Like many San Franciscans, I’ve learned that there are people who are turned on by all sorts of stuff, and that just because I find it unappealing, or even repulsive, doesn’t make it any less legitimate as a source of pleasure. And I expect the same respect from other people.
I have to say I’ve hit my limit. There are some things that are just too disgusting to even contemplate.
Robert’s written before about Slash fiction–homoerotic love stories between fictional characters–and its interesting gender-bending context. Now I have to admit that the thought of Kirk and Spock getting it on does nothing for me, but I am happy that if it turns someone on, there’s someone else there to write it.
I have found the Slash, though, that crosses the line. The Slash that’s too repulsive for even me. The stuff I find too creepy and disgusting to exist.
Yes, I am talking about Dick Cheney Slash.
“So where are we in the White House, exactly?” Cheney asked as he searched for a cigarette he had in his suit jacket on the floor.I shudder at the very thought of this obscenity.“This is an unperceived room. I call it my Confidential Room. Not even the president knows about it’s existence.”
“No shit… Really?” Cheney lit his cigarette and inhaled. “Can it be Our Confidential Room?”
Rumsfeld snickered as he began slipping his clothes back on. “You bet!”Cheney grinned. He laid his head back, concentrating on the dark ceiling that strangely resembled a dark night sky.
Rumsfeld carefully fixed his hair and kissed Cheney on the forehead. With a wink and a farewell, he left Cheney lying there…
…in the confidential room that they claimed as theirs.
December 28th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
Well Sasha, I have always thought of myself as generally tasteless, someone who is not easily offended or even repulsed but this crosses my line too.
I’m not an expert on slash by any stretch of the imagination; however, I think even many slashers would find this very unappealing.
But while I don’t find this particular pairing to be erotic at all, it does reveal a major split in slash literature, the split between Real People Slash and Fan Fiction. Strangely, fan fiction slashers are morally repulsed by people who write real people slash, that somehow RPS slashers cross some big line in the sand. Part of it is that they, according to a writer I’m reading, are invading the real person’s privacy and many find that ethically troubling. Keep in mind that many of these folks write some incredbily bawdy homo-erotic literature and while I don’t find it offensive at all, many might.
I’ve been reading a writer who argues that the writers of slash create a queer female space–keep in mind that the readers and writers of slash are hopelessly straight. While probably, most if not all, have never had a same sex couplinng in their life, according to this author, they are creating erotic relationships with each auther during the act of reading and writing for each other. The actual suggestion she made was much stronger than that, but I will leave that for the blog I plan on writing this week. (I have been reading various queer theory articles over the last few weeks.)
The world of theory is just that and probably not very useful in everyday life, but the interest that the writers have in gender bending is always, always, always something I enjoy exploring for obvious reasons.
One author I am reading wrote an article called “Queer at Last” and she suggests that there is an emerging grouping of people that she terms as queer heterosexuals, a category of folks that I plan on discussing in the future blog. In a throwaway comment, she suggest that trasngender folks call into quesiton not only gender identity but sexual identity as a stable category. What an understatment…
Strangely, I just ran across a writer I haven’t read in years. Her name is Joan Nestle and she documented relationships between butch women and femme lesbians. She lived through what many call the classic period of butch/femme, the 1950s, and had to deal with oppression from a mostly straight, young feminist group of folks in the 70s who claimed that she was mimicking/aping heterosexuality… much like a writer did recently in Beyond Chron. Needless to say, she ane most lesbians find that analysis to be ignorant and profoundly missing the point. (Power exists in interesting ways in butch/femme relationships. I happened to be in several of these relationship prior to coming out as trans and was always, always struck by how powerful femme women were. Maybe it is because I am attracted to very smart, strong and powerful women, but I don’t think it was unique to me and in fact Joan Nestle discusses how the aforementioned analysis of butch/femme relationships is actually profoundly sexist and ignores the power of femme women in these relationships.)
While I could never, ever claim to understand what being a butch lesbian, I celebrate and honor those that have lived in the world as butch women and for anyone who is interested in reading one of the most powerful books on gender and sexuality, try reading “Stone Butch Blues” by Leslie Feinburg.
Anyway, back to Cheney. Yes, even I find this disgusting. And I have one of the highest thresholds of any one I know…
Best,
Robert
December 29th, 2005 at 5:01 pm
Hey, you all…
It would really help the discussion if you would at least try to articulate *why* you find this stuff disgusting. Otherwise, you’re just labeling it.
Personally, I don’t like slash because the 10 or so pieces I’ve read - and I searched online for the so-called “good stuff” - all read like they were written by a teenager. The style is a cross between the sex chapter in a high school health class textbook and a romance novel.
December 29th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
Good point. Well, try as I might, Republicans just aren’t sexy to me.
December 29th, 2005 at 6:16 pm
Well, I am disgusted by the sympathy for Cheney et. al. implied by treating them as sexual beings. These guys should be standing trial, not getting it on in the White House.
It is true, though, that having looked at some of this stuff, I am reasonably shocked by how bad much of it is. The awkwardness is less jarring to me than the borderline illiteracy. For me, nothing’s quite as much a turn off as wading through a thicket of grammatical errors, extraneous apostrophes and misused homophones!
I should give credit to Boing Boing, since that’s where I ran across this.
December 29th, 2005 at 6:32 pm
Yep. I agree with Sasha. And impeach Cheney first.
I have to admit, most of it is shockingly bad, but I have run across some good stuff.
Again, most porn is bad too, right? I think what is cool about slah is that there is more emotional content than most porn and that most of this homo-erotica is written by almost exclusively straight women.
You gotta admit that is kind of cool, right? I’m still working on a blog about this. Look forward to your response Judy.
And Judy, if you are interested, I will get you a copy of this academic article about how the writers/readers are creating a queer female space. It is incredibly interesting. But then I’m a queer theory geek so I admit that what I find interesting or even sexy may be very different than most.
December 29th, 2005 at 8:29 pm
I’m with sasha: Considering what they’ve done, it’s not funny to imagine these guys having any kind of fun. well said about the schlock level of the writing.
I’m not into porn, because of the low artistic quality and because I don’t like any work - film, literature, painting, sculpture, dance, conversation, whatever - that has a specific agenda vis-a-vis how it wants me to respond emotionally. I don’t like being manipulated. I don’t like movies that mean to scare me or make me cry. The worst comic is one who is obviously trying to make me laugh. Porn feels like cheating. I also think that porn (the industry and the end product) can and does exploit both actors and viewers… but not always. As long as the people involved are adults, I’m not going to put a finer point on it than that.
I don’t think it’s cool or not cool that women are writing slash or reading it or creating a new sexual space for themselves. Honestly, I’m kind of sick of the whole Sex-Positive thing, the new word for doing your own thing.
Nowhere but in America would someone say, “I’m Sex-Positive!” Sweden is probably one of the most sexually open and forward countries in the world, and I don’t think the Swedes talk about how Sex-Positive! they are. I get it: It’s a reaction to our Puritan roots, which yet plague us, but it strikes me as a kind of adolescent rebellion.
You (whoever “you” are) want to read slash and do it with plushies - online - and have relationships with a bunch of people at once and watch movies with titles that are bad-pun versions of blockbusters and walk down Folsom St. wearing nothing but a leash - I’m not going to stop you. But please, don’t try to tell me you’re more liberated, open-minded, more “positive” about sex than I am because sex is your hobby and how you define yourself.
Why does everything in America have to be turned into a fashion, clique, or contest?
December 30th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
Okay. Let me just admit that I had a knee-jerk reaction to a couple of things…
First, I was around during the split in feminism between the pro-sex feminists and those that were of the Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon crowd in the eighties and it was pretty ugly. Dworkin and McKinnon crawled in bed with Republicans to create anti-pornography laws. Of course the irony was that an anti-porn law that they worked on in Canada was used to ban one of Andrea Dworkin’s books. Alas, a bunch of gay and lesbian porn was banned. Many in the LGBT community felt that there was not a recognition of power differences between heterosexual relationships and queer relationships. They were, IMHO, right.
This topic deserves a longer thread but it echoes back to the book review that Beyond Chron where girls gone wild was compared to butch/femme lesbian relationships. Frankly, it is simply ridiculously stupid to compare the two.
As some may know, one of my parents had money. I unfortunately never did. When I was 25 I scraped together enough money to go to Laney College, a Community College and then transferred to Berkeley. I have a big chip on my shoulder and I admit it. I was very impressed with the students at Laney who struggled, and perhaps were not as learned as their counter-parts at Berkeley, but they tried. I was very unimpressed with the students at Berkeley who had to be chided to do their reading and to show up to class. Jesus. The amount of priviledge. It was disgusting and that was a public university…
A couple of years ago I was in New York with my partner visiting with some of her friends. We started talking about Oprah and how she had chosen this book for the Book of the Month club and the author had refused because he felt that it was beneath him… One of my partner’s friends agreed. Well, needless to say, I nearly had a cow. My friend Hasan was there and he could see the steam coming out of my ears…
Here are these women reading books and some prissy, snobby author doesn’t want them to read his book. Unbelievable.
I say all this and acknowledge that it is different, nonetheless, if some women out there are writing as opposed to mindless watching television, and they are writing homo-erotic literature that may expand their consciousness somewhat about queerness, I say great.
Again, I realize I am having sort of a knee-jerk reaction, but there it is…
December 30th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
P.S. As I ran up and down the stairs for the last 30 minute taking all of the recycling down, I thought about the previous post. For all my anti-elitist sentiments, I’m currently re-reading Judith Butler, one of the most inaccessible writers there is. Chances are that most professors don’t even fully understand what she is talking about.
So while I have this knee-jerk reaction, I am re-reading Butler, Foucault, and Lacan, hoping to re-ground myself in their theories, before tackling my perspective on slash. Is that a tolerable paradox? I think so.
As I noted earlier, I’m reading an article called Queer at Last. I jokingly told my partner that it is essentially a critique of all the straight academics that are so excited by queer theory and believe themselves to be queer.
She jokingly told me not to send it to her professor friend in New York who would have a cow…
Anyway, in the article, the writer suggests that those that are het need to name their own privilege and the institutional structures that benefit them.
Butler calls it a dominant regulatory system that regulates and naturalizes heterosexuality, a heterosexual matrix. Anyway, the author of queer at last suggests that we need to expose the naturalized status of heterosexuality in order to subvert it.
To the degree that we can expose the naturalized status of dominant regulatory systems, we must do so and post modern theory, while clearly elitist, is an effective tool. Do I think a drag queen singing; “you make me feel like a natural woman” exposes and disrupts dominant regulatory systems more than some straight guy in academia sitting in his office writing an article about queer theory? Yes…
Do I dismiss him if he can effectively subvert the heterosexual matrix? No.
Is it a tolerable paradox? For me, yes.
December 30th, 2005 at 4:55 pm
For clarity, I mean should I dismiss the straight academic guy who is exposing these structures… I say no. Others may disagree.
On the other hand, if he is not naming his own privilege, than I he should be critiqued.
Sort of like whiteness. Whiteness is always invisible, despite the intense amount of privilege it bestows on white folks, like me…
But just take it a step further; using these same tools, theorist Gatyatri Spivak, an amazing postcolonial critic, has effectively deconstructed imperialism and the struggle for decolonization while simultaneously acknowledging how she is complicit as an academic in reproducing the very social formations that she opposes…
Does theory matter? Is there a real queer identity? Well, when you get the shit kicked out of you walking down the street for being queer, yep, it’s real. And should some academic acknowledge that while writing that identity is not real, they are only able to talk about queerness because some real live queers/drag queens threw rocks at some cops at Stonewall…But do I want to denaturalize heterosexuality? Yes. And knowing that there are some folks out there doing just that in many different ways is an exciting prospect to me, whether it be by some drag queen singing; “you make me feel like a natural woman,” or some academic presenting an article at a conference, or some straight woman typing away at a computer writing slash, well, I say, rock on.
December 30th, 2005 at 5:06 pm
Forgive the typos above. Too much time at Laney I guess. :)
December 30th, 2005 at 5:14 pm
I think one positive thing about the “sex-positive” stuff is that it tends to put into question the fantasy construction of what a “normal relationship” is.
Is it easy to overstate the revolutionary potential of sex? Of course. But it plays a role in breaking down notions of an ideal family, an ideal relationship or normal sex. (Note that I say “breaking down the notions of…”, not breaking down an ideal…)
December 30th, 2005 at 6:33 pm
Agreed. It is easy to overstate the revolutionary potential of sex. But I do think that one can have more nuanced conversations where differences of power are recognized and that the whole world is not seen through a hetersexual lens (girls gone wild=butch/femme relationships) and that gender and sexuality can be exposed as constructed, and historically and culturally specific.
Forgive me if I go on too much on these topics. I am in the middle of medically transitioning (dramatically increasing my testerone levels) which is quite a powerful time and trying to analyze my thoughts and feelings about gender and sexuality as I do so. It is fascinating. Clearly some of the attributes we attach to certain genders are biological in origin. Andrew Sullivan wrote an interesting article for the NY Times about his experience with testerone. There was an unfortunate article in the Village Voice about a FTM transitioning, but there were some moments that I could relate to…Anyway, as I grapple with the changes, my head is full of thoughts about Gender Trouble..And the physical changes are just beginning so that’s exciting…
Unfortunately, not everyone is as fascinated as I am with this stuff. :) So I spend most of my time writing and not necessarily publishing it. Grin. I suspect that is a good thing…
December 30th, 2005 at 7:35 pm
I totally agree with Sasha, the concept of Cheney having sex is just not one I want to think about, period. (Bill Clinton, now….)
December 7th, 2007 at 11:51 am
While I admit Cheney, or really ANY politician slash, is…disturbingly odd, remember that this is mostly just written in humor, a joke. And wouldn’t it be great if Dick Cheney were to somehow find this? He might seriously have a heart attack, he needs another one.
And I’m going to sound real stupid for asking, but does the author know you posted a part of her fic here?
December 8th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
No, I was not informed about my fic being posted here.
Please keep in mind that I was only writing that slash fiction as a joke to just humor myself and my friends.
Deeply analyzing a story that was purposely meant to be a joke sounds more amusing to me than my story itself!
NEXT TIME, DON’T BE SO RUDE, sasha.