#anyways a cis woman can get pegged. by a trans woman even. we have the technology.

[meggydolaon]

You FUCK her with a strap 😤😤😤 use your imagination

Edeltheaaa. yea yea

[voxofthevoid]

Taking It Up The Ass Isn’t Character Growth - A Rant

So, in response to an ask a while back, I said I had a rant brewing on fandom and sex positions, and well, a lot of you wanted to see it, so here you go. You literally asked for it.

Disclaimer: This is going to talk a lot about top/bottom roles in slash fic and fandom attitude towards them and is heavily filtered through the lens of my own tastes and experiences with fandom. I’d also like to be upfront that I am 100% in favor of people writing whatever fictional content they want, and it’s not what fandom does with characters that bothers me but rather how that translates into attitudes towards real, live people. Also, this is the essay version of a slow burn AU because I regurgitate my entire fandom history before getting to the point. Beware.

I discovered fan-fiction around a decade ago, had no clue what the hell it was, got hooked and dived deeper. I started participating in fandom circa 2013, and I was fairly young and also completely inexperienced both sexually and romantically. The fandom in question was Hannibal and my ship of choice was Hannibal/Will. It was/is a very chill fandom in general, but we had our drama. And chief among the contentious topics was—you guessed it—the top/bottom debate. I can’t actually remember any other topic that was discussed and argued for so ardently in that fandom, at least in those days. Even after I drifted away, I came across a few posts on the matter.

Generally, you had two camps—people who supported strict roles and those who were in favor of switching*. And because we’re a society plagued by illogical assumptions, the strict role camp mostly had people who thought Mr. Big Bad Cannibal in the Fancy Suits wouldn’t take it up the ass because he’s older, more experienced, more mentally stable, and of course, more ‘dominant’ in personality. Yes, that sentence is chock full of problematic shit. I am aware. Lots of people were aware and argued strongly against attributing top/bottom roles to personality. I don’t remember anyone arguing as enthusiastically for Top Will, but those voices were also there. But the general idea was that assigning strict top/bottom roles to a male/male couple was casting them in a heterosexual mold and thus, the progressive option was to make them switch. Strict roles also garnered comparisons to “yaoi” and uke/seme stereotypes, which was of course bad and fetishizing and we, the Western media fans, of course had to do better. Stealth racism is fun to untangle.

Anyway, I lapped up the woke juice. Partly because I was a baby queer from Buttfuck Nowhere, Asia, who had zero exposure to LGBT+ communities and what queer folks did with each other. Partly because it was the stance taken by most of my favorite writers so it seemed like a good position to emulate.

Emulate it I did. Most discussions I had about this happened in private with the handful of close friends I had in fandom. Where it really showed was in my writing. I made sure to write switching—maybe not in every fic, but then I alternated between fics. Thing is though, I did have a preference. I liked Top Will. I created and consumed a ton of Top Hannibal, and sometimes it was okay, sometimes it was not, but I couldn’t pinpoint why it made me uncomfortable. Back then, I thought I was a cis questioning/bi girl and once again, the impression I got was that not being MLM, having a preference was automatic fetishization. So I tried my best to justify my preferences, to my friends at least. I think what I said was that fandom was skewed towards Top Hannibal, and I liked the opposite because I’m a contrary fuck. Which I am, to be fair, but this was just me desperately trying to figure shit out without being offensive.

That’s the line I touted all the way until 2018, which was when I fucked off to grad school in A City, finally freed of Buttfuck Nowhere and able to actually date. At this point, I was settled in my sexuality (girls only) and questioning my gender (non-binary or trans guy). I had also tentatively figured out during undergrad that I’m an exclusive top and a Dom. Actual attempts at dating cemented that, yes, those are my preferences, about as flexible as a steel rod. Cue motherfucking epiphany over my fanfic tastes.

And see, over these years, I was engaging intermittently with fandom. I dutifully wrote switch couples. I also continued to have rigid tastes and continued to explain it away as being a contrary fuck—to be fair, until Steve/Bucky, my preference did seem to be the opposite of the larger fandom preference. But correlation, as we know, isn’t causation. Until Steve/Bucky, I continued to write versatile couples because I honestly didn’t have the guts to just say I liked it just one way. I do now but even then, I feel compelled to add that it’s because I want to see my own taste reflected in fic, so I write/read the character I relate to as a top, it's not that deep etc. Would I be as forthright if I didn’t have that reason? Would I have such strict preferences in fic if I didn’t have strict preferences IRL? The latter’s a mystery, but the former isn’t—I wouldn’t be because fandom is still entrenched in the same ideas that got me to this point to begin with.

In every fandom I’ve been in, I’ve seen some version of this debate go around. Sometimes, it’s one party saying “why would you write Character X as a bottom, he’s so Reason A” and a reblog chain that insults the OP and/or extols the virtues of switching. Sometimes, it’s a general-ish message that says they don’t understand why people have strict preferences when we all know real gay couples switch. Sometimes, it’s blanket statements that accuse anyone with preferences of fetishizing. Sometimes, it’s the same reasoning that gets you “Character Y is a top because of Reason B” transposed on versatile couples except this takes the form of “they switch because they’re equals.”

Ya’ll, I’m fucking tired.

I have long since lost count of the number of stories I’ve seen where an exclusive top learning bottom and liking it is character growth. Where a character who prefers to bottom taking a turn on top is empowering.

Isolated, these are fine. But I’ve seen enough of such stories that it’s distinctly discomfiting and a major squick. Sometimes a trigger, if I'm too immersed in the story. I’m not going to try and burn an author at the stake because they pissed me off. I am just going to close that window and quietly handle my shit. People can write whatever they want. But this one theme hits too close to home, as you can see from this 1.6k rant.

My friend (also my ex-girlfriend) and I had an all-out bitching session about this the other day. Both of us are kinky fuckers who have rigid, complementary roles we prefer and we have both had our grueling days of struggling to reconcile our sexual tastes with our ideologies precisely because of how these things are frowned upon in conservative and progressive circles. Seeing that in fandom, of all places, is both insulting and exhausting. Topping and bottoming aren’t personality traits. Neither is D/s. It’s sexual preference and power play. It really does not have to be that deep. I am not exorcising childhood trauma using the bodies of women. My partners, former and current, have not been brainwashed by the patriarchy. We will not become better, more complete individuals once I magically stop being a stone top and my partners embrace the joys of a strap-on.

I have, with my own two eyes, seen someone say that in a really committed relationship, of course the couple will switch.

Bullshit.

It’s transparent bullshit. This does not get attributed to cisgender M/F couples. Even when the automatic assumptions of woman = bottom and man = top get addressed, switching isn't presented as the default. No one’s saying “oh, if you really love your husband, you’ll peg him”. I do know butch/femme sapphic couples get their own share of shit. Because it’s all heteronormativity, right? Can’t have any other reason for top/bottom roles.

You have two extremes with “so who’s the woman” on one end and “it’s woke only if they switch” on the other, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re equally damaging. There shouldn’t be a pressure, however subtle, to conform your taste in fiction to some arbitrary idea of progressiveness. People are going to like whatever they want anyway; all this does is create an atmosphere where those likes can’t always be freely expressed without a lot of mental gymnastics. We’re seeing so many versions of this in the pushback against so-called problematic content, but smaller, subtler versions exist too.

Fictional characters aren’t real. They can be whatever you want them to be. And yes, other people will often want them to be the exact opposite of your ideas, but that’s just how things work. Meanwhile, the people behind these usernames? They’re real. No one should be throwing real people under the bus to ‘protect’ characters that don’t exist. Hannibal Lecter doesn’t care whether he gets fucked or dismembered in Author B’s fanfiction, but the discourse that surrounds the dick up his ass? That does affect flesh and blood people.

I am not claiming that this is the only attitude in fandom. Middlegrounds do exist. Plenty of people abide by fic and let fic and there are folks who pipe up to say not every RL queer couple switches. But it’s often the extremes that reach most people. That was certainly my experience, and I’m not the only one.

I don’t really know how to end this post. It is 100% a rant and one that’s been building up for a while. Bottom line is that people’s sexual behavior varies wildly and whenever you attack sexual tastes in fanfic by saying it’s unrealistic - or worse because let’s be real, that’s a very tame word choice - please remember that there’s likely someone out there who practices it.

* I’m using switch and versatile synonymously in this post. It’s mostly concerned with top/bottom debates. A lot of what I’m saying is also echoed in portrayals of and discussions surrounding D/s dynamics, but I’m not addressing that as much for now.  

[bearsfakedthemoonlanding]

Queer Thoughts 7/15/2020

[personal introspection on gender theory, sexuality, and being a person.  mentions elements of transphobia.  dead dove, do not eat]

The other day a friend of mine got into the fun “trans debate.”  Not one of the bad ones, but just the one that argues whether or not it’s transphobic to be un-attracted to someone based on genitalia alone.

And what I realized from this is that it’s so easy not to understand each other.  Her opinion is that of a cisgender, masculine woman who’s only ever dated women, and only ever wants to date women.  My opinion is from a bisexual trans person.  How I experience attraction and how she experiences attraction are vastly different. 

We didn’t get into it, I was just sort of an aside audience to the conversation, so I don’t know her deeper inner thoughts about it.  She recognizes trans people to be what they say they are, though, it’s just the between the legs situation that throws her off.  Vaginas are her whole thing.  I can respect that. 

For me, as someone who’s often misconceived to be any different gender, and who is often surprised by the people I find attractive, I can’t imagine having that narrow of a scope.  After enough HRT nobody will be able to look at me and know what’s going on between my legs at all, and because I’ve spent so much time with trans and intersex people, I often don’t assume either.  If I’m into a person, I’m into them, and whatever they happen to be carrying will be a fun surprise. 

Makes me think about my parents though?  And older cis people that I’ve talked to.  It’s no wonder I don’t make any sense to them.  They look at me and they see “that weird girl,” and that’s fine, for now.  Because their scope of who people are and how they can look is also limited.  Most of my family and their friends grew up in the midwest, and while there’s scenes there, you really have to go looking for them.  My family hasn’t ever had to deal with someone like me before.   They have their two boxes, and they struggle to imagine someone living outside of them, just like they struggle to imagine someone ever being homosexual (or any variating thereof).

Just like my friend struggles to imagine being attracted to someone with a penis.  She’s valid.  They’re all valid.  Gotta wonder though if she’s ever met a beautiful woman with a penis.  God knows I have, and it would have been so easy to fall in love. 

But then again, I can’t imagine a lot of things too.  I can’t imagine ever dating a straight man again, because the last time I did it was chock-full of ignoring pronouns and descriptors and it was so full of confusion.  He wondered why I couldn’t suck it up and be more feminine.  He didn’t want to be seen as “gay” in public with me.  I wondered what he wanted to do with me in the first place, if this was how he really felt about it. 

I’m grateful not to be in the dating scene anymore.  My girlfriend is so cavalier about everything.  I told her the truth and asked her opinions and she said a number of things like “yeah, that makes sense” and “you’ve kind of been working your way towards this anyways” and “it’s your body, you decide what you want for it” and “explain to me what this means.”  I don’t need another reason to be in love with her.  I’m already overflowing with adoration.  But her kindness and patience and unquestioning just fills me with so much happiness.  I couldn’t have ever imagined someone being so kind.  Accepting me at my word and offering support.  Loving me anyways. 

If I was in the scene still, though, I think I’d have to date other gender-weird people. [ My girlfriend is the exception to the rule, but even she grew up a tomboy. ] I’d feel too uneasy explaining myself to someone who’s never questioned their gender this thoroughly.  Who hasn’t felt that deep, gut wrenching discomfort and wondered why and tried to fix it.  Who isn’t that square peg in a round hole.  I’d want to be with people who’ve done the reading and questioned the theories and found their way back around to, “you know what?  fuck it.” 

And even this is a queer view of gender.  I’ve talked to binary trans people who knew, deep in their chest, what they were supposed to be.  And despite how they got their, or what their journey looked like, they knew for certain they were going from one to the other.  See how we slip past understanding each other?  I could never fathom having that certainty.

[overelegantstranger]

I had a headache at the time I saw your original post so I didn't feel up to engaging with it much, but if/when you have the time and energy, please could you expand on your behaviour model of queerness? (feel free to answer privately or publicly, whichever you prefer)

Hey,yeah, so! First off, sorry this took me a little bit to get to; I wasn'toperating on full brain for a while there. Anyway, the idea of Queerness as aDiscrete Identity only really started to happen in the late 1800s, when EdwardCarpenter (a gay guy in a long-running relationship, incidentally) startedyelling about it. This is part of an attempt to assert queerness as a thingseparate from morals, as a part of one's identity and as something thatdeserves a struggle for rights same as any other demographic.

I agree withthis, just in case anyone watching this thinks I want queer folks to end uplike Oscar Wilde and Simeon Solomon. I don't. But, nevertheless, in my personalopinion we lost something, as queer people, when the identity-centered approachCarpenter started took hold. The thing about identity centered approaches isthat they more easily create an us/them dynamic. Queer people become discreteunits that Straight Society can dismiss as a "them", when before - asDeborah Lutz puts it in my favourite ever book ever, "if people discoveredsuch things as sodomy existed, they might try it for themselves". StraightSociety is, by and large (but not Fully) "safe" from that anxietynow.

You're either "Gay", or you're"Straight"; you're a "them" or an "us". Thisforms an essential bracketing off of experience, because identities areactually much slippier. The lines between trans identity and gay identity areincredibly slippy, for example. Carpenter himself articulates gay male identityas having a "woman's soul". Trans and gay identities are very closelywound together; to be gay, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, is to begenderqueer.

This got separated out; I'm not sure what came first, greaterunderstanding of transness or respectability politics, but nevertheless, to adegree, identity politics allowed this distinction to happen because it hadlaid down a framework in which there could be uses and thems with regard to sexuality and non-cis gender experiences. Once"them" became a discrete class rather than just an immoral version of"us", it could be further distinguished and shifted, by both the inand out groups. I am not sure of quite the dynamics at play here but queernessgot stripped of its aspects until the only difference between the"us" and the "them" was the gender of the person you hadsex with. This was your identity, now; this was a Category you could exist in.It gained some nuances (Carpenter suggests all queer men are effeminate andarty) and lost others (your gender wasn't inherently slippery, any more). Butbecause of that slimlining of the categories, lots of people found themselveswithout category. Due to the new framework, we make identity after identity.That's fine. I have no problem with that. But categories come with measuringdevices, and all out-groups measure you for "fitness".

I've lost my thread. Anyway, you start with two distinctcategories. "Gay" and "Straight". "Gay" lost itsgenderqueerness quite early, if I recall, though I'm not sure of the actualdynamics. "Bi" immediately troubles this bracket, because you can'tfit bi folk into either. They don't measure up to the requirements of thecategories. This is why, in my opinion, a lot of biphobic folks will fall backon behavioural models. They'll use your behaviour to try and figure out whereyou fall. Rightly, a lot of bi people have fought against this and establishedfor themselves their own box.

Mainstream queer history is the constant creationof boxes. I don't necessarily disagree with this; I certainly see the impulse.But boxes necessitate measuring yourself. You have to always be enough to fitin the box, even if you made it for yourself. You're always seperated, even ifyou share a line with another person's box. Everything you do is measuredagainst the box. If your identity changes or your understanding of yourselfdevelops, you have to change the dimensions of your box (generally impossible,because we don't have personal control over many of the boxes. Boxes can changeshape if enough inhabitants decide it needs to change, but most of the time wejust move boxes).

This is an exhausting process because it requires you watchyourself at all times, to measure every aspect every time it changes. This is,in my opinion, especially exhausting because of the lines we've put up aboutnot claiming words unless you fit this box or that box, not talking about thisissue if you're not a Known Inhabitant of Box 54 And You Can Prove It. Likebringing an electric bill to prove your address, you have to present yourexperiences to prove your box-membership. So we become constantly aware and onedge; constantly waiting to whip out a ruler and measure, to prove to ourselvesor others that we belong.

Another aspect of identity models is that the act ofboxing isolates one part of your identity from another. Your gender is hangingaround in one box, while your sexuality throws a ball against the wall ofanother, and never the twain shall meet. What happens if you feel those aspectsare intertwined? What if, as I have seen often, you feel more a man whenattracted to men and more a woman when attracted to women? What if you feel youfit the definition of cis woman but your attraction to women makes you feeldistanced from womanhood in some way? What if you're aroace and a woman but youfeel isolated from the "woman" box because so many of your fellowinhabitants are allo? Do you make a new box to hold All of you or do you justcontend with living with your identities boxed apart?

Constant measuring is stressful and painful and confusingand I reject the lot of it. I reject the idea that my identity can be boxed.I open myself to the idea that my orientation and gender do not have to be pegson which my identity hangs; I open myself out to the possibility that none ofit fucking well matters. I am queer, and that's it. All the little pieces of itdon't matter. There's nothing to measure, nothing to live up to; I'm queerbecause I reject "straight" norms, and that's it. I'm not going toreplace it with another set of norms just so that I can wave my electric billin front of a REG.  What I do is moreimportant to me than whether I could fit this identity or that identity. How Ibehave is more important to me than proving I belong.

I could call myselfa polysensual, polyalterous gray-ace, aromantic androgyne; I could chase categories until every aspectof me is defined. Those categories, however, because every spare corner isfilled up with gatekeepers and discoursers, require things of you.

Polysensualrequires you to evaluate what you want from people and who you want it from,and not only what you would do butyour gut responses, the hypotheticals, the maybes. Polyalterous requires you,even though the very word is meant to mean a slipperiness between friendshipand romance, to make sure you can’t tellthe difference. Aroace requires you, again, to understand distinctions youmay not even be able to read. It requires you to measure every incident of attractionagainst a measure you don’t understand and feel constantly like someone’s goingto look through your list of attractions and make sure you count as aromantic,as ace.

Does the single time I felt sexual attraction to some celebrity discountme? Was I really talking myself into this crush or that crush? The time Iwanted a male classmate to look at me, to be impressed with me, to hold my handand kiss me – is that a romantic crush? Was that alterous, because of the timea bit later when I was dating a roommate and I felt full of glass? Androgynerequires you to examine your whole life, to evaluate yourself against girlnessand boyness and every time you tip away from one or towards another or away fromthe system entire, you find yourself lost and confused and remeasuring, but everytime you measure the ruler has changed dimensions.

I chose other words, but those too leave you dogged by the feelingthat you’re not enough, that you don’t deserve those words or communities ordefinitions; that someone’s going to see right into you and find you don’t fit.I got tired of it, I got pissed off. I’m sick of the idea that something elseinside me can be measured; that what I choose and want and claim is somehowless important than some essential Inner Self.

I fully support the use of labels, self-identification, thewaving of flags, the coining of words. I think everyone should have access toall the tools they possibly can find in order to find communities, to feel likethemselves, to understand themselves, to be understood. I don’t believe thatany identity inherently requires extreme self-analysis but I think the systemwe have, certainly on tumblr and online more generally, is sliding rapidlytowards requiring it.  I do not mean tosuggest that everyone should take ona behavioural model for themselves. I do however think that the climate we haveonline is making things less helpful, more opaque, via constant gatekeeping.

That is not a fault of the labels themselves, but it is a consequenceof identity-based models falling prey to respectability politics andauthoritarian mindsets.

That is not a fault of the labels themselves, but it is a consequenceof identity-based models falling prey to respectability politics andauthoritarian mindsets.

Moving away from a behavioural model was, at first, a goodthing, because it moved discussions of queerness away from morality. It did,however, wash us up where we are now – full of “discourse” and infighting andconstant, constant measuring.

Not everyone is going to be unhappy with the system as it isand that’s fine. Perhaps in encouraging them to do as they want while I do as Iwant I’m making another box, but perhaps I’m not.

There are aspects of the identity model I keep, but wordsand definitions have become less important to me as I’ve gone on. It is, forinstance, important to my sense of self now that I use he/him, that I feel asense of odd kinship with those troubling, “effete”, arty, dandyish, decadent,immoral gentlemen of the late eighteen-nineties. How I specifically define mysexuality is less important to me than the fact that I’m with Book, that I’mgoing to be with Book my whole damn life. How I define my sexuality is lessimportant to me than what I actually do and who do it with. It’s imperfect. I’mnot sure I’ll ever be able to fully move away from an identity-model in someform, partly because the identity-model is so pervasive that if you refuse anidentity you’re presumed cis and straight. This is happening even now with queer; even though queer is itself anidentity label, its lack of measurability has lead it to be considered spicy cishet.

If any box can be redefined as “cishet” the second a morevocal box disagrees with it, I don’t want to play by those rules and wait to bemade cishet; I want my behaviour to speak for me. I want people to have to consider me queer because theycan see I’m not-straight, I want to evade those who would shove me intostraightness just because I don’t fit their boxes.