I think there are some kinks that you sort of grow out of. That isn't to say that everyone that has a specific kink is embryonic in some way, but that person by person there are kinks that really speak to you for a while and then they don't. I think a lot of it IS personal change, but also, as you say, just reading so damn much of it. I used to have a bit of a kink for BDSM, and there are personal reasons that I stopped being quite as interested in it, but also CSI slash—well, I want to say "beat it out of me" but what a horrible pun! Still, there is a LOT of BDSM in that fandom, and some of it is hot, and some of it makes sense for the characters and the situations, but some of it errs not on the side of "you're just doing this for the thrill" but rather "this has become way too procedural." Like, long discussions about contracts and super slow builds that never climaxed. I remember reading some story that got to 20 quite short chapters and they still hadn't had sex! There had just been a lot of inner dialogue about what it meant to be a "slave" or a "master" and it's like, you know, I like some foreplay but this is ridiculous. It really took the "kink" out of the whole thing for me, in a lot of ways, and I lost any affinity I had for it, and put away something I'd been working on for HP fandom.
As for your yaoi experience, I think that there are some things, and some groups of people, where it isn't socially "okay" to have that kink or read that fanfic. Fandom has such a sense of itself as being so weird and always being afraid that the "mundanes" will think we're crazy that there is a lot of posturing within fandom: "I'm not crazy because I can recognize that that person over there is crazy. I'm not crazy because there are (arbitrary) lines that I will not cross." When I came into fandom it was the middle of the LotRPS craze and there was a lot of prejudice in HP fandom against RPS. And now I'm writing all this Idolslash and I'm fairly unrepentant about it and those who are squicked by it don't have to read it.
But I think there's a difference between being squicked by something and feeling that it's "wrong." I'm squicked by affair fics, by unknowing beards in slash, by Snape as a sexual being, but I don't think any of it is wrong. The people you were talking to implied that yaoi was wrong, and that led to your squick, but you weren't really squicked, so when you stopped thinking it was wrong, you stopped being squicked. I'm not sure I want to say that the point is to stop thinking certain things are just "wrong" because that could be my bias, and I'm not even sure if the whole phenomenon of the longer you're in fandom the more tolerant you become about these things is actually good or not, but I do think that the need to show that you are sane by pointing out someone else's crazy isn't good for fandom, even if it has been around since the very beginning.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regna
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-24 12:30 pm (UTC)As for your yaoi experience, I think that there are some things, and some groups of people, where it isn't socially "okay" to have that kink or read that fanfic. Fandom has such a sense of itself as being so weird and always being afraid that the "mundanes" will think we're crazy that there is a lot of posturing within fandom: "I'm not crazy because I can recognize that that person over there is crazy. I'm not crazy because there are (arbitrary) lines that I will not cross." When I came into fandom it was the middle of the LotRPS craze and there was a lot of prejudice in HP fandom against RPS. And now I'm writing all this Idolslash and I'm fairly unrepentant about it and those who are squicked by it don't have to read it.
But I think there's a difference between being squicked by something and feeling that it's "wrong." I'm squicked by affair fics, by unknowing beards in slash, by Snape as a sexual being, but I don't think any of it is wrong. The people you were talking to implied that yaoi was wrong, and that led to your squick, but you weren't really squicked, so when you stopped thinking it was wrong, you stopped being squicked. I'm not sure I want to say that the point is to stop thinking certain things are just "wrong" because that could be my bias, and I'm not even sure if the whole phenomenon of the longer you're in fandom the more tolerant you become about these things is actually good or not, but I do think that the need to show that you are sane by pointing out someone else's crazy isn't good for fandom, even if it has been around since the very beginning.