Piggy backing on your last: [..]about f/f sex writing not matching up with how people's bodies work in real life: I actually feel like I encounter a lot more sexual realism in the f/f stories I read than in the m/m ones [...] the majority of erotica is written in a heightened register, and involves a good deal of fantasy.
The latter point is actually why the former works for me: it is a body physically like mine, and also a body that, like mine, is being constituted through both the physical and the fantastical. I think the element of imagination in sex is...not undersold, but I wouldn't have known to fantasize about certain desires for this body if I hadn't seen them in f/f technicolor desires, even though I knew the names and technical details before-hand. So seeing very intense physical reactions in bodies like mine was very much a "hm, I wonder if that's accessible to me after all?" (Reader, it was.)
There's a thread additionally of "fantasizing about women is normal" (teenage me thought "all girls do this" and also "I'm a mere ally to the gays", the usual), but that fantasizing about oneself is abnormal, especially if oneself is not a cis dude1 -- so f/f grounds itself in the first and expands to the second, kind of.
So basically, I'm interested in all the people saying that is not the case for them.
I ALSO wanted to say to the general discussion, that in the context of bodies&gender&fantasy it would be remiss to exclude build your wings, since it absolutely hits my fantasy/embodiment buttons in ways similar to good femslash (for obvious ch 56 reasons, but also way before that in a much more tonal/less explicit way). I'm feeling weird that it doesn't quite belong here, and thus the bigger thought that I have not seen any discussion on this thread of ostensibly-male-femslash-y or transfemmeslash, which. I realize is an ask in a small genre for an even smaller subset, but does inherently complicate imagination/body-empathy threads. And I want it!
And, ofc, opening tabs on all those cadres of writers you mentioned!
1. what's the deal with language here, are we still in this awkward format? What I want to say is: people who primarily/complexly identified with womanhood or felt complexly unidentified with manhood as teenagers 2. to be clear I am not even saying byw is in those categories,
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 11:42 pm (UTC)Piggy backing on your last:
The latter point is actually why the former works for me: it is a body physically like mine, and also a body that, like mine, is being constituted through both the physical and the fantastical. I think the element of imagination in sex is...not undersold, but I wouldn't have known to fantasize about certain desires for this body if I hadn't seen them in f/f technicolor desires, even though I knew the names and technical details before-hand. So seeing very intense physical reactions in bodies like mine was very much a "hm, I wonder if that's accessible to me after all?" (Reader, it was.)
There's a thread additionally of "fantasizing about women is normal" (teenage me thought "all girls do this" and also "I'm a mere ally to the gays", the usual), but that fantasizing about oneself is abnormal, especially if oneself is not a cis dude1 -- so f/f grounds itself in the first and expands to the second, kind of.
So basically, I'm interested in all the people saying that is not the case for them.
I ALSO wanted to say to the general discussion, that in the context of bodies&gender&fantasy it would be remiss to exclude build your wings, since it absolutely hits my fantasy/embodiment buttons in ways similar to good femslash (for obvious ch 56 reasons, but also way before that in a much more tonal/less explicit way). I'm feeling weird that it doesn't quite belong here, and thus the bigger thought that I have not seen any discussion on this thread of ostensibly-male-femslash-y or transfemmeslash, which. I realize is an ask in a small genre for an even smaller subset, but does inherently complicate imagination/body-empathy threads. And I want it!
And, ofc, opening tabs on all those cadres of writers you mentioned!
1. what's the deal with language here, are we still in this awkward format? What I want to say is: people who primarily/complexly identified with womanhood or felt complexly unidentified with manhood as teenagers
2. to be clear I am not even saying byw is in those categories,