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Meta on "Why I Love the Het"
The lj world is overflowing with 'why I like m/m slash' or 'why women like m/m slash' essays (and the odd, 'why I don't like m/m slash' essay in answer), but het fanciers, like myself, haven't had to produce much meta about why they like what they do.
Some of this is the straightforward result of the dominant heterosexual culture in which we all live, that is, you don't have to explain why you like what the majority of people around you and the culture at large assume you like, because, duh, of course you like that, doesn’t everyone? This is also at least part of the reason for all the "why I/women like m/m slash" essays and questions out there - it isn't the standard assumption that women like to read and write m/m romance or porn and so it does seem to beg explanation and exploration, even and perhaps especially by those who are drawn to it and find that they need to understand for themselves why they are swimming against the tide, as it were.
The thing about the lj fanfic world however, and especially the meta fanfic conversations (which I totally enjoy and follow almost more avidly than all but my primary fandom these days), is that it is dominated by the m/m shipping conversations, so much so that the het fanciers are starting to feel a little tossed about as the tide pulls in the other direction.
Which you know, is good for us. A little self-exploration of why you like what you like, and why certain things ping for you, never hurt anyone and probably helps many.
Now - I freely admit I am not a 'standard' het-shipper (assuming such a creature actually exists, as with the m/m fans, everyone has their own take on why they like what they like), and I may even be pretty much an outlier in the sense that I am pretty self-conscious about the particular sets of issues that fascinate me and hold me steady and fixated on the het as a writer and a reader. But I thought if I tossed this out, it might start at least, all the 'yes, but....' conversations that are so interesting. To me. *g*
That being said, some of the things that hold me to het, (and to a smaller degree the f/f) are pretty standard among het-fanciers at large, at least if I've been reading my meta+comments correctly. I love women, all shapes and stripes and sizes, and I want stories that feature women front and center. All of the fandoms that interest me most these days (with a few exceptions I could talk about later) have in canon a variety of strong and interesting women. I want them in my fic, just as I adore them in the canon source. Het and f/f and the rarer still gen (by which I mean stories without a central romance plot, rather than simply stories without sex) are therefore my stories of choice.
Second, when it comes to porn, I may be sufficiently unimaginative (though I don't really believe this, I just think it's the way I'm wired), but - in general - if there are not girl parts getting all wet and sticky *in the fic* generally mine don't either, metaphorically speaking, of course. ;-) There are certainly some exceptions, but as a general thing, this holds up over and over again. The identical, average, vaguely OOC BDSM situation, for example, leaves me unmoved when it features m/m, but when it's f/f has me squirming in my chair. That just is - it's not a defense or a rationale, just an observation about my preferences.
So - there are two incredibly basic reasons for my het-centric reading and writing tastes. Nothing terribly remarkable or unpredictable about them. Or particularly meta-ish!
If that's *all* it was, I probably wouldn't be writing this, of course. My love for the het is also political and intellectual and even at some level philosophical (in the metaphysics of the human condition sort of way).
I'm a feminist. And overwhelmingly heterosexual in orientation and life experience. I suspect had the 'right woman' ever come along, things might be different - but she didn't and the right boys did, and so here I am. A married, duel-career + family het woman. Which means that I'm riveted to the intellectual and political challenge of how, given all our cultural baggage, bulging with centuries worth of expectations for how 'men' and 'women' are supposed to behave, men and women actually create and maintain meaningful and mutually satisfying relationships, now or in any time.
Het-fic strokes this jones of mine in every story, from the awesomely good to the horrifyingly bad - at their core - *all* het stories struggle with this problem. And so, in my own home fandom - La Femme Nikita the Series, which is overwhelmingly het in orientation for a whole bunch of reasons I'd be happy to discuss later if anyone is curious, I have read completely or in part almost every story ever written and archived. Which means I've read a ton of het fic, ranging from the awesome to the really sappy and silly, through the horrifyingly awful, to the absolutely enraging. And I keep reading it - because in every one of those stories, the issues that fascinate me are raised - from how a man and a woman, given all their confusing and conflicting needs and desires and expectations, manage to get it on at all (lust of course usually gets things going - and I love reading stories where the female character gets to acknowledge and revel in her lust for a truly hot guy), to how they sustain the relationship beyond lust - in particular how does the woman cope with the ripe-tide of expectations that her first function is to put the relationship above all else vs. her own need to maintain herself and her own identity, separate from the 'we' of the relationship.
Now, I freely acknowledge that in far too many het-focused stories this conflict between self and couple has been reduced to series of clichés that are alarmingly rigid and often do damage to stories that began on an interesting premise. We have willful misunderstandings, interior monologues about what will be/was lost when commitments are made, whiny stupid refusals to accede to reasonable requests, and agonizing over stepping over the line to make a life choice that signals that one party has capitulated to the other's self-needs. Often with result that one of them, usually the woman, has to be rescued from some really silly, self-inflicted scenario by the dashing, manly hero. In far too much of the forgettable fic, this is all resolved through mind-blowing sex and a return to frighteningly conventional notions of m/f couple hood that seem to come right out of a promise-keeper's handbook to happy marriages. So, the conclusion is often irritating - but what keeps me reading is the ways that the authors, overwhelmingly women, raise the issues in the first place.
What does the female want, in this story? What does the male want? Why? How do they go about trying to get it? How do cultural expectations help or hinder them? How do they manage to communicate to their lover what their needs and desires are, if they've even managed to figure them out? What if all their needs and desires simply can't be met? What if they have fundamental differences in the way they see their world or want it to be shaped? How do gender expectations play into it? How don't they? If you love him/her, is it okay to do something that otherwise you wouldn't? Is it imperative that you do so? If you make a commitment - to, say conventional marriage - does that mean you have accept the traditional patterns, or can you continue to buck them and make your own way?
In my fandom, for example, Nikita wants to not be an uber-secret undercover agent more than almost anything else. Never gonna happen, she is a slave, in very literal ways, held by her spymasters until she dies. So - given that she can't have that and her lover, Michael, can't really give it to her, no matter how much he would like to, what, if anything, can they settle on instead? Can he give her the next thing she wants? The freedom, in Section, to operate independently of the rules that bind them with regard to whose lives they save and whose lives they don't? Sometimes. When it suits his needs. Or at least doesn't interfere with them. Can she accept this partial freedom of action? Will she? Will she challenge him about it? As she grows in professional knowledge and competence, will she challenge him less out of understanding? Or more, out of confidence in her own judgment? How will each of them use gender expectations to get what they want? From outsiders or from each other? By acceding to them or defying them? Seeing how each new story featuring them tackles this problem has kept me in this fandom for nine years - since 1997. (Counting *that* out on my fingers was a little scary!) ((Madeline/Operations stories also deal with this, and I read them too!))
I read and write het-fic for the exploration of the conflict between self and couple, between mine and ours, me and we, between a woman and a man.
I'm enough of a post-modernist, intellectually, to read all this conflict, all human relationships, as essentially about power - who has it, under what circumstances, and how do they use it? Wisely, carefully, carelessly, to heal, to harm, to bully, to build? Add to that gender-based confusion and conflict, and I love it all.
Even formulaic Harlequin lines acknowledge these sites of m/f conflict, on their way to a resolution. Het-centric fanfic does it using characters and situations that are almost always more interesting than anything hack romance authors have to offer - which is why I read here, and not in the grocery store - though as I grow more self-conscious about my own reading issues, I actually pick these up with more curiosity than ever - though I can't bring myself to pay for one when I can get the equivalent for free, online!
I understand, from the meta, that what draws many readers/writers to the m/m is the tantalizing possibility of avoiding all the things I just talked about - for me, the love of the het is the inverse. I embrace all this, and I want to read and write about it.
Some of this is the straightforward result of the dominant heterosexual culture in which we all live, that is, you don't have to explain why you like what the majority of people around you and the culture at large assume you like, because, duh, of course you like that, doesn’t everyone? This is also at least part of the reason for all the "why I/women like m/m slash" essays and questions out there - it isn't the standard assumption that women like to read and write m/m romance or porn and so it does seem to beg explanation and exploration, even and perhaps especially by those who are drawn to it and find that they need to understand for themselves why they are swimming against the tide, as it were.
The thing about the lj fanfic world however, and especially the meta fanfic conversations (which I totally enjoy and follow almost more avidly than all but my primary fandom these days), is that it is dominated by the m/m shipping conversations, so much so that the het fanciers are starting to feel a little tossed about as the tide pulls in the other direction.
Which you know, is good for us. A little self-exploration of why you like what you like, and why certain things ping for you, never hurt anyone and probably helps many.
Now - I freely admit I am not a 'standard' het-shipper (assuming such a creature actually exists, as with the m/m fans, everyone has their own take on why they like what they like), and I may even be pretty much an outlier in the sense that I am pretty self-conscious about the particular sets of issues that fascinate me and hold me steady and fixated on the het as a writer and a reader. But I thought if I tossed this out, it might start at least, all the 'yes, but....' conversations that are so interesting. To me. *g*
That being said, some of the things that hold me to het, (and to a smaller degree the f/f) are pretty standard among het-fanciers at large, at least if I've been reading my meta+comments correctly. I love women, all shapes and stripes and sizes, and I want stories that feature women front and center. All of the fandoms that interest me most these days (with a few exceptions I could talk about later) have in canon a variety of strong and interesting women. I want them in my fic, just as I adore them in the canon source. Het and f/f and the rarer still gen (by which I mean stories without a central romance plot, rather than simply stories without sex) are therefore my stories of choice.
Second, when it comes to porn, I may be sufficiently unimaginative (though I don't really believe this, I just think it's the way I'm wired), but - in general - if there are not girl parts getting all wet and sticky *in the fic* generally mine don't either, metaphorically speaking, of course. ;-) There are certainly some exceptions, but as a general thing, this holds up over and over again. The identical, average, vaguely OOC BDSM situation, for example, leaves me unmoved when it features m/m, but when it's f/f has me squirming in my chair. That just is - it's not a defense or a rationale, just an observation about my preferences.
So - there are two incredibly basic reasons for my het-centric reading and writing tastes. Nothing terribly remarkable or unpredictable about them. Or particularly meta-ish!
If that's *all* it was, I probably wouldn't be writing this, of course. My love for the het is also political and intellectual and even at some level philosophical (in the metaphysics of the human condition sort of way).
I'm a feminist. And overwhelmingly heterosexual in orientation and life experience. I suspect had the 'right woman' ever come along, things might be different - but she didn't and the right boys did, and so here I am. A married, duel-career + family het woman. Which means that I'm riveted to the intellectual and political challenge of how, given all our cultural baggage, bulging with centuries worth of expectations for how 'men' and 'women' are supposed to behave, men and women actually create and maintain meaningful and mutually satisfying relationships, now or in any time.
Het-fic strokes this jones of mine in every story, from the awesomely good to the horrifyingly bad - at their core - *all* het stories struggle with this problem. And so, in my own home fandom - La Femme Nikita the Series, which is overwhelmingly het in orientation for a whole bunch of reasons I'd be happy to discuss later if anyone is curious, I have read completely or in part almost every story ever written and archived. Which means I've read a ton of het fic, ranging from the awesome to the really sappy and silly, through the horrifyingly awful, to the absolutely enraging. And I keep reading it - because in every one of those stories, the issues that fascinate me are raised - from how a man and a woman, given all their confusing and conflicting needs and desires and expectations, manage to get it on at all (lust of course usually gets things going - and I love reading stories where the female character gets to acknowledge and revel in her lust for a truly hot guy), to how they sustain the relationship beyond lust - in particular how does the woman cope with the ripe-tide of expectations that her first function is to put the relationship above all else vs. her own need to maintain herself and her own identity, separate from the 'we' of the relationship.
Now, I freely acknowledge that in far too many het-focused stories this conflict between self and couple has been reduced to series of clichés that are alarmingly rigid and often do damage to stories that began on an interesting premise. We have willful misunderstandings, interior monologues about what will be/was lost when commitments are made, whiny stupid refusals to accede to reasonable requests, and agonizing over stepping over the line to make a life choice that signals that one party has capitulated to the other's self-needs. Often with result that one of them, usually the woman, has to be rescued from some really silly, self-inflicted scenario by the dashing, manly hero. In far too much of the forgettable fic, this is all resolved through mind-blowing sex and a return to frighteningly conventional notions of m/f couple hood that seem to come right out of a promise-keeper's handbook to happy marriages. So, the conclusion is often irritating - but what keeps me reading is the ways that the authors, overwhelmingly women, raise the issues in the first place.
What does the female want, in this story? What does the male want? Why? How do they go about trying to get it? How do cultural expectations help or hinder them? How do they manage to communicate to their lover what their needs and desires are, if they've even managed to figure them out? What if all their needs and desires simply can't be met? What if they have fundamental differences in the way they see their world or want it to be shaped? How do gender expectations play into it? How don't they? If you love him/her, is it okay to do something that otherwise you wouldn't? Is it imperative that you do so? If you make a commitment - to, say conventional marriage - does that mean you have accept the traditional patterns, or can you continue to buck them and make your own way?
In my fandom, for example, Nikita wants to not be an uber-secret undercover agent more than almost anything else. Never gonna happen, she is a slave, in very literal ways, held by her spymasters until she dies. So - given that she can't have that and her lover, Michael, can't really give it to her, no matter how much he would like to, what, if anything, can they settle on instead? Can he give her the next thing she wants? The freedom, in Section, to operate independently of the rules that bind them with regard to whose lives they save and whose lives they don't? Sometimes. When it suits his needs. Or at least doesn't interfere with them. Can she accept this partial freedom of action? Will she? Will she challenge him about it? As she grows in professional knowledge and competence, will she challenge him less out of understanding? Or more, out of confidence in her own judgment? How will each of them use gender expectations to get what they want? From outsiders or from each other? By acceding to them or defying them? Seeing how each new story featuring them tackles this problem has kept me in this fandom for nine years - since 1997. (Counting *that* out on my fingers was a little scary!) ((Madeline/Operations stories also deal with this, and I read them too!))
I read and write het-fic for the exploration of the conflict between self and couple, between mine and ours, me and we, between a woman and a man.
I'm enough of a post-modernist, intellectually, to read all this conflict, all human relationships, as essentially about power - who has it, under what circumstances, and how do they use it? Wisely, carefully, carelessly, to heal, to harm, to bully, to build? Add to that gender-based confusion and conflict, and I love it all.
Even formulaic Harlequin lines acknowledge these sites of m/f conflict, on their way to a resolution. Het-centric fanfic does it using characters and situations that are almost always more interesting than anything hack romance authors have to offer - which is why I read here, and not in the grocery store - though as I grow more self-conscious about my own reading issues, I actually pick these up with more curiosity than ever - though I can't bring myself to pay for one when I can get the equivalent for free, online!
I understand, from the meta, that what draws many readers/writers to the m/m is the tantalizing possibility of avoiding all the things I just talked about - for me, the love of the het is the inverse. I embrace all this, and I want to read and write about it.
no subject
Thanks - my pleasure! And I'm glad to know it resonated beyond my fandom (all the other commentors are fellow LFNers, so I wasn't really sure if it was more fandom specfic than I realized or intended).
I totally feel for you in terms of the lj meta context, where the talk is about slash, and that feels like the norm. Using it as an opportunity to look at where a het-fancier's 'yes, buts' come in, is a great way of going about it, and doing so without being defensive but more about how you've got to where you are is completely to be commended, because it's helpful.
I was totally absorbed by all the slash meta - mostly because I didn't really 'get' slash - for a very long time, but then it seemed like it was time to quit worrying about other people's tastes and start exploring my own. *g*
I take on board your point bout reading about strong and intereting women (though what I have to figure out is why I prefer to read about some women over others, is i self-identification or more complicated?)
Oh absolutely - there is a lot of that. Some people like Byronic heroes, male or female, other's prefer the stoic Gunman, etcc.....and that will defintely affect *which* female characters people like and respond too.
The colour-blindness metaphor, or rather the point that it lead to about being able to see slashy undertones, but nt feeling them, is true to my experience.
Jaybee is a very smart cookie.
Perhaps then, the fact that the more general philosophical question that interests you isn't at the core of my reading, or not so consciously, anyway, because I prefer stories where characters make it work that does look at the interior, the emotional and psychological aspects of that, that makes me say that.
I'm not sure I'm representative, really, of most fic readers - because I *do* think of my tastes this way, but then, I've also spent a lot of meta time with friends comparing our different tastes in LFN stories/characters....and we wandered far afield into philosophies of life and the rest.
So I don't knowingly look out for it, or don't see the sites of conflict in this light, because it seemed to me, in reading your description about the working out that is part of a m/f ship (with the added view of gender expectations) that would be something that would happen in longer fics and established relationship fics.
Longer fics, at least, because the non-canon het pairing will need a fair amount of development as well....though like most people these days (at least on lj) I tend to read short because I'm out of time, but it isn't really my preference.
I tend to see fandom as providing shorter first time fics, though that may be because I read unconventional ships which have different story needs? Or maybe we're just reading different?
I think that is probably more fandom specific than not. The two dominate het pairings in LFN are established either before canon even begins, or literally, in the very first episode - so first time stories just don't have much place. As for shorter - I think that is a broad lj trend? (I don't have much evidence, just a gut feeling as a reader).
But I do agree with you about the problematic resolutions of the more forgettable/frustrating fic - especially when it seems to jettison what we know about characters.
Absolutely - a lot of it is just horrid and on so many levels. But in some ways, even the horror interests me - because I'm fascinated by the power of the dominate cultural tropes to overpower more original stories.
What you're saying about LFN (I haven't watched it) as a mainly het fandom is interesting - Dark Angel too has very little slash, though there was space in the canon for femslash, at least.
Interestingly enough, there is plenty of space in LFN for both f/f and m/m, in the sense that the main male was hit on more than once, in canon, by other men - but in terms of plot lines and regular/reccuring characters - the f/f is way ahead in terms of writing potential. I never watched Dark Angel (Jessica Alba, right?), but it certainly looked like something I would enjoy.
no subject
PS: I have friended you, because I want to read more about how you think.