A Note on FemSwap Fic

[x_los]

It confuses me that so much f/f swap danmei fic features A Top, who mostly doesn’t come. If she does come, it’s from watching her partner have a nice time, ‘the pressure of the strap on’ (sweet baby jesus that’s not how straps work, and at this point it’s not a fun fantasy! to pretend that it is, it’s just weird, like saying ‘many women can come from having their elbows jiggled’: this is the ‘Charlie Brown had hos’ of lesbian sex), or via a quick, furtive self-pleasuring that the narrative spends no time on, because it only really cares about the dick-recipient’s experience. The ‘bottom’ rarely so much as touches the ‘top’ in these pieces’ sex scenes, even just affectionately.

Stone butches sure do happen in real life. This dynamic, however, is not born of an absence of desire, but of a differently-shaped desire, which must be accommodated and catered to differently. It can be written really sexily. There’s a great Ranwan that goes in, here, in which the couple discuss or refer to this difference in their needs at all, ever, rather than naturalising it into 'how relationships usually work and/or must work'. I suppose that not every fic with sex needs to feature both partners coming, or to even imply they ever will. But it’s downright weird when 90% of femslash is like this, with no discussion of the fact. Mechanically—in part, I’m sure, due to greater experience with writing m/m slash—much of this sex writing feels as though it’s actually about men: the ways their bodies work, or at least the ways these bodies work in the already-fantastic contexts of slash. But I don’t experience sexual envy of men, or necessarily want to read about them in an f/f scenario. They’re fine I guess, but why are they here, when they’re manifestly not what the author wants to engage with in this text and not what I’ve been told to come and see?

And yeah, some girls do power play shit. Topping can happen. But not everyone, every time? Mostly sex between women really does not work this way, so it’s disconcerting and a turn off to see this practice (and an extremely one-sided form thereof) again, naturalised right into the woodwork, with the implication being that 'the top' is relentlessly desiring, but disinterested in care or satisfaction themselves. (I suspect this is concomitant with a rising interest in conceptualising queer male sex in terms of tops and bottoms, when that’s not necessary or always useful even in the distanced-erotica of slash.) In situations where I like both characters (i.e. the only time I can be bothered to read fic), I would like them both to be emotionally and physically involved in the story’s goings-on. Otherwise, no amount of sex writing is successfully sexy. Even a ‘stone’ dynamic is still engaging in these respects: the means of care and satisfaction are different rather than absent.

The fantasy in play cannot be ‘an emotionally evacuated, rich vibrating-dildo without personhood loves me’, because something without emotional needs of its own cannot love. And it’s just not even hot? Oo, you don’t even get to touch the other person!! They seem to be having a crap time up there! Ooo, mm, baby. ‘My fantasy is that the character I project onto just lies back and is nominally used for pleasure (thus escaping even the guilt of wanting), but actually receives all the care of their non-entity partner and even the encapsulating narrative. I receive: all the benefits of stratified capital accumulation (but it’s my partner’s money, so I am guiltless in its acquisition and distribution), my partner receives: hole.’ At that point just get/write about one of those German sex machines, because you actively do not desire a partner?