julesjones | No, actually, it's because I prefer cock

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No, actually, it's because I prefer cock

This week we have had not one but two romance blogs start talking about why there is so little f/f romance about. And in both cases, the usual thing has come up with some people claiming that the only conceivable reason why straight women won't read f/f is because they are terrified that they will like it and this will make them lesbians. Even after other women have posted to the thread that it's because guys turn them on and women don't, and thus f/f is *boring* if they're only reading it for the porn. Not repellent. Boring.

This... is annoying me. Because I'm one of the women who finds f/f boring if I'm only reading it for the porn. I'm Kinsey 0. I don't find women's bodies disgusting. I just don't find them a turn-on. So many books, so little time, and why would I want to waste time reading about women slapping their bits together when I could be spending it reading about men doing likewise?

And the theory that bi and lesbian women liking m/m is proof that we've all internalised hatred of women's bodies doesn't wash either. There are *other* reasons for women to find m/m more interesting to read than f/f, regardless of their personal sexual orientation, and for some it's all about the hurt/comfort and emo!porn. Women are allowed to express love and fear and other squidgy emotions, and men aren't. So it's fun to watch them being forced to open up and deal with those emotions. For many readers that's part of the point of the romance genre in the first place. M/m gives you double the man-angst for your money, while f/f gives you none. I'll point here at my Girls who like boys who do boys essay and its comment thread for a more detailed discussion of this and other reasons for the appeal of m/m.

Which isn't to say that I don't read f/f stories. I do. I've read some superb f/f fanfic, and published some of it in my zine series.[*] But what I'm reading there is generally not PlotWhatPlot. A lot of commercial f/f is PWP, or at least doesn't have any other story elements that are sufficiently interesting to me personally to make up for my lack of interest in the sex scenes. This isn't just because it's f/f -- I react the same way to m/f contemporary romance. I generally don't read either unless I have specific recommendations from people I trust, because prior experience suggests that it is far more likely to be a boring waste of my time or an active wallbanger than something I'll really enjoy.

Yes, some women do indeed read m/m but steer clear of f/f because they're homophobic, or because of internalised misogynism. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a liking for real phalluses is just a liking for cock.

[*] I'm not linking to examples because the very thing that makes them good reads for me means that they may not work for people not familiar with the fandom.

ETA: I'm using "porn" here in the fanfic/sf fannish sense, which doesn't have the derogatory connotations that it does in romance fandom. Given last week's explosions in the romance blogsphere about the word, I thought I'd better clarify.

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I do so agree. I'll read most anything if the style or storyline grips me, but PWP is a special case, and so to a degree, for the reasons you set out, is angst/emo. If it's about (a) physical bits and (b)emotional reaction, then I'm going to choose what has the most of the latter, which is m/m, and the physical bits that turn me on, which is also m/m.

It's also a matter of difference. I have no objection to women's bodies, or emotions, but they don't exactly come as a surprise or revelation to me either. Been there, got that.

Well, it was one of yours that I immediately thought of linking to as an example of the f/f I like to read...

Well, it can only be the one, being as I only ever wrote the one, and it's interesting that the f/f in that was bloody hard to write. It was in there because it was necessary to the story, which for once was what interested me - the whole question of loyalties and how people choose sides - but I found it murder to write the scenes where the POV character was talking about her attraction to the other, because it was really hard to imagine that the things she was talking about were not just beautiful - which I could see - but sexually attractive. Hell of a leap of imagination, and if it's so for a writer it must be equally so for a reader.

I have no female icons.

You did a damned good job of it. But it works in part because there is emotional attraction, not just physical attraction. And of course that's what the story's about.

Well, I think for me, it's like that for all porn, f/f, f/m or m/m. Men's bodies don't disgust me, women's bodies don't disgust me; in real life, I can get quite interested in either. But written/drawn/photographed on a page/screen, they do nothing for me; I'm there for the emotion/dialogue/plot, so once the UST, which I do enjoy, morphs into RST, I'm skimming to the next "interesting" bit.

Yup, people vary wildly in what they find interesting or respond to. If the people that triggered this rant had said that *some* women feel that way, it wouldn't have bothered me, because I think it's true. It was the blank denial that people vary in their sexual responses that had me going Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Even after other women have posted to the thread that it's because guys turn them on and women don't, and thus f/f is *boring* if they're only reading it for the porn. Not repellent. Boring.

Oh yeah, absolutely, because if there's no woman in there, then I'm really not interested, in the same way. So I totally get that.

A lot of commercial f/f is PWP, or at least doesn't have any other story elements that are sufficiently interesting to me personally to make up for my lack of interest in the sex scenes.

Yeah, I'm just discovering this. Not that I have a lack of interest in the sex scenes, but that PWP is still boring if I'm not interested in the characters. I can forgive iffy writing in fanfic better because my knowledge of the characters can fill in some gaps.

Fortunately, I found an f/f publisher whose owner started her writing career with SF/F-oriented fanfic - and it shows. Many of her writers have come through the same apprenticeship and I know that she has high standards for those who don't. Every so often I try something from a different publisher, but it still surprises me how often I feel let down. And yeah, I've pointed some straight fans at some f/f fanfic and said to them, just skip the sex scenes, because the way those characters are written works so well, but I get that they might dislike or be bored by the sex. :)

and for some it's all about the hurt/comfort and emo!porn.

Oh, I do love some good angst. Fortunately there's enough good f/f h/c and angst, especially in my favourite fandoms that I get enough of a fix and generally don't have to resort to digging out the K/S, because, y'know, love the h/c but I usually skip the sex. *g* But I also get that some m/m combinations especially if they have uber origins might still hit the spot, even for women who prefer women. Takes all sorts and, it'd be a boring and limited world for writers if everyone liked reading the same thing.

If I didn't have a a major guilt complex about the TBR pile dating back to Boston Worldcon, I'd be asking you for the publisher's name, because that sounds like a publisher worth checking out.

A lot of my fanfic was all about the angst. Yes, it was hard-core porn in the original erotica sense, but it would been very boring to write if the only point of the exercise was describing sex acts in graphic detail. What I was interested in was what you learnt about the characters as a result of what they did or didn't do in bed.

Yes, please do share the publisher's name. I don't have plans to write f/f any time real soon, but that's good information to have, if only to share with other writer friends who might.

I could see an appeal in losing the annoying romantic heroine.... A lot of romance (not that I've read that much, or, probably, that good romance) feature some spectacularly annoying women. They're silly, soppy and mopey. Not getting hugely irritated every other sentence by what a goose the stupid woman is, might be a nice change...

EXACTLY. I don't have a problem with women. I identify as 'mostly straight' because I very occasionally fancy a woman but have never done anything about it.
The trouble with f/f is generally that I can't identify with the characters. On the other hand, reading The Syndicate, I could identify with Allard quite easily. OK so the plumbing's different, but so what? The BRAIN was the same. Other women are, largely, an alien species to me.

Yes, there's that joke about "My gender is geek."

Allard has straight-but-not-narrow male fans who are not in the least bit turned on by his antics in bed, but read him happily anyway, because they can identify with him and find his interior monologue hilarious.

There's some excellent het romance that doesn't have this problem; the problem is finding it. This is one reason I took to hanging around the romance blogs -- I loves me some good het romance when I can find the stuff that's to my taste, but I am not willing to prove Sturgeon's Law in the process of finding it, because so much of the 90% actively annoys me rather than just boring me. Now I can find reviews that let me see if a book's likely to suck me in rather than meet the wall.

Milsf has gone the same way for me -- I'm no longer willing to read it unless it's an author I trust or comes recommended by someone I trust, because the stuff I don't like I *really* don't like, rather than just thinking "meh". I love Heinlein, but some of what came after him...

Let me know what exactly you are looking for in het romance and I'll happily go through my (keeper) shelves and share my treasures. L&M is one of my all time favorite romances, so I think we might have some overlap. :)

I'll take you up on that once I've made some headway on my TBR pile. Some of it's more what I *don't* want -- e.g. a book all about the joy of recognising that nobody can be truly happy in the big city, and throwing it all up to go back to the small country town is one that will meet wall at very high velocity. One about finally getting out of the small country town and back to the big city, on the other hand, I will probably have no trouble identifying with...

(I *like* the small town in question. I enjoy going back to visit. I just don't want to have to live there permanently.)

[rock 1]
Mil SF has bifurcated off (hmm, bifurcated is too two-dimensional..) into several different directions--there's the work by
- e.g. David Drake and Mike M/o/s/c/o/e Shepherd which sometimes in some ways appears to be almost painfully having them attempt to get past their 1960s Vietnam era or so only-MEN-are-combatants-military service backgrounds;
- there's the contingent who seem to want to completely excise the past 33 years during which women got into military flight training as members of the military and over time were acceded to migrate from being limited to non-combat transports planes into warbirds, during which the US Coast Guard Academy and the United States Military Academy and the Air Force Academy and the US Naval Academy and Texas A&M and eventually event the Citadel begrudgingly allowed women in as students/member of the cadet corps, started serving on sea duty, and generally went into all but a very few military career areas, and ascended the ranks of command up the chain of command ... that contingent includes apparently at least one viciously rancid misogynist type in both the person's writing and the person in person;
- then there are the Others, who to varying degrees have accepted that contemporary experience/expectations-based-on-daily-life, are that women are astronauts, politicians, military officers, firefighters, police... Roland Green's series that started with Starcruiser Shenandoah was one in which there was a line something like "sometimes people chose roommates of the Interesting Sex, sometimes of the Uninteresting sex, and those with neither manners nor preference got transferred to the Army." The focus characters included four characters in a mixed gender wardroom... sexual orientation of the various characters were mostly hetero, but one of the more major characters in the second book was homosexual in a committed relationship, two of the four mentioned earlier there were indications were probably bisexual, etc. It was no big deal in the society except for minorities who were inclined to intolerance and not particularly appreciation by the majority.

Regarding f/f SF/F, it went out of style with the downplaying/social decline of feminism as issue the public wanted to hear about/pay attention to. "Nobody wants to read about girls doing it with girls anymore," said Lisa Barnett, late partner of and co-author with Melissa Scott, at a Boskone around 2005, and Melissa Scott expressed much the same opinion. They were collaborating on a series where two of the leads are a m/m couple. Melissa Scott did have a book out from Baen, Mighty Good Road where the leads were a f/f couple, however, that I think was the last book she wrote published by Baen. Her work's always had a lot of gender and gender role examination to it, including at least book with a spectrum of five, was it, genders, ranging from pure heterosexuals at both ends, to full functional hermaphrodite in the center.

Rock 2
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Some of the things that aggravate me about Alpha Male romance stuff is that much of it seems to me to reflect gender roles of male as hulking bad-tempered bad-mannered warrior of pure animus with no anima, who needs to tie into a woman for taming--it had echoes of the pre-feminist revolution world regarding gender nature/role expectations, and the concept which reigned supreme back then which held that women has no place in academia, in politics, in the sciences, in government, in engineering, in architecture, in film production, in television productio, in studio management, as other than clerical worker drone There were no female firefighters, no police, rare was the MD who wasn't male, a vanishingly small percentage of bank officers (as opposed to bank tellers), no women running Fortune 500 companies (there are still few), no women who headed up any college or university that wasn't all female... the alpha male fantasy and science fiction romances seem to toss every concern or reality check that those times existed, or could exist again--a substantial portion of the world population has values, particularly religious values, that "the husband is the lord and master and the wife is submissive" and that no woman should ever be in a role in which she is not subordinate to men; that no man should ever be the subordinate in commerce, politics, academia, the house, or anywhere else to any woman; and that powersharing of equals is unthinkable--that;s assuming that they;re not even more extreme and demand that women be locked away in purdah and hever have any economic or social self-determination and rights for self-determination.

Being a "protected" class means also never having or being allowed the wherewithall to stand on one's own and be capable/competent/considered capable of competency/allowed freedom to be self-reliant (and when the support structure collapses, how is someone who's been bound on a pedestal, supposed to be able to cope, when the former custodian and supporter is gone?!

Getting to Heinlein--Heinlein was an amazing product of his time--he didn't get past the time and culture he came out of, but he went much further in imagining changes, that just about anyone else from his generation and background, regarding women. (That said, I got halfway through I Will Fear No Evil and got stuck when I was a teenager and never since even attempted to go back and try to finish it. I was revolted by it even, and today expect I would find it even more revolting and immature--sort of "Heinlein gets to come out with his fetishes!"

And getting back to f/f -- there were several factors in its market appeal 20+ and more years ago. One of them was prurience on the part of males, another was political lesbianism on the part of women. Homoerotism on the part of males, was much less socially approvable--note that even today, hot wet mouthed liplocks of female entertainers on TV and especially awards shows is "entertainment" and doesn't get much in the way of demands for the FCC to stomp on it... but the Superbowl ad in which two men accidentally kiss, caused a major negative furor. Female/female relationships on drama series and soap operas get much more air time than male/male ones.

TV tends to trail books by decades as regards social trends, and tends to be very much these days a recidivist medium, as opposed to artistic area of endeavor questioning/challenging the status quo--the function of contemporary commercial US TV is to get the advertisers' products sold, with the entertainment as eye candy and mind candy to suck people into being conditioned with commercial messages (including Product Placement in film and TV...). The TV show content therefore has to comply with characters, situations, resolutions, mores, etc., that promote sales of commercial products and get people to listen to/watch commercials.... getting people to think critically, or get wound up in the story beyond a certain point, defeats the commercial goals.

Rock 3

F/f relationships in SF/F went passee years ago--they weren't controversial anymore, and they weren't really "naughty" as in pushing the social acceptability edge anymore, and the novelty was gone. Male/male, however, was still taboo, and still is taboo to a large percentage of the population, perhaps even the majority. The m/m audiences include women--but then the Kirk/Spock genre is more than 40 years old--more than a generation and a half it's been around. However, originally it was essentially a small tightly knit underground with common tastes in entertainment and common lack of full accedence to the available approved roles for women in the culture. There was that hook into Jungian archetypes with Mr Spock as cipher for the anima/hidden woman... and K/S was a phenomenon almost completely ignored/overlooked/not deigned to even be noticed for the purposes of sneer at it, by males. Romance got sneered at, K/S was beneath acknowledgement of its existence.

The m/m audience includes homosexual males, who have been able the past few years in some states, to have legally recognized partnerships, and even marriage. Yes, women can have legally recognized f/f relationships, but "Boston marriages" where two women shared lives with or without carnal relationsship, was socially acceptable going back a long way....

Anyway, bottom line--m/m has social and market cachet today that f/f doesn't had and hasn't had for years.

That header would make a good T shirt

I could set up a CafePress shop. Just as long as nobody expects *me* to wear the teeshirt in public...

I agree with you, I don't read F/F romances not because I find them repellent, but because for me are boring. I like a woman body from the estethic point of view, I can see when something is beautiful, but it doesn't excite me. For example, once I received a propostion from a lesbian; she was a very beautiful woman, and I clearly thought, well, if I feel the desire to prove, she could be the right woman... but I didn't feel desire for her. My friends (male) who were with said I was nut, how can I dump a woman like that... well because I didn't see and prove what they felt seeing her.
Same with the books. Erotic romance should appeal to you, if not, you are reading a "how to" manual. And I never read manuals! I'm for exeperiment on field.
Elisa

Yes, there are a lot of things I find beautiful to look at, but I don't want to have sex with all of them.

Where's your sense of adventure, people?! You need to do these sorts of things if you ever hope to have fascinating dinner conversation in your later years. And just think of the missed opportunities to be able to bust that baby out during a key conversation with the DH at some point. Shaking my head at y'all here.

Oh yes... I don't know how much more simply one can put it. The people I find sexually appealing are all men. That's just my personal bent and I canNOT see why anyone needs to get het up (to err, coin a phrase) because there are a lot of us who feel that way...

Edited 2008-05-15 12:05 (UTC)

Some people have a lot of trouble wrapping their minds around the concept that other people are not necessarily just like them. All the way across the Kinsey spectrum, you will find people who are utterly convinced that anyone who claims to have a different Kinsey score to themselves must be either lying or deluding themselves.

I like how you expressed your points and I agree with much of what you said. Which leads to the need for quality f/f stories, not just PWP stories. I've read wallbangers in m/f, f/f, m/m, as well as other configurations. I don't have a preference per se, except that I want to read well-written stories with intriguing characters. If it happens to be two men, that works for me. If it happens to be two women, I'll enjoy it too. Give me some meat to go between the bumping uglies bits.

Thing is, m/m will always have more for me to enjoy than f/f of the same quality will, and often for more reasons than simple body parts. So given a choice, I'll go for the m/m. But I'll take an f/f fanfic recommended by someone I trust or an author I like in a fandom I follow over a completely random m/m story. There just aren't very many of those.

*nods* Understandable on all points. Based on responses and the popularity of m/m stories in the market and in the fanfic world, many agree with you. If I had to pick my preference, I would select menage stories, but I think that's a different post altogether. =D

I wish women could just like what they like without having to analyse it and judge each other about it. Men like all kinds of wacky porn, including f/f, and nobody questions their sexual orientation or identity.

The sad thing is that the second blog post was about a genuine problem with homophobes throwing tantrums about the existence of Those Books. But going straight to "anyone who doesn't want read f/f is just in denial" in the comments will simply antagonise the women who find most f/f boring but have no problem with other people enjoying it.

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No, actually, it's because I prefer cock

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