Fanfiction and sex... slash vs. het

[heathernmoore]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., Catherine Keegan <keegan at m...> wrote:
> OK  I'll bite.  I've only recently started reading the HP fanfics.  I avoid 
> the slash stories.  I've stumbled into a few and had to wonder how I was 
> that blind to not figure out that it was a slash story until I got to the 
> sexual side of the story.  Some of them even had warnings but for a while I 
> was browsing through Schnoogle and Sugar Quill sequentially without always 
> checking the first page of information...
> 
> At 12:20 AM 12/15/01 +0000, Ebony wrote:
> >Questions:
> >
> >1)  Why do you think this double standard exists?  Is it reflective
> >of the quality of the writing or the maturity level/personal squicks
> >of the audience?
> 


  I've never quite understood my own reaction in this issue, but explicit sex scenes, whether textual or visual, almost *always* ring as "padding" to me -- fluff which doesn't do much to further the plot, but gets that impressive word count up. 

I've never been embarrassed by sexually explicit talk/advice columns or radio shows, objective talk *about* sex in the form of "top this" sessions with friends or sexual manuals (a la JOY OF SEX or 1001 NIGHTS OF GREAT SEX). It's always great fun to go and peek/giggle/rummage/scheme/buy things in the new wave of Respectable Adult Toy Stores and then show them off to/try to figure them out with The Current Boyfriend. And by the same token, a good chunk of my friends are gay men, and I have *lots* of fun going out clubbing with them -- I'll dress more outrageously and dance with more abandon as a straight women among gay men that I will otherwise.

So I'm pretty sure my impatience with sexually explicit scenes in stories doesn't come from an innate discomfort with sex itself. 

The discomfort isn't restricted to fan fiction, either - I can barely tolerate Jean Auel's novels because she increasingly loads them up with repetitive sex scenes between Ayla and Jondalar (or someone who is making Jondalar boring and insecure). She's a fine writer, though, with interesting extrapolations of archaeological theory.
Just as a lot of fanfiction writers turn out material of professional quality -- Lori and Barb being two whom I have read. (Although I'm more familiar with Lori's X-Men stuff, I'll admit.) Good ear for voice, dialogue, much smoother plotting than I can manage at this stage.  But as with Auel's stories, whenever I get to the sex scenes, my eyes do that compulive roll and glaze. Unaccountably, I squick.
  
 I squick at some other kinds of "padding," too -- excessive angst, pretentious symbolism, pseudopolitical rants (if I disagree with the underlying politics, of course ... ;>), cutsey-poo New Age stuff, Hurt/Comfort touchy-feeliness.  But the reaction doesn't have quite the same impatient flavor as the sex-scene squick. 

 I'm thinking the squickiness might be related in some way to varying personal approaches to personal space and privacy and intimacy. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to treat maturity level and personal-squick-factor as a linked trait -- they may be *wholly* separate from one another. 

 Is it possible that the audience for slash fanfiction is selected from a less cynical subset of the fandom? 

 Or have I talked myself into a corner?