I Am Femslash: SETI-fan
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| Title: | I Am Femslash |
| Creator: | SETI-fan |
| Date(s): | February 25, 2017 |
| Medium: | Tumblr post |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | I Am Femslash, Archived version (scroll down) |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
I Am Femslash is a 2017 essay by SETI-fan.
It is part of the I Am Femslash essay series sponsored by Femslash Revolution.
Excerpts
Now, as this internal debate had been going on, my mom came out as a lesbian and I started acknowledging that option as being out there. I knew I had aesthetic appreciation for both men and women, I knew I tended to pay more attention to female characters in fandom than male ones and didn’t tend to go crazy over the actors everybody else did, but without the physical desire to reinforce things, I couldn’t tell where the line was drawn between just interest and attraction. But I quietly opened my mind to the possibility maybe I was a little bit bi, or at least okay with the idea that whoever I fell in love with could be in any gender’s body. I started getting flirted with by girls at conventions, and was flattered and intrigued, but nowhere near ready to take that step and actually make a non-straight move.
So how does all of this tie in with femslash? Because it was ultimately fandom that led me to a better understanding of what I wanted.
While I had kind of jokingly enjoyed a few slash ships in the past, the first one I actually seriously shipped was Princess Bubblegum and Marceline on Adventure Time. It started the same way I had with past non-canon slash pairings, “man you can find interpretations of scenes to make any pairing work with a bit of creativity”, but then the show actually was going there and it worked for these characters and I was in. The fandom was gifted with talented writers and artists who took the little hints and allusions the show slipped past network regulations and built gorgeous backstories and complex relationships for these two.
Unlike many people in fandom, I avoided smutfic in general. (See again my feelings of revulsion about sex.) But when writers I knew and enjoyed included scenes like that in their Bubbline fics, I stopped skimming past them and decided to go with it because their storytelling overall was so good. And then I started reading purely smut stories by writers I liked. And a little voice in my mind started saying, “So that’s what everyone’s been talking about all this time.” Suddenly, instead of thinking “don’t want to do that, ugh, maybe could tolerate that”, I was thinking “I’d try that, that sounds cool, ooh I want to try that…”
I’d never wanted to try anything before.
And then the new Ghostbusters and Holtzmann hit me like a ton of bricks and I’ve pretty much just leapt off the cliff at this point, cheering all the way down. (Huge appreciation and apology to my best friend who’s had to put up with me turning into a teenager at thirty-one and tolerated my fangirling patiently. I’m leveling out some, I promise.)
Femslash opened that door in a way no other erotic fics or content ever had before. It’s stories about female sexuality written by women, for women. It was a perspective I hadn’t encountered before (especially since I wasn’t going to talk with my mom about her own personal experiences that way and the only other gay people I knew were men). It included women my own age talking about coming out later and discovering yourself and negotiating female-female relationships. And there are so many writers using it as a way to expose young and/or inexperienced readers to important concepts on healthy relationships, like navigating when mental illnesses affect one or both partners. Or how to communicate through emotional times and express your needs without shutting down and distancing from each other. Or even just the safe ways to explore kinks and how to provide aftercare and discuss boundaries and consent. God, the inclusion in some of these stories of how communication and consent don’t take a thing away from the passion and sensuality of the moment is incredible and should be part of every young person’s education on how to be a good sexual partner. I know not every fic is written to be realistic and healthy, nor should they be, but it’s so nice to see people using the medium to provide healthy role models as well, not just pornographic fantasy.