in which I am greedy

[sciatrix]

I am tired of soft lesbians. I would not mind them, but they are everything I can find.

Give me hard lesbians: women who have suffered, and women who have caused suffering. Give me survivors. Give me women who know what it is to live in a world that is unforgiving and know how to make love in that world anyway.

Give me broken lesbians: women with scars mental and physical, who are stretching their cut tissue into something functional. Give me women who know what being broken looks like and who know how to put themselves back together again. Give me women who don’t know they are broken and who are trying to fix themselves anyway. Give me women who make bad decisions because they are in pain or never learned how to do better.

Give me experienced lesbians: women who have had sex before and like it (or don’t), women who know what they like and what they don’t, and women who negotiate different opinons on what is good. Give me women who know that they have sensitive nipples (or not) and who prefer stimulation (or not) of different types; give me women with strong opinions about strap-ons, and penetration, and vibration. Give me women who have sex, because that ain’t just something that men do.

Give me conflicting lesbians: give me women whose relationships are imperfect, and messy, and complicated. Give me women who fight about silly things or looming, massive things. Give me women whose relationship is tense sometimes. Give me women who are unhealthy, women who need to break up, and women who have already mentally checked out and are looking for the next place to land.

Give me inexperienced lesbians: give me women who make obvious errors in interpersonal relationships. Give me women who don’t know what they want or how to become acquainted with their bodies. Give me women who don’t know how to be supportive of others, and give me women who don’t know how to care. Give me women who are greedy.

Give me f/f with one lesbian or even no lesbians at all: f/f with bisexual characters, or pansexual characters, or asexual characters. Give me f/f with people who have a variety of experiences, backgrounds, and tastes. Give me f/f with women whose tastes do not match up completely, women who negotiate different orientations or different preferences, and show me how they reach a comfortable medium.

Give me all of these things, because I need them and I want them.

I am tired unto death of soft lesbians. There are only so many iterations on specific well-trod f/f themes that I want to engage in, and soft dollies that sit next to each other and gaze emptily and softly into each other’s eyes is not enough. I want women with personality, with flaws and strengths and sparking character. I want women who step off the page or out of the screen and impress their realness onto my mind. I am greedy for them; I will consume them and roll their lifelike words into my skin.

Why is that so hard to find?

Comments

[zenolalia]

It's been a while since I waded into this particular subject (tumblr's atmosphere rendered it a dangerous conversation to have).

Looking back over my own archives, I noticed that the reduction in "hard" femslash happened right alongside the continuing overlap between fandom spaces, and radical feminist oriented spaces, where "radical feminist" specifically refers to second-wave (1960-1980) regressive and anti-sex feminism.

The increased amount of "purity" culture, and its overlap with fandom spaces due to tumblr's entire mechanics, led to a general sanitizing of fandom content that began with F/F content, presumably because radical feminism prizes F/F relationships in a very unhealthy, pedestal fashion.

And so, women's relationships with other women were pedestalled, and over about 3-5 years, femslash became a much more genteel, coy space.

Which, I mean, fair enough. I love fluff and I absolutely mainline coffee shop/florist AUs. But when the ONLY thing your fandom has on offer is sugar cookies, you end up with an iron deficiency that can only be fixed by eating a steak so rare it's bleeding.

I'm hoping that as fandom migrates away from tumblr and into more a more focused-communities system again, we'll see a resurgence in this "lost art" of making tough as nails lesbian storylines.

[merelydovely]

Really valuable commentary! My own awareness of the shift is super peripheral and secondhand, so it's nice to have someone else tie it to larger trends.

[sylvaine]

... oh. Oh geez. That makes this whole thing even more miserable. I hope you're right with that last part, too!

[sciatrix]

I wish I was as optimistic as you are! I mean, to be clear, I don't think that you're wrong that the TERF brigade and the general dynamics on Tumblr are intensifying this problem, but... focused-communities systems are definitely not the only solution. I say this because when I was digging into all the f/f meta I could glut myself on, shortly before I got frustrated enough to write this post, I actually found this extremely illuminating 2011 conversation over on girlgay describing the influence on femslash fandom of a popular archive called Passion and Perfection. It pretty much perfectly describes the tropes that were driving me nuts about these phenomena in femslash, and the time-slice that discussion is from would have been influenced by primarily Livejournal- and Dreamwidth-based fans. So I really don't think this is a Tumblr-driven phenomenon, eight years later, and I don't think it goes back to the last 3-5 years. I think this is a much older issue than that.

[zenolalia]

Oh, I hadn't heard of that archive before. Thank you so much for the link.

I'm definitely going to stick to my optimism, if only because people who would normally write hardcore f/f rather than soft and sweet have been put off by the lack of privacy and control that tumblr encouraged. Real privacy controls will surely help us all get our brains straight again.

But it's interesting to see the roots of this phenomenon stretch back that far.

I suppose terfs did have to sense a fertile ground for their ideas though, so it makes sense.

[sciatrix]

Yeah, like--I haven't done the in-depth study of TERF communities on Tumblr that you have, but the gatekeeping you've been keeping an eye on was in full swing back in 2010 as fandom on Tumblr was beginning to take root, too. I've mentioned a couple of times being traumatized by the waves of anti-asexuality brigading c. 2010-2012--it comes up a lot in the archives of Writing From Factor X, which I was publishing at the time--and that kind of pushback was flowing out from other corners of the blogosphere before Tumblr ever ascended. We were calling it out as linked with biphobia very early!

I think that Tumblr has played a role in traumatizing people and creating more fear around appearing not pure enough by appearing to shine spotlights on everyone and making public call-outs and angry misunderstandings very common. But that kind of toxicity is fully capable of making its home on Livejournal and Dreamwidth, too, and in these cases you can wind up with friends-locked content, gossip about who said what, and weaponized secrecy as tools instead. Are you by chance familiar with the Winterfox/Requires Hate/Benjanun Sridaengkew saga? There are a lot of lessons there to be learned about both how Tumblr-style toxicity was mainstreamed--in many ways Winterfox piloted a lot of later staples of harassment from the left--and also many lessons about the ways in which platform features are not a panacea.

[fucktheg0ds]

I remember reblogging this on Tumblr and can I just say, fucking THIS.

[sciatrix]

<3

[staranise]

Google found 0 search results for your keywords. Did you mean harsh vacant-soulled career women with straight brown hair who swear they won't be drawn into commitment again, until they totally are?

[oracne]

I am pretty sure I have read that romance novel....

[sciatrix]

I have definitely read that novel. For which I paid money after being assured it had won several awards... and immediately identified from its aesthetic upon reading as being serial numbers filed off femslash from a fandom I didn't follow. (I was right, incidentally; it was a Rizzoli & Isles fic first.) I don't actually have a problem with publishing serial-numbers-filed-off fanfic, but it was a bit of a blow to unexpectedly get exactly the aesthetic I was trying to avoid by looking for acclaimed and/or popular published f/f.

Eventually I gave up on finding a genre of reliably appealing f/f, published or otherwise--it does not help that I dislike Sarah Waters, although I do love Nicole Griffith--and went off to sulk and reread Don Strachey novels and a few beloved stories (fannish and otherwise) to scratch the itch to see someone vaguely resembling myself in fiction. (Not me, of course; that would certainly be asking too much.)

I should do a recs list, too, come to think of it.

[wellthisisnice]

You totally should do a recs list. I demand a recs list of stories, so i can bookmark it and take years upon years to actually read said stories (or even find the books).

[brainwane]

:\ My sympathies on the argh of how hard to find the stories you want to read are!

In case you would like a rec - have you already read Slow River by Nicola Griffith? EDITED IMMEDIATELY TO SAY oh of course you have, I'm sorry for redundancy.

[sciatrix]

LOL JINX 🤣 It's quite all right--as I said, I love her, but I'm certainly not averse to making sure she gets more love. I actually started with Hild and then The Blue Place, I think it is, which were both excellent.

There was a commenter who came onto the other big post that got linked on girlgay to grouse about whether the poster had even tried to find f/f to love, and I was thinking to myself "ah, yes, I need to signal that yes, I have tried, I need to head that sort of thing off..." Which is--I see what the irritation is and where it comes from, but it's also very very frustrating to be No True Scotsman'ed when you do bring up frustration with an existing genre that seems to have moved in and set up shop over much of the concept of f/f.

[brainwane]

I need to read more Griffith -- watersword recommended Slow River to me for the wastewater management plot (which I ABSOLUTELY ADORE) and I should find whatever book of hers would be the best next step for me.

Bleh the frustration of being No True Scotsman'd and of having so little of your representation in a genre that, on the face of it, ought to reflect you.

If you ever feel like giving Alexandra Erin's fiction a try, Tales of MU definitely has varied f/f stories and arcs that include characters of the sort you mention above (but is unfinished and sort of trails off).

[sciatrix]

I will, thank you! I don't mind unfinished, generally.

[glorious_spoon]

OH MY GOD THIS.

I'm not a huge fan of fluff to begin with (a little goes a looooong way, imo), and I've pretty much given up finding anything else in for fandom F/F fic. It seems like everything is either soft femme fluff or the occasional grimdark issuefic. Which is an issue in slash fandom to some degree as well, but you can still find slash that has, like, interesting character dynamics and a plot.

[sciatrix]

The response by the way I got to this sucker on Tumblr was largely "so you like grimdark? let me just--" or "but not everyone likes grimdark! I want happy endings!" and a lot of "so you want abusive relationships then?" and, like...

I hate grim dark fic. I just want more depth than just soft femme fluff? Like, I like femme women, I just want them to have opinions and goals and quirks and weird obsessions and personality. At some point, I am going to actually write up why Aubrey/Chloe is a bulletproof ship from me from the first Pitch Perfect (I need to watch the sequels), and it's not like Aubrey isn't a super femme character. It's just that she is also a perfectionist and wound extremely tightly and bad at identifying what she wants and incredibly competitive, and I love those things about her even as she is a quintessentially femme ambitious woman. Or my delight over Daphne in Ocean's Eleven, who hides behind cluelessness and is bored to tears and has one hell of a mischevious sense of humor. Or GOTG's Mantis, who is a different kind of very femme and very non-combatant and has a spine of steel under it, despite being raised to be afraid.

Pitch Perfect fandom actually made me very sad when I went looking because... it was like the fandom saw Chloe being super into Becca, which is a reading I can get behind, but there didn't seem to be much interest from Becca back and I didn't see much in the way of--of convincing me why there was that interest, or even why something might last long term given Becca's general wariness of emotional vulnerability. For me, the thing that draws me in is vivid personalities with bright contrasts, and it felt so much like the fandom was just softening all of those vivid personalities in order to Give Chloe What She Wants without... really... delving into the places where those personalities can be off-the-wall, or ridiculous, or rub up on one another in such a place as to create conflict that can be resolved, or even working on why exactly these two specific people like each other.

Incidentally, I love established-relationship fic, and this is why--I love stories with characters where the new relationship energy has worn off and now you have to learn to live with each other's rough edges and less-than-wonderful traits and everything else. I love stories about strong personalities learning to make room for one another. And I feel like that is something I see much more clearly shown (not told) in dudeslash, much more of the time.

[sylvaine]

My ongoing, eternal frustration is "why isn't there more f/f with plot???" It's immensely wearying.

[sciatrix]

omg YES.

I definitely need to make a recslist because one of my very favoritest f/f stories is also a novel-length plotty monster and I love it so much and everyone should see it.

[sylvaine]

GOSH PLEASE DO that would be so bloody fantastic!

[sciatrix]

okay okay:

when I finish my second page of grading, I can pause and go through all my bookmark hoards and we'll have us a f/f recs extravaganza. only rules are that characters within the story itself ID female (e.g.: yes trans women, yes always!girl!characters, yes yes yes).

chyeah, let's motivate!

[sylvaine]

Heck yeah \o/

(Also, have you seen the don't have to know canon f/f rec fest at my journal: https://sylvaine.dreamwidth.org/155122.html ? I cannot say anything about the relative softness of the fics recommended, since I've not yet read most of them, but I'm hoping there'll be a few plotty ones among the 160+ recs!)

[aurumcalendula]

This! (like dammit, I want more plotty (and epically long) f/f)

[aurumcalendula]

This!

[jadislefeu]

Absolutely and extremely cosigned. It's so stifling to have all of f/f shoved into a little box marked Pure and Wholesome. And like you said, there's nothing wrong with fluff--but there's something wrong with one note, instead of reflecting the variation of the world. It's an improvement over And Then They Died And It Was Very Sad, but I'm always still just like I WANT THE SAME STORIES EVERYONE ELSE GETS BUT WITH GIRLS WHO LOVE GIRLS THANKS. I want to see myself in my favorite genres, goddamnit. I haven't been reading much of any profic of late, because it's just so hard to find anything with lesbians in it--and I'm still gunshy from Black Blade Blues promising me a badass lesbian blacksmith with an undercut and then giving her an extended angst plot about fighting with her girlfriend about being in the closet and it was written by a man and BOY COULD I TELL--and just... at least AO3 has tags. I've found myself just kind of going back to the kind of mslash I read when I was 12 because it's so hard to find femslash, especially at the lengths I prefer to read (100k+, the longer the better). And that kind of no-conflict Soft Sapphic Fluff doesn't lend itself to the kind of length I prefer to read anyway! But reading mslash and het too much ends up feeling rather empty, because I'm not there.