I do not want to be working on matlab code

[sciatrix]

...so I've been bouncing around here all day instead! (I am actually getting some things done work-wise, but clearly not enough.)

One thing that's been on my mind is a conversation I was having the other day with a gentleman I know, in which we were talking about how it can be really awkward and uncomfortable when you try to just... talk about your life and the straight people have no earthly context and stare at you like a deer in headlights, and you know you can either put on your teaching mode or you can just let it go and continue to be reminded that your context and authentic self is inherently uncomfortable or impolite in broader society. Which sucks.

Anyway, he was specifically talking about things like Grindr culture and jokes and dealing with well-intentioned straight cis incomprehensibility of where he was coming from. As an example, he mentioned the kinds of casual tensions in his group of friends that can happen when some people have propositioned other people and been turned down and some people have slept with other people but not necessarily as a long-term Thing and some people in the room really are in a long-term thing, but folks can just... set that aside and ignore it and have a nice dinner conversation anyway.

Which does not seem to be how straight people negotiate sex and sexuality, which, fair, different cultures. The different values about sex and the way that connection via sex is both less important and more important, though--it's hard to not be able to share big swathes of your interior life with huge swathes of the people you interact with, even if it's just gossip and commentary on the funny thing that X said or the way Y is feeling based on such-and-such context.

But it did make me think about the way in which media fandom, which is intricately intertwined with every female-and-enby-dominated* queer space I have ever inhabited (ace or otherwise!) is just as prone to using sex and sexuality as a means of interaction and connection and socializing and friendship rather than fencing it off in a little corner from the rest of everything. Even if actually having sex with one another is much less common in the circles I've personally been in. Stuff like--getting together in a group of three or four people to co-write 30,000 words of porn for a buddy who was feeling down, for example, or talking frankly and cheerfully about personal kinks and squicks (and using those terms broadly, sometimes to talk about both sexual and nonsexual kinks!).

I really like this friendly openness and integration of sexuality with everything else, is the thing--when you saying something about what does and doesn't work for you in fiction doesn't necessarily imply any value judgement on anyone else, or anything other than what works for you. I like the option to have somewhat permeable boundaries among friendships--but not all of them, and not in an assumed-yes way--and not have to figure out how to place every single thing on just one person.

But it does make it very difficult to mention to straight people large swathes of social relationships or communicatory norms. (I am reminded rather of mentioning Tumblr as an aside to my one straight guy friend back in April of 2017 and having him, baffled, respond "Who uses Tumblr these days?" And I thought... almost everyone I know! It's as ubiquitous as Facebook! Then I thought better of telling him that, because casual mentions of fannish things had been treated in the past as utterly incomprehensible and baffling, and I knew better than to bring it up--which is generally how I handle straight people and cis gay men, because this stuff ought to be opt-in.)

I don't really have any conclusions, but the connection stuck out to me and I hadn't thought about it before, so I figured I might put this down before I forgot that it was an interesting thing.

_{*the main exceptions are various professional organizations largely dominated by cis gay men, who are understandably uncomfortable with the concept of slash and may also be uncomfortable with the kind of Internet culture I sometimes casually refer to as "nerd shit" generally. Even with queer non-dudes I meet through work Twitter or other contacts, things like the recent Tumblr exodus or the concept of slashfic keep coming up in conversation, no matter how fannish the person in question actually is.}

Comments

[extrapenguin]

(Here via network!)

This post actually put a finger on a bunch of my feelings re: fandom and IRL interactions having different etiquettes. I also speculate that part of fandom's sexual openness is due to the fact we all interact via glowing screens – the pseudonymity and lack of "body access" makes for a lower threshold of sharing.

[lazaefair]

I was just about to post this. I can write confessions and talk frankly about private stuff no problem when it's just me, a text box, and another text box that spits out words in response to mine. Interacting with people in meatspace - even queer people in queer spaces - means having to marshal a lot more mental and emotional resources in order to manage nonverbal communication, gauging moods, etc.

[sciatrix]

One thing that occurs to me about this, though, is that not all of the spaces I just mentioned are primarily online--these days, my primary asexual community (for example) is an offline pack of Austin-based folks, and the same cultural norms teeeend to prevail there.

On the other hand, I might also just personally have a warped sense of what is genuinely private: I have had a lot of people ask me about my masturbation habits or my genital configuration if I out myself, especially back in the bad old days c. 2010-2014ish, and I kind of grew up in such a way that... IDK, once I trust people with the queer shit, it means I've decided to trust them more or less totally. And I have fannish friends who follow me on Tumblr or here, for example, or fannish friends I met offline and now follow me here, and those things don't really change the way I relate to them.

[lazaefair]

Makes sense. I think you could probably generalize it all as "outsiders banding together." If society has deemed a fundamental part of your identity a taboo, and you've decided to tell society to take a hike over this taboo, your standards for what's taboo and what's not will be different from society's, right? Whereas someone who's decided to conform will cleave to those more restrictive standards (or more likely, be conditioned into thinking those standards are how the world is supposed to be).

[sciatrix]

Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it. Also, because for a long time being openly ace meant putting up with a lot of intrusive questions, I think that I've just gotten desensitized with respect to my own boundaries. I enforce them a ways farther out from my own comfort zone in most situations there days, mostly because I don't like the way people treat me when I only maintain boundaries at my actual comfort zone.