There's never any entrance requirements for sharing what you think here! I picked a slash story, because it was real, it happened a few weeks ago, and slash makes up the bulk of what I read. Interestingly to a greater degree than what I write, but that's a conversation for another time.
There have been some things said in this round about troubling trends and behaviour, and yes that's necessary, and helpful and some of it has been deeply insightful and meaningful. But I will say bluntly that some of these posts are logically absurd, factually inaccurate, actively hateful and do not serve any function that will change fandom for the better.
But as to your question, how to love them.
I think first I would want to respect their choices and their experiences. If someone, as many women in fandom have, says that they feel comfortable only reading m/m stories, that they are not comfortable with reading either het or f/f or stories focused on women, then I am going to respect that choice. I am profoundly uncomfortable with women setting themselves up to judge the worthiness of another woman's choices, coping mechanisms or tastes. I am profoundly uncomfortable with women believing they have a right to even know the reasons a given woman might have for those feelings, far less judging them as worthy or not. I think it wouldn't hurt to recognize that what a woman does fannishly is not the whole of her person, but may be only a *koff* facet of herself.
I think I would than have to recognize that some women don't want their consciousness raised. They don't want to, or can't think about it, or cope with dealing with the issues. I have to respect that. It is not okay for me to devalue them as people because they have chosen a path I would not take. They are not impeding my access in any way to stories about women.
I think I need to stop doing the thing I'm doing right now, and that I've seen in so many posts, and that is semantically separating myself from these other woman. We are, as you say, peers, and we suffer the same slings and arrows, and dividing us from them makes it easy to talk about "the problem" and mean the women on the other side of the fence rather than the culture we all, every single one of us, reflect knowingly unknowingly, obviously and subtly.
It is possible to ask that writer and her friends I cited above to think about why they like that kind of portrayal of women in stories in a way that might actually get them to do it. It's possible to discuss how the original media portrayals of female characters impacts our own creations and readings, and what we might want to do about that, but we need to shut the scapegoat back in his pen and put away the scale and the tape measure and the pointing fingers before we can talk about these broader issues together.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 08:31 pm (UTC)There have been some things said in this round about troubling trends and behaviour, and yes that's necessary, and helpful and some of it has been deeply insightful and meaningful. But I will say bluntly that some of these posts are logically absurd, factually inaccurate, actively hateful and do not serve any function that will change fandom for the better.
But as to your question, how to love them.
I think first I would want to respect their choices and their experiences. If someone, as many women in fandom have, says that they feel comfortable only reading m/m stories, that they are not comfortable with reading either het or f/f or stories focused on women, then I am going to respect that choice. I am profoundly uncomfortable with women setting themselves up to judge the worthiness of another woman's choices, coping mechanisms or tastes. I am profoundly uncomfortable with women believing they have a right to even know the reasons a given woman might have for those feelings, far less judging them as worthy or not. I think it wouldn't hurt to recognize that what a woman does fannishly is not the whole of her person, but may be only a *koff* facet of herself.
I think I would than have to recognize that some women don't want their consciousness raised. They don't want to, or can't think about it, or cope with dealing with the issues. I have to respect that. It is not okay for me to devalue them as people because they have chosen a path I would not take. They are not impeding my access in any way to stories about women.
I think I need to stop doing the thing I'm doing right now, and that I've seen in so many posts, and that is semantically separating myself from these other woman. We are, as you say, peers, and we suffer the same slings and arrows, and dividing us from them makes it easy to talk about "the problem" and mean the women on the other side of the fence rather than the culture we all, every single one of us, reflect knowingly unknowingly, obviously and subtly.
It is possible to ask that writer and her friends I cited above to think about why they like that kind of portrayal of women in stories in a way that might actually get them to do it. It's possible to discuss how the original media portrayals of female characters impacts our own creations and readings, and what we might want to do about that, but we need to shut the scapegoat back in his pen and put away the scale and the tape measure and the pointing fingers before we can talk about these broader issues together.