Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Previous links are in the previous post.

Fay has another essay, some of which I addressed in the comments, but not the question of my literary disinterest in slash.

First of all, for my purposes genres or subgenres are self-identifying subsets of fiction into which stories can be classified by any reasonably aware reader. When someone posts a slash story to a slash-only list, or otherwise marks a story with the classification “slash,” then it’s self-identified as slash. Most fanfiction readers will classify any story featuring a non-canonical homosexual relationship as slash. For the purpose of classification, it doesn’t matter that some stories are better than others, or that some are smuttier than others, or even that a few stories are more difficult to classify than the majority. People who want to read slash will look for fiction identified as slash in some way.

Consider, for example, the genre of science fiction. Sci-fi is a self-identifying genre, in that short stories are published in magazines that accept only science fiction, and that novels are published by sci-fi houses and/or marked “sci-fi” on the spine. Readers can identify sci-fi by content even without these clues. Most sci-fi readers will classify any story featuring futuristic science as science fiction. It doesn’t matter that certain stories fall in between sci-fi and fantasy, or in between sci-fi and thrillers - the classification is still useful for people who want to read sf, and equally useful for people who don’t.

Before the pulps, there was no genre of science fiction. If you wanted to talk about sci-fi, you would have to refer generally to, say, the works of Verne or Wells. Now we can look back and classify those pre-genre works into the genre; in fact, we can’t help classifying them. The days in which a sci-fi writer could pass for mainstream are over. Likewise, we can’t help classifying slash as slash. The genre will not go away anytime soon, and the label functions to tell people that this is a subgenre with certain known characteristics.

I have a literary reason for liking science fiction: I read sci-fi for the exploration of futures and the heroic plots. In general what I consider to have merit in fiction is the heroic and skill in the depiction of a world, whether a future world, a past one, a fantastic one, or a slightly altered version of our own (eg., in Ayn Rand). People might dismiss sci-fi for literary reasons as well: usually such critics feel that the antiheroic has more literary merit than the heroic, or they want more attention to character and less to plot and milieu. People also dislike sci-fi for non-literary reasons - they have a visceral dislike of the fantastic or of the heroic.

So, as I’ve said before, people can have a literary or a visceral disinterest in slash. I ruled out moral disapproval of non-smut slash because literary works (as opposed to erotica) are not usually judged on a moral basis. In any event, moral considerations are not literary ones, so for those who think they apply they can be lumped into the visceral dislikes.

Fanfic is about playing with canon or fanon. What you do with them is a matter or literary or visceral tastes. As with sf, my interest is in the universe and the heroic plot, and also in humor, especially at the expense of either canon or fanon. So I prefer AU stories (particularly numbers 3, 4, and 6 from the Borg AU Classification), adventures, parodies, and filk, all of which are closely based on canon characterizations, canon events, and/or the canon universe as a milieu. I don’t care for angst, fluff, or slash, all of which are based on altering canon characterizations. (In the case of Buffy, the show’s level of angst is tough to top so the real crimes against canon occur on the fluffy side.)

So I have a literary disinterest in slash, because I have a more general literary disinterest in non-canon characterizations. Someone else might have an opposite literary interest in tweaking canon characterizations - this might include slash but would not be restricted to it, there being so many other ways to alter the characters. That leaves the question, can someone have a literary interest in slash alone? I’m not going to say it isn’t possible, but the pro-slash factors people usually cite are not, on the face of them, literary in the sense I mean it. “Pretty boys” is clearly a visceral taste, and the interest in slashy subtext would have to be accompanied by comparable interest in other kinds of subtext to be a general literary interest. I don’t believe in subtext, myself, but I hear people go on at length about alleged J/C subtext in Voyager episodes, and it doesn’t seem to capture the attention of the C/P crowd.

So instead I attribute the interest in slash to modern sexual politics - the romanticization of friendship, a certain J/C author would, ironically, call it. (Ironically, because J/C is exactly the same phenomenon, right down to the alleged canon subtext - why can’t these two friends be just friends?) I would call it the homosexualization of romance - because the opposite gender is no longer “other” enough, and romance is no longer star-crossed enough, the way to recapture that old troubadour spirit is to complicate relationships by making them same-sex. This theory explains (to me) why one particular kind of alteration to canon characterizations, making them gay, is so much more popular than, say, making them Mormons, or gourmet chefs, or hermaphrodites.

None of the above is a comment on the quality of slash or on the right of slashers to slash. It’s just an explanation of what it means to have a literary disinterest in slash as a non-canonical genre, something that is frequently said to be impossible.

Once again, people are writing essays in my comments. One of them is easier to read here. The two previous entries which have attracted so much interest are The Morality of Reading and Agendae, but I’ll recap. In the first entry, I made an argument about why reading slash was not a moral issue in the way reading smut (of any orientation) could be - not even if the reader finds homosexuality itself immoral. I went over what being slashy says to me as a non-slasher. My second entry was directed not so much at the commenters but at some stupid remarks that were made at fandom_wank about my manifesto. I defined “gender politics” and fic agendas, and said that women writing gay male erotica was weird. My general point in all three entries is that people can dislike slash as a genre for literary, as opposed to moral or visceral, reasons.

So, on to the comments. There isn’t really a thread of argument in them, but they are interesting in their own right (and long), so I’ll address the bits that stood out. First and foremost is the “good for the gander” argument - that it’s not unusual for women to like m/m slash because it’s not unusual for men to like f/f pornography. However, men and women are different. Men fill the jails, and women fill the fanfic mailing lists. What men see in f/f videos is not, until proven otherwise, what women see in m/m fanfic. If you went out and polled a hundred non-fan men and women about their interest in homosexual erotica involving the opposite gender, you would not get the same results for both sexes. Mainstream women are not consuming m/m erotica in any appreciable numbers, while f/f pornography is a large part of the porn industry. So when I say that women writing m/m erotica is weird, and that the “pretty boys” explanation doesn’t explain anything, that’s what I’m basing my ideas of what’s unusual upon - the mainstream population. Why do slashers like pretty boys in such greater numbers than average women?

Likewise, the percentage of homosexuals in the population has been estimated at 1.5% for women and 3.5% for men. So in real life, one can assume that most people are not gay unless they indicate that they are, by word or deed, and be right most of the time. Likewise, in fiction one can assume that most characters are not gay, unless TPTB say otherwise. In fact, in most fanfictional universes there is no stigma attached to being gay, so there is even less reason to assume that a character who isn’t gay in canon is anything but heterosexual - especially since most characters are given heterosexual backgrounds in canon. For instance, every main and recurring character on Voyager except the Borg Queen was known to have had heterosexual relationships, many of which occurred on-screen. No homosexual relationships were ever mentioned or shown for any of them.

Nothing I’ve said implies that women should not or cannot write homosexual characters, or male characters, if they need to - say, if they’re writing about a canon Willow. The question is why slash writers “overpopulate” the fictional world with gay characters. Clearly, as I said, it’s not because the m/m writers are homosexual men, which would be the most obvious explanation.

By the way, by slash I mean the fanfiction self-identified as slash. Like science fiction, it’s a known and well-understood term in that sense, even if in my mind real sci-fi has more stringent requirements.

Fay said: If you are determined to believe that all slash is simply “weird” porn, or that it is all Harlequin-level writing, then I suppose you will continue to believe this whatever I say. In this you will be sorely mistaken, but perhaps it is more comfortable to cling to a preconception than it is to question its validity and risk having to reassess one’s stance.

I never said that all slash was weird porn or bad writing. I reassess my stance every time someone makes a logical argument against it. The most irritating thing about discussing slash is how it always comes back to the assumption that slash is somehow a challenge to the morality or “preconceptions” of everyone who’s not interested in it. Slash, as I’ve said before, is just another fanfic agenda. If you told me there was a wonderful subgenre out there where canon characters were suddenly Mormon, or handicapped, or axe-murderers, or gourmet chefs, I would find the existence of such a subgenre interesting, but not the fic.

Go ahead, start complaining about my preconceptions about Mormons.

It’s sleeting.

This week, in a fit of geekiness, I installed Privoxy for OSX. Privoxy was formerly known by the more descriptive name “Internet Junkbuster.” It’s a local proxy that provides privacy by blocking ads, cookies, referrer information, popups and other Javascript pestware.

My main interest in privoxy was blocking cookies, because I’m just ornery that way. Cookies annoy me. I don’t mind sending a referrer, because that’s not really information about me, it’s information about the structure of the world wide web. The referrer is the previous page, if you clicked a link to get here, or empty if you just typed in the URL or used a bookmark to get here. Your referrer is:

I track referrers myself, since I’m curious who’s linking me. I don’t set tracking cookies, so I never know whether it’s your first visit to the site or if you stop by all the time. I don’t think that’s any of my business. I do set untracking cookies, so I won’t be tracked when I hit my own pages. If you really want to opt out of my tracker, tell me and I’ll give you the untracking URL. My blog will set a cookie when you choose a stylesheet, but otherwise, Jemima’s Trek is cookie and evil-javascript free.

So I have this one don’t-track-me cookie that I wanted to let through privoxy, and I also had this little problem where the default privoxy setup killed Camino. My Camino is oversensitive - this was the second or third time I’ve had to reinstall it after it ate a bad webpage for dinner. In this case, privoxy was sending it corrupt javascript. I didn’t want privoxy “fixing” the javascript that way - I just wanted it to block ad images and cookies. Camino already blocks popups on its own, and the other javascript annoyances, like links that open in new windows, aren’t worth another Camino reinstall to avoid.

When all else fails, RTFM. I found a PDF version of the privoxy manual and printed it out to read on the T. By the time I got home, I was ready for another evening of tweaking config files. I turned off all the filtering options - the bits that rewrite a web page to turn off gif animation or remove popping-up code - and my new Camino was much happier. I turned on the cookie cruncher, but added an exception for jemimap.freeshell.org. I left in all the ad blocking and turned on the checkerboard pattern that privoxy uses to replace ads. (The other choices are to use a transparent gif or an image of your own choosing.)

It’s a great little program, though it doesn’t seem to be quite as smart about multitasking as the browser itself. That’s a typical problem with proxies, though. I admit, I’ve been so busy with last-minute ASC voting that I haven’t had much chance to admire the checkerboard of nuked ads on ad-heavy web pages. Because I have all the filters off, cookies set with javascript can still get through, but those are rarer than HTTP cookies and Camino is still set up to ask me if I want them.

Obviously, the answer is no.

Cool icons of the day: Entries in this year’s pixelpalooza

I’d been wondering whether the slowness of the new Green Line trains was all in my mind, but this morniing cured me of any doubts. I watched an all-new train creep through a major intersection, and then, instead of turning around and heading for the nearest bus stop, I climbed on board. I measure the first half of my commute in Metro time - if I finish the Metro while the train is still above ground, that means something is amiss, or I’m on a new train.

The conductor was feeling chatty. He admitted that the trains were slower - you get where you’re going, it just takes longer to get there - and even explained the technical difficulties. Apparently there is no “play to the wheels” of the new trains. He also mentioned something about the old trains wearing the tracks down in certain ways, but I was too far away to follow the exposition very well. In any event, it explains the derailments. I suspect they happen at curves in the track. That also explains why every new train I’ve gone inbound on has gone out of service at Park Street instead of making the last stop at Government Center. The Government Center station is one big curve, and these things wouldn’t squeak going around it, they’d derail.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

PS: I forgot to mention that the fast old trains catch up to the slow new trains, so the new ones then have to go express. The chatty conductor had to walk down the train to the “cheap seats in the back” to tell us we were going express to BU East (not to be confused with going any faster). Either there is no intercom at all beyond the annoying automated stop announcements, or the intercom was broken. The even more annoying piercing beep beep beep beep that goes off whenever the train doors close was, unfortunately, in fine working order.

Today I got a two-new-cars Green Line train again. Our leisurely pace inbound was quite regal.

The worst April Fools joke of all was, of course, the snow.

I stopped by the library on my way home last night and found Walter Jon Williams’ Star Wars novel on the new book shelves. I’d been looking around for it in bookstores, and just realized last week at Pandemonium in Cambridge that the reason I hadn’t found it before was that it’s out in hardcover. Somehow I always think of media tie-ins as going straight to paperback.

I have this problem with the Boston Public Library. I take out books, I return the books - no problem. Every few months, however, the library loses a book I’ve returned, and then blames me. There used to be a special status for such books - claimed returned. I would tell them that I’d returned the book and they would mark it claimed returned. Whether they ever found the missing books was beyond me. This time, however, a manager was trotted out to negotiate with the computer over the status of a useless little anthology in paperback that, even if I were the thieving kind, I wouldn’t have bothered to steal. Then he, the manager himself, trotted out into the stacks to look for this book which the BPL would be better off without. He must get a lot of exercise.

I don’t understand how a completely computerized system can fail so frequently. I doubt the bar code readers are at fault - in fact, I suspect that it’s human negligence, and not just human error, that causes so many books to go missing - somebody’s not in the mood to scan in the returned books.

Either that, or they’re running Windows.

This morning I discovered the MBTA’s clever scheme to keep the new Green Line trains running. They’ve split them up so that each new car is attached to an old car. This makes the new “trains” go somewhat faster, but still not as fast as two old cars together. All sorts of similes come to mind, but I’ll spare you.

Someone sent me a Chesterton quote that’s appropriate for these warblogging times. The following is from The Daily News, September 19, 1903:

The saying that good men are the same in all religions is profoundly true, if it means that the attitude of doing one’s best is the same everywhere. But if it means that they will all do the same thing it is not true; it is not common sense. A man from a distant continent or a remote century may be as good as any of us–self restrained, aspiring, magnanimous, sincere. But we must not complain if he has a slight penchant, let us say, for human sacrifice. It will altogether depend upon the nature of his philosophy. And that is how the case stands at the root of the horrors of the Near East. The Moslems are not without creditable qualities in the least–courage, sobriety, hardiness, hospitality, personal dignity, intense religious belief. These are fine qualities. The thing we will not face is the enormous fact that they have along with all this, not merely from personal sin, but by ingrained, avowed, and convinced philosophy another quality, a total disregard of human life, whether it is their own or other people’s. Therefore our civilisation is and must be at war with them, and that war is a religious war, or, if you prefer the term, a philosophical war. We are allowed by the modern mind to call the Moslems en masse thieves, beasts, devils from hell, though it is manifest to common sense that no people can be so entirely composed. The one thing we are not allowed to say against them, the one thing that amid all our curses it would really be thought illiberal to say, is exactly the thing which is really our case against them. Our case against them, that is, is that they both think and act, that they think and therefore act against everything for which we stand.