niche lesbian post for lesbians.
i think we have a special kind of porn-sickness which is different from other peopleâs. if youâre like me, youâve been on tumblr roughly one million years and on the internet and more than likely involved in fandom as long or longer. and in fandom you ship two male characters. yeah, there are lesbian ships. but that is not the main activity of fandom. fandom is slash. like one of my earliest internet memories was reading a sexual slash fic about two band members of an early scene band. on quizilla.com. they used lipgloss as lube. i was 13.
in slash shipping fandom, you take two male characters who (usually) donât fuck and think extensively about the dynamic of them fucking. if you write fic you cast your innermost desires onto these male characters. when i had an insanely heartbreaking breakup with my first real girlfriend i got heavily into captain america fandom and wrote fic and drew fanart of steve/bucky. two lovers who get back together after decades and still remember and love each other despite literally being forced apart and made into enemies and separated seemingly by the ultimate barrier of death. yeah i really leaned on coping about never seeing my gf again by investing heavily into this ship. looking back, it makes a lot of sense.
anyway, being sexually invested in shipping, masturbating to explicit fic, thinking a lot about male characters fucking; it is a kind of porn sickness. because we donât want to fuck men and weâre not actually interested in gay relationship dynamics. we ship two men because of internalised misogyny and lesbophobia: male characters are more human than female characters, have more interiority, are easier to project ourselves onto. and we have no model for our desire. we are cast adrift from any continuity or hereditary form of understanding our lesbian sexual selves, because we are cast adrift from community with other lesbians, older lesbians, and lesbian culture and history. it literally has died out or been suppressed. this isnât the case for gay men who can trace stories of their desires, even if subterranean, from the greeks to the renaissance to oscar wilde and on. (obviously lesbian history does exist and can be discovered but it takes more work. like no wonder sarah waters is so popular. what else have we got? literally fragments of sappho and the well of loneliness?)
so when we project our sexuality onto male characters we are actually sickening and deadening our specific, lesbian sexuality. even when having sex with women or thinking about it we might be operating within a male-centric eroticism without realising.
itâs interesting to me because after a considerable length of time of not being involved in slash shipping fandom and actively seeking out interactions with a lesbian erotic imaginary, my sexual fantasies and real-life desires have transformed. like i donât imagine top/bottom dynamics, abo dynamics, male-style ejaculative orgasm etc anymore to get me off. and in partnered sex iâm not concerned with power dynamics in the same way, with whoâs active/passive receiving/giving in the sense of gay in male top and bottoming. iâm tapping into my real desires of lesbian-specific and breast/vulva/vagina-centric-activities such as massage, oral sex, fingering, fisting, tribbing, etc. and lesbian-specific dynamics of mutuality or stone sexuality. and it is so much more real and hot than before, when i was sublimating and transposing my lesbian desire onto a male-bodied and male-homosexual erotic imaginary.
on this site and other âqueerâ areas i see a lot of erotic substance which has to do with being ârailedâ and âruinedâ. where has that come from as the form of sex we imagine with each other? i think it is also a kind of disassociation to project your sexual energies and imaginary onto fictional characters, and male characters. it dissociates us from our female, lesbian bodies, our clits and cunts and specific forms of interrelating with each other. it further casts us adrift from one another. you canât connect with an another woman in the fullness of each otherâs femaleness and homosexuality when your whole system of sex is based on male sex, usually anal penetration. (not that there cannot be lesbian anal acts. but thatâs not what weâre talking about).
not to mention the rise of lesbians identifying as trans men in order to fuck other âtrans menâ. whole other order of sublimation and transference and inability to exist sexually as a lesbian women. i donât blame them, but i do see it as one of the effects of living an internet-youth and developing a burgeoning sexuality within a misogynist, male-centric culture (both in the world in general and within porn communities like fandom).
