Today's work/fandom collision

[rivkat]

So I am at this intellectual property conference, and the first panelist (who I like a lot) started with two provocative questions: How many in the audience thought of themselves as authors? (All of us.) How many had had positive experiences producing or performing in pornography? (Nobody raised a hand.) And here I am, sitting in the audience with the fic nicknamed “Kryptonian Sex Secrets” open on my desktop. How am I supposed to react? Would I have been more honest to raise my hand? I do think of some of my fiction as pornographic, even though it’s not a great term and even though it causes me some discomfort.

The panelist was talking about porn made with real bodies, not porn made with words based on imaginative conceptions of real (actors’) bodies. So she didn’t mean me, not exactly. But should she have?

Comments

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of Valerie Steele's academic work on fetishism, when she very deftly points out that the one truth about pornography and BDSM that so few cultural critics want to address is the pleasure of it. Women don't strap themselves into eighteen inches corsets only to make some kind of comment on the strangling effects of the patriarchy, nor because their daddies did something hideous to them.

This has to be related somehow to the way that, over in the literary studies corner of the academy, nobody ever admits to picking a particular genre or period or author to specialize in because they think that reading it/him/her is more fun than a whole day at Disney World.

[chase820.livejournal.com]

Is this an American thing, I wonder? That if you admit your work is somehow fun, it's not really work? Goes back to the old Puritan "suffering and denial are good for you" philosophy, I s'pose. We're such freaks.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

In some ways, I think we take that as read. But it's always worthwhile to say that I do this because I love it. Too few people get to love their work to take it for granted.