[poll] fic-writing and sexuality

[wisdomeagle]

Is there a correlation between sexuality/sexual orientation/sexual preference and your fic writing habits? Many discussions of "why I slash" suggest that there is.

This is prompted by a specific question, but first I want some poll data. There are three polls, one for women (girls), one for men (boys), and one for people whose genders don't fit in those boxes. You can see the results of the polls that don't apply to you by null-voting -- hitting "submit poll" without ticking any boxes.

If you realize you've made a mistake, you can go back -- click the poll number, choose "fill out poll" and voila, you can change your answers.

The questions are phrased "I write a good deal of." Feel free to interpret this relatively: if you write one fic a year but it's always boyslash, that's "a good deal of boyslash." But if you write thirty fics a year and one of them is boyslash, that's probably not "a good deal."

Pimp?




[Poll #1136793]


[Poll #1136794]

[Poll #1136795]

Comments

typo

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

If you write thirty fics a year and one of them is boyslash, that's probably got "a good deal" though.

"got" should be "not," and I'm not entirely sure about the "though."

Re: typo

[wisdomeagle]

:) Thanks.

[cheshire23.livejournal.com]

So, is a threesome het or slash? Just curious...

(Don't mind me, I'm on a bit of a kick for Simon/River/Kaylee right now. :))

[wisdomeagle]

Oy, I write a ton of threesomes but that didn't occur to me when formulating the poll! I think I would say that m/f/f threesomes count as het and femslash.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom's delicious account...

I am attracted to men and write mostly men, but I am not attracted to most of the men I write (many I find downright fugly).

[wisdomeagle]

Thank you for noting that (I think it's relevant to the ideas I have percolating).

[amymccabe.livejournal.com]

I suspect that any time you start attempting to create categories for gender and sexuality, you're opening up a can of worms.

I'm bisexual and I'm not that crazy about being lumped in with omnisexual or pansexual. There's a whole lot of men and women out there that I am not attracted too and have absolutely no interested in romantically. Omni- and pan- seem to imply all or everyone. The fact that I am bi and no, would rather not fuck everyone I see can sometimes be a hard thing to get across, along with the fact that I am bi and monogamous.

Furthermore, pansexual or omnisexual always strikes me as terms that describe loving or being attracted to people regardless of gender. What attracts to each gender is different. I have some things I find attractive in men and a completely different things that I find attractive in women.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

I think most people who identify as "omnisexual" or "pansexual" don't mean that they have no standards (or even that they're non-monogamous), but rather that they find "bi" problematic for whatever reason (personally, I often use the term "bisexual" for myself for ease and clarity -- and am a very picky monogamous person, fwiw -- but I dislike the implication that my attractions are split exactly 50/50, and I also recognize as problematic the implication that there are only two sexes to which to be attracted . . . thus eliding people who do see themselves as fitting into the gender binary).

But I know that the stereotype of bi="will f*ck everything that moves" is still prevalent and hurtful, so I get where you're coming from.

And I would describe myself as "being attracted to people regardless of gender" because I hear that as meaning "someone's gender isn't going to preclude me from being attracted to that person," and I'd always just taken for granted that people are generally attracted to different things in men than they are in women (in terms of physicality at least), so it's interesting to me to hear a different understanding of that statement.

[eponis.livejournal.com]

I'm writing so little nowadays that I felt like nothing really counts as "a good deal." And really, m/m slash does dominate, because many of the biggest ships in my biggest fandoms are m/m. But I went ahead and checked all of them, since I've written all four, and don't feel a particular preference between them, given a story of equal quality.

[gileswench.livejournal.com]

I'm a straight woman who writes mostly het, some slash and some gen...and a very rare amount of femslash. I'll read all of them.

Basically, what it comes down to for me is the characters. If I can see them together, I can write them together regardless of gender or canon sexuality. If I can't see them together, I can't write them together, again, regardless of gender or canon sexuality. The most important thing for me is two characters who combine to make something greater than the sum of their parts. I find that element between a woman and a man in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, between two men on Stargate:SG-1, again between two men in Due South...but between nobody in a lot of fandoms. Among secondary pairings I like, I find there are some of every possible sort.

So while it may appear that my sexuality is a major force in my choice of pairings/fic sexuality, I find it's more a function of how I see the characters and their emtional chemistry. Gender is there, and it affects character and relationships as well as sexual interaction, but it's a secondary consideration for me in terms of choosing what to write.

[wisdomeagle]

Gender is there, and it affects character and relationships as well as sexual interaction, but it's a secondary consideration for me in terms of choosing what to write.

I understand that, and if I come to any conclusions they wouldn't be about an individuals, because I know there are a whole complex of forces that go into what we read, what we write, what we ship, what kinds of pairings ping for us -- on the other hand, I do think there are trends in fanculture as a whole and am curious to see how those numbers look.

[cetacea.livejournal.com]

I filled out this poll as if I were a bisexual, but that's not entirely true. I consider myself a five on the Kinsey scale, which means that I am "predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual".

[wisdomeagle]

Noted! I'm probably a Kinsey 5 as well, and usually identify as lesbian, but I too feel that's not entirely true since it elides some things about my attractions.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

The first time, I filled out this poll, from work, I only clicked on f/f and het, because it didn't seem like I produced much gen. But looking at the gen entry in my genre index, it does seem like I have (and that's not even including the gr0n, the Windows of My Soul ficlets, or The Watcher's Diary of Lydia Chalmers, not to mention gen or gen-ish WsIP). So I've changed my answer, although I do think I used to produce more gen than I do now (femslash_minis has corrupted me).

I do want to write more m/m than I have in the past.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

I want you to write more m/m, too!

[callmesandy.livejournal.com]

I am very glad that you included the my gender doesn't fit in your boxes! :)

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the "my gender doesn't fit in your boxes" option--much appreciated.

For me, the kind of fic I mostly write (m/m slash) feels like an integral part of my sexuality. I'm genderqueer (bio female but I don't feel like a "woman" and I'd choose a male body and identity if I could) and attracted almost exclusively to men. For me, fiction is my main point of access to what feels like my "true" sexuality.

For as long as I can remember, stories of male friendship and emotional attachment have appealed to me. And as soon as I started having specifically sexual thoughts, round about 12 or 13 or so, I realized that I found the idea of two men having sex erotic as well as emotionally satisfying. Since there weren't a lot of stories like that available to a rural female adolescent in the early 1980s, I made up my own fantasies, sometimes with original characters and sometimes with fictional characters or historical people. This was many years before I knew there was such a thing as fanfic or slash.

Once I got involved in fandom, I sort of assumed that many bio-female boyslashers were like me. But I found that it wasn't the case, at least according to the results of a poll I did a couple of years ago, specifically about bio-female boyslashers. I link to it because I think you might find it interesting.

There do seem to be certain common trends in your poll (most non-bisexual people seem to write fic that includes at least one person of their preferred sex), but I'm fascinated by the complexities being revealed.

[wisdomeagle]

You're welcome. :)

I really appreciate your thoughts and input; it's good to hear a perspective that's quite different from my own in lots of ways.

And I do find your poll interesting; thanks for linking back to it.

I think I get frequently... taken momentarily aback when confronted with lesbians who write boyslash. Not that I don't read, write, and enjoy boyslash occasionally, but that there seem to be so many of us who do. Right now there aren't any straight women who've taken this poll who write a great deal of femslash, but there are several lesbians who write a great deal of m/m slash.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

My entry point into fandom was through fanfiction and specifically political--for me slash provides some of the gay representation that mainstream fiction doesn't provide. I find that I do tend to respond to characters who I can read as bisexual men who like some of the same kinds of guys and women that I do.

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

Hi! Um, I'm here via kindkit's link, and I just wanted to clarify - I'm bisexual, but what I primarily write is gen, and I generally think of myself as a gen writer, even though I've written a fair amount of romance (a little less than a third of what I wrote last year, I think).

I know that, for me, most of what I write is satisfying to me whether it's romance or gen - usually I want something out of the characters or relationship that doesn't have much to do with sex, or romance, or physical attraction. Not that it disappears or is ruined if sex enters the picture, but it doesn't require it, and physical attraction and romance are so hard for me to write well that I usually don't bother unless I specifically want the challenge.

(Sometimes I envy people who find it easy to write convincing romance. My best efforts frequently get 'this is practically gen!' or 'but really I read this is as simply a strong friendship', which I don't exactly mind, but which does tell me I'm not too hot at this romance thing.)

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

I changed my answer because I wanted to represent for straight girls who write femslash because I realized that lately I've been writing a pretty balanced mix of the genres.

I hate to give a really shallow answer, but if I like the characters and the people are pretty and they are smooshing parts together, it probably works for me.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

See, I made a comment above before I read this comment (but after you made it) but you were totally my example of someone whom I expected to not answer that she wrote a good deal of femslash but who nonetheless has a nontrivial femslash output. And I wasn't even thinking of so much anything recent even as so much. I remember some great femslash fics from back when you were on your Lilah Morgan kick.

[a2zmom.livejournal.com]

I am a straight chica and mostly I write gen or he. But I also write f/f and m/m and I think all the stories I currently have out to betas are slash.

So, for me, the true answer is whatever the story I want to tell, that's what I write.

[attaining.livejournal.com]

I personally write a pretty even amount of everything. The last fic I wrote was femslash. Before that, het. Before that, male/male slash. XD; Although, if it helps your stats, I tend to write characters as bisexual more often than one side or the other. For example, if I was writing a Buffy/Faith fic, I would characterize the girls as bisexual rather than lesbians because they also have relationships with men. Same for Spike/Angel. I'll always view Willow as a bisexual character. I'm also bisexual. But if you've studied sexuality, you've probably heard the theory that most people fall somewhere between 100% heterosexual and 100% homosexual, but society tends to push most of us to identify as one or the other. Hence the stigma surrounding bisexuality and our supposed inability to "pick a side."

*flails* I had a really long comment about the correlation between writing male/male slash and gender disparity in the source material, but it was too long. |D B-but I posted it here if you're interested. XD;;

I LOVE BEING ABLE TO EDIT COMMENTS.

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

the correlation between writing male/male slash and gender disparity in the source material

I can only speak for myself here, but for me, there is none. I've been in fandoms with great, well-developed, interesting female characters (the Buffyverse, due South, and Blake's 7, for example) and I've never yet had any interest in writing het or girlslash.

[nwhepcat.livejournal.com]

I've answered the poll and didn't click the m/m slash ticky box, because I wasn't sure what I've written counts as a "good deal" of slash. But it's not exactly negligible, either. So I thought I'd add this.

[secondsilk.livejournal.com]

I still think of myself as a m/m slash writer in m/m slash fandom, but I'm really not sure that that's true anymore.
I do know, though, that when I write femslash I am conscious of it being a political act, of writing it (in part) because, as a queer woman, I feel I should. I joined the femgenficathons to support female-character-centric fic because I am a woman. I joined femslash06 for the same reason.

I am also wildly unadventurous. I write what I read and I read what's on my f'list, so that influences me as well.

[mcicioni.livejournal.com]

P.S. I write almost exclusively m/m slash (and not a lot of it at that). The men I slash are usually men I wouldn't touch with a barge pole if I ever met them in real life (Gil Favor from Rawhide; a number of other Western characters, including Chris/Vin; Fraser/Kowalski; Titus Pullo/Lucius Vorenus from Rome). But I deeply identify with whoever's point of view I happen to be writing.

And find it hugely interesting that I can identify with people I definitely do NOT resemble - big butch brutes such as Titus Pullo because they can be emotional, and task-oriented autocrats such as Gil Favor because they are rational).

Time to shut up.

[missambs.livejournal.com]

Now, I haven't written fic in a while, so I'm going from the last time I heavily ficced. I hope that's okay. :)

I know I clicked everything, but I believe that to be genuinely true. I really do write everything indiscriminately, though heavier on some "types" depending on what character/relationships catches my fancy in a particular fandom/moment. For instance: I wrote quite a bit Duncan/Logan in the Veronica Mars fandom, which was relatively low in femslash for me -- but Femslash Is My Home in the Buffy fandom. It's what has always felt most natural over there.

[chichiris-chica.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if it's really an issue. Maybe it has more to do with the characters and the kind of relationship they have with one another? Maybe that's what attracts you most rather than just the appeal of the kind of pairing you write? (Though, of course, that would be getting into fandom preferences and blah blah.)

I like all kinds of pairings, maybe it just depends on who we're talking about? :)

[counteragent.livejournal.com]

I responded as a reader. Hope that's OK.

[few.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thank you, thank you for including asexual as an option! Even polls that include bisexual tend to forget about the rest of us.

(I write mostly het and what most people would consider gen, but a LOT of that gen is focused on male/male relationships of a non-sexual/non-romantic nature. I've only recently started getting into a proper slash pairing, so I didn't select that as one fic ever doesn't qualify as "a good deal". :) Nothing I write includes graphic sex, because it does not interest me at all as either a writer or a reader, though occasionally there's a fade-to-black type of implied sex where it's important to the story that a physical relationship between the characters be established. I think that's only happened maybe three times in the 12 years I've been writing fanfic, however.)

[goodbyebird]

I'm gonna take the lazy route and ditto the above comment ;)

What I find interesting in fanfic is probing the psyche of the characters or simply telling a good story. PWP doesn't interest me in the slightest, though I won't in any way shy away from reading stories because they have sex in them. The times I have enjoyed the sexual aspects in a story, it's been because the characters aren't just having at it, there's also stuff going on in the background.

The only slightly sexual stuff I've ever written has been in response to fictathons. Since it doesn't interest me much, I doubt I'd be able to write anything good anyways.

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

thanks for the 3rd gender option and the asexual one, so often forgotten.

[springmornings.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom. :) It's interesting to see all the responses to this.

I'm a lesbian and write pretty even amounts of slash and het, although I may be inclined to one at a certain point in time; I don't really write gen but some fics are kinda gen in that they're also about character development and other relationships, not just the romance.

As a reader, though, I read more slash (but I still read some gen and het), whether it's m/m or f/f. I think slash often has stories and conflicts I identify with. I remember even in middle school, before I knew I was gay or what slash was, I was especially drawn to stories where someone was "outed" as something. It may have had to do with being found to be "special," but I also think it had a big part to do with my own identity. And there's just a lot of other little things like that.

Anyway! Very interesting poll. :)

[capncosmo.livejournal.com]

[Here from metafandom]

This poll is a really interesting idea! I just wanted to clarify my particular answers a little bit, though.

I pulled up the numbers from the tags in my fic journal because I am a huge dork, and I feel like it's important to ask: are you wondering about what actually comes out of my pen or what I prefer to write? Or, to put it another way, do you want answers based on all 62 of my fics, or just the 17 that weren't requested/a result of a challenge? Or the even smaller number that I wrote just because I wanted to and not as a response to anything?

Because (and this has always been an interesting phenomenon to me) the nature of fanfic as an ongoing conversation between the fans has pushed me to write a lot of things I ordinarily wouldn't. Like, the breakdown according to my tags is 41 het, 14 m/m, 4 f/f, 20 Gen, but every single m/m and f/f fic was a request of challenge. That's not to say I didn't like writing them, or that I wrote them against my will, but that left to my own devices it's not what I would write.


Switching gears, this also kind of gets into the definition of "gen" again as I'm thinking about this. What I consider a story with a pairing is, I know, VASTLY different than what a sexual person might consider a pairing. The relevance to this post is that this is *exactly* what you're trying to get at in this poll, mainly because my orientation has a direct effect on my writing.

...Let me try and be clearer: As an asexual, what separates a friendship from a romantic relationship for me is the feeling behind it only, not any kind of gesture/physical intimacy. I don't really get it, so I don't write it, meaning that 80% of the stuff I say has a pairing *could* be read as a close friendship by someone using physical affection as an indication of closeness.

How to survey people on this specific difference, I am unsure, but it might be interesting to see if orientation relates to content as well. Or something (^_^)