you ever have a fic get you in such a chokehold you start pacing your room and talking to yourself

I Am Femslash by SETI-fan

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

I was very surprised and touched to find out I’d been suggested as a femslash writer by readers to contribute something for this celebration, especially since I came out so late in the game, relatively. So, I decided that might be a topic worth discussing in itself: the role of femslash in my long journey to discovering who I was.

I read and see so many stories about lgbt+ individuals coming out in their teens or early twenties and knowing early on they were “different”. My situation wasn’t nearly so straightforward. I didn’t figure out how I identified until I was nearly thirty, and even then it still took some self-analysis to piece out what I wanted. This process was made a lot more complex than it should have been thanks to one particular speed bump:

My physical sex drive didn’t kick in until I was about twenty-eight. Nothing is medically wrong with me as far as I can tell, I just always was a late-bloomer, physically, socially, and apparently in this respect too. Don’t get me wrong, I had crushes in high school, but they were of a very PG-13 variety. I thought kissing could be fun and longed to hold hands and have sweet dates like I saw in the movies and TV shows, but when it came to the idea of sex? Ugh. I actually remember crying as a pre-teen when my mom gave me The Talk and explained that’s what happened. I had never had anything bad happen, it’s just like some part of me already noped out of that from day one.

(In retrospect, I’m very grateful I didn’t end up with any of the guys I crushed on in high school. Younger me…didn’t have the best taste and liked the idea of rehabilitating a “bad” guy with a good heart. Yes. I was that cliché. Thank you, life, for saving me from myself.)

Anyway, so in high school I wasn’t ready and in undergrad I was so preoccupied with school, work, and family drama at home that relationships weren’t a priority I thought much about. By grad school, I finally started feeling ready to give dating a bit more priority, but the old road block was still there.

Sex still didn’t sound remotely appealing. In fact, in many ways, it sounded repulsive.

I started thinking that I just hadn’t found the right person. I figured if the emotional side was there, then the physical side probably follow. If I really loved the guy, maybe that made the rest happen more naturally, or at the very least maybe I could at the very least tolerate sex if I didn’t end up enjoying it particularly. After all, I definitely found some guys handsome and had great emotional connections and blushing feelings with some. Maybe that could develop into more. The few unsatisfying dates and unrequited crushes I had didn’t get me any closer to wanting to explore that option, though.

Now, as this internal debate had been going on, my mom came out as a lesbian and I started acknowledging that option as being out there. I knew I had aesthetic appreciation for both men and women, I knew I tended to pay more attention to female characters in fandom than male ones and didn’t tend to go crazy over the actors everybody else did, but without the physical desire to reinforce things, I couldn’t tell where the line was drawn between just interest and attraction. But I quietly opened my mind to the possibility maybe I was a little bit bi, or at least okay with the idea that whoever I fell in love with could be in any gender’s body. I started getting flirted with by girls at conventions, and was flattered and intrigued, but nowhere near ready to take that step and actually make a non-straight move.

So how does all of this tie in with femslash? Because it was ultimately fandom that led me to a better understanding of what I wanted.

While I had kind of jokingly enjoyed a few slash ships in the past, the first one I actually seriously shipped was Princess Bubblegum and Marceline on Adventure Time. It started the same way I had with past non-canon slash pairings, “man you can find interpretations of scenes to make any pairing work with a bit of creativity”, but then the show actually was going there and it worked for these characters and I was in. The fandom was gifted with talented writers and artists who took the little hints and allusions the show slipped past network regulations and built gorgeous backstories and complex relationships for these two.

Unlike many people in fandom, I avoided smutfic in general. (See again my feelings of revulsion about sex.) But when writers I knew and enjoyed included scenes like that in their Bubbline fics, I stopped skimming past them and decided to go with it because their storytelling overall was so good. And then I started reading purely smut stories by writers I liked. And a little voice in my mind started saying, “So that’s what everyone’s been talking about all this time.” Suddenly, instead of thinking “don’t want to do that, ugh, maybe could tolerate that”, I was thinking “I’d try that, that sounds cool, ooh I want to try that…”

I’d never wanted to try anything before.

Around twenty-eight years old, the physical side of attraction finally kicked in, likely helped along by the coaxing in these stories, and to my great surprise, it only kicked in for girls (and a range of nonbinary situations that are more case-by-case since I dig androgyny too, but I’m going to oversimplify a bit here before this becomes an even bigger essay since the focus is femslash). I’ve tried reading straight erotica and felt the same lack of appeal. I can still find guys handsome and imagine kissing or cuddling with them and enjoying emotional relationships, but when it comes to going any farther than that, I recoil.

But suddenly it was like I was given permission to let in the feelings that, when I think back over my younger life, were honestly there all along, just muted and unrecognized. Heteronormativity, yes, but made harder by the lack of a sex drive too. The signs were there, I just didn’t have the libido to reinforce what I was thinking and give it that full meaning. Femslash let me tentatively explore that world before I was ready to take the first steps toward actually asking out or accepting an invitation from a woman in real life. Baby steps into allowing myself to feel those things.

And then the new Ghostbusters and Holtzmann hit me like a ton of bricks and I’ve pretty much just leapt off the cliff at this point, cheering all the way down. (Huge appreciation and apology to my best friend who’s had to put up with me turning into a teenager at thirty-one and tolerated my fangirling patiently. I’m leveling out some, I promise.)

Femslash opened that door in a way no other erotic fics or content ever had before. It’s stories about female sexuality written by women, for women. It was a perspective I hadn’t encountered before (especially since I wasn’t going to talk with my mom about her own personal experiences that way and the only other gay people I knew were men). It included women my own age talking about coming out later and discovering yourself and negotiating female-female relationships. And there are so many writers using it as a way to expose young and/or inexperienced readers to important concepts on healthy relationships, like navigating when mental illnesses affect one or both partners. Or how to communicate through emotional times and express your needs without shutting down and distancing from each other. Or even just the safe ways to explore kinks and how to provide aftercare and discuss boundaries and consent. God, the inclusion in some of these stories of how communication and consent don’t take a thing away from the passion and sensuality of the moment is incredible and should be part of every young person’s education on how to be a good sexual partner. I know not every fic is written to be realistic and healthy, nor should they be, but it’s so nice to see people using the medium to provide healthy role models as well, not just pornographic fantasy.

So yeah, I’m still at the beginning of my journey into embracing this new development and find someone to have a real-world relationship with, but the door is open now and I’m finally comfortable exploring those interests and I feel like I’m not going into this world completely blind and naïve. And I finally want to pursue a relationship like that instead of vaguely dreading it and hoping things work out okay. I don’t have to settle. I know I can find happiness and experience a physical relationship to its fullest. Femslash did that for me. I’m sure it’s done that for a lot of other young women. Hopefully most didn’t have to wait as long as I did to find that peace with who they were and what they wanted in life.

About the author:

I’m a biology teacher, writer, and artist who first experienced fandom as a 12-year-old obsessed with Star Wars and joined the internet fandom at 15, back at the turn of the millennium. I’ve been writing fics (under this same screenname) ever since and think I’m finally starting to get decent at it.

http://seti-fan.tumblr.com http://archiveofourown.org/users/SETI_fan/ https://www.fanfiction.net/u/2430050/SETI-fan