Ganked from clairvoyantwank.

aadler_ writes about his experience at writercon, particularly his bad experiences with slash oriented events. To sort through the irrelevent, boring stuff, you get:

There was a three-hour break scheduled for lunch. I thought there would be time to manage lunch after watching a Firefly vid made with action figures … but there were problems with setup that took some time to work out, and the vid itself was almost an hour long, so when it was over, so was the lunch period, and I just had to wait.

(I got some unpleasant vibes during the showing. Not from the vid itself; actual thought and plotting had been put into it, and there were some genuine comic moments. However, the story involved Mal and Jayne having sex with each other while under the influence of a pheromone-based drug, and then dealing with the aftermath, and I think my son and I may have been the only males in the room, and raucous reaction from the wholly-or-predominately female audience was unsettling and frankly seemed to have some hostile undertones. Left me in a sour mood.)

The mood was not improved by the next panel, “Who Are You People? Characterization”. Okay, note this: there were five panelists, and among them they had slashed Xander with Spike, Xander with Andrew, and Xander with Larry; in addition to which, one of them observed casually that she wrote a lot of Real Person Slash … and these were the people posed to us as authorities regarding accurate characterization. Just as a matter of form, wouldn’t attention to characterization include NOT habitually homosexualizing a major character who had been canonically presented as exclusively heterosexual? There’s no denying that slash is a major current in fanfiction … but, damn it, heterosexuality really is the human norm (not just a presumed standard, but the actual stance of the majority of the human race), and I’m getting almighty weary of having slash automatically assigned the default position in fanfic discussions.

It did, however, feature a moment that definitely got my attention. nwhepcat, not one of the panelists but offering an observation from the audience, related that there had been a lot of recent turmoil in DC fandoms, with the predominantly male population which had characterized the fandom until then being swamped by a huge new influx of interested females … and the ‘old guard’ pleading with the newcomers, “Don’t gay up our fandom!” nwhepcat related this without sympathy but likewise without glee; the others in the room, however, responded with a giant laugh. There are a couple of different ways to interpret this. If those hearing nwhepcat’s comment interpreted ‘gay up’ as simply the introduction of a less masculine viewpoint, then their response is understandable and justifiable. On the other hand, given my own recent experiences at WriterCon itself, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to see the plea as having come from a distaste for seeing an established fandom suddenly inundated in male/male slash.

Taken in its rawest form, that situation would go as follows: the people who formed and maintained a fandom for years, purely from love of the world and its characters, find themselves invaded by a new crowd enthusiastically producing (and celebrating) a mass of stories built around a premise revolting to the original fandom group and glaringly OOC for the fandom characters involved. (Imagine Buffy fandom being swamped by hordes of fifteen-year-old males who thought rapefic was the swellest thing ever, especially when the women — Buffy, Willow, Dawn, and let’s not forget Tara — discover they had actually wanted it all along.) The fandom is being flat-out ruined for its builders by something utterly alien and utterly incompatible with everything they originally loved in it … and when they beg for some relief from this to-them-horrible transfiguration, their distress is not only disregarded but seen as a source of hilarity.

That would indicate not just selfishness, but active meanness. And, even if the slashers in Buffyfic maintain that they’re not motivated by the smug satisfaction that comes from rubbing someone’s face in something that appalls him, it still feels, to those subjected to it, exactly like gleeful oppression.

The comments bring us:

I respectfully suggest that perhaps the fault lies in your own issues with sexuality, not in the faulty characterization or "smugness" of a certain set of writers.

So I don't get how that's any more "oppressive" than walking in a bookstore that has a big section on a subject you're not remotely interested in--you walk in, you look at the section sign, think, "Huh, not my cuppa," and you go browse another section.

Dunno that I'd automatically assume that the blurb quoted means that Mal & Jayne would have sex with each other. It could have been more clear. I especially would have wanted to know if I'd been attending with my child.

I do think that it must be a strange and slightly daunting experience to participate in what is a predominantly female, and predominantly queer-friendly culture if one is neither female nor queer.

And my personal favorite!

Which is to say, at the most simplistic level straight men pretty much think of sex in terms of getting to put one's penis inside someone else, and getting to have an orgasm. The potential for being violated, or even simply getting shagged and not being aroused/having an orgasm isn't part of that visceral concept of sex in the same way that it is for women.