sciatrix: A thumbnail from an Escher print, black and white, of a dragon with its tail in its mouth, wing outstretched behind. (Default)
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?
sciatrix: A thumbnail from an Escher print, black and white, of a dragon with its tail in its mouth, wing outstretched behind. (Default)
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

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sciatrix: A thumbnail from an Escher print, black and white, of a dragon with its tail in its mouth, wing outstretched behind. (Default)
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