shadowscast

One of the great things about LJ and fandom is the venue it gives us for exploring our own understanding of friendship, sexuality and other such personal things that might otherwise just get buried in everyday life.

What I mean to say is, I'm about to write a long and self-indulgent personal post, making reference to various themes or wanks or whatever-you-call-them that are running about LJ right now.

About friendship, friending, and LJ "friends."

I don't think I've explicitly stated my policy on LJ friends. Honestly, I just didn't find it that important. But I've become aware that some people do find it important—to the extent that there's apparently drama involved sometimes, and the new year was official "defriending amnesty day" or something.

So. I find the term "friend" kind of a misnomer here, actually. My flist consists entirely of people I find interesting to read. That's it. That's the whole set of criteria. And by "interesting to read" I mostly mean "obsessively posts about Buffyverse stuff." I've developed a bit of a personal connection with some people from my flist over the eight months I've been around, and I'm always happy when anyone posts in my journal (yes, I crave attention!), but if any of them unfriended me...well, I probably wouldn't even notice. It's not like I go to my userinfo and count friends all that often. I would notice if someone who's been commenting fairly often stopped doing so, and I might go to their journal to check if they're okay, but basically? I'm used to online relationships just drifting in and out. I may be new to the LJ thing but I cut my teeth on irc back about thirteen years ago.

If you have friended me and I haven't friended you back, there are two possible explanations:

1) I haven't noticed. Like I said, I don't check my own userinfo all that often.

2) I did notice, but when I went to your journal the most recent entries didn't relate to my fannish interests.

Since I don't friends-lock posts in this journal, the only function of my flist is the pulling-together for reading purposes. And, like I said, what I'm mostly interested in reading about is (Spike-centric) Buffyverse stuff.

I realize that other people have different understandings of the meaning of "friending," and I sincerely apologise to anyone I've inadvertantly offended (though they probably wouldn't be reading this post anyway...LJ is nicely non-confrontational like that). Here are couple important facts that affect my conception of what this whole flist thing means:

1) I've never met any of you in person. I've never been to a con, and don't know any of you from RL. The only person on my flist I've actually met is

myriadworlds, and she doesn't use her journal for fannish stuff—isn't really part of this nebulous LJ fandom community.

2) Unlike many of you, I don't tend to mix posts about RL with fannish posts. This journal isn't my RL journal. I mean, this post isn't so fannish...but it's about my relationship with the fannish community, so it slips in. My posts about work and my social life and so on go in my other LJ, with which I have an entirely different relationship. My "friends" on that journal are actual, RL friends, many of us friends-lock all our posts, and if one of them unfriended me I'd be genuinely upset.

So that's my perspective—that journal is all personal and social; this one's just for fannish fun.

About ::licking::, ::hugging::, and LJ flirtyness.

As usual, I only became aware of the ongoing controversy through second or third-hand references to it...but thanks to a link in

poshcat's journal, I think I've found and read the seminal text: Sex, Discourse, Et Cetera in

jennyo's journal.

The crux of it seems to be that some people don't like the ::licks:: and ::petting:: and pseudo-intimate playfulness that some community members indulge in. I think there were a number of different reasons for the dislike—from just finding it silly (and sometimes exclusionary), to disliking the way it blurs the boundaries between real and pretend sexual attraction, to being insulted that straight, privileged upper-middle-class women are pretending to be subversive by playing at queerness in this safe space.

Me? I like the licking. I like the play. I've encountered it mostly from

poshcat, and the first couple times I wasn't sure what to make of it, but I enjoy it. I lick her back. I don't experience it as anything but low-risk playfulness, though I guess there's a smidgen of politics in there (would Stephen Harper approve? No? Okay, then it's subversive, dammit!). I don't assume it means she really has a crush on me (especially 'cause she licks everyone, the slut...I love you,

poshcat!)

Oh, yeah, confession time: my first "relationship" was an online one. You know how I mentioned doing irc thirteen years ago? I had an irc boyfriend for a while. That was when I was sixteen. We'd chat, and then we'd type ::kiss:: at each other, and honest to God I felt like I'd been kissed. His screen handle was imoq, and in real life (as far as I know) he was a 17-year-old Mexican boy named Alejandro. I broke up with him after a while because I became sort-of involved with a real life boy.

My first real-life kiss, by the way, came three years later. I was kind of a late bloomer.

Hm, I've wandered off topic a bit. I did have a point...oh, I guess I'm drawing some sort of comparison between the LJ things and my actual (sort of) online romance. Umm, which is to say, I can see room for confusion there. But still, the LJ flirting feels more light and fun...maybe because we're adults with other real relationships and we know the difference?

But what if I'm flirting non-seriously and someone else is being serious about it? Well. Never had that problem on LJ, but that kind of thing happens in RL all the time. You sort through it somehow.

And honestly, I do flirt with some of my RL friends, male and female. Not all of them, not as easily as on LJ (where, let's face it, there's less chance of accidentally crossing boundaries since we lack physical presence)...but I snuggle with my best friends in a happy, non-sexual way. And I've flirted like mad with some of my friends with a mutual agreement that it didn't mean a thing.

About my own sexuality.

cathexys wrote in the discussion under

jennyo's post (linked above):
"while on a theoretical basis i love the ability of online personas to play out roles of sexualities and genders, i wish people would own and stick up to who they really are..."

(I'm not picking on

cathexys specifically, I just found that quote a nice entry point into a thing that's bothering me in this discussion).

So. I'm a 27-year-old white middle-class anglophone woman of WASP origin. I'm married to a man. And, God help me, I was a LUG. (Lesbian undergrad.)

Some parts of the discussion made me feel kind of defensive. Which, hey, that's all about me and my issues, certainly nobody was talking about me directly (hardly anyone out there even knows me, frankly). But I do get a bit prickly when it's suggested that it's not okay for people to experiment with different sexual roles and types of interactions in whatever forum they choose, as long as their partners are consenting and all that. And yeah, that includes straight women pretending to flirt over LJ—because who's got the right to say that it is all pretending, that it doesn't mean anything, that it isn't a joyful expression of some aspect of their selves that they never got to express before?

*sigh* Honestly, I just cringe when the LUG word comes up. It makes me want to launch into a long and complicated explanation of my own difficult process of figuring out my sexuality.

I started identifying as lesbian after going to a gay/les/bi youth group for a while—while I was an undergrad, natch. Before that I'd identified as bi (and before that, as nothing). I think the politics of the particular group pressured me into changing my label, which I was never very sure of in the first place; despite "bi" being in the name of the group, I remember one of the facilitators remarking that she didn't really believe in bisexuality. Anyway, at the time I was dating a girl, and I wasn't attracted to men at all.

But then she broke up with me, and a couple years later I accidentally fell in love with a boy, and then I married him.

And eventually I came to a realization that I'm not so much bisexual as asexual, and even though it sounds kind of weird, that was a huge relief. Suddenly all the things that had never made sense about me fell into place. It took me ten years to figure out if I was really attracted to men or women because the answer is neither. I don't experience sexual attraction the way other people do. I don't get aroused around people I'm attracted to—the whole concept of attraction is totally intellectual to me. (Then there's the whole fetish thing, but that's a different story entirely). I do love cuddling and closeness, but to me sex is pretty much just extra-intense cuddling.

Result: it doesn't bother me if LJ-flirting is pretend-flirting, 'cause all flirting is pretend-flirting to me, in some sense...but it's still fun.