Introduction/Paryt/Hang Out Post!

[amaresu]

So, apparently this community has 211 members with 308 subscribers and I bet you barely know each other. I know that I barely know you. So we are having an introduction/party/hang out post of greatness!

What do you do here? Introduce yourself in a comment, reply to other peoples comments, talk about that bizarre idea you've had and didn't think anyone else would be interested in, throw out some ideas you think this comm could have fun with, basically have fun and get to know each other. There's no wrong way to do this. Except .gif spamming in a top level comment because there are still people out there on dial up.

I'll go first in the comments.

Comments

[dagas_isa]

I write meta, f/f, and other female-centered fic (m/f and gen), and I actually really hate a lot of attention myself but I like saying things. Most of my fandoms are Final Fantasy/Anime/Manga etc, mostly stuff that isn't western TV, movies, or comics, and most of them are Yuletide fandoms. Mostly, I want to see some unabashed love and fangirling for (specific!) female characters and f/f ships going on. I'm really just very tired of the "how is [some series'] portrayal of female characters sexist" and "why do we not pay attention to female characters" meta, and definitely want to see more meta directly loving on or involving female characters casually (for example, a generic "how to write a sex scene" meta piece but including f/f pairings as examples).

[dharma_slut]

for example, a generic "how to write a sex scene" meta piece but including f/f pairings as examples).

You are so right. And I am so guilty of this. When I write about writing on lj/dw, I tend to use m/m examples because the preferences here are so much about slash.

When I write them elsewhere in the internet, I write them het, because I don't want to confuse the hets. But at least-- I write them women-led. I think.

[calvinahobbes]

I would not only love a generic "how to write a sex scene" featuring f/f pairings, I would actually also love a specific "how to write an f/f sex scene". I think I have seen something like that somewhere? But more's the better...

[dagas_isa]

I think I wrote one that was about approaches to writing f/f sex scenes, but it was more about tone and less about mechanics and things people want to use.

I do have a lot of thoughts about writing f/f sex scenes, but I feel really hesitant about writing "how to write an f/f sex scene" for a lot of reasons (besides the fact that I have no clue if any of mine are *good* or not). For one, I don't want to come off as being prescriptive, at all since even the general "rules" (like the majority of women don't orgasm from penetration) are going to have large numbers of exceptions. Two, I think about 90% of writing a good f/f sex scene is also applicable to writing a good m/f or m/m sex scene or vice versa, and that remaining 10% is really about differences in plumbing, which I'm not really sure how to approach it from a "how-to" stand point. I think it would help if there were specific questions to answer too, rather than just a big lump of "well, how do two women have sex anyway?"

[calvinahobbes]

You have some really valid points, and I'm glad you put them forth, because I thought about something similar, but I had trouble formulating it, so I stuck to my brief comment.

I guess what I think would be most valuable isn't "this is how two women have sex" but rather "this is how two women MIGHT have sex". I suspect that some of the reason people don't write those sorts of guides is that they would need caveats galore, but I think that's exactly why it's important to write them. So, yes, posts about plumbing and about rules of generality, but also posts about subjective views or even personal experience, whatever that might mean to a poster and depending on how personal they'd want to get.

It goes beyond just writing guides in a way, and feeds into body politics and the idea that we need to talk about our subjective experiences. Both to get a broader idea of what is normal, but also to get an idea of the ways other women's bodies differ from our own.

[dagas_isa]

There's definitely an element of body politics in there. Plus, in the of comparing female to male anatomy, it's much less obvious what's going on in terms of arousal or climax and there's not a lot of encouragement to find out. So while it's easy to use things like getting hard or ejaculation in a story as shorthand for male arousal and climax and have those be mostly understood by the readers, doing so with female sexual responses (in het or femslash) is more difficult. First for actually knowing as an author what can be used, and second for having them understood by readers as signs of arousal rather than some kind of weird malfunction or injury.

And as much as I love sex-ed stuffs and reading voluntarily shared TMI and how useful it's been, I admit I would feel a little skeezy searching that stuff out that's written for a real-life context in order to write porn.