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

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I'm attracted to that -- something about authenticity and free expression of sexuality -- and yet, and yet. Given the role of power in sexual fantasy, why try to extract it from the expression of that fantasy? Aren't I engaging in power games when I write, too? As I said to another commenter, I wish I were confident that my distinctions are in some way objectively valid, rather than designed to preserve the sexy stuff I like while denying others the sexy stuff they like. To the extent that their stuff is oppressive and mine isn't, I'm okay with that -- but the problem is that I don't fully believe that theirs/mine and oppressive/nonoppressive map well onto one another.