Confession: I like my male BSOs feminized.
Okay, there's a line where that sort of thing goes from fun into badficland, but still. It's the girly men that I'm looking for. I fetishize and get off on their youth, their physical smallness, their visible and invisible innocence. Their tendency to use words instead of fists. Their ability to speak the language of emotional need. Their understanding of c retaking, and their own need for the same.
Their receptive sexuality, which basically gives you girl-pov hetsex with two guys.
I know that, objectively speaking, Daniel Jackson is a tall, strong man some five to ten years my senior who can more than take care of himself. But for some reason, I want to read about the side of him that's needful, young, sweet, vulnerable. This is one of those things that has more to do with identification than with sexual preference – so it's not that I'm irl attracted to femmy guys, so much as it's the fact that I'm a cis, femmy woman myself.
I think that what I'm really looking for in slash is some foothold for my gender, some place where I as a woman can enter into the text. Some frame through which my experience, culture, and embodiment can be relevant. I don't personally have a whole lot of experience with men – The Boy is male, but not exactly macho, and I descend from a tribe of women that never seems to produce boychildren. For the last four or five years of my life, my teachers and mentors and friends have all been women, both in physical space and in fandom. I identify heavily with my own gender, and my own sexed biology – not all women do, but I very much perceive myself as female, and choose to present as feminine.
And of course there's nowhere for me in genre fiction an media, because no girls allowed, duh.
I need my access character to be feminized, because I'm looking for a way to integrate my experience of the world as a woman, my own fairly feminine values and lenses, with genre fiction. I love sf and I love fantasy – I love their way of looking at things sideways, through layers of metaphor and substitution. But I personally don't identify with a masculine mindset, so I need to engirlify my characters.
It's rare that showrunners give me an access character that's already a girl. When they do, I glom on to that girl, and don't really have a need to feminize the masculine characters. I do tend to mentally transform those female characters to bring them more in line with my viewpoint picking the version of them that I find most accessible – so, for instance, I usually elide Buffy's suburban whitegirl privilege, whinyness, and Spike issues, because while I find many things lovable and attractive in Buffy there are also sides of her that are repugnant to me. The Buffy that I read/write about is a different aspect of the character than the one that I would write race or class meta about – I file off her dark spots, because I need to be able to love her. It's not actually that different from what I'm doing by feminizing my male access characters – I'm always trying to bring them more into line with my perception, experience, and values.
Given a choice, I'll run with an access character like Buffy or River or Gabrielle, Jane Eyre, Morgana and Gwen, Miyazaki's girls. I strongly prefer working with female characters – I think I probably write girls at least as often as I do boys, if not more so. I have to remind myself to make icons of male characters, and even then I upload girl icons for use first. But in most mainstream sf/f, girls-only-land is not an option. For one thing, lots of geek fandoms don't have any girls – unless you're doing Eowyn, Tolkien fic is pretty much always about male characters. For another, not all girl characters offer me access. (this is the one that showrunners never seem to get. Apparently all girls are alike). It's much easier for me to ride around in Luke's head than Leia's. Sam Carter is absolutely impenetrable to me, all sciency and all-American and sunshiny. It's Daniel whose pov comes easily for me, so it's Daniel that I try to shape into a perfect identity object.
When we talk about slash, we talk a lot about externally-oriented fantasy – that is, we adopt a view of slash fiction that posits the creation of an ideal heterosexual lover - women re-write male characters to make them better boyfriends. Many of my male BSOs fit this model, and they tend to be the ones attached to female access characters: Angel, Simon Tam, Arthur Pendragon, Rochester. But fantasy can also turn inwards. Access characters allow us, canonically, fantasies of heroism, adventure, and success. Fic takes these fantasies further, into dreams of being cherished, valued, loved, protected, praised, and fucked. Of being lovable – because if there' one thing that's universally true of the kind of access character who gets widely feminized, it's that they're beloved. The logic train goes that if Daniel is as lovable as we all find him to be, and if the characters within the text love Daniel just as much as we do, and if Daniel is like us, then we must ourselves be worthy of that kind of love. And considering the degree to which women's self-esteem is eroded by patriarchy, the fantasy of lovability and worth is pretty powerful for us. I know that it is for me.
Femme!fic is not good fic, insofar as good fic is defined by realism, canonicity, and sobriety. But it hits on one of the major streams of the id vortex, one that I think it could be argued is of great political and social import as well as being erotically satisfying. Oh, and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
princessofgeeks has been doing some really interesting meta work on gender in Stargate SG1 fic, with bonus fic recs – for which I've got to thank her, because I had a lot of fun reading the more romance novely ones!
Their receptive sexuality, which basically gives you girl-pov hetsex with two guys.
I know that, objectively speaking, Daniel Jackson is a tall, strong man some five to ten years my senior who can more than take care of himself. But for some reason, I want to read about the side of him that's needful, young, sweet, vulnerable. This is one of those things that has more to do with identification than with sexual preference – so it's not that I'm irl attracted to femmy guys, so much as it's the fact that I'm a cis, femmy woman myself.
I think that what I'm really looking for in slash is some foothold for my gender, some place where I as a woman can enter into the text. Some frame through which my experience, culture, and embodiment can be relevant. I don't personally have a whole lot of experience with men – The Boy is male, but not exactly macho, and I descend from a tribe of women that never seems to produce boychildren. For the last four or five years of my life, my teachers and mentors and friends have all been women, both in physical space and in fandom. I identify heavily with my own gender, and my own sexed biology – not all women do, but I very much perceive myself as female, and choose to present as feminine.
And of course there's nowhere for me in genre fiction an media, because no girls allowed, duh.
I need my access character to be feminized, because I'm looking for a way to integrate my experience of the world as a woman, my own fairly feminine values and lenses, with genre fiction. I love sf and I love fantasy – I love their way of looking at things sideways, through layers of metaphor and substitution. But I personally don't identify with a masculine mindset, so I need to engirlify my characters.
It's rare that showrunners give me an access character that's already a girl. When they do, I glom on to that girl, and don't really have a need to feminize the masculine characters. I do tend to mentally transform those female characters to bring them more in line with my viewpoint picking the version of them that I find most accessible – so, for instance, I usually elide Buffy's suburban whitegirl privilege, whinyness, and Spike issues, because while I find many things lovable and attractive in Buffy there are also sides of her that are repugnant to me. The Buffy that I read/write about is a different aspect of the character than the one that I would write race or class meta about – I file off her dark spots, because I need to be able to love her. It's not actually that different from what I'm doing by feminizing my male access characters – I'm always trying to bring them more into line with my perception, experience, and values.
Given a choice, I'll run with an access character like Buffy or River or Gabrielle, Jane Eyre, Morgana and Gwen, Miyazaki's girls. I strongly prefer working with female characters – I think I probably write girls at least as often as I do boys, if not more so. I have to remind myself to make icons of male characters, and even then I upload girl icons for use first. But in most mainstream sf/f, girls-only-land is not an option. For one thing, lots of geek fandoms don't have any girls – unless you're doing Eowyn, Tolkien fic is pretty much always about male characters. For another, not all girl characters offer me access. (this is the one that showrunners never seem to get. Apparently all girls are alike). It's much easier for me to ride around in Luke's head than Leia's. Sam Carter is absolutely impenetrable to me, all sciency and all-American and sunshiny. It's Daniel whose pov comes easily for me, so it's Daniel that I try to shape into a perfect identity object.
When we talk about slash, we talk a lot about externally-oriented fantasy – that is, we adopt a view of slash fiction that posits the creation of an ideal heterosexual lover - women re-write male characters to make them better boyfriends. Many of my male BSOs fit this model, and they tend to be the ones attached to female access characters: Angel, Simon Tam, Arthur Pendragon, Rochester. But fantasy can also turn inwards. Access characters allow us, canonically, fantasies of heroism, adventure, and success. Fic takes these fantasies further, into dreams of being cherished, valued, loved, protected, praised, and fucked. Of being lovable – because if there' one thing that's universally true of the kind of access character who gets widely feminized, it's that they're beloved. The logic train goes that if Daniel is as lovable as we all find him to be, and if the characters within the text love Daniel just as much as we do, and if Daniel is like us, then we must ourselves be worthy of that kind of love. And considering the degree to which women's self-esteem is eroded by patriarchy, the fantasy of lovability and worth is pretty powerful for us. I know that it is for me.
Femme!fic is not good fic, insofar as good fic is defined by realism, canonicity, and sobriety. But it hits on one of the major streams of the id vortex, one that I think it could be argued is of great political and social import as well as being erotically satisfying. Oh, and
princessofgeeks has been doing some really interesting meta work on gender in Stargate SG1 fic, with bonus fic recs – for which I've got to thank her, because I had a lot of fun reading the more romance novely ones!