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So, the most recent Bitch has an article on the culture of fanfic, “Fan/tastic Voyage,” by Noy Thrupkaew, which, as usual, has a heavy emphasis on the slash aspects. Though it’s a good article, and exactly the type of cultural phenomenon that Bitch covers, I was a bit surprised to see it. I mean, I had just assumed they would have touched upon this topic already (no, I haven’t read every issue).

It just all seems old hat to me. Though long part of fan and geek culture, I hardly was in the thick of it—yet I knew of slash fanfic for over ten years now. I mean, Becca’s journal directed me to a Globe and Mail article several months ago about slash fiction entitled “If Frodo Loved Bilbo” (though, really, shouldn’t it be If Samwise Loved Frodo…?). And there is a very good book about fanfic that was put out in the mid-90s called Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins that I read a long many years ago, which I was a bit disappointed that Thrupkaew didn’t even mention in her article.

Not that the whole thing isn’t still worth discussing, I just want articles that aren’t mostly “hey, look at what people are doing!” I know that there has been a huge boom of slash fiction with the widespread use of the internet—but even that was a few years ago. Still, I found the Bitch article interesting enough. Thrupkaew took a nice approach in trying to understand the appeal of writing slash by speculating on what type she would write.

Thrupkaew also got at what I believe is the appeal for hot man-on-man action for some women: not the fact it’s safe to fantasise about men or that male sexual desire is the dominant paradigm, but that it is an erotic experience women can’t experience firsthand, and so there is large appeal to explore on the dynamic. I would even go further to say that if you primarily like boys in your bed, than why not two for the price of one? And, as she points out, there is the fact that the most developed characters on any given TV show tend to be male, that’s it’s rare to find one, let alone two fully realized female characters to admire and latch on to. Notable exceptions being the Joss Whedon family (Buffy, Angel, Firefly) and to some extant other SciFi shows such as Farscape and Star Trek: DS9. And, of course, there is Xena and La Femme Nikita.

Though not a huge follower, I like slash and fanfic, or, as I really haven’t read that much, I like the fact that it exists. I think it makes perfect sense and really the creators of these shows (and book and comics) should be flattered and pleased that people are doing this. It means they suceeded, that their stories have gotten under their audience’s skin and are part of their personal mythos, if only for a little while. Heck, my friends and I will do this in a mild way when discussing a show we all watch—not go as far as plotting whole scenarios, but musing on a characters motivation, their next possible action, how they interact with the other characters and so on.

It’s not unusual for me to graze slash sites. Like I said I’m not a big reader of the stuff; I’ve probably only read about ten all the way through—and a couple were actually well-written, with appealing scenarios. But I am endlessly fascinated by the pairings people come up with and the devices they use to orchestrate their bed romps. My favorite actual fanfic pairing is Joxer/Ares, God of War. My favorite speculative pair is Statler/Waldorf—you know, the hecklers from the Muppet Show. I know David Chess has gotten searches for Jellicle Cat Slash—which just boggles the mind. And then there are the places I just don’t wanna go—like Bill Gates/Steve Jobs.

Probably the most wretched turn fanfic can take is the “Mary Sue” syndrome, something that Thrupkaew does touch upon. This is when the writer none-too-subtly interjects her- or himself as a character in the story they write, usually as a powerful peer of the main hero. Mary Sue is actually a fairly recent term for me (though Kip swears it was mentioned in Textual Poachers. I knew of the concept, though, and it always makes me squirm in pitying embarrassment. I just knew them as twinks, or practioners of tiny sex.

I first encountered the term Mary Sue in Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog, Making Light, in the entry “Marching Mary Sues” (everything is better when it’s marching, even moreso when it’s a calvacade) It’s a great entry—beyond directing me to the MaggieFic’s Handy-Dandy Mary Sue Generator, it has one of my favorite lines ever: “If this power could be used for good, it wouldn’t be this power.” It also references the comment section of an earlier post that not only supplies one with the search phrases to turn up gobs of fan fic, but has a hysterical account of a Mary Sue at Hogwart’s.

I found the Mary Sue Generator fun, though I did misunderstand the intent at first; I just charged right in without reading the instructions. There are attributes and then blank word fields—I thought one entered the various attributes and then a little story would be genrated—a limited one, like Mad-Libs or They Fight Crime. But you actually just generate the attributes of your Mary Sue, which is actually entertaining enough—especially since I could get results very close to what I first hand-entered: Emerald eyes, raven tresses, an intrguing scar as opposed to a clever scar, though the closest I could get to “empathy out the ying-yang” was plain “empathy.” I have to say I didn’t know “Heiress” was an occupation and I was amused by the newly revealed relationship to a major character “Madame Hooch‘s Shady Ex-Lover”—but I actually decided to go with “Han Solo’s Catholic School Classmate.”

Triple Overdrive

A recent post of Barry’s (aka Ampersand, aka Keeper of the Old Church, aka the Wedding Co-coordinator) about sex and its apparent importance as a measure of success and normalcy has got me thinking about certain things, including, yes, sex. But more precisely what I see as the three main drives or appetites that shape and affect most of human existence—and our uneasy relationship with them. As I see it, they are Hunger, Sleep and Sex.

Under Sex I would include the urge to masturbate, which I see as being different than the urge to copulate, and with Sleep I would include the idea of leisure, the need to be lazy or inactive. In exploring these concepts, I am unconcerned with bodily functions (such as breathing or voiding), emotions, or spiritual aspirations. I am simply interested in the physical drives that more or less we base our lives and culture around.

The drive to make money or amass riches? Well, in it’s purest form, it’s a way to secure better, bigger, more sex, food and leisure. I am as interested in the demented impulse to acquire money for its own sake as I am in underwater-scatalogical-kiddie-barnyard-animal porn.

Given my interest in trickster figures, these are aspects that I have been given reason to think about often, as your basic trickster indulges in them to excess, usually to comic effect. And this is what I see reflected in many of the most popular of the American TV sitcoms such as Friends, Scrubs, and so on. The main cast of most of these shows are picked from very specific groups—no matter how hip or modern they have been upgraded to be—and then painted in broad, fantastical strokes: They are New Yorkers (gypsies, bohemians, not mainstream) Hospital Staff (Soap Opera fodder, pantheon of gods [doctors] and nymphs [sigh, yeah, the nurses]) Gangsters, College and High School students and those that stand between us and the End of the World. The border groups, those on a threshold. Not normal. Not us.

So let’s begin. Instead of saving the “best” for last, let me begin with what began it:

Sex

Okay, let me just get this out of the way. Though I sympathize with Barry’s emotional reaction, let me just state I disagree with his general premise. Sorry: in my experience, people in the real world who base their lives around sex after their early twenties are looked on with as much derision as those who have none. Phoebe Buffay on Friends would be classified as a nymphomaniac who endangers herself daily and should be urged to seek help, if not be ostracized. As for Joey Tribbiani, well, no one would take him seriously—hmmm, actually, kinda like on Friends.

The fact is, this is not the real world nor does anybody I know take it as such. The main characters on these shows have insanely easy access to sex, as they do to real nice apartments, up-to-the-minute wardrobes and expensive gadgets. And a more than fair portion of each thirty minute episode is dedicated to sex humor, because sex is an easy hook and easy to make fun of because it is a point of vulnerability. But Hollywood overrates the time and effort that sex, or thoughts of sex, take up in our daily lives.

I actually find that premise easy to dismiss. What burns my cookies is the idea that love equals sex, like, say, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the second season, when Angel, the vampire-with-a-soul, experienced true happiness, it wasn’t from the realization that he loved Buffy and Buffy loved him. Oh no. It’s when they had sex that his soul pops out. Gah… (Really, that makes Angel a bit of a girl that way—true acceptance through sexual encounter.)

I could go on and on about the unrealistic and unattainable sexual ideal for women on TV and in the movies (often conflicting, Ice Princess vs. Slut), but what about the men? Despite what Hollywood would have us think, they are not always ready to go. They can be, very specifically, not in the mood. Thank God. How annoying would it be, walking down the street with someone who is always this close to an erection?

Then there’s the sexual intolerance, actually, specifically, towards masturbation, which is not respected in its own right. Only those who can’t get any resort to masturbation, right? Well, no, not for me, and quite a few others I know. I like sex with another, I like masturbating, and the urge for both is quite distinct.

I actually find masturbation jokes irritating in an embarrassing kind of way. A sort of swaggering “oh, yeah, I can get It any time I want, so let me prove it in a slam against the losers who can’t” kind of way. Please.

True mundane sexual incompatibility never seems to be addressed; it’s either love of the Gods or the Psychos. Not the well, that didn’t work, or that was kinda icky. And it would be nice if the girl could be turned off by the young stallion (not the balding letch) for indefinable reasons. And vice versa, ’cept that the girl not be a nerd or homicidal bitch.

In real life, with those married couples I have known who have sought marriage counseling, it wasn’t because of sexual incompatibility or infidelity. It was a problem in communication and connection. And those people looking for a mate, male or female, do not emphasize the sex. They are looking for an emotional or intellectual connection with a person they trust enough to have sex with. (Now, “couple logic”, that’s a rant for another day.)

I know and have known friends who would be typified as average, mainstream Americans clubbers, been in Greek Houses, and those who would be considered promiscuous, though they‘d have nothing on Phoebe or Joey. And I have known those who indulged in the lewd talk because that’s what you do, right? Right? As for the scandalous affair that is on everyone‘s lips? Well, if it were common, no one would talk about it, and usually it’s two years old when you hear about it.

Sex is indeed commonly thought to be a measure of success—but not sex alone. There are other qualifiers such as social position, intellectual merit, popularity, etc. I mean, your average hooker outdoes all of us, but no one puts her or him up on a pedestal and toasts their achievements.

We aren’t that straightforward about sex; we can’t frankly talk about it or the possible consequences. Not like adults anyway, we haven‘t moved much beyond a grade school mentality in many respects. Though of all of the three appetites I’m discussing, it is the one that we can literally live without in a way we can’t with Food or Sleep. So why is it the most important, and why am I going to end up spending the most words on it?

Hunger

The human relationship with food is even more perverse than sex and usually treated as pornographically, with similar moral restrictions. Let’s go back to Friends, shall we?

A motto that I grew up with was “Never trust a skinny cook.” What, then, are we to do with Monica Geller?

Skinny? She’s a starvation victim. It‘s not just that she doesn’t enjoy food, she’s clearly repulsed by it. Then there’s the Bizarro alternate universe where she is a fat smelly geek, reflecting her adolescent trouble with eating. But, that Monica always seemed more content and comfortable and trustworthy than the starved-crazed “real” Monica.

Most anxiety relates to food—not enough or too much. In a land when a sense of never-ending supply and overwhelming portions is the goal, those that show any honest evidence of indulgence are scorned and ridiculed. Show us famine victims in Africa and we shriek and throw food at them without thinking out how it will actually reach them. Our insanity around food knows no bounds.

Food neuroses and limits are usually brought up at some point. And usually ridiculed. And when the actual food does make an appearance on your average TV show, is it pleasure in the healthy foods, nourishing staples or comfort foods? Oh no. It’s the bad foods, the naughty, the elite foods: dark chocolate, lobster, devil’s food cake. Not a tuna sandwich, not Nutella, not red beans and rice, not even a simple candy bar or a glass of water, things people I know will really crave and feel better by.

But the real screwed up messages about food for me come from the commercials. Talk about conflicting messages and unrealistic measures of success. And the gender politics? Brrr. Yes, women can do it all: a career, motherhood, house-keeping, cook every meal while eating Jenny Craig, keeping herself safe from exposing the fact she‘s “on her period” and following Jenny Craig–all without pores! Whereas the men are generally too stupid to work a microwave and so have to resort to fast food. But that’s okay if they can figure out what beer to party with.

Sleep

Or, as I said, leisure. You can find dozens of articles on how screwed up Americans are about simply relaxing and doing nothing. Most instances I see on the sitcom is the ruined vacation or the prevention of sleep, funny because, well, do they really deserve this rest? Shouldn’t they be working or looking for fulfillment?

I actually would put drugs under this category rather than Sex—and alcohol as well, as opposed to Hunger. It’s all recreation, a change and an escape. All good. We actually need this for our all-over health—physically, emotionally and mentally.

It still cracks me up that in the dot com days, all these fringe alternative web jockeys put in 80 hour weeks for their Company. It was a striving for virtual money at the sacrifice of their health and well-being. And I thought that this was the Slacker generation…

And vacations aren’t vacations unless you are doing something—skiing, hiking, cancer research, whatever. And as for the weekends, when someone asks, “What did you do?” surely you cannot answer “sat on my ass the whole time, and, by God, I liked it!’

Conclusion

Let me just some up by saying there is no real conclusion, no new thoughts, theories or observances. We humans are screwed up into tight little balls over our base—as well as our higher—impulses. We check ourselves against the perceived norm and calculate who are our allies and who are not. As with any other human venture. This, as always, comes out in the most popular tales of the day.

In these stories, human nature and appetites are exaggerated and often lampooned. There is usually moral judgement and retribution appropriate to maintain the status quo. Excessive behavior will be often punished, but sometimes rewarded depending on the offender. And though these stories reflect the standards of the culture of where they are told, they never were a place to derive an accurate picture of everyday experience or beliefs.

Spent all my money on booze and strippers

Well, no, not really. But I did have a good time last night during Christopher’s field trip to Mary’s Club, said to be downtown Portland’s oldest strip club.

We ended up as a group of about a dozen by the end, but no one unknown to Christopher except Mark and Elaine, who proved to be good sports when I had to cancel our tentative dinner plans with them last night and instead joined us at Mary’s (we had commited to Christopher first and simply forgot when discussing dinner and watching The Seven Samurai with them)

Mostly it was a gang of the usual suspects, including Kevin, Kip and Eric—Barry couldn’t make it, alas, he was working last night. Though I most certainly enjoyed the company I kept last night, I was disappointed that Barry could’t make it last night. Beyond the joy of his presence, I had met him at the end of the ’80s, when most of the comics we read seemed to have some scene or another in a strip club. The nostalgia value would have been interesting. Actually, I believe it was the late ’80s or very early ’90s that one of my favorite issues of Joe Sacco’s Yahoo was done, in which Sacco illustrated a script written by Susan Catherine detailing her experiences on the stripper circuit.

More…

So, yeah, good people, good conversations—though I often wasn’t looking at the person I was talking to, out of fear of being rude to the stripper on stage while she was performing. Now, the whole stripping thing was odd for me only because it all seemed so normal and inoffensive. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve gone to so many life drawing sessions at Hipbone that people taking off their clothes and presenting themselves has lost a lot of the thrill for me, or if it’s just that a moral circuit in my brain is broken. There are so many things that I just can’t get worked up over: porn, most sex acts between consenting adults, who’s doing whom, people who like 7th Heaven, and so on. Personally I save my rage for acts like rape, torture, racism, land mines in Iraq, not to mention corporate hanky-panky. And a certain Commander-in-Chief often gets my blood pressure up.
I found myself feeling perfectly comfortable at Mary’s Club. It probably

helped that there was a definite feeling that the strippers had some control of their enviroment. The crowd was all in all a good friendly one,  peppered with women beyond our group. Of course there was that one asshole who has to stand out with a swagger and macho talk. He was quickly dressed down by the stripper on stage who took his drink and sent him on his way. She was already my favorite, being as impressively limber and athletic as a gymnast and having done a routine to “Eleanor Rigby”. I mean, she wrapped her legs around the pole, hung upside down and took her top off, and she could keep one foot on the stage while touching the ceiling with the other (damn!). Turns out that she was the mother of our cocktail waitress. A family joint is Mary’s!

The only time I felt faintly uncomfortable was when one customer requested a table dance. This act took place off in a corner, half-hidden from the general club by a video poker machine. It wasn’t anything I saw happening, which was not any different then the act on stage. I think it was the fact that it was happening in a corner, half-hidden, that made it seem furtive and wrong though I know the only intent was discreet.

Or maybe I was reminded by a truly vile segment of Desmond Morris’s TV mini-series: The Human Sexes. He had just finished going on about how women body builders grossly deform their bodies. Cut from a female body building competition to an example of what Desmond deems the natural woman—a skimpily dressed big busted lass preforming a lap dance for some guy. I cannot even begin to describe my rage over this, all from a guy whose own figure more closely resembles the Venus of Willendorf than the presumed male ideal of Arnold Schwartznager.

But beyond that, my only discomfort came from the usual bar nonsense like cigarette smoke and some guy interupting the conversation Elaine and I were having to ask if either of us played pool—totally ignoring our husbands on either side of us. We lied about not knowing how and went back to talking and tipping the strippers.

I didn’t find it very sexual though. Not even tiltilating from the sense I was doing something naughty. Again, I’m don’t know if this stems from life drawing or what. Probably just not my thing, which I don’t believe is because I’m a woman. I know and have known woman who are aroused by this kind of display and not with that defiant “If men like it, I’m going to like it” attitude accompanied with either a mad glee or the look one gets before swallowing castor oil.

Stripping and porn in general are odd things with so much meaning and possible meaning for so many people. Some people are angry about it because it’s Wrong. Why it’s wrong splits off into many categories, from God doesn’t like it to it’s demeaning to women. But I don’t believe it is inherently demeaning and, let’s face it, all the clothes I ever owned and all the obscenity laws I lived under were man-made, not divinely requistioned.

I am not so naïve as to ignore the society and culture that we and Mary’s Club exist in. Of course along with sex comes power and the question of who has it— as Ani DiFranco states, “Any tool is a weapon, if you hold it right.” And though there are alternative venues featuring men- or women-only clubs, neither can shake the looming shadow of the forbear they’re a response to: the “Gentleman’s” Club, the Peepshow, 20 Nude Girls 20, XXX, Shag McNasties, and so on.

The first and only other strip joint I have ever been in was in Pittsburgh, where I was attending college—a totally different experience than Mary’s Club. In fact, it was the stereotypical Strip Club, with peepshow in the rear and adult book store attached, along with a sleazy atmosphere. Unlike Oregon, the strippers didn’t lose their thongs—which made it worse somehow. As Becca pointed out to when we discussed strip club experiences, declaring something obscene and then censoring it makes it seem even more obscene than the original thought.

And whereas I would never use my experiences or opinions to invalidate another person’s, the idea that strip clubs or porn incite violence or discrimination against women just doesn’t jive with me. Does it help? No. Nudity is vulnerabilty, vulnerability gives the appearance of a victim.

But I believe those who would harm another would do so regardless. I was molested by a couple of men growing up and I was shown porn to—I don’t know—get twelve-year-old me in the mood? But other adult men in my life then that I later found out read Penthouse would not only never have done that to me, but condemn the men who did.

I guess for me it’s like complaining about the color of the paint on a house while the foundation is crumbling. We are all taught, male and female, from very early on to appreciate a certain type of female ideal form and then our gender training veers off: males are taught that they should want her, females to be her. And just as the allegories of Justice and Liberty are represented by women, so is Sex, draped over cars or hawking electronics.

Really, Pornography just seems so much more honest somehow.

My sentiments exactly

I have recently started re-reading Tho mas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud to balance my reading of Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism by Marina Warner. It’s not uncommon for my to mix up my non-fiction reading a bit as pursuing one kind of fact for too long can be wearying. And it’s sometimes interesting to read books that compliment each other or give two different perspectives.

The epigram of the first chapter instantly brought back all of my I am fond of Laqueur’s book and analysis and why I keep this book around to refer to time and again:

The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are “the opposite sex” (though why “opposite” I do not know; what is the neighboring sex”?). But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world.

Dorothy L. Sayers “The Human-Not-Quite-Human”

Then we get to the good stuff, like historical accounts of maidens awaken from comas with “passionate embraces”, the pluses and minuses of the old belief that female orgasm was necessary for conception and, of course, inside-out penises. And that’s only the first chapter.