schemingreader

By now you've certainly all read about the harry_holidays wank. If not, well, the whole thing is rehearsed in glorious Technicolor here on Fandom Wank, and probably all over your flist as well.

Fine, fine--let's not go through the entire thing again. I read all the comments that were up last night and some of the stuff posted today, too-- and had some meta thoughts tangential to it--mainly my ideas about why such a thing would inspire so much debate and rancor. I see a few issues here:

1. What we are doing in fandom, or the obligations of volunteer/avocational work
2. What people reveal when they discuss kinks/squicks
3. Homemade smut and its social role



1. What we are doing in fandom, or the obligations of volunteer/avocational work

I want to throw the first one out as a question. Do you consider uncompensated work you do for aesthetic pleasure, community building or even a political common good, to be as strong an obligation as work for pay? Are things you do just for fun on the same level as other volunteer work, say for your religious community or for charity?

The reason I'm posing it this way is, some people in fandom take their writing assignments as seriously as writing they are doing for publication, and others--really don't. Moderating fan fiction exchanges is definitely a lot of work and involves a contract of sorts with participants. It's much more likely that participants won't hold up their end of the bargain. I think without peer pressure and community expectations, we wouldn't put in this kind of effort.

Though maybe people put more effort into their uncompensated labors of love than they do into their paid work as a matter of course. In any case, how people react to what the responsibilities of a fest mod or fest participants are and what those people can expect from one another has a lot to do with this question--the question of uncompensated work.

2. What people reveal when they discuss kinks/squicks

I was discussing the present wankery in flocked LJ comments and I said:

The reason this all blew up, I think, is that people who write for fic fests want to be able to trust that if they tell what they like and don't, they won't be held up for ridicule.

to which xochiquetzl replied:

Yeah. I did a poll at my LJ once. People almost universally said it was much harder to say what they really wanted. Some said they'd rather get an okay fic that doesn't hit all their kinks than admit their kinks in public. Signing up for an exchange is an act of courage.

I believe and have said emphatically everywhere that literary tastes do not correspond to sexual tastes. But it's also true that we reveal a lot about ourselves when we let people know that we like to read stories about m/m sex, with this kink or that.

I come to fandom with bouncy optimism about the tolerance and ability to accomodate each other I saw here. i wrote last year:

I really love the model of having people post warnings at the tops of their stories. It shows we have figured out, at least to some small degree, that we don't all feel sexuality the same way. We get that everyone is different, and can encourage more than one view of sexuality. Our whole vocabulary of kinks and squicks is a sophisticated acknowledgement of the varieties of human sexual experience.

To me, it's a big violation of trust to ask someone to tell their kinks and squicks with the expectation that these will be honored, and then to post a story that mocks them for what they like. I say this having been defriended by two people immediately after I posted a list of my kinks and squicks! I think a lot of us operate as though it's safe to have different smut reading and writing preferences--and indeed, safe to like different things sexually, though of course that's quite separate--and it's really not.

I want it to be, and I'm going to keep trying to act that way, but I see--it's not safe to let people know what you like on the page, much less in bed! There are also real-life risks--repercussions at work or at home, from people who think liking porn is really bad, for example.

All of which is to say, it's not surprising that violating the ethical contract of a fic fest by mocking someone's squicks and preferences would upset people who weren't even involved. It's got to be a hot-button issue.

Which leads me to:

3. Homemade smut and its social role

The so-brilliant accio_arse wrote in her journal this morning:

This is how I see my fandom porn: I have a rose-tinted image of happy writers and artists, alone in their rooms, merrily churning out reams of finely handcrafted smut for the sheer pleasure of it. It’s a veritable pornutopia!

Whereas the porn industry, according to my information, generates more revenue each year than the mainstream movie industry does. It’s a behemoth of a money-making beast; don’t underestimate it. Do I really want something like that impinging on my version of smutdom? I think not. It may seem like an unrealistic and idealistic position to take, but you know, that’s just me.

That's where I am too. Mainstream porn? Destroying the moral fiber of the universe! Homemade porn? Liberating our consciousness with our sexuality and also making our teeth whiter and our breath fresher!

Which is, perhaps, entirely unrealistic. Fan writers are just as liable to the wider culture's varieties of sexism, objectification, and general ickiness as anyone else.

But I always hope they aren't, and when stuff dusts up, I feel so disappointed. I think I'm not alone in this. I noticed with a sense of the absurdity of it, how much effort I put into the description of sexual acts that I don't--couldn't!--do myself. It's like knitting a sweater or frosting a cupcake or detailing a car. You are just doing it for fun but you have to do a good job. But it's also supposed to be just for fun, and not something we take terribly seriously. We can't really decide what ethics govern our behavior if nothing we do is meaningful--if it's all just for the LOLZ, who can complain?

See, everything you think is going to be something trivial boils down to something major! This wank is about nothing less than the commodification of art and the role of the alienation of labor in the culture of irony! My poor husband, now he's going to have to listen to me quoting Shlomo Avineri. See what you've started?