sciatrix

f/f writing gripe of the night:

the problem with having been wistfully deterred every time I tried aggressively to dive into femslash writing the first time is that I just have way less to draw on for scene structure than I apparently can pull from for m/m. Which is ridiculous: I’m not even limiting myself to standard human vulva-inclusive genitals, so why the hell is this hitting me so much harder than sex from a male PoV?

like, why is shit like “I would like clothes off, please remove” and “excuse me, please put your hand on my fucking clit now now now” and “I am nervy but I want to make my body feel good please and thank you” suddenly so much trickier from a female PoV than a male one? It’s not like I don’t have a ton of experience with the latter to draw on here. but okay, it’s intimidating, fine; I’m a baby writer, I am still learning this shit, practicing is okay. gotta think on it and chew a bit.

so I go looking for resources and advice. and…. there are none. fuck.

well, okay. that’s not entirely true. but what there is seems to be very focused on either anatomy, mechanics and safe sex (”how do lesbians do it, anyway?”) or on coming up with good words to use for genitalia in your porn writing. and. neither of those are my bloody problem here.

first, I am pretty well acquainted with the theoretical ways that you can get up close and personal with a cunt. tribadism and cunnilingus and fingering and fisting are not foreign concepts to me. I am aware of the difficulties with actually pulling off scissoring and frankly tits present all manner of possibilities, and all that assumes your characters have never heard of toys. I don’t need another list of dry descriptions of Possible Activities to do if you have two editions of Slot B.

hisses Scarleteen is a lovely resource but it is not particularly helpful as a guide to writing porn, thank you.

second, the wording thing people complain about is not usually what I’m bothered with. which: c’mon, folds? lips are right there, or rely on texture and sensation to describe things. obviously euphemisms like ‘love tunnel’ are Right Out, but I wouldn’t have been using those anyway. (also I’m gonna be honest: vulva is an appealing, velvety word. fight me. and cunt: also lovely. I can take or leave pussy, but cunt and vulva are buddies to me.)

besides, word choice normally wouldn’t bug me much–after all, I tend to not be someone who writes heavily on the anatomy references anyway, so

that’s stalling me just a bit, but it’s not actually the thing that keeps smacking me in the head as I try to write this scene and derail.

no, what I’m scrambling for is descriptions of sensation, of experience, of feeling… from the perspectives of actual people. And scenes with women fucking each other described in an interesting way that illustrates the vulnerability of the characters

and it’s not just me: cursory searches from my trawling through DW comms yields an anon femslash thread wherein the first comment when asked what people would not want to confess to off anon was people complaining about the paucity of anything but fade-to-black.

so is it something about the headspace? my internalized weirdness? what is going on with my head?

and gah, is there like a treasure trove of How To Write Good F/F Explicit Sex I’m missing somewhere? I’ll work up a bunch of links to all the best stuff I find in the morning as I trawl Dreamwidth and LJ comms, but I’m regretfully afraid of the possibility that there’s just nothing for it but to go hunting for the best f/f in my favorites lists, reread them, and brood.

oh, oh, the horror.

Threaded | Flat

From:

staranise

Ahh, so this post precedes this post.

This reminds me of a conversation I've had with my girlfriend, who's a lot more experienced I am. "I'm not used to the idea of stage-managing my own sex," I said. "Deciding what, specifically, I want to do. I always kind of thought I just had to show up and be willing and the other person would figure it all out."

"Yes," she said wisely. "This is the problem in the sex lives of many lesbians*."

*Meant inclusively, like "wlw"

I recently watched a Canadian film from 1995 called When Night is Falling, which is a bizarre disjointed mess story-wise but very pretty; and it occurred to me that while in the movie as presented there's no reason for the protagonist to sleep with her female love interest, you could rewrite the movie to say, "She's ostensibly Christian but already having sex with her male fiance; she must have already done a lot of work on her own sexuality and figured out a lot about her desires to go that far. If that were a part of her character that would explored, the eventual relationship with a woman would come out a lot less from nowhere."

I think part of why it's so hard is that you have to figure out why these women want to have sex, and what sex means to them--and that's so much more complicated than it is a lot of the time than with men. Because it's related to the real problems real wlw have expressing our desires or even knowing what they are.

But on the other hand, I think that if you allowed that question to form the spine of a story, you could do amazing things with it. Start with two wlw who both know the other's queer and single and working in an office together or something, and walk them through that process: Do I want her? Does she want me? Should I do something? What should I do? How might this end? How do I want this to end? What might go wrong?

I'd love a story like that. I'd recognize myself in a story like that.

From:

moem

I'm not going to fight you, I'm agreeing with you: vulva is a perfectly cromulent word, and a pleasantly sounding one at that. I have no idea why people so often seem to feel that it's weird or clinical. Maybe it's just new to them?

From:

siderea

no, what I’m scrambling for is descriptions of sensation, of experience, of feeling… from the perspectives of actual people.

I have a theory about this! I actually think that most porn has a problem with this, and that the larger problem is that we only have words and useful idiom for describing the experiences of active partners with penises. Most of those words are verbs and most of that description is actions. That is much more useful for describing the perspective of a fucker than a fuckee.

And I think this is a specific instance of the greater class of problem that we don't have a great language for discussing or describing internal bodily sensations, a problem that comes up when I try to explain things I am experiencing to medical professionals. It doesn't make it easy to convincingly communicate the experience of being penetrated (by anything, in any part of the body), or really even being touched. Nor any of the experiences of being a recipient of BDSM.

More thoughts, having to do with the repetitive nature of sexual behaviors making them hard to describe, and how this is like trying to describe evocatively the experience of listening to music. But later; it's my bed time.

From:

d_t

gonna use my first comment on this site to make a poorly laid out discussion of Words, yeaH.

For context on my past and present: I spent most of my active sex life as an unwillingly submissive bisexual woman and I'm now an ace nb transman with power bottom tendencies, and throughout most of my partners have been men. I'm going to occasionally haphazardly lump cisfemale chars and transmasc chars together because the language issues overlap and I'm trusting yall to keep up with me. I'm also going to use cf/cm for cisfemale/cismale.

For reasons that may be obvious, I don't have much experience with f/f wlw type actions. But, for similar reasons, there's a complete lack of trans characters in fanfiction and @sciatrix's complaint about scene structure is one of the things that tripped me up big time when I vowed to start writing more transmasc characters. The language/vocabulary is the second thing that tripped me up.

I, the author, know my characters want to fuck because I've arranged their universe to make that happen. I know the desire is there because I've put it there. And using the scene shorthand that m/m fic has given me, it's relatively easy to show that desire/lust. Because a dick gets hard (which has implications for arousal vs consent).

Without dicks, how do we write that desire/lust? There's no convention for writing arousal for parts that aren't dicks.

There's the obvious- vulvas get wet, clits get stiff, all that heartrate and breathing prose we're so fond of. But those are 'hidden' things, right. Dicks stick out. Easy to see.

I spent a while retrofitting the same action centric language that @siderea and @lazaefair mentioned onto cf/cm and nb/cm ships because if two dudes can have active sex, why not everyone else? 'she thrust her fingers' and 'he thrust his dick' can carry the same energy. 'she ground the palm of her hand against', 'she slammed her hips into'. The same vibe can be carried over for arousal- there's no reason a character with a vulva can't rub on their partner. No reason they can't say they wanna fuck with their words and their hands and their body language and their genitals.

Feel awkward? sure.

Still left me with a language problem. At least for me, it's awkward using words that I'm not used to. I'm comfortable using 'dick'. 'Clit'? Not so much even though it's got the same mouth shape. How about 'click'? How do you integrate strapons? For me as a transmasc person, the correlation between putting the hard dick on and fucking is hard to miss, but there's still arousal and play before the strap on comes out, right? How do words work, honestly.

I started hanging out on blogs that are horny on main. (fuck you, tumblr!) topmemesdeluxe normalized the use of 'strap' in the same way that I'm comfortable using 'dick'. Which lets me play with the distinction between a guy's dick and that very same guy's strap. lesbianmonsters used to post a lot of reader/creature fic and while readerfic and lesbian content doesn't float my specific boat, it normalized vulva and clit and female desire for me. Hell, even thirstbloggers helped me out. You know, the ones who go off in the tags. It's real actual experience there, people are saying what they want and how they want it. And adapting that language to my work feels far better that digging through the discourse on what's a good word, what's a best word, how do we say it.

I think I lost track of my point in there somewhere. Anyway
- we gotta make our own scene structures
- read your demographic's actual real experience. find your thirstbloggers. use their language. they know how they wanna get down.
- everything is awkward until suddenly it's not
- go write, no shame

From:

alatefeline

>> This reminds me of a conversation I've had with my girlfriend, who's a lot more experienced I am. "I'm not used to the idea of stage-managing my own sex," I said. "Deciding what, specifically, I want to do. I always kind of thought I just had to show up and be willing and the other person would figure it all out." <<

*applause* This is STILL TRUE even if you THINK you are good at self-advocating and feel able to do so in a sexual context.

An explicit personal example follows, feel free to skip.

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I went off-script from the start. Being so much more bookish than socially adept, and having well-to-do holdover hippie parents PLUS the gender studies library of a lieft-leaning liberal arts college, I ran with the idea that Consent Was Good and Pleasure Is Fun and Safe Sex Matters and Use Your Words. (As a note, this was about ten, twelve years ago, and I have had sex to date with a grand total of two people). And guess what? My primary partner and I were *still* at sea figuring out how to Words, especially since we were each other's first partner *and* both of us were then actively presenting a gender we would later realize we didn't identify with (she's a trans woman, I'm genderqueer and AFAB). We fumbled around with some bad scripts collected from cultural context, and one of the few things we got right from the beginning was that I articulated my 'yes's and 'no's because I had read the overt script that that was a Good Idea and failed to internalized the hidden script that it wasn't. We eventually had some great sex, but also had, and have, other ongoing problems communicating and connecting what we want and need. The later one-off sexual connection with a friend with whom I was exploring some poly possibilities was sincere, awkward, physically enjoyable, and definitely not something that could provide a useful script to repeat, because it only happened. I now think I have to have Using Words Well as an existing condition in a friendship to consider a relationship and as an existing condition in a relationship to consider sex.

I have yet to have sex with a person with similar genitals to myself, and I expect that when that possibility comes my way, it will be awkward as hell to talk about, too.

So stories like this - stories with wlw, in the broadest sense, believably negotiating desire and connection - would be really amazing for me, and achingly relatable.