I admit, your posting made me uneasy in many ways, particularly because I think that we really need the opposite in F/F. Badly.
I’ll be grateful if you can point out the problematic aspects in the following.
It mainly feels a bit like playing off femmeslash against asexuality, and priorizing the later at the expense of the former. We need both in fiction, and for Femmeslash, we particularly need femmeslash that isn't focussed on keeping the characters pure and unsullied from the scary scary sex. We need more sexual F/F, not less.
The lack of sexual F/F in particularly is what plagues many, many stories that are F/F - Maria Sama ga Miteiru as mentioned above is one of the more jarring examples, but there are many more. We're kinda pushing away from it for a reason.
"It can be just about women making a deeper connection to each other that's erotic, but not necessarily sexual," as spoken by jazzypom.
This, especially, is what I mean. From my perspective, this is not a solution, but one of the major problems in F/F canon stories. Most authors take great pains to make sure that it's one of these two: a)non-sexual (I can start listing canon stories and finish next week, and people'll be able to list more. Women being sexual with other women? Sure is frowned upon - including by the very same men who are usually claimed to like it. What they tend to like is women making out before a guy joins in) b)non-emotional (pretty much every supposedly lesbian encounter in every fantasy story ever, Song of Ice and Fire being a "good" example for it. Sure, they have sex, but care little for each other, that'd threaten the ego of poor male readers, after all, women being able to love non-men? Blapshemy!)
F/F canon stories that have both an emotional and a sexual component are very, very rare and only became a bit more common in the last 3-4 years.
Canon-wise, I don't see asexual characters being underrepresented in F/F. They seem to be the norm. And since fanfiction tends to fix what canon is missing, not what canon has in spades, it makes sense that fanfiction tends to add characters that are sexually involved, for a change.
The only real way to reconcile them that I see is have a couple of both kinds, sexual and nonsexual, or sexual couple AxB, who both have a deep nonsexual relationship with C, who has no sexual interest in either A or B. I think the later option could actually be pretty interesting in fact.
Just removing the sexual as the main part is really not what's lacking in F/F. We can just watch canon for it.
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Date: 2011-06-01 09:56 pm (UTC)I’ll be grateful if you can point out the problematic aspects in the following.
It mainly feels a bit like playing off femmeslash against asexuality, and priorizing the later at the expense of the former. We need both in fiction, and for Femmeslash, we particularly need femmeslash that isn't focussed on keeping the characters pure and unsullied from the scary scary sex. We need more sexual F/F, not less.
The lack of sexual F/F in particularly is what plagues many, many stories that are F/F - Maria Sama ga Miteiru as mentioned above is one of the more jarring examples, but there are many more. We're kinda pushing away from it for a reason.
"It can be just about women making a deeper connection to each other that's erotic, but not necessarily sexual," as spoken by jazzypom.
This, especially, is what I mean. From my perspective, this is not a solution, but one of the major problems in F/F canon stories. Most authors take great pains to make sure that it's one of these two:
a)non-sexual (I can start listing canon stories and finish next week, and people'll be able to list more. Women being sexual with other women? Sure is frowned upon - including by the very same men who are usually claimed to like it. What they tend to like is women making out before a guy joins in)
b)non-emotional (pretty much every supposedly lesbian encounter in every fantasy story ever, Song of Ice and Fire being a "good" example for it. Sure, they have sex, but care little for each other, that'd threaten the ego of poor male readers, after all, women being able to love non-men? Blapshemy!)
F/F canon stories that have both an emotional and a sexual component are very, very rare and only became a bit more common in the last 3-4 years.
Canon-wise, I don't see asexual characters being underrepresented in F/F. They seem to be the norm. And since fanfiction tends to fix what canon is missing, not what canon has in spades, it makes sense that fanfiction tends to add characters that are sexually involved, for a change.
The only real way to reconcile them that I see is have a couple of both kinds, sexual and nonsexual, or sexual couple AxB, who both have a deep nonsexual relationship with C, who has no sexual interest in either A or B. I think the later option could actually be pretty interesting in fact.
Just removing the sexual as the main part is really not what's lacking in F/F. We can just watch canon for it.