Sexualized Saturdays: On Shipping Questions and Questionable Ships

How many of you here are in the Supernatural fandom? Yes, all of you? Then you probably know about NJWank2013: one of Supernatural‘s many chances to gank us all with angry feelings before the season finale. Let’s recap the events: At a Supernatural convention in New Jersey (“Salute to Supernatural 2013″), there was a panel with Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, otherwise known as Sam and Dean. The first questioner at this panel was a young lady who started her question with “I’ve loved seeing Dean’s character become more comfortable with himself this season. I’m bisexual and I’ve noticed some possible subtext…” She was immediately drowned out by a chorus of booo’s. While a bodyguard confronted her, Jensen said that he couldn’t hear the question, and that he planned to move on. “I meant no disrespect,” said the girl, and that was the end of that story.

Psych.

Sexualized Saturdays: River Song

Oh, Steven Moffat, why do you so often introduce ladies that you claim are bisexual only to never give any hint or evidence in the actual show that they are? River Song is not the first character to be outed outside of her TV show, but is there any evidence in the actual show that River Song is bisexual? And does it matter if there isn’t?

River Song is one of those characters that I find extremely confusing. Don’t get me wrong, she’s extremely interesting, but she’s a time traveler, we meet her out of order, she ends up being Rory and Amy’s daughter, as well as the Doctor’s wife and murderer. Everything with River was very confusing. Add to that a confusing representation of River’s sexuality and suddenly you need some damn strong headache medicine.

Sexualized Saturdays: Star Wars and Interspecies Relations

So quite a while back, I did a post on the Jedi and their sexual relations, but I feel the need to revisit this world. One nice thing about the prequel universe—depending on how you look at it—is that nothing is developed at all. Characters are personality-free vehicles going through the motions George Lucas wanted them to, and the universe itself certainly isn’t portrayed that well either. In some ways, this is a good thing, because it gave the Clone Wars a lot of space to work with. In fact, it gave just about anything dealing with this time period a lot of room to work with. But the Clone Wars is what I’m most familiar with, so we’re going to use it almost exclusively for the purposes of this post.

One thing that I always liked about Stars Wars, especially on the planet of Coruscant, is that there are a bunch of different sentient species all intermingling with each other. However, it doesn’t often appear that they are engaging in interspecies relations. We know that there has been and probably still are sexual relationships between people of different species going on in the universe. Every once in a while, characters will be revealed as being bispecies, and the Twi’leks in particular have a long history of being sold into slavery, with their women usually ending up as sex slaves. (The Wookieepedia article says that they usually were dancers or entertainers for their owners, because of how attractive people found them, but let’s be realistic: they’re used as sex slaves.)

However, the fact that there are interspecies relationships—outside of slavery—makes the Star Wars universe much more interesting.

Sexualized Saturdays: The ‘Everyone is Gay’ Trope in Fanfiction

I first encountered this trope in Harry Potter fanfiction waaay back in the day, but it’s something that’s pervasive in many fandoms: stories that feature exclusively same-sex relationships. Harry wants to be with Draco, and that’s okay because Ginny is with Luna. At least Sirius and Remus approve of the matchup. Then Hermione stops by with Parvati to say hi on their way to Dean and Seamus’ house and… you get the gist.

A lot*

A more recent fandom where this is very popular is the Avengers fandom, along with any spinoff crossover fandoms that include Supernatural or Sherlock. Steve/Tony and Phil/Clint and Pepper/Natasha (and possibly Thorki) with a side of Destiel and Johnlock? Par for the course, guys.

Let’s consider the good, the bad, and the ugly of ‘everyone is gay.’

Sexualized Saturdays: A Little Less Penetration, A Little More Action

“I know fanfic authors, well, I know what they like.”

So many of you may have realized by this point that I have been pretty heavily into Teen Wolf recently. No, don’t worry, this post isn’t about Teen Wolf too, but it was when reading some Teen Wolf fanfiction recently that I noticed something that I thought was pretty cool.

Many of the fanfics I read did not define a loss of virginity with penetration. There was more than one fanfic I read were mutual masturbation or oral sex were defined as enough of a sex act to be considered as “actually having sex.”

Now I’m not saying on the whole that every Teen Wolf fanfic is like this. I think it is more likely I just ended up reading a string of fics that define sexual intercourse more broadly than penetrative sex. That being said, I find it incredibly interesting that more fanfics are beginning to define sex and virginity more broadly. The reason I find this so interesting is because even now you have plenty of people who declare for sex to be “real sex” there must be some kind of penetration. No penetration, no sex.

As you can imagine this is frighteningly heterosexist and extremely problematic when we talk about virginity.

Sexualized Saturdays: Gay Characters in Children’s Cartoons

I’m doing a lot of Netflix watching right now, and I came to an interesting revelation while watching and researching Gargoyles.

Lexington is gay.

That’s not a guess. That’s the word of show creator Greg Weisman. In various interviews, Weisman admitted that, as the character was further developed, Lexington’s sexual orientation was realized.

Sexualized Saturdays: Queerbaiting

Queerbaiting happens when The Powers That Be (TPTB) of a show or other work openly acknowledge that their text could have a queer reading, but don’t ever actually make any of their characters queer. It’s when TPTB try to satisfy the slash-loving part of fandom’s need for shippy content by allowing their characters to engage in long, heated stares, share dialogue that could be read romantically, and be physically affectionate with each other—without alienating their straight audience and pigeonholing their show into a ‘gay and lesbian thing’. It’s the showrunners placing suggestive things into the text and then yelling “No homo!”

This creates a couple of problems.

First, this plays into the assumption on the part of TPTB that fans who want to see real queer relationships on a show are simply fangirls who fetishize gay relationships. They pay lip service to the idea of the ship in question, but don’t take it seriously, because they assume that the people who want it to become canon are just in it to see two hot guys (or girls) make out. This is patently not true. Although gay-fetishizers will always be a part of slash fandom, a large part of the fandom is queer, and we read these characters interactions as queer because we are desperate for shows that represent our own experiences.

Second, whether intentionally or unintentionally, queerbaiting perpetuates the idea that queer relationships are not important and that they’re not worthy of representation. It’s like, “Sure, we’ll give you some suggestive dialogue, but actually spend time telling a story about you in a thoughtful and complex way? No, we can’t be arsed. You don’t matter enough for that.”

Sexualized Saturdays: Hunter Gathers from The Venture Bros.

It’s always hard to find good homosexual characters in pop culture, but finding any transgender, gender fluid, or nongender characters, let alone a good one, is especially hard.

The Venture Bros. is one of those shows that seems really weird based on any previews or short clips you may have seen, but it actually has some of the best writing I have ever seen in a show, especially when it comes to minority characters. In the show, Brock Samson is a bodyguard and agent working for the OSI or Office of Secret Intelligence. He was first trained by Colonel Hunter Gathers, his mentor, and a man he says was like a father to him. Hunter also might be transgender.

(The pronouns Hunter is addressed as changes based on his biological sex in the show. Since Hunter is currently a male on the show I will refer to him with male pronouns.)

Sexualized Saturdays: Rape Culture

WARNING: I’M UPSET, SO MY NORMAL PROFESSIONAL LANGUAGE FILTER IS BROKEN. YOU’RE WARNED. THERE ARE ALSO MULTIPLE PICTURES DEPICTING RAPE AS FUNNY. WONDERING IF THE PICTURES ARE FUNNY? VISIT THIS SITE.

If you’ve been following the news, odds are you probably know a good bit about the Steubenville, Ohio rape trial. The case centers around two Steubenville High School football players charged with raping a drunk teenage girl.

Pictured: Michael Nodianos. One of the people making light of the girl’s rape.

The case is unique in that hacker group KnightSec first drew attention to the case by leaking a video showing students joking that the victim “is so raped her puss is about as dry as the sun right now.”

If you didn’t throw up a little bit, get the fuck out. Better yet, sit down and learn something.

Sexualized Saturdays: Why Trigger Warnings are Important

Trigger Warning: rape, abuse, PTSD

This post is going to be a little different than the norm. While I was inspired to write this after reading a really bad piece of fanfiction, which pertains to geekdom as all our posts should, my research into the topic led me away from geekdom. And one of the first sites I found was an article attacking feminists and calling trigger warnings a “feminist online fad”. So in order to properly explain why I believe trigger warnings are important in fanfiction, blog articles, television programs, etc., I’m going to look at and try to debunk some of the numerous reasons why other people believe trigger warnings are counterproductive.

There seems to be a wide range of opinions on this topic, and some of these opinions are, quite frankly, rude and rather sexist.