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marythefan and I have had this running argument over the relative queerness of slash, and here's the thing. I was entirely wrong, and she was entirely right. Now, with the fervor of the convert (the very lazy, conflict-avoidant, cognitively muddled convert...), I want to try to make this idea clear to people like me, who think it sounds like bullshit at first. Hopefully it will take somewhat less effort than moving in with each one of you individually and talking for five years. *g*
There's this thing, this community and tradition, that is slash fandom. But there's also this thing, this somewhat less organized but no less creative and articulate and engaged group of people who are queer media fans. (By this you may wonder whether I mean "queer fans of media" or "fans of queer media." That's not an easy question to answer, but I'll try to get back to it in a second, okay? Stick with me for the moment.) It's a big Venn Diagram: there's slash space and queer space, and then a whole lot of people (like myself) who identify as both, who are entrenched in both perspectives and both communities. And many (most?) of us discovered and entered both communities simultaneously, which is why I think it's so easy for us to assume that the two groups are identical. They aren't.
It's easy to see from one direction, really. The world is FULL of queer people who are science fiction geeks and comic book geeks and pop culture junkies, but who don't give a hot damn about slash fandom. We all know that -- I mean, surely we all know that! Some of them just think it's kind of an oddball thing to be into, some think it's fine and dandy but not their cup of tea, and some of them are pretty suspicious of slash for a multitude of reasons. But they are definitely NOT slashers, and they more often than not don't really understand or appreciate what slash is. They are outsiders to what we do as slashers. They know that, and we know that.
What's harder, it seems like, for some slashers to recognize is that it's exactly the same from the other angle. Being a slasher doesn't mean you necessarily have the slightest insight into, or interest in, the queer community. The acafan and meta-heavy wing of slash fandom has been saying this for some time: that slashers don't necessarily write about queerness, they write about things that relate largely to straight femaleness. Actually, I added in the "necessarily" -- that's often left out of the position statement, which I think is vastly more correct if you include that one word. There ARE slashers who write about queerness -- both straight and queer slashers who do so. Some slash does that. Just not *all* slash.
So, if a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) has been spilled over what slash is -- what does it mean, separate from that, to have queer fandom? Essentially, I would say it's a space within Fandom that looks at texts for what they say about what it means to be queer. Sometimes that means queer subtext -- sometimes it means queer characters -- sometimes it means texts that challenge social norms about sex and gender in ways that are relevant to queer experience. But in order to do any of this, to participate in a legitimately queer fandom...I'm not going to be the border police and say, yes, you have to be queer -- but you have to have some legitimate, real sense of what "queer experience" could mean. In the majority of cases, yes, that's going to come about because you identify as queer yourself; it's normally going to be lived experience, not the vicarious experience of the ally.
I can already feel the objections some people are going to make to this. Queer people disagree with each other all the time! Gay men have experiences and concerns that are different from those of lesbians! Bisexual people have experiences that are different from both! Bisexual people who live within the queer community have a different perspective than bisexual people in heterosexual marriages! Transgendered people are a whole separate thing! Race! Class! Nationality! Religion! Individual difference! Okay -- yes. "Queer experience" is a false singular; the reality is, of course, "queer experiences." And that's what makes queer fandom fun and exciting -- if we all agreed on what images and media and positions spoke most clearly to us, there'd be no point in talking about it at all. Diversity, huzzah!
However, for the most part, what you can say is that people who identify as queer do so because they feel like their lives are different than they would be if they were straight. People who *don't* believe that are very unlikely to take on the label of queer or be very interested in queer analysis. How different? In what way? How should we use that difference as consumers and producers of media? What are the political uses and limits of the idea of difference? Those are the conversations that go on in queer fandom. That's what we talk about.
Those are not questions that are about slash. Slashers, on an individual level, may participate in queer fandom, and they may bring what's going on over there back into slash. In fact, I think that's been happening at a good clip for the last ten years, leading to an immense surge in fresh, interesting voices in slash that largely weren't there Back In the Day.
Slash is largely about pleasure. That's not to denigrate it as merely porn or merely entertainment: pleasure, particularly female pleasure, is a powerful and politically-charged concept. We still live in a society that is profoundly ambivalent about female sexual pleasure: we're fascinated by it and we resent and fear it as well. For women to take full responsibility for who they are as sexual beings is not unimportant, and for women to insist on varieties of romantic fantasy and erotic stimulation that speak to *them,* not to the people they've been informed they should be -- that matter. Slash matters.
But queerness isn't about female pleasure and female pleasure isn't about queerness. It's just that there are a lot of us for whom the two are related in various ways, and a lot of those very people have been hugely influental in shaping *both* the slash community and the queer fannish community, so that there's a constant flow of ideas and dialogue between the two that can even obscure the fact that it's a conversation *between* rather than a conversation *among* or *within.*
Hopefully this provides some context for some of the things I've said lately, both here and incathexys's journal, about my discomfort with the way the slash community often deals with gayness -- the OMG, THAT'S SO GAY! discourse. Because, look, here's the thing: slashers invented slashiness. Not y'all personally, but the current generation of slashers inherited a tradition and shaped it and refined it and evolved it, and we who are slashers, who are within that community, are the sole and unequivocal arbiters of what "slashy" means. Not that we always agree with each other -- again, half the fun! But it would be flatly ridiculous for someone to come in from outside the slash community and tell us what's slashy and what's not. We know slash. That's our turf as slashers.
Queerness is the turf of queer fans, not of slashers. You know who gets to say what's so totally gay? Gay people. Not that they will always agree with each other! Not that they will always *disagree* with what straight people think. But the thing is, people who are saturated in queerness and spend our lives thinking about the queer issues -- guys, we get to be the voice of what's SO GAY.
Doesn't that just make sense? I mean, I have Jewish friends and have studied Judaism and truly admire the religion and the culture in many ways -- but as much as an ally as I consider myself, I would never in a bazillion years blithely assume I could announce what was a so very Jewish way to think, act, be, believe. And if I did, if I wrote in my livejournal about how X character's actions were just, my God! SO JEWISH, you know?!? -- particularly when the character isn't canonically Jewish, but just pings my shiksa sense of what "Jewishness" means...I would expect my Jewish readers to look askance at me. It would be, at best, a weird thing to say, and at worst, an immensely insensitive thing to say. Even if they agreed with me that there was something Jewishy about that moment, I think they'd be justified in wondering wtf I was thinking when I said that.
That's how I often feel when I see people who are entrenched in the slash community but not in the queer fan community making similar statements about queerness. I get that slash fans are generally natural allies; I adore many of my straight sisters in slash fandom, and I believe that most of them truly are innocent of homophobia. But it makes me feel weird to listen to people who are allies, who are interested, but who are outsiders who possess privilege in this situation, pretend to operate from a position of insiderness. It's kind of patronizing, just like it would be if I charged around having all the answers about what, say, Asian-Americans were really like. I might be right in many cases, or I might be dead wrong -- more likely, it's oversimplifying to say yes, I got it right or no, I got it wrong. But whatever, the point is, I wouldn't do it because it's an inappropriate position for me as a white American to take. If I want to talk about Asian-Americanness -- say, because I'm writing a CSI story about Archie or a Buffy/Satsu epic -- I would listen a lot more than I talked. I would try to be faithful to what I heard people whose experience it actually was saying.
That so many slash fans believe that advice can't possibly apply to them -- freaks me out, actually. Being a slasher is not a Gay Ghetto Pass. It's one thing to say, you know, for the purposes of my stories, I don't need to know about queerness, because these characters aren't "really" queer, they're "really" reflections of my experience, on which I am an expert. I have mixed feelings about that statment, but I can appreciate the intellectual honesty of it.
My sense of compromise grinds to a halt when slash fandom claims the authority to parse not what is slashy, but what is gay. If you care about queer experience, do what other power majorities do when they want to learn about and be involved with a minority group: listen, listen some more, and when you speak, speak from a position of someone who is a guest in other peoples' reality, not from a false sense of insiderness or queer credibility. If you don't care about queer experience, that's okay, too. Just don't say that you do. Don't pronounce about gayness as a lark if the reality is that gayness is irrelevant to what you care about as a slasher -- which is slashiness.
marythefan and I have had this running argument over the relative queerness of slash, and here's the thing. I was entirely wrong, and she was entirely right. Now, with the fervor of the convert (the very lazy, conflict-avoidant, cognitively muddled convert...), I want to try to make this idea clear to people like me, who think it sounds like bullshit at first. Hopefully it will take somewhat less effort than moving in with each one of you individually and talking for five years. *g*There's this thing, this community and tradition, that is slash fandom. But there's also this thing, this somewhat less organized but no less creative and articulate and engaged group of people who are queer media fans. (By this you may wonder whether I mean "queer fans of media" or "fans of queer media." That's not an easy question to answer, but I'll try to get back to it in a second, okay? Stick with me for the moment.) It's a big Venn Diagram: there's slash space and queer space, and then a whole lot of people (like myself) who identify as both, who are entrenched in both perspectives and both communities. And many (most?) of us discovered and entered both communities simultaneously, which is why I think it's so easy for us to assume that the two groups are identical. They aren't.
It's easy to see from one direction, really. The world is FULL of queer people who are science fiction geeks and comic book geeks and pop culture junkies, but who don't give a hot damn about slash fandom. We all know that -- I mean, surely we all know that! Some of them just think it's kind of an oddball thing to be into, some think it's fine and dandy but not their cup of tea, and some of them are pretty suspicious of slash for a multitude of reasons. But they are definitely NOT slashers, and they more often than not don't really understand or appreciate what slash is. They are outsiders to what we do as slashers. They know that, and we know that.
What's harder, it seems like, for some slashers to recognize is that it's exactly the same from the other angle. Being a slasher doesn't mean you necessarily have the slightest insight into, or interest in, the queer community. The acafan and meta-heavy wing of slash fandom has been saying this for some time: that slashers don't necessarily write about queerness, they write about things that relate largely to straight femaleness. Actually, I added in the "necessarily" -- that's often left out of the position statement, which I think is vastly more correct if you include that one word. There ARE slashers who write about queerness -- both straight and queer slashers who do so. Some slash does that. Just not *all* slash.
So, if a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) has been spilled over what slash is -- what does it mean, separate from that, to have queer fandom? Essentially, I would say it's a space within Fandom that looks at texts for what they say about what it means to be queer. Sometimes that means queer subtext -- sometimes it means queer characters -- sometimes it means texts that challenge social norms about sex and gender in ways that are relevant to queer experience. But in order to do any of this, to participate in a legitimately queer fandom...I'm not going to be the border police and say, yes, you have to be queer -- but you have to have some legitimate, real sense of what "queer experience" could mean. In the majority of cases, yes, that's going to come about because you identify as queer yourself; it's normally going to be lived experience, not the vicarious experience of the ally.
I can already feel the objections some people are going to make to this. Queer people disagree with each other all the time! Gay men have experiences and concerns that are different from those of lesbians! Bisexual people have experiences that are different from both! Bisexual people who live within the queer community have a different perspective than bisexual people in heterosexual marriages! Transgendered people are a whole separate thing! Race! Class! Nationality! Religion! Individual difference! Okay -- yes. "Queer experience" is a false singular; the reality is, of course, "queer experiences." And that's what makes queer fandom fun and exciting -- if we all agreed on what images and media and positions spoke most clearly to us, there'd be no point in talking about it at all. Diversity, huzzah!
However, for the most part, what you can say is that people who identify as queer do so because they feel like their lives are different than they would be if they were straight. People who *don't* believe that are very unlikely to take on the label of queer or be very interested in queer analysis. How different? In what way? How should we use that difference as consumers and producers of media? What are the political uses and limits of the idea of difference? Those are the conversations that go on in queer fandom. That's what we talk about.
Those are not questions that are about slash. Slashers, on an individual level, may participate in queer fandom, and they may bring what's going on over there back into slash. In fact, I think that's been happening at a good clip for the last ten years, leading to an immense surge in fresh, interesting voices in slash that largely weren't there Back In the Day.
Slash is largely about pleasure. That's not to denigrate it as merely porn or merely entertainment: pleasure, particularly female pleasure, is a powerful and politically-charged concept. We still live in a society that is profoundly ambivalent about female sexual pleasure: we're fascinated by it and we resent and fear it as well. For women to take full responsibility for who they are as sexual beings is not unimportant, and for women to insist on varieties of romantic fantasy and erotic stimulation that speak to *them,* not to the people they've been informed they should be -- that matter. Slash matters.
But queerness isn't about female pleasure and female pleasure isn't about queerness. It's just that there are a lot of us for whom the two are related in various ways, and a lot of those very people have been hugely influental in shaping *both* the slash community and the queer fannish community, so that there's a constant flow of ideas and dialogue between the two that can even obscure the fact that it's a conversation *between* rather than a conversation *among* or *within.*
Hopefully this provides some context for some of the things I've said lately, both here and in
cathexys's journal, about my discomfort with the way the slash community often deals with gayness -- the OMG, THAT'S SO GAY! discourse. Because, look, here's the thing: slashers invented slashiness. Not y'all personally, but the current generation of slashers inherited a tradition and shaped it and refined it and evolved it, and we who are slashers, who are within that community, are the sole and unequivocal arbiters of what "slashy" means. Not that we always agree with each other -- again, half the fun! But it would be flatly ridiculous for someone to come in from outside the slash community and tell us what's slashy and what's not. We know slash. That's our turf as slashers.Queerness is the turf of queer fans, not of slashers. You know who gets to say what's so totally gay? Gay people. Not that they will always agree with each other! Not that they will always *disagree* with what straight people think. But the thing is, people who are saturated in queerness and spend our lives thinking about the queer issues -- guys, we get to be the voice of what's SO GAY.
Doesn't that just make sense? I mean, I have Jewish friends and have studied Judaism and truly admire the religion and the culture in many ways -- but as much as an ally as I consider myself, I would never in a bazillion years blithely assume I could announce what was a so very Jewish way to think, act, be, believe. And if I did, if I wrote in my livejournal about how X character's actions were just, my God! SO JEWISH, you know?!? -- particularly when the character isn't canonically Jewish, but just pings my shiksa sense of what "Jewishness" means...I would expect my Jewish readers to look askance at me. It would be, at best, a weird thing to say, and at worst, an immensely insensitive thing to say. Even if they agreed with me that there was something Jewishy about that moment, I think they'd be justified in wondering wtf I was thinking when I said that.
That's how I often feel when I see people who are entrenched in the slash community but not in the queer fan community making similar statements about queerness. I get that slash fans are generally natural allies; I adore many of my straight sisters in slash fandom, and I believe that most of them truly are innocent of homophobia. But it makes me feel weird to listen to people who are allies, who are interested, but who are outsiders who possess privilege in this situation, pretend to operate from a position of insiderness. It's kind of patronizing, just like it would be if I charged around having all the answers about what, say, Asian-Americans were really like. I might be right in many cases, or I might be dead wrong -- more likely, it's oversimplifying to say yes, I got it right or no, I got it wrong. But whatever, the point is, I wouldn't do it because it's an inappropriate position for me as a white American to take. If I want to talk about Asian-Americanness -- say, because I'm writing a CSI story about Archie or a Buffy/Satsu epic -- I would listen a lot more than I talked. I would try to be faithful to what I heard people whose experience it actually was saying.
That so many slash fans believe that advice can't possibly apply to them -- freaks me out, actually. Being a slasher is not a Gay Ghetto Pass. It's one thing to say, you know, for the purposes of my stories, I don't need to know about queerness, because these characters aren't "really" queer, they're "really" reflections of my experience, on which I am an expert. I have mixed feelings about that statment, but I can appreciate the intellectual honesty of it.
My sense of compromise grinds to a halt when slash fandom claims the authority to parse not what is slashy, but what is gay. If you care about queer experience, do what other power majorities do when they want to learn about and be involved with a minority group: listen, listen some more, and when you speak, speak from a position of someone who is a guest in other peoples' reality, not from a false sense of insiderness or queer credibility. If you don't care about queer experience, that's okay, too. Just don't say that you do. Don't pronounce about gayness as a lark if the reality is that gayness is irrelevant to what you care about as a slasher -- which is slashiness.
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Long-ass comment (I get carried away)
Date: 2008-02-15 01:08 am (UTC)From:Yes, yes, yes. Well said, all very valid points and I'd like every slasher to read this, so I'll link it in my LJ, not that many people read that... I can't really say I've met slashers who try to tell anyone what's gay or exclaim "that's so gay", but that's probably due largely to a smart and mature Flist. I'm sure they're out there in abundance, just like in RL.
The only thing I would like added here is a definition of "queer", because it's a word you're using a lot that might mean different things: simply "not straight", or from an academic perspective there's the whole "Queer Theory" which is more about questioning existing views on gender and gender roles (at least, it was at my Uni).
I feel vaguely that even if I were gay, "queer" takes a lot more living up to, if you know what I mean? Like you have to be a little more extreme/active/political/whatever to be allowed inside that definition. Some would argue that not quietly accepting the traditional or societal assumptions about gender etc would render you queer or at least having a queer perspective, but somehow I think you might not agree with that? It would be the more academic view, and not quite fair to the queer folk on the street.
About who gets to say what's Jewish, gay etc, it's not unlike how it's ok for coloured people to be calling each other "nigga", but not for a white person to do so. And I (fairly straight girl with next to no "queer experience", though truly un-phobic in every way) nurture some guilt about the way a zillion girls have marched in and usurped the whole "being gay" thing. I'm thinking especially of self-serving slash which as you said isn't really queer but reflections of the writer. I don't really see intellectual honesty in that - why write it queer if it isn't, and you're not? I find it a little immature and yes, patronizing.
And I hate knowing that a lot of queer people would probably feel objectified, demeaned and offended by some of the fic out there which frankly portrays the characters as less than actual people. That's why I like the use of honest fic labels like "pure fluff" and "gratuitous smut" when they apply. No false marketing. I stand by my userpic, but I don't claim to know anything else about having male/male sex, being a girl'n'all...
I should probably mention that I think fic, slash & het, is to no small extent porn for women. Not porn, porn, but rather what women use instead of porn. I hate to concede that in general, women really are different from men, and not least when it comes to the erotic. Men download porn, I read fic. And yeah, I rate fic to be more and "better" than porn. I'm very picky about what I read, and really good fic is porn for the intellect and for the purely emotional part of me. Before I saw the light of slash, I got similar kicks from het. This is a whole other discussion but my point is, a very small percentage of slash has anything to do with the more demanding definition of queerness. So slashers, take a step back and think about it. Then keep on writing the good stuff.
Thanks for the quality meta! / Josie
Re: Long-ass comment (I get carried away)
Date: 2008-02-15 01:35 am (UTC)From:That may be true for you and maybe it's even true for the majority of women, but that does not make it true for all. I know quite a lot of women who watch porn, or who, if they're reading to get off and not just to read a story, prefer written porn from Nifty, etc. than fanfic.
Re: Long-ass comment (I get carried away)
Date: 2008-02-15 09:25 pm (UTC)From:That goes without saying, hence my use of the words .
Generalisations are a necessary evil because if you have to always state every exception, you'll never get anywhere. In trying to be brief, I realize I sounded too sweeping.
I know that lots of women watch porn. I don't read fic either if I'm just trying to get off. And visual porn (film and still images) kinda produce an automatic physical response in me that written porn doesn't do the same way.
I guess the significant thing is that most of the time I'd rather have the pleasure of a good story (whether it turns me on or not) than of just getting off, and I believe that is much more often true of women than of men. Again, I can only speak from my own experience and that of my friends, whom I discuss sex with, a lot.
Preface my entire response with IMHO
Date: 2008-02-15 01:39 am (UTC)From:I tend to use the word queer much more often than gay/bisexual/pansexual/lesbian/omnisexual/etc because, IMHO, it's all-inclusive. Despite being active in queer politics, I simply haven't become used to people using the term "gay" in an all-inclusive fashion.
As for whether or not it takes more 'living up to' than calling oneself gay, my experience is that you may be right. People are more likely, IME, to think that they may be 'gay'/'lesbian'/'bi' than 'queer,' when they are first coming out. However, that doesn't mean that they won't eventually settle on the term, even if they're not involved in the politics.
When I use it in the fashion that the OP was, I don't intend for it to apply to people who have reached a certain level of self-awareness -- simply people who are gay/lesbian/bisexual/pansexual/etc (as you mentioned, I use it to refer to those who are 'not straight').
And personally I like it because I feel that it refers to the fluid nature of sexuality, in a way that terms that identify a specific subsect of orientation don't. It can include people who have had gay relations, but identify as heterosexual, it can include people who have found themselves more lesbian than bisexual as the years have gone on, etc. YMMV.
Not porn, porn, but rather what women use instead of porn. I hate to concede that in general, women really are different from men, and not least when it comes to the erotic.
Over-generalization alert! While I liked that you eventually brought that back to your own experiences, I think that using that to be true for all woman is dangerous (especially when relying on the dichotomy of you're either male and think like this, or female and think like this, since those aren't the only gender experssions, and those aren't the only forms of erotic entertainment).
I tend to prefer images to words when it comes to being a huge turn-on, and I'm a female. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy good erotica, simply that when I'm in the mood for an insta-turn-on, I don't tend to look for long stories.
Re: Preface my entire response with IMHO (ditto)
Date: 2008-02-15 10:25 pm (UTC)From:Oh, um, YMMV? *not so good with the abbreviations*
Any generalization is an over-generalization, it's in the nature of it. Dangerous, yes, but necessary to keep things moderately brief:
Did no one see me use the words, "in general"? Perhaps I should made more clear that by saying "in general", I'm stating that it is in fact not true for all women.
If I'm looking for an "insta-turn-on" outside my mind (and handy things they are!), long stories are of course not my choice either. I'll go for certain images, maybe porn clips, or even certain parts of written erotica that I know will do it for me quickly.
I just know that from what I've read, seen, heard from friends etc, men tend to be more visually stimulated than women. It can't be a coincidence that men's mags are full off tits & ass (or cocks & ass if it's a gay mag), and there's nowhere near the same thing for women that is at all widespread. Societal influence? That too, but surely we can all go along with the generalization that it's mostly women that read and write harlequin novels, fanfic, fic, slash and women's erotica? If you make a porno movie for women, it's not going to look the same as the regular porn, is it?
So I'm not saying that fic is the same thing as porn. And I know lots of women do enjoy regular porn, but when I think of the way women indulge in fic, the only remote equivalent for men that comes to mind, is porn. I also like to use the word "porn" for indulging in cool things like cars I desire (car-porn), pic spams with arm-porn or what have you... An angsty fic feeds my angst-kink like porn feeds sexual need. Am I making any sense here at all..? ยด:)
Re: Preface my entire response with IMHO (ditto)
Date: 2008-02-16 04:13 am (UTC)From:I wouldn't call someone queer who refuses that identity, either. I don't think it has anything to do with the term being 'wrong,' so much as allowing someone to choose their own identity. There's a lot of identity politics at play -- IMHO the same thing would go for calling someone gay/bisexual if they didn't want to be labeled as such. I'm just saying that I don't neccesarily see the term queer to be any more inherantly weighty/need more living-up-to than the terms GLBT.
Edit: I think I'm understanding the confusion. I wouldn't 'out' someone with the title unless they had outed themselves. I was trying to use the example of people coming to terms with their sexuality as one of the ways in which taking on the identity 'queer' can often take more self-analysis than calling oneself 'gay.' I see that I must have used confusing language, and I apologize. I never meant to say that I would call someone heterosexual queer if they didn't first identify themsevles as GLBTA/ETC.
Since I think I was misunderstood, let me give you the long and the short of it: I agree with the OP, and I like the term queer for those who choose to identify as GLBTA/ETC since it seems more fluid. ^^
Did no one see me use the words, "in general"? Perhaps I should made more clear that by saying "in general", I'm stating that it is in fact not true for all women.
No need to get so defensive, honey. There was a misunderstanding due to the way you phrased, no need to stress (it happens -- it's especially funny since I had also phrased my response in a way that made it hard to understand). I assumed, since you made definitive statements to the extent of:
I should probably mention that I think fic, slash & het, is to no small extent porn for women. Not porn, porn, but rather what women use instead of porn.
- that you meant them to be as definitive as they came out. And since you then followed that with a general statement where you mention that woman are generally different than men, I assumed that you meant to include the point you had just made as one of the areas that they are different. I assumed you meant generally to mean that in most areas they are different, but in a few they aren't -- instead of that you were going to list a bunch of ways they're different, and even those aren't true. I was misunderstanding your intentions.
Semantic arguements aren't my strong point, so I'll just say that I must have misunderstood your intentions, and am glad that you clarified your stance. ^^
Re: Preface my entire response with IMHO (ditto)
Date: 2008-02-17 10:15 pm (UTC)From:No need to get so defensive, honey - gosh, yeah I know. I kinda hate having involved discussions online, especially with people I don't know, because I easily take things personally - something I don't do at all in RL. You can't be as provocative as in a face to face talk without raising hell, either. Not seeing or hearing the person you're talking to sets us all up for misunderstandings, and it takes so much space to express yourself properly and exactly. Thanks for being levelheaded.
About the fic/porn/women thing, I have these moments where I really feel "that's what it is!", but when I look at the statement at another time I think, "that's not true!". I just think there's something there, but obviously it's arguable even for me... lol.