who gets to decide what others can write?

[veronica_rich]

If you're a woman or girl in fandom and you're eloquent enough to write reams of meta criticizing other female fans for writing m/m or male characters, and not enough female characters, I really have a hard time taking your criticisms seriously. Because if you spent half as much time and energy writing and creating the female characters you claim you want to read about, as you do complaining your fellow fans are not serving you by writing what YOU feel you have the right to read, there wouldn't be a problem. You'd have gone a long way toward solving it.

I write m/m. I have written f/m. I have written gen, humor and otherwise. I have not written f/f because I have not encountered a f/f pairing I want to write. It doesn't float my boat. It may never float my boat. You don't like what I write, don't read it. I have plenty of f-listers who don't like slash; they don't read those stories of mine. We still manage to get along. You don't see me complaining that the good J/N or W/E or even the two good J/E writers who exist in my fandom aren't writing the J/W that I want to read. If I want J/W that fits my specifications, I'll write it myself.

And I have. Many times.

I write m/m. I'm neither gay nor male. I don't pretend to be; I don't pretend what I do is groundbreaking or a blow for gay rights, though I do support gay equality. But my support thereof is separate from my fanfic; my fanfic is NOT political, even if I were to drop a political theme or statement into one. I would never pretend it is. I do not believe I am appropriating a culture to fetishize it, because (1) I make an effort to write from my characters' brains, not their genitals, even if it's just porn; and, despite my effort to do a good job, (2) I cannot imagine that anyone would take my POTC slash fanfic seriously as literature. I do not publish in literary venues; it's LiveJournal fan communities, for godsake. My stories show up alongside 14-year-olds' discussions of "OMG JOHNNY DEPP IS SO HOTT!!111" I mean, really. I won't publish my original writing HERE.

But, what if I DO want to write m/m original fiction? Do I not have that right, especially if what I produce is a fair attempted portrayal of human beings? Tyler Perry isn't an older woman, despite playing one in several movies. Anne Rice was never a 300-year-old French male vampire; Naomi Novik never captained a ship as a man during the Napoleonic war; and neither Ted Elliot nor Terry Rossio were ever a 20-year-old woman in the 18th century Caribbean. (Remember how Elizabeth Swann was seen as a feminist ideal in fandom? That was two men writing her, with input from various other men producing and directing. Was there even an XX in the bunch other than Keira Knightley? I'm pretty sure she didn't singlehandedly create that character. My criticisms of T&T never included the assertion that they didn't have the right to write that character.)

My point - and to paraphrase Ellen, I do have one - is that fandom exists for people to share what they enjoy with other people who also enjoy the same things. This doesn't mean you should shut up and never criticize anything. But think about who you're criticizing. If you see egregious offenses in the movie or book (i.e., Cannibal Island characterizations of the natives in POTC-DMC set some people's nails on a blackboard) and you want to discuss them in an adult fashion with other fans, there's a place to do that. Or, write a letter to the studio/publisher/literary magazine pointing out the problem. Those writers were paid a great deal of money, and you have a right to question their intent. But if you just wish you could read more free fanfic of your favorite character ... write her yourself or encourage those writers who do, to do more. Complaining about the free fanfic from writers who don't want to write her isn't going to garner you stories that you want to read. Fanfic is a labor of love, a fantasy that will never come true - it's not coursework for college-level Creative Writing 241, even if some people do use it to practice their writing skills.

But, eh, as always - what do I know of such esoteric topics? I'm just a middle-aged fanfic writer with a four-year education from a medium-level Midwest university. I don't have any advanced degrees or academic papers under my belt, or published novels. I never experimented with other women or multiple partners, never inhaled, shot up, or snorted, and I wear plain cotton underpants. LOL ...

ETA (from one of my replies below): I would point out in the POTC fandom that I may well be the only writer (other than someone who once kindly wrote a story inspired by one of mine) who has made a fat woman the star/protagonist of any of any fanfic - Prissy, from CotBP. I just wanted to throw that out there. I'm a fat woman myself - do I have the right to scream that I'm being marginalized by all the women in this fandom who only want to write skinny, beautiful Elizabeth Swann??

Comments

[venusinchains.livejournal.com]

I think I've been reading a few of these metas of which you speak. But there are so many of them - and I think some of them might not be as related as they think they are.

From what I gather, some folks use m/m as a reference to slash fiction, and some folks consider m/m to mean solely original gay male fiction. The argument against women writing m/m fiction originated with the 'm/m as original gay male fiction' meta. That began at a Gay Fiction Writer's Award ceremony: a female writer of original gay male fiction won an award; she then made comments that were not well received by some of the male writers of original gay male fiction (I have no idea what those comments were); one of those male writers made some misogynist comments in return (I have no idea what those comments were); the meta 'do straight female writers have more or less privilege than gay male writers' begins; and then manages to get mangled up with the ever present 'why aren't there more great female characters' meta. In my mind, anyway. So there may be some Fandom and Original Fiction arguments that are 'crossing streams' in a totally confusing - and regrettably escalating - way. (Or I'm just confused. Probably the more likely option. :-p )

I'm in total agreement with the 'put your pixels where your want is' idea. The sheer volume of Strong Female Characters would be awesome. The more congenial atmosphere would likely improve the number and quality of slash fics, as well. And the folks who were always going to write lousy fic would continue to do so. (Bitching will never make that go away. That's how almost all some people learn.)

I'm also in total agreement with the 'I don't fetishize gay men' idea. I fetishize those characters because of those interactions (often involving intended subtext). It's not as generalized (for most of us) as some folks are trying to make it.

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what the female writer's comments might've been either, obviously, but I can tell you some comments I ran into at a convention I went to last summer. I was on a panel with three published authors of erotica, including gay erotica - a man and two women. I was the only nonpublished one. And while all three admitted they had written fanfic in the past, the two women proceeded to sort of marginalize and pooh-pooh it because it couldn't make money in itself and wasn't "real" writing - it was the male writer who agreed that the spread of fanfic, and especially slash, had helped grow a female audience for their kind of paid erotica in the marketplace.

So, yeah - women can say some incredibly shortsighted things when they're more interested in looking esoteric than in really examining something, just like men can. They don't get a free pass from me just because we've historically been a marginalized minority.

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

They don't get a free pass from me just because we've historically been a marginalized minority.

Hear! Hear!