meme_of_bilitis | I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

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From: (Anonymous)

... that you've seen in fandom. F/F-related, naturally.

From: (Anonymous)

That time someone I followed on LJ said that Tara was emotionally abusive to Willow. I didn't really follow the logic. Something about not being supportive enough, and also overruling her decision related to Dawn wanting to resurrect Joyce?

I assure you, it did not make more sense with more context.

From: (Anonymous)

Oh hey, I think I know who you're talking about. As I recall, they were an emphatic Willow stan who thought the character could do no wrong. If it seemed like Willow was doing wrong, it was actually some other character (probably Tara) doing wrong to Willow.

From: (Anonymous)

ayrt

That does sound familiar. A lot of over-identification with and projection on Willow?

From: (Anonymous)

In general: Aja saying f/f has been tainted by the male gaze in an irreversible way, and that writing m/m, meanwhile, is unchartable territory (???) and inherently a radical, feminist act.

Specifically: someone saying that they liked Marimite but loathed the soeur system (which is... a pretty big part of the story) because it gave the story problematic tones.

From: (Anonymous)

Like, it's true that straight men can be party crashers for f/f in a way they aren't for m/m, but that's not "tainted in an irreversible way," jeez. That might be true of like, a few select titty anime, but not f/f fiction in general! Someone tell Aja it's okay if she just likes dicks booping, tastes aren't morality.

I couldn't get through Marimite, but that's just because it was slow, no one was an alien or a witch or a vampire, and it wasn't even giving me explicit gay.

From: (Anonymous)

I read this as Marmite a couple of times before I realised.

From: (Anonymous)

Oh Aja.

From: (Anonymous)

Lol here it is:

"By starting with a relationship, m/m slash, that’s so far outside the boundaries of normalcy, you give yourself permission to stray further off the range towards a broader range of gender and sexual expression than you would if you were writing, for example, two women—because two women together is a dynamic that has long been prescribed to us by the patriarchy. It’s already been appropriated by men; it’s harder to write dangerously, because our ingrained cultural images of women together were images given to us by men, not by lesbians and bisexual women self-defining their own relationships.

By contrast, no one has ever prescribed to us how to write two men together, because it just isn’t done. It’s off the map; here there be (sexy) monsters.

That’s not erasure—it’s kind of the opposite: a totally blank page where we can write ourselves with an unprecedented absence of cultural interference."

From: (Anonymous)

...Wow. I have heard this viewpoint parroted to the letter on multiple occasions and I did not realize it had a Source.

"so far outside the boundaries of normalcy" jesus christ.

From: (Anonymous)

That’s not erasure—it’s kind of the opposite: a totally blank page where we can write ourselves with an unprecedented absence of cultural interference."

You know, I'm generally opposed to the "slash is women fetishizing gay men" idea, but treating gay men as a BLANK SLATE is also some kind of not good. Yuck.

I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

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