ineptshieldmaid replied to your post
Aug. 1st, 2019 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2K8zdzQ
ineptshieldmaid replied to your post “msilverstar replied to your post “thatgirlonstage: …”
BIG MOOD. But also you’re right about m/f fic being weird like that! The BEST m/f fic is like ‘this dude here he is REALLY INTO PUSSY, PREFERABLY WITH HIS FACE’, but sadly, it is a rare subgenre.
Yes!
Yes. OK, so my feelings, as a bi woman who writes a spectrum of kinds of fic, looking at the comments I get on said fic, I definitely feel like there are two major categories of people who read m/f fic. And one of them, is the category I’m in, where I read m/f fic because I am into m and I am into f and I am definitely into what they can do together. Bingo: m/f is on the menu. (As is, for the record, other-slash-no genders too, it’s just those are the categories the archive uses, so.)
There is another major category, though, and that is people who read m/f fic who are into m and into the relationships m have with f, but they are super not into f! and that is! that is where they lose me! (and this is probably not a hard category divide, and maybe is more of a spectrum, so to anyone reading this who isn’t sure where they fall that is okay, there are probably also many other subcategories I’m not describing too but anyway this other category is the one that sometimes leaves me Uncomfortable Feedback so like, that’s why I’m talking about it.)
And I’m not saying it’s a bad viewpoint or whatever, it’s just totally foreign to me and I don’t super understand it. I sort of vaguely assume they’re largely straight women, but I don’t actually know that and was sort of being flippant in my previous post when I used that terminology– I don’t understand them, I don’t know their perspective, I don’t really know what’s up and I don’t really mean to judge, except when they say things to me, the writer, that come across as sort of gross, and in that case I do get sort of grossed-out, but that’s not to say they’re necessarily bad people, just, I don’t like their takes. Anyway!
And so those readers would really rather I mostly talked about the m and didn’t actually dwell so much on the f. I guess? I think? I don’t know, I don’t really understand.
But you are correct, the number one marker for me that a fic is going to be Quality M/F is if the M is like Please Sit On My Face, regardless of the quality or quantity of the actual face-sitting– it’s just a telltale, like, hallmark of quality. I like a (fictional, for the purposes of this post, is what I’m discussing, to be clear, lol) dude who’s really into pussy, where it’s a deliberately affirmative thing, and not just– he’s a boy and she’s a girl and what more can i say trite formulaic nonsense. And not to be gender essentialist at all, but that’s the thing here– it’s whatever the genitals are of the character who is NOT a man, for this specific thing, which is in most cases at least nominally a pussy of some kind. I don’t actually care about the details, I care that it’s Not Male Genitals.
(There’s not a cut-and-dried converse Hallmark Of Badness but anything where, like, her objections have to be overmastered in some way, is a pretty good I’m Not Going To Like This One red flag. (It’s not consent play! That can be good! I am incredibly super into that stuff in general, even horrible non-con-fantasy stuff even in the right fic, so it’s not like i’m saying it’s got to be Pure and Right smut; I love trashy stuff when it’s unabashedly trashy! But it’s the oldschool romance novel negging kind of Man Knows Best shit that’s bad bad bad I Will Not Like This news. Her mouth says no but her body says BACK BUTTON THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.))
ineptshieldmaid replied to your post “msilverstar replied to your post “thatgirlonstage: …”
BIG MOOD. But also you’re right about m/f fic being weird like that! The BEST m/f fic is like ‘this dude here he is REALLY INTO PUSSY, PREFERABLY WITH HIS FACE’, but sadly, it is a rare subgenre.
Yes!
Yes. OK, so my feelings, as a bi woman who writes a spectrum of kinds of fic, looking at the comments I get on said fic, I definitely feel like there are two major categories of people who read m/f fic. And one of them, is the category I’m in, where I read m/f fic because I am into m and I am into f and I am definitely into what they can do together. Bingo: m/f is on the menu. (As is, for the record, other-slash-no genders too, it’s just those are the categories the archive uses, so.)
There is another major category, though, and that is people who read m/f fic who are into m and into the relationships m have with f, but they are super not into f! and that is! that is where they lose me! (and this is probably not a hard category divide, and maybe is more of a spectrum, so to anyone reading this who isn’t sure where they fall that is okay, there are probably also many other subcategories I’m not describing too but anyway this other category is the one that sometimes leaves me Uncomfortable Feedback so like, that’s why I’m talking about it.)
And I’m not saying it’s a bad viewpoint or whatever, it’s just totally foreign to me and I don’t super understand it. I sort of vaguely assume they’re largely straight women, but I don’t actually know that and was sort of being flippant in my previous post when I used that terminology– I don’t understand them, I don’t know their perspective, I don’t really know what’s up and I don’t really mean to judge, except when they say things to me, the writer, that come across as sort of gross, and in that case I do get sort of grossed-out, but that’s not to say they’re necessarily bad people, just, I don’t like their takes. Anyway!
And so those readers would really rather I mostly talked about the m and didn’t actually dwell so much on the f. I guess? I think? I don’t know, I don’t really understand.
But you are correct, the number one marker for me that a fic is going to be Quality M/F is if the M is like Please Sit On My Face, regardless of the quality or quantity of the actual face-sitting– it’s just a telltale, like, hallmark of quality. I like a (fictional, for the purposes of this post, is what I’m discussing, to be clear, lol) dude who’s really into pussy, where it’s a deliberately affirmative thing, and not just– he’s a boy and she’s a girl and what more can i say trite formulaic nonsense. And not to be gender essentialist at all, but that’s the thing here– it’s whatever the genitals are of the character who is NOT a man, for this specific thing, which is in most cases at least nominally a pussy of some kind. I don’t actually care about the details, I care that it’s Not Male Genitals.
(There’s not a cut-and-dried converse Hallmark Of Badness but anything where, like, her objections have to be overmastered in some way, is a pretty good I’m Not Going To Like This One red flag. (It’s not consent play! That can be good! I am incredibly super into that stuff in general, even horrible non-con-fantasy stuff even in the right fic, so it’s not like i’m saying it’s got to be Pure and Right smut; I love trashy stuff when it’s unabashedly trashy! But it’s the oldschool romance novel negging kind of Man Knows Best shit that’s bad bad bad I Will Not Like This news. Her mouth says no but her body says BACK BUTTON THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.))
no subject
Date: 2019-08-03 05:40 pm (UTC)Like...fiction is about the human experience, and sex is a thing humans do, and the idea that the only reason I’d want to read about it is because I, personally, would like to bang one or more of the participants is a very foreign concept. Not to say that "because it's hot" is not a totally valid reason to read about sex. It's just not the only one.
(Also, co-sign on Please Sit On My Face being a telltale hallmark of quality, LOL.)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 12:14 pm (UTC)And I guess some people don't have that experience or viewpoint. And so the lesson here is that I don't understand what they do have instead. That's just-- my theory on what must be going on, here.
So it's not necessarily that the dissatisfied readers don't have any attraction to female-bodied-type persons, per se; it's that they can't empathize with characters that do?
I think I'm losing the thread of this somewhere, and part of that is that it's been some time since I opened this tab to reply to this and I don't remember what my original point was, but part of it is just that I don't understand what's exactly going on so these are all theories.
Anyway-- in my original post I do think I theorized that it was monosexually-attracted people I didn't understand, but I think it's not that, it's this empathy vs. literal self-insertion kind of mindset instead, and I'm not even sure it's literal self-insertion for the misunderstood category.
So I try to be empathetic to people who clearly don't understand my modes of sexual attraction, because man I have a good imagination and I can't even imagine how the hell it works if it doesn't work like it does for me.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 08:07 pm (UTC)On that note I do think sometimes the aversion is tied up in that discomfort a lot of women (myself included) experience wrt having a body at all? So if they’re reading porn and they have to think too deeply about women’s bodies - and more specifically about anybody else observing a woman’s body, which is either explicitly or implicitly what’s happening anytime there’s physical description - everything gets fraught and it kills any pleasure and/or escapism going on. Which is a very understandable reason, and says deeply depressing things about the society we live in. And I’m sure there are other things at work too that I haven’t grasped because it’s not the way it works for me, so as you say I try to be empathetic and just appreciate that human beings are complicated and so is human sexuality.
But yeah, other times people just seem to find women’s bodies gross, and maybe that’s merely an issue of poor word choice on their part but the strength of the reaction can be kind of unsettling sometimes.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 08:09 pm (UTC)