what you have to realize is that there’s a huge number of people who simply do not have a concept of ‘fact’ and ‘not fact’ with regards to information. they genuinely don’t appear to comprehend the idea of objective reality. any narrative that makes them feel better is true, and any narrative that makes them feel worse is false.
you can’t convince them otherwise. sometimes they grow out of it, but you can’t force it. and a lot of them just aren’t equipped to change, for whatever reason.
you can’t get rid of them or exclude them from the dialogue. it’s a basic flaw of human nature, you’d introduce too much terribleness in the process.
and apparently there are enough of them to elect someone like trump, based on ideas like “repeal obamacare because it has obama in the name” and “anything that makes liberals mad is good for america, up to and including becoming a carbon copy of pre-ww2 germany.”
so what do you do about them? how do you keep them from destroying everything in their blind blundering toward a narrative that makes them feel good? well, you have to either get around them or use them. you have to either set up ironclad protections that even a lie-fed mob can’t break in the interval before their attention is grabbed away by a different pedagogue, or you have to resort to a bit of pedagogy yourself.
i’m not sure about the ethics of telling people what they want to hear in order to get them to do the right thing. but i feel pretty sure progressives could do a WAY better job of making the right thing sound attractive than we’re doing right now. we need to step up our marketing game, y’all. we’re not above it. the objective facts are informing us we can’t be if we want to win.
“We are so smart and so right we shouldn’t HAVE to cooperate with those idiots to get our way!” is a ‘fact’ that both progressives and conservatives enthusiastically subscribe to.
Kise: “The game at the Interhigh. It was my fault if we lost. I’m really sorry about that.” Kasamatsu: “Idiot, what are you saying? You’re our team’s ace player. Did anyone of them said anything like that even once after the game? It’s the ace’s job to lead us to victory. But don’t shoulder the responsibility when we lose on top of that. That’s my job. The ace player only needs to look forward.”
This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I
Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks
of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.
A few months ago I had a conversation about pubic hair, with a lover of mine. Your bush is super hot, my lover said. I’m blushing, I said. Then she asked: was my decision not to shave a political one, or just a “this is fckn sexy” one? And at that last question—I wasn’t sure what it was, or why it was happening, but something reared up in me. Some looming, rebellious objection. It wasn’t my lover’s fault; she is a thoughtful and considerate communicator, and had done nothing wrong. And it was strange, to feel as I did; because it wasn’t as if I was new to the idea of female body hair being a site of political dissension. I’m thirty-five years old; I was hassled by my schoolfriends in middle school for not shaving my legs and hassled by my girlfriend in high school and my Womyn’s Center mates in college for shaving them. Patti Smith’s Easter, with its iconographic pit hair has pride of place on my record shelf. I have done my time in the trenches of feminist debate, and when I was younger I spent my fair share of time agonizing over which personal grooming strategy made me “the best feminist.“
But the truth is that these days, twenty years on, my selective hair removal—I shave my legs and my pits, but not my bush—feels, to me, neither politically motivated nor even particularly intentional. Instead it feels normal. It’s one of the myriad little habits that makes feel at home in my body, in that deeply comfortable and worn-in sense of “at home” that comes from being able to walk around one’s apartment barefoot, in the dark, while thinking about the last scene in one’s novel rather than where one is placing one’s feet. It’s a level of at-home-ness; of ownership and normalcy, that means conscious thought is superfluous. And though I acknowledge the usefulness, in many contexts, of interrogating received wisdom and assumptions about what constitutes “womanly” or “hygienic” female behavior, I would argue that in this world—this world which, today more than ever, teaches women never to be at home in our bodies, never to be comfortable in our bodies, never to stop thinking about our bodies and feeling guilt and shame about our bodies—that there is value to carving out spaces of normalcy, as well: space for us to breathe into all our inconsistent and idiosyncratic ways.
What does all this have to do with femslash? Glad you asked.
I am no longer a fandom newbie, but neither am I a long-time veteran of the wars. I wandered wide-eyed into fandom in my late 20s, already a full-grown adult: a near-lesbian in a foundering long-term relationship with a man, I was also a crafter and feminist and compulsive reader of literary fiction; and I was looking, with mercenary intensity, for writing which explicitly portrayed the kind of sexual complexity with which I was struggling in my personal life, and which I was pointedly not finding in published fiction. I knew zilch about fandom traditions or fandom political histories; all those fandom battles which old-timers were already heartily sick of fighting. I just knew: god! Here were people writing about sex (between men) so viscerally compellingly that even I could understand the appeal: I, who have always felt vaguely repulsed by men’s society and men’s bodies—even, inconveniently, the bodies of men I loved.
And even though my lack of fandom context led to me doing and saying some things in those early days that were, in retrospect, kind of embarrassingly naïve and lacking in nuance, I’m glad that I was ignorant of the larger fandom dynamics around lady/lady sex writing (or hey, around lady/lady writing at all [or hey, around writing about women, full stop]). Because my ignorance meant that when I discovered an entire new-to-me, female-dominated community writing complicated, explicit sex scenes, full of longing and messy exploration and bodily fluids, I could blunder right into writing about women conflictedly fucking other women; conflictedly fighting with other women; conflictedly forgiving other women and reconnecting with other women and betraying other women and taking care of other women and bittersweetly remembering other women. Because why wouldn’t I write about that? That was, to my fandom-naïve eye, the normal thing to do in this subculture into which I’d wandered.
Unsurprisingly, this provoked some interesting reactions.
Due in part to my ignorance when I came on the scene, I’ve since had a lot of interactions and internal debates, and witnessed a lot of fandom dust-ups, about those three things: writing female characters; and writing female characters in relationship to other female characters; and writing female characters fucking other female characters. (I havealsowrittena lotaboutthis, aswell.) Some of these interactions have involved talking about why folks write queer women characters. More of them have revolved around why folks don’t; or don’t like to; or don’t think it’s a fair thing to ask; or don’t like it when I do. Common objections I’ve heard to writing and reading women fucking women include: there are fewer female characters in source media (or they’re not as interesting), so finding them and developing investment in them requires more work; f/f writing doesn’t get as much attention, and it is disheartening to choose political correctness over reader response; writing female bodies while living in a female body in a culture that hates female bodies is more emotionally difficult/traumatic; female bodies are gross; the mainstream hypersexualization of lesbians means that is it anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex among women, especially kinky sex; mainstream objectification of female bodies means it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex involving women, especially kinky sex; the omnipresence of sexist tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write female characters as anything less than morally exemplary, which is boring; the omnipresence of homophobic tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write a story that deviates from the anti-trope script (e.g. “happy lesbians with well-balanced relationships”), which is boring; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and including female sexuality is too close to home to be enjoyable; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and expecting hobbyists to be warriors in the army of capital-r Representation is obnoxious; fandom space is dominated by young women, and expecting them to be warriors in the army of capital-R Representation is sexist when we don’t hold middle-aged male media creators to the same standard.
I could write an essay about each of these, some of which are really complex points with some merit. But I think one thing that stands out, from a majority of my interactions on this issue through the years, is the perception that the act of writing relationships among women is inherently political, in a way that the act of writing about relationships among men is not.
just moving along like everyone else 