speaking of disk horse

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/2ZzEFAp

… I just got a comment on one of my extremely raunchy BuckyNat fics by someone lauding how wholesome the sex was, and what a good example it was. “what good sex is supposed to be like” …. it’s an orgy fic with male multiple orgasms in it, iirc. (In other words, Not Exactly Realistic.)

Now, all told, it *is* a fairly wholesome smutfic! Everyone in it has a lovely time and feels sexually gratified and emotionally supported! It might actually be a threesome fic, I haven’t reread it in a while– I think it’s BuckyNatSteve– and it’s just good communication and hot sex and everyone being cared for all around, orgasms for everyone. I like writing stories like that.

But this comment was like… lauding me for bringing the tone of “the culture” up with this wholesome smut. 

And I’m not specifically offended by the comment? but it makes me… hmmm… a little… 

Listen, there’s definitely a need for Wholesome Smut Fics. I absolutely have a need for this, myself, and I do enjoy writing them, and I write them for me and I write them for other people who are having a hard day and just want something nice but not saccharine, and that’s fine.

But I write trash too, I write bad communication and angst, I write self-destructive bullshit and a whole spectrum of stuff. [To be perfectly honest, the only reason I don’t write more miscommunication angst and such is that I get too anxious and can’t make it work because I’m too afraid of Bad Things. That’s not morally-driven at all, that’s Anxiety babey. I read far darker than I write, that’s for sure.] There is room, and need, in “the culture” for all of that kind of thing. And I am certainly not writing wholesome poly smut fic as a how-to for impressionable young readers. Whatever else that stuff is for, it is absolutely not sex ed. Oh my gosh. You are going to be so disappointed, young reader, by the fact that I gave supersoldiers ridiculously absent refractory periods, among other things. [In real life nobody communicates like that either and if you expect it you are going to cry a lot, a lot a lot. the Infinite Bomb Dick is fantasy but the bit where everyone Knows What Bucky Needs And Gives It To Him Without Him Asking is absolutely entirely fantasy, that will never happen to you, my sweet summer child. never.]

Please, children, please, don’t read my fics looking for moral guidance. Oh my god. I do write wholesome filth sometimes, I do, because I like wholesome shit sometimes, but I also write bad things, and I sometimes pepper things with convincing realism (I am fond of writing good awkward sex, that’s a trope I like) but they are not real. My real sex life is nothing like this. Your real sex life will never be anything like it either. Oh my god. 

My writing is neither moral nor immoral. It is stories I am driven to tell, because I want to read them, and they are imperfect mirrors of my observations at bestI have no particular agenda in any of them and please don’t infer one.

I don’t know how to respond to this comment, though. Like… uh… glad you found what you needed but uhhhh i also write stuff that you’d probably think drags “the culture” down so maybe don’t keep clicking? IDK man. What do you say?

Comments

[lazaefair]

Methinks this was another incident of modern fandom purity culture. Relatively benign, but still.

I remember when all smut of any type, flavor, kink, and degree was hidden away in super secret archives and treated like some kind of furtive Fandom Secret Knowledge. And when all slash fics, even G-rated ones, were relegated wholesale to the same perverted back room as the graphic het porn. The idea that Kids These Days are now subdividing and ranking smut according to levels of moral purity is just really funny.

[sabotabby]

Seconds. I'm old enough to remember limes and lemons and when you had to warn for TEH GAYYYZ and don't like, don't read.

I despise fandom purity culture, much as I understand and appreciate the impulses behind it. But smut is fantasy and what gets you off isn't always upright and pure.

[chamerion]

Eesh. I’m squirming in sympathy just reading this because you’re right, “offended” is absolutely the wrong word, but personally speaking I have a little bit of a weird flinch response to stories with that sort of heavy-handedly didactic tone so being lauded for Setting A Good Example For Impressionable Youths is...that’s not a compliment LOL. Wholesomely filthy is an A+ smut mood, but there’s a difference between wholesome filth and idk. Sexy Aesop’s fables. You know?

I think a lot of it comes down to what you say about mirroring. I just think fiction is fundamentally about reflecting on the human experience, and that covers a lot of tender wholesome ground but a lot of awkward or painful or ugly ground as well. There’s that line (I think it might be CS Lewis but don’t hold me to it) about how friendship is born in the moment when someone says “You too? I thought I was the only one.” And I’ve always thought that’s a pretty good description of how art works, too. That shocking sudden intimacy of like...touching fingertips with a stranger through a pane of frosted glass.

You can absolutely learn a lot that way! But it’s a sort of learning that’s rooted in empathy and exploration, not instruction.

[dragonlady7]

I definitely felt Purity Cultured by it, and since the Tumblr version of this post got reblogged by a fairly big name it's mostly been received that way.

I do sympathize with the commenter-- rereading it, they specifically mentioned that it was nice to read sex where nobody was getting "choked"-- and I do get that, a lot of mainstream porn starts off fine but then suddenly swerves sideways into almost pro-forma physical humiliation now and then. So it's not like I don't sympathize with wanting to just read nice sex for once, where the point is that everyone's having a good time, but like.
IDK-- I don't find that dynamic as much in fannish fic porn, generally it's well warned-for. But I guess if it's not your bag, it's nice to find a fic where there isn't any, so maybe that was the commenter's actual perspective.
But like. Not to be TMI but I also like to read that stuff too sometimes? It's got it's place, ok, which is why my perspective is "love as thou wilt just tag your shit accurately".

And I definitely feel like that's way more of a thing in mainstream porn, which is why I so seldom venture out to look at it. I am not aware of this sort of thing being so common in fannish stuff, but then, I don't surf tags, I only read stuff that's recced or otherwise curated, because I don't read that much.

I am definitely old enough to have spent my early fandom career having to go to special archives to read slash, and even then-- I tended to write m/f stuff, and so I'd get to post without thinking of it, and it was actually several years before I wrote a slash fic and realized with a rude shock that one of my standard archives that I always posted to wouldn't accept it, and then I had to really think about it, because I was queer before I was fannish and I should've noticed how Problematic that was but I hadn't really thought it through. So it's all kind of... weird to me, now, to see what the new dividing lines are, since I've never been good at paying attention.

[dragonlady7]

Yeah. I mean, I can sympathize with the commenter, because it's nice to find a fic with a dynamic that doesn't sharply turn halfway through-- I was thinking of this because I was (sorry if this is TMI) looking at actual mainstream like video'd porn, just kind of idly browsing through looking for something that was hot, and I literally could not find anything where the woman wasn't getting choked or having her head stepped on or something, just like in the middle of an otherwise unexceptional m/f scene. So like. Absolutely!
But the point there is like, tag your shit. And so maybe in mainstream porn there's a shortage of ethical tagging of one's shit, because I sure as hell couldn't figure out a way to actually filter my search results to get what I wanted, which was everybody having a nice time thank you. But that doesn't mean that I don't want there ever to be any videos where somebody gets choked, because listen sometimes that's hot and, well, i was going to say the heart wants what it wants but let's not kid here, whatever anatomical parts are involved they are not the heart.
But!
I don't think that's so much a problem in fandom, we tend to tag our shit and also we have entire genres where basically the whole entire premise is "Everybody Has A Nice Time", which tends to be what I write in.
But not what I read in, so like. Sorry, again, probably TMI, but listen. Listen. Anyway. No.

(Is that weird, to explain that what I like to write and what I like to read are pretty dramatically different? I feel like that's not unusual. Also maybe I have a scratch file full of absolute unpublishable filth, it's like a sideways Dorian Grey kinda situation, let's not examine that too closely.)

Anyway I think what my problem with all of it boils down to is the backhanded compliment aspect of it, known really intimately to a lot of us "passing" bi types, where it's like, wholehearted approval of a thing you're actually not, quite, with a side helping of implied condemnation of a thing that you actually secretly (and it's not like, an active secret, it's a passive "passing" issue) are. How Great That You're A Virtuous And Wholesome Good Person, Not Like Those Icky Sinful [What You Actually Are]! Yeeeeeeesghh fucking yikes.

[dragonlady7]

It's really similar to an issue I've had in the past, where I write m/f smut and get Straight Ppl commenting on it like... IDK how to describe it. But in a comment reply above, I realized that a large part of the issue is that sort of... assumption. It's a backhanded compliment based on the assumption that I am just like the commenter, a fellow-traveler of sorts-- which, as you say, is part of the whole thing, that CS Lewis thing maybe--
but the issue is that the commenter is identifying with me based on something that they're assuming.
In this story, I can easily be read as Straight, and Virtuous.
In real life, I am actually queer-- but a bi m/f relationship looks the same as a straight one, if you're coming from that perspective. And I am actually pretty into dark stuff, but I don't tend to write it, or I do but I back off and have a less dark kind of conclusion to it.
But when I read, it's not just the wholesome stuff, and I don't always look for the Just Kidding It Was Really Just Roleplay twist endings I tend to write. In my head, I'm a much darker writer than I really am.
(Maybe it's because the twist endings don't always get added on until the last draft? maybe because I have a bunch of unposted shit that's super dark? maybe because some of my most notably unfinished WIPs are unfinished because i can't think how to end them without going through some dark shit that i figured readers wouldn't like?)

Anyway. The problem at the heart of all of these kinds of comments are when someone delightedly identifies with me in a way that elides a great deal of who/what I actually am.
And it's possible to do that without the elision, it really is-- (is that a word? it is now)-- you can say "oh god I just love wholesome smut" without saying "unlike all that other trash out there" or like... IDK but it's definitely possible. \

IDK!

[sabotabby]

Tagging is the best. I love tags. I wish sometimes there were hierarchies of tagging (I largely care about what kind of story it is, not specific acts) but it's awesome for avoidance.

Almost all the sex I've written ranges from "Everybody Has a Nice Time" to "The Sex Act Is Not the Point Of the Sex Scene" (which is about as nasty as I get). What I read is far more varied, and occasionally runs to the dark and not-very-PC end of things.

(Porn is different because there are real people involved and regardless of what goes on in it, I need to know that no one is doing stuff they don't want to be doing.)

[dragonlady7]

Yes, hierarchies-- that'd be so fantastic! There is a lot of stuff where I don't care what the actual mechanics are, but occasionally I would like to know. if you could like... collapse the list and just expand certain subsections... maybe...

I like to read super dark shit sometimes, but sometimes it upsets me, and I really like to know that it's an option that I can avoid when I want to. But yes-- real porn, there are actual humans there, and I definitely dislike how hard it is to tell what the actual provenance of the footage is. I dislike almost everything, and then I hate that I'm looking at it, but then I just specifically want to envision what a specific thing would look like, and then ughhhh most of it is so upsetting. Blearrghh.

[chamerion]

Oh man, yeah, I can see how that would unpleasantly echo the experience of being queer-but-assumed-to-be-straight. That’s a very insightful point.

I don’t write a ton of smut but I do sometimes get the urge to write Bleakly Depressing Shit, or wrestle with morally dubious or downright bad protagonists. I’ve described the latter as the slightly more dignified version of childishly screaming WHY at all the cruelty in the world, but fandom purity culture tends to interpret that desire to understand as a desire to excuse. Like you said, I can sort of see where that impulse comes from - occasionally fannish villain apologism veers in downright unsettling directions - but I think you have to critique the handling of this stuff on a case-by-case basis, not call for blanket bans on certain subjects because some stories handle them badly. Which is to say that I totally sympathize on having darker stuff in drafts than I’ve necessarily published.

And yeah!!! It really just isn’t that difficult to say “I love and appreciate X in fiction,” or even “Y isn’t my personal cup of tea,” without putting down anybody whose tastes are different. You would think that more people would realize they’re potentially putting their foot in their mouth with the latter but I think there’s maybe something to be said about how the current fandom culture encourages bonding via shared dislike of things as opposed to shared enjoyment. Or maybe it’s just young kids being kids and they’ll grow out of it - I’m not sure I have a long enough perspective on fandom to say for sure. If nothing else it’s sort of tactless and insensitive - and in ways that are very relevant outside of fandom too, as you've pointed out.