Slash rant, part 17016.

Meta
Title:	Slash rant, part 17016.
Creator:	Alara Rogers
Date(s):	August 21, 2003
Medium:	LiveJournal post
Fandom:	Panfandom
Topic:
External Links:	here, Archived version
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Slash rant, part 17016. is a 2003 essay by Alara Rogers.

Some Topics Discussed

• Mpreg
• "feminizing male characters"
• the differences in writing het and slash
• "both slash and het writers need to be on guard against sexism creeping into what they write or how they think"
• the essay comments on a post by Sue the Android that appears to be offline; it was here
• pregnancy in fan fiction

Excerpts from the Post

acadine wrote a great post on why the theory that slash writers don't write het because het can only be written badly gives her hives. And I agree heartily. I do not consider the motivations "Everyone will think I'm Mary Sue-ing the female character" (not unless you are a crap writer) or "You can't write het without resorting to unequal, imbalanced, sexist dynamics" (only if you are a. a crap writer or b. have never had a relationship of equals in your life, or known anyone who has) to be legitimate reasons for not writing het.

I *do* consider motivations such as "Two guys are hot," "I don't want to imagine women having sex," "All the women in my favorite fandom are boring," "The character archetype I most love almost never appears on a woman", "I get plenty of hot het lovin' at home and don't need to get it in fiction", "I really want to talk about homosexuality", etc., to be legit motivations for writing slash. However, I think that both slash and het writers need to be on guard against sexism creeping into what they write or how they think.

We all know how sexism impacts het writers. "All female characters change their last names when they get married, even if they are aliens." "Female characters are obsessed with their romantic lives to the exclusion of anything else, even if they have a vitally important job/career/future goal." "When female characters fall in love they become hopelessly domestic and think solely about their house and their kids." "Strongwilled female characters must become weak and swoony when they fall in love." Blah blah blah. It does drive a lot of people to avoid het in general.

Sexism impacting slash writers is more subtle. I mean, if you write slash where every important canon female is a jealous shrew, okay, you're sexist and it's obvious. But there are much less obvious tropes and some of them are even opposite to each other.

For example. Mpreg.

Mpreg is an extreme example of the phenomenon of "feminizing" slash characters-- not just by having them emotionally act like women but by having things that usually, or *only*, happen to women happen to them. Sometimes feminizing a slash character is an act of gender transgression and involves a certain degree of bravery. Sometimes it's sheer laziness or cowardice because the female author wants to talk about her own fears and dumps them on a man because if she put them on a woman it'd hit too close to home. (A lot of male rape in fic seems to work like this.) One can't categorically say this is always bad writing or always sexist when sometimes it's excellent and sometimes it's gender-transgressive. I would say the same is probably true of mpreg. Personally I find the notion of a male body with a baby inside it squicky as hell, but you genderswap the guy and *then* make him pregnant and I'd be happy to read your fic. That's a personal bias, though; I can't come up with any *reason* why one should bug me and the other shouldn't aside from "it's unnatural!", which I don't accept as an excuse anywhere else.

I recently read a rant against mpreg which had some good points. Making a male character suddenly act all domestic and broody and World's Greatest Dad-like because he is pregnant is stupid. Unless he's the sort of guy who that might have happened to anyway, and frankly, I can't think of *any.* Quite aside from the fact that you really, really, really need to come up with a good explanation why a male character is pregnant, because it *is* biologically impossible and if you don't have an explanation I just won't be able to buy your story at all, having a male character suddenly act like a totally stereotypical pregnant mom is Out Of Character.

But, almost always in fandom, so is having a *female* character act that way.

And... what's inherently wrong with writing a story in which a hero (male or female) has to work around being a parent? Yes, it would be insanely hard. So's saving the universe. What's your point? She says "And then there's Dick Grayson, seduced and abandoned by heartless Bruce Wayne, bringing up his daughter as a single mom and fighting crime in the evenings. Just try to imagine a day that includes both stomping bad guys and watching Tellytubbies and imagine the enormous mental effort involved in codeswitching between the two. However well-balanced a person may be, the two roles are completely incompatible." If you write it so that there's no emotional conflict or difficulty with this situation, sure, that's bad writing. But I'd be *fascinated* by the story of a superhero who's a single dad, or a single mom. Or a superhero couple who are parents. Because yes, we have a damn hard time imagining any compatibility between child raising and heroism. But given how strongly child raising has been associated with females throughout history, isn't an attempt to re-imagine this, to try to overcome the conflict, inherently feminist? And, looked at another way, why would it be more okay for, say, Carrie the girl Robin from Dark Knight Returns to be in this situation? Or any female superhero? This actually has nothing to do with who was pregnant; Hank McCoy ended up with a baby to raise without even having *sex* in Darqstar's X-S series, and if he hadn't lived in a communal household with a ton of other heroes and also been a scientist who could be vital to their work without going out on missions, this would have been very difficult for him.

Personally I have a problem with pregnancy in fan fiction for the same reason I have a problem with het-- it so often resorts to sexist stereotyping, reducing a character to a cariacture. But I am desperate to see it done *well*. Being pregnant does not reduce a woman to a cipher whose sole interests revolve around the baby (I'm lookin' at *you*, J/A shippers...) Of course it shouldn't do the same to a man either. I'm not terribly eager to see more mpreg just because of that squick factor-- as fascinated as I am with androgynes my primate hindbrain just keeps going "BUT MEN DON'T GET PREGNANT!!" But *if* you're gonna write mpreg-- with or without a genderswap of the rest of the body to make it more plausible-- *don't* resort to cliches of pregnant female behavior. It'd be wrong for most of the female characters in the plot and it's almost certainly wrong for the males. If you're a slash writer it's not enough to avoid "feminizing" your male characters. If by feminizing you mean "act like a totally stereotypical woman", you can't do it to most of your female characters either, nor can you suggest that making a man act a certain way is wrong because it's too "feminine" without considering if any female character in your fandom could act that way either. Making *anyone*, male or female, behave like a stereotype instead of like the character appears in canon is bad.

Comments at the Post

[valarltd]:

Having been pregnant 4 times, I would like to think that should I ever finish the SW MPreg story I've got on my harddrive, it will be realistic. (Of course, the embyros get moved to an artificial womb within the first month, so the physical side is minimally explored)

Han's first reaction is to attempt to recalibrate the meddroid, because it's obviously out of whack. He's embarrassed, and hating the whole idea that the all-kniowing, all-powerful Force decided it was time for him to have kids, without consulting him or Luke.

But hey, any fic that gives Yoda the chance to use the line "Knocked him up you did, now do the right thing you will." can't be all bad.

I don't write much het, because it doesn't come out well for me. I can do it, just not as hot as my slash.

[redmonster]:

*boggles* People actually write this on a regular basis? Frequently enough that a technical term has been created for it? I've never even heard of mpreg before this! I can understand the desire to write such a story in terms of scientific curiosity. "How would one make this happen?" "How would a man, this character in particular, handle being pregnant?" "How would the community surrounding him respond?" "What if there were a culture in which men were able to get pregnant? What would it be like?" But most importantly, "How would one make this happen?" :) If such questions are handled honestly and seriously, I'll bet they could amount to some very interesting fic. From the way you describe it, though...silliness. Sheer silliness.

[skywaterblue]:

*fucking dies laughing.* Oh. MY. GODS. That was the best meta commentary about the whole thing yet.

[norabombay]:

But if people stopped writing horrible mpreg, what would I have to laugh at? It's only funny when it's just atrocious. It's like being a conossuer of badfic. The ratio of crap to good is skewed about 1000 times more to the crap then it is in the rest of fandom.

[alara rogers]:

It's odd that I ranted about mpreg because I really don't read the stuff; I'm more ranting about the philosophy that mpreg is bad because it makes tough male heroes soft and girly. Because, of course, it's ok to make tough *female* heroes soft and girly. And I'll bet that bad pregfic with female characters outnumbers bad mpreg by the same ratio. :-)

[skywaterblue]:

The whole pregnancy issue makes me really want to write an O/K where it's done logically, and then Odo ends up being the parentally one, because he really likes kids, while Nerys goes off and continues to work on her career, because she would. And it wouldn't involve changeling babies, or kids who were damaged in the Occupation or anything. It would also be the most boring story ever written, because domestic life? Boring. There is nothing exciting about the third time the baby spits up on you. And that is why I hate pregnancy stories.

[hibernate]:

If you're a slash writer it's not enough to avoid "feminizing" your male characters. If by feminizing you mean "act like a totally stereotypical woman", you can't do it to most of your female characters either

Funny, I commented somewhere on this just yesterday.

People talk all the time about people feminizing male characters -- but I think it's much worse when it's done to a female character, simply because it slips by much easier. A weepy girly man (when there's no basis for this in canon) can be easily dismissed as poor writing, while a female character (again, with no basis in canon for that behaviour) acting the same way is far too often accepted.

As for pregnancy fic, be it mpreg or otherwise, it's very rarely handled in a realistic way. It's the same thing as noted above -- mpreg is somewhat difficult to take seriously, while pregnant women acting out of character seem to be considered as a completely normal thing.

My views on mpreg come from hearing tales of Loke as a child, so I've never had anything against it in theory. I've just never seen it done in a believable way.

[alara rogers]:

People talk all the time about people feminizing male characters -- but I think it's much worse when it's done to a female character, simply because it slips by much easier. A weepy girly man (when there's no basis for this in canon) can be easily dismissed as poor writing, while a female character (again, with no basis in canon for that behaviour) acting the same way is far too often accepted.

Or it's taken as a natural outcome. Like, "what did you expect from reading het? Of course the women would act like Harlequin romance wannabes." Whereas with slash I more often see "Well, this is bad slash."

Although, that being said, some slash detractors have the attitude that all slash "feminizes" the male characters, so I suppose the reason I hear rants about het sucking more often than slash sucking is because I hang out with more slashers. :-) Still, I don't see *nearly* enough recognition that bad het is bad because it's bad, not bad because it's het.

I suspect part of the problem is that relatively few fans who write het have actually *been* pregnant, or for that matter involved in a romantic relationship of equals. It seems like the older generation gravitates more toward slash. Possibly because the stuff that was out when they were young and enthusiastically grabbing up new fandoms had incredibly sucky female characters who you almost had to rewrite from scratch to make them interesting. This situation may improve as more fans with some life experience to them latch onto fandoms with strong female characters such as Voyager, Farscape, X-Men (the movies aren't so great for the female characters, although X2 was lightyears better than X1 in that regard, but the movie may lead some into the comics and there are a *lot* of strong female characters in the comics)...

I've already seen that while there is a whole lot of very bad J/C and O/K written by teenies, apparently, there is some distinctly good stuff as well. There's J/A written by "theirloveissopure" teenies and then there's J/A written by mature adults. Being selective about where you go for your fanfic helps.

[ebailey140]:

"We all know how sexism impacts het writers. "All female characters change their last names when they get married, even if they are aliens." "Female characters are obsessed with their romantic lives to the exclusion of anything else, even if they have a vitally important job/career/future goal." "When female characters fall in love they become hopelessly domestic and think solely about their house and their kids." "Strongwilled female characters must become weak and swoony when they fall in love." Blah blah blah. It does drive a lot of people to avoid het in general."

Yeah, and that's more of a perception of some readers and writers than representing the reality of hetero relationships, or how they can be written. To use an in canon recent example of readers having that perception, some fans were complaining that Morrison's Jean just didn't drop everything for Scott. Never mind that she was kind of busy, being the last, and sometimes only, line of defense for the School against the U-Men, and later Cassandra Nova and the Imperial Guard. Then there was keeping Chuck alive, running the School, setting up the X-Corporation. The woman had a lot of responsibilities. If she'd just left to take care of Scott at that point, first all the students, then every mutant in the world, would have been DEAD. Yet, these readers just couldn't get why these minor things took priority for her over her romantic life.

What gets me, though, is most fic writers are women. It's sad that THEY are defining women in the most sexist of ways. The only way this can be consistant is if this is how the writers see themselves. Unless they see themselves as weak and swoony, completely obsessed with their romantic life or domesticity at the exclusion of everything, there's no reason for them to WRITE women that way.

As for writing hetero sex, I'd think if one enjoys EXPERIENCING it, it shouldn't be that hard to write it, unless sex in general is something you have difficulty writing. Unless one has experienced gay sex, one only knows it from observation. I'd think it would be easier to write what you've done :)

With relationships, het, gay, and everything in between, I think it comes down to being able to write people. If one can write male characters well, one really shouldn't have a problem writing a gay male relationship without "feminizing" one of them. If one can write women well, the same applies to writing lesbian relationships. If one can write both genders well, hetero is easy.

[musesfool]:

Mpreg only works as broad parody. Really. At least, that's the only kind I've read. Expectations by girlinthetrilby comes to mind. Pregnant Superman. Comedy *gold*. I also find the idea of serious mpreg to be highly sexist. But I could be looking at it from an odd angle.

[yahtzee63]:

Just here to say ITA. As someone who writes both slash and het on a fairly regular basis, I fully and fundamentally believe that, if you're doing it right, there IS no difference between slash and het fiction. If you're doing it right, you're telling the story of two individuals coming together -- two personalities, two selves, one unique situation -- and if you've managed that, then the shape of the genitalia involved is really not that important a detail. And if you're doing it wrong -- writing flabby stereotypes in the same stock situations -- there's STILL no difference.

[carmarthen]:

If you're a slash writer it's not enough to avoid "feminizing" your male characters. If by feminizing you mean "act like a totally stereotypical woman", you can't do it to most of your female characters either, nor can you suggest that making a man act a certain way is wrong because it's too "feminine" without considering if any female character in your fandom could act that way either. Making *anyone*, male or female, behave like a stereotype instead of like the character appears in canon is bad.

I totally agree; I don't even like the term "feminizing" used to describe character bastardization ("infantilizing" is usually more appropriate, and I hope not offensive to babies/small children) because most women aren't like that either. I would think that predominantly female slash writers would be aware of that, but a disturbing number of strictly m/m slash writers seem to be squicked by women at the least and misogynist at the worst. I don't get it at all.