The Joys of M/M Sex

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Title:	The Joys of M/M Sex
Creator:	Thamiris
Date(s):	2000?
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Topic:
External Links:	The Joys of M/M Sex
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The Joys of M/M Sex is an essay by Thamiris.

Some Topics Discussed

• stumbling across slash fanfic in 1998 on the internet
• finding Kirk/Spock "icky" but intrigued by slash in Xenaverse
• believing porn to be bad because it oppressed women, but porn between men evaded that complaint
• the act of sex as power
• writing sex as power
• pain, bondage, and BDSM

The Essay

I stumbled across my first slash (m/m) web page purely by accident, in the early spring of 1998. I'd heard of slash in a very vague way--that at some point in time people had wanted to see Kirk and Spock doing each other. The whys mystified me. Kirk and Spock? Ick. I figured it was some Trekker thing. I didn't realized that other fandoms engaged in this strange practice. Hell, I barely knew what fandom was. I'd only recently discovered Ares and the Xenaverse, the objects of my startling new obsession. So one day on a non-smut Ares list, I followed a link in someone's signature, and ended up reading Ares/Joxer. Whoah.

Shock.

But less because of the homoerotic component, then the coupling itself. I mean--Joxer? Once I'd started reading it, however, I went back. Again and again. Giggling, trying to deny that the stories turned me on. And I denied it a lot. Yeah, talk about protesting too much...

You have to realize that I'd had very little experience with erotica. Barely any. I mean, yeah, I'd had sex...I'm married, had lots of boyfriends. And I'd seen a few videos. But I'd always disapproved of porn. It was a feminist thing. In the eighties and into the nineties, you were supposed to dislike it. Only perverts and rapist were excited by it. Certainly not women. Certainly not married 32-year-old academics like me. But m/m gave me an out: I could like porn, but the politics had switched. Women weren't being oppressed...Men were. But that was ok--they deserved it. (Terrible attitude--self-spanking for even thinking it. Remember: I'm trying to be honest here.)

So there I was, meeting slash for the first time, and liking the way it said hello. At this point I'd started to dabble in fanfic myself, mostly straightforward adventure with a het romance at the heart (this was my first attempt at any fic). But thanks to the encouragement of a friend, I joined a few slash lists, and finished gathered up the courage to write my first boys-fucking-boys fic. After that, I just couldn't stop. That sounds so quick, doesn't it? But it was. Read slash, wrote this little comedic PWP (Phone Sex), sent it to Hercfic, then received some positive feedback. I was hooked. And it all happened in a matter of weeks.

But this begs the question: why do I write slash? On the most basic level, it's to get off. Yep, plain, old fashioned horny lust. I find it incredibly erotic both to read and write about hard cocks sliding into wet mouths--especially when the players are beautiful men. And because the characters are male, the fiction loses the gendered imbalance that always distracted me in het erotica. With slash, I'm uninvolved in the action: I control it. So it's also about power. I watch, I direct from a safe distance--the lovers whose stories I tell are my puppets. It's a disturbing position in many ways, since I can now understand why men have traditionally objectified women. Complete power is a turn-on.

This explains in part the violent element that reappears in my narratives. That is: there's an element of revenge. Historically, men have used and abused women (of course there are exceptions to this, yadda, yadda, yadda and female complicity, blah, blah, blah...) but I think that we're at a stage where women are discovering the erotic powers of violence. Ideally, we'll move beyond this, as we've been encouraging men to do. But at this point, pain is appealing because it signifies my empowerment. Not that I'm a complete psycho here. I have a husband. I have male friends. Hell, I like men. But sometimes it feels good to hurt them in my fiction. I know--there's a special place in Tartarus for people like me.

Pain is also appealing, however, as part of the discourse of pleasure, albeit a marginal one. I'm intrigued by the dynamic between the two, the Mobius Strip of sensation. And so my characters often play power-games, tying each other up to play with the bound one's body. To wring a variety of responses from it. That's why you see "bondage" in so many of my disclaimers. Another reason why I'm intrigued by BDSM is that it allows me to act out my own fantasies along those four-fold lines. I get to role-play as it were--only on a variety of levels. But, vicariously, I can experience submission and domination without any repercussions.

Roleplaying...Yes, that takes me to the final point. Most conspicuous for me about female-authored slash is that it's women writing from a male perspective. This is particularly evident in my fic since I favor the first-person point of view. In fact, my favorite narrator is Julius Caesar, whom I've painted as a megalomaniacal control-freak with a big hard-on for Ares. And I write about that hard-on as if it were my own. As if Ares were sucking my own cock...

Yes. It's a classic case of Freudian penis-envy, and while I'm loathe to give credence to that ridiculous idea, I have to admit I'd sell my soul to have a cock just so I could get a blow-job. Not that I don't like being a woman. It's great!! But I'd love to try out the equipment for awhile...Preferably when Ares and Caesar were free. (Although my husband maintains that I want to be Caesar--apparently my love of power isn't the world's best-kept secret).

So I write slash for power and desire. But then, that's why I do anything. What else is there?

Added Later

Thamiris added this to the bottom at an unknown date:

I wrote this ages ago, and some things have changed. I still write for power and desire, but I've fallen hard for writing itself. The challenge, the play...Writing has always been an erotic act in and of itself--witness the medieval grammarians, Sidney with his textual impregnation, Dinesen and her bloody sheet. Slash has become this incredibly textured mind-fuck for me.

Plus ca change...