, then might I ask why you're here and took the time to respond

[ blackjackrocket]:

Because there's more in this community than 'empowerment' discussions. Besides, I'm interested in the how and why of things, even if I have my own answer. I never said that these things should be ignored, I just wonder why slash gets analyzed as 'empowering' and no other types of fics do.

[norah]:

I hate to be so equivocal in an environment that loves opinion, but all of the above, depending on how it's done and what you mean. I think slash fandom is empowering to women as a community of women who support and engage one another. I think individual stories range from feminist to misogynist. And I think sometimes, it's just about the porn, which is also cool, but not particularly gender-politics-weighted in the individual PWP. I'm not sure that the phenomenon of slash as a whole can be said to do any one thing w/r/t empowerment or disenfranchisement or any other gender-related affect.

[prettyarbitrary]:

Crappy answer: all depends on the person reading it.

I think that, in a way, it empowers women. For me, it's like...well, I often don't connect with the women in romantic relationships in stories. Frankly, they're often stupid. Or if they're normally intelligent, they go stupid when they're around that guy. This is getting better, though, I'll admit. So I like some slash because it involves two strong characters who don't just go stupid or somehow change automatically just because they're in a relationship or have sex. Now, there's some slash where that does in fact happen, and that usually irritates me too. Anyway, that's empowering, because it means I can identify with a character in a romantic situation without having to accept the lameness.

It depowers and marginalizes women because...well, I guess it doesn't exactly, but it does show the general crappiness of female roles in a lot of contemporary stories.

And it's not about either when you just get bored with the whole "boy meets girl, blah blah blah" because for god's sake, they put it in everything, and you just want to read something a bit different.

[pinkdormouse]:

I *want* slash to be about queer characters of whatever gender having adventures *and* relationships, although not always at exactly the same time. When that happens, it can be empowering for me as a pretty-boy butch dyke with bisexual leanings. Most slash though misses something somewhere for me.

[starstealingirl] -- see more of this fan's comments at My first ever slash manifesto. (Also titled: A Comment Gone Horribly Awry):

I'm fascinated by your idea that women slash writers make themselves the savior of the story by disempowering other female characters. I think it ties into a lot of RL questions that have been asked about competition between women, and the idea that there can only be one strong woman in any given setting....

[ainaria]:

So we are now discussing slash in fanfiction, right? Not m/m original stories?

I think it's all in the subtext. I don't care if it's m/m, f/m or f/f. Sometimes, when I'm watching a show or reading a book and I think, hey, there's something going on. Something I'd like to explore or just read more about.

I don't really think slash in terms of empowering anything. It's just... stories. Expansion of what already is.

Although, there is the interesting Buffy's a bitch - syndrome that seems to effect some authors and some fandoms more than others. The one strong woman that actually is on the show - like Buffy or Scully - and authors (mostly women) make them bitches.

Why?

It's definitely got something to do with depowering. Only, it's the authors who depower strong women characters. Is it because by doing so, the author herself is 'the saviour' of these poor men? She puts them together and all is well.

So, by depowering the female characters, she empowers herself? wow.

[chasethecat]:

I suppose that writing slash is empowering to women in the sense that it's a community where it's not only acceptable, but expected, that women have sexual desires and express them; that's still not really the case in mainstream society.

[snipped]

I think that the definition of what's empowering for women *should* include the whole fannish community. I suppose it's not so much about the pairing, as the writing, and what the writer gets out of it. Some women might write a m/m slash story that bashes women and places all of the emphasis on COCK or whatever, and some women could write het about a strong female character; I don't think there's any kind of fic/fannish exploit that is intrinsically empowering to women.

And I guess for some people, m/m slash is a sort of turning the tables, using men as sexual objects thing, but I don't think that's really empowering for women so m/m slash isn't inherently empowering.

[jaybee65]:

Why does m/m seem to get singled out for praise and attention in this respect? And why do m/m slashers often get so defensive when this is pointed out?

By the way, thank you for saying "m/m slash" instead of "slash" -- when the question is posed directly, most m/m slashers will say that of course "slash" is an inclusive term encompassing both m/m and f/f, but after saying that they'll still go right back to using the word "slash" in contexts that mean *only* m/m. It's like "gay" versus "lesbian" versus "queer" -- except that fandom doesn't have a good word for queer yet.

If I like f/f but not really very much m/m, am I part of the slash community or not? The answer I get seems to depend on the mood of the person I'm engaged with, and it's awfully hard to feel connected with a community that gives one the feeling of being a stepchild or an afterthought. And yet when f/f people point out that they can feel somewhat marginalized as "slashers" and that therefore perhaps it might make sense to think of f/f as a independent community altogether, they're accused of being being hypermilitant separatists. You can't win. *Sigh*

[adens shadows]:

Stories are a way of escaping reality. They must draw the reader in. The reader must feel emotionally tied to the story. The reader must be interested.

For example, if a story includes rape and the author's goal is to connect the reader with the victim, it may be staged to disgust or arouse the reader. If the writer wishes us to empathize with the rapist, the reader may feel empowered, satisfied, angry, afraid, etc. At least, that's the goal...

Anyway. I'm in a dark mood, apparently. You should see what I mean by now. If you don't, **** ***.

Slash is no different. It should be written to compel the reader into an emotional response. If you leave a story feeling marginalized and small, or empowered...then, ideally, that was the author's intent and the story served its purpose.

Art compels us to emotion. We are drawn to it. It moves us. But the art is not to blame. It is not the cause. We respond.

So, slash neither empowers or marginalizes. It exists to entertain, to draw out a response. We respond as our personalities dictate.

[Cheshire23]:

Some m/m slash seems to be written almost as a response to the comparative lack of developed female characters in a particular series. (LOTR and to a lesser degree Harry Potter both come to mind here as examples of that.)

The only fanfiction I write is either Potterverse or Amberverse, and I put characters in relationships that I think would be interesting in relationships or that I feel have demonstrated an interesting bit of a spark in canon, regardless of gender or pretty much any other consideration. When I ran Amber as an RPG, I had one male canon character paired with a male player character who had in his background mentioned a "bit of a crush" on said canon character, in part to reward the poor player for the hell I put his character through and in part because I just thought it'd be an interesting storyline, much like the "tragic romance" backstory of the PC's parents. (Yes, this was a "Celtic knotwork" family tree, why do you ask? *heh*)

When working with the Potterverse, it feels more like the character shows up in my head and says, "Here's my story, please tell it." I used to write Sirius/Remus just because I thought they fit so well together, but the version of Sirius that I had worked out was very different from what canon presented as his background in OotP, so I've been a bit...stuck, even though I still love the pairing. The other characters who have asked for their stories to be told either have a story that doesn't have romantic elements to it (I wrote Misplaced Pride because that vision of Amos Diggory regretting the death of his son just would not leave me alone) or are f/f pairings (Poppy/Minerva, Padma Patil/Lisa Turpin).

Anyway...both fandoms I write in have a comparative shortage but by no means a LACK of strong female characters, and I do think that some people use slash as a way of avoiding writing an original female character (and thus being vulnerable to the Mary Sue accusation), so it's possible that slash simultaneously "empowers" women to put their own spin on events, while "disempowering" them both because of fear of the Mary Sue accusation (no matter HOW unfounded) and because of the original shortage of strong female characters.

[jdemorae]:

I've seen and heard the argument in a number of different fan spaces that m/m slash was empowering to women on a fannish whole (as opposed to isolated author feels empowered just through the process of writing) and I was curious if other people had any thoughts on this?

I'd argue with this statement in and of itself. It carries the implication that the "individual author" (presumably writing original fiction) is somehow superior to the author who writes with an audience in mind. A value judgement, right out of the gate. There are those who say, "I write for myself only," and entire pages can be devoted as to just what exactly that means.

Do I believe that a slash story "empowers" a fandom? No. Considering how a number of slash writers get treated, how certain canon stories are deemed "too nice" for slash (which operates on the assumption that homoerotic fiction is 'dirty' or 'debased' or 'corrupts the integrity' of the source material) those who are brave enough to produce the first slash stories in a fandom show a lot of courage.

What are we talking about when we say, "empower' anyway? It's often used as a neat buzzword that everyone is supposed to know exactly what it means, but the definition actually changes from group to group. To answer a question like this, the terms need to be clear.

In this instance, what is the definition of empowerment? How are the feelings and needs of those claiming empowerment not met through other aspects of fandom--and rembmer that 'fandom' is a blanket terms.

Does m/m slash empower women? Does m/m slash depower/marginalize women? Does m/m slash having nothing to do with gender or neither empowers women nor marginalizes them?

Maybe I'm showing my ignorance here, but I don't understand these questions. People write for a variety of reasons--to express themselves in a creative context, to communicate, to teach, to commiserate, to entertain. Do these things empower? If so, then yes, writing homoerotic fiction empowers the author.

Depower/marginalize women? I don't get this one at all. Is it because women characters have so little place in m/m stories, and are often unsympathetic when they do appear? Is this "marginalizing" or an example of author bias, or lazy writing?

And why do you feel that way? I'm curious because I've heard that empowerment issue brought up but not much discussion on how it empowers women...

Depending on where you live... It's taken some time for women to be able to write and publish under their own name, as opposed to pseudonyms. Even sci-fi greats like C.L. Moore and Andre Norton wrote under masculaine or masculine seeming names because their publishers told them sci-fi written by a woman would flop. The only outlet for most women who wish to write erotic-themed material is either formula romance or if so inclined, the small (but growing) lesbian press. "Decent" women didn't write that stuff. An entire avenue of expression was cut off. "Girls can write sexy, but only with lots of purple prose and if the hero steals the show."

As for the slash = m/m, and must include anal sex... I think it's just habit, really. I'm *far* more concerned with emotional and psychological accuracy. (For example, a story that began with an attempted sexual assault, that then became a 'tender teaching the uke through his first non-penetrative experience" less than five minutes after the attack gets prised because, 'it's more realistic that the sex be like that--totally overlooking the psychological and emotional reality.)

[nell65]:

I know I'm repeating a bit of what has been said, but I think it bears repeating.

I think fanfiction as a whole, especially as I've experienced it (since about 1997 or so), as a primarily female environment is a relatively empowering endeavor undertaking by women and for women. By fanfcition though - I mean all of it. All genres, all kinks, all ships, all fandoms, FPF/RPF.....all of it. Not just one special piece.

The online fanfiction world - as a world created by and maintained by women largely for other women *is* a female space, and in that space female empowerment of all kinds, large to small, can and does happen. Fairly often, at least in my personal little corner of it - which is, I admit, a pretty tiny sample.

I do think smut - of all kinds and genders and kinks - written largely by women for women - is collectively an empowering thing as a massive community of women learns, through trial and error, satisfying ways to express sexual desire and sexual pleasure in text and images. For some this has brought with it huge and positive life changes, for others only small revelations, but it is all empowering (I believe, anyway). Your kink is not my kink, etc., but I do, personally, feel like I gain as a women in a space where you (the collective, general you) are free to write what you will - even if I don't get it or like it.

I don't, however, accept for a minute (a second?) the idea that m/m is *particularly* empowering, or for that matter, particularly disempowering. I know that in my case, anyway, it was the vast quantities of het smut - that went well beyond the bodice ripper type which I had previously rejected as stupid and lame - that made me feel like I'd just fallen into this most amazing torrent of female sexuality that swept me along into all sorts of places I hadn't been aware of before. For long time I was utterly undiscriminating too - all of it was good, the hot, the lame, the laugh-inducing....

And I don't think I was in the least un-empowered (if that is a word) before - only that the depth and breadth of it all took my breath away, almost literally as I read with excitment and wonder and a sense of coming home at last, read until my eyeballs dried up and pain set in, only to do the same thing again the next day. From that experience I did emerge feeling more powerful than before in the sense of being surer than ever about the things that pleased me and that I wanted for myself.

In contrast, turning to explore m/m a few years later (for a variety of reasons m/m is exceedingly rare in my primary fandom), I didn't get that feeling at all, which was disappointing and frustrating at the time, but I eventually realized that I had already had that experience - which is why I didn't need to have it again.

I do see all the time, though, testimonials from women for whom m/m gave them what fannish het smut gave me.

As for negative images and attitudes about women - I think m/m is as prone to them as any other type of fanfiction, and yes, those particular stories give me, personally, the willies (or sometimes fits of rage, but I can be an angry feminist on occasion) - but I have the same reaction to all fanfiction that does this - whatever the genre or kink or plot.

Which is all a very long way of saying I think limiting the discussion of the empowring possibilities inherent (or not) in fanfiction to just one sort (m/m in this case) misses the mark

[anonymous]:

'Slash' originally meant exclusively m/m, although a long time ago and that's why people still sometimes take it to mean m/m. I know I usually make that assumption. I read m/m slash, and never f/f. It's empowering in the sense that, when I write, I can take men and treat them like puppets on strings. One could argue it's disempowering because I write women (and consequently myself) out of the equation.

I think, more than empowerment it has to do with who I can identify with.

Being straight and a former tomboy, I find it easier to identify with a homosexual male than a homosexual female. I can also identify with certain female characters, but most of them annoy me, and I often tend to favor canon that is male-heavy in the first place. And that's largely all there is to my preference.

[gwynfyd]:

I first became interested in reading stories about two men in sexual/romantic relationships when I was about 15, and discovered Mary Renault's historical novels. I was already a feminist at that point, and for some time, the two interests confused me. I began to think they were contradictory, then realized they weren't. If you see homosexuality and Slash as de-powering women, then do you see enforced, total heterosexuality as empowering women? Are societies which criminalize homosexuality havens for feminism? I doubt it. The same people who hate gays also insist that women should be subordinate to men. My interest in Slash isn't because it turns women into minor characters, for the most part. I like Slash because it frees romance from the boy/girl straight jacket it's been trapped in for so long. Reading Slash hasn't made me less of a feminist, and I don't see why it should. Romance isn't only the domain of women, and that means that women's domain isn't only romance. Does this make sense?