(no subject)

[elspethdixon]

1. OMG, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in The Road to Singapore achieve a level of slashy gayness I have rarely seen outside of, say, that one comic where Batman and Superman spend the night together in the fortress of solitude and watch phallic alien worms mate.

Seriously, I would like to know what people who do not see slash subtext or queer subtext make of this movie, and how on earth they explain the characters' relationship to themselves, and what on earth the writer and director intended the characters to be other than flamingly bisexual guys in a long-term open relationship.

Also, Dorothy Lamour is incredibly gorgeous, but that goes without saying. One of the things I love about old movies is how attractive the actresses are - Hollywood had a much wider range of acceptible female body types back then (though "white" was still pretty much a requirement).

eta: Oh, look, it's Anthony Quinn playing a vaguely ethnic guy. And random musica numbers worked in at random a la Vaudeville. Yep, this is old school Hollywood. Oh God, and brownface. Why do you hurt me, 40s Hollywood? I only want to love you.

2. Some day, I would like to be able to search for long, deliciously whumpy gen h/c fic without running across any creepy anti-slash sentiments. And unless you're some flavor of LGBTQ yourself, all anti-slash sentiments sound creepy. It doesn't matter how not-homophobic you may be in real life, because all I can see of you is your ff.net page with it's statements that you don't read or write slash and don't like it. Or that sidebar link in your lj to an organization that supports "family values." (adding the fear of possible creepy misogyny as well). Or that person who commented on your journal decribing all slash as "trash" and complaining that there was too much of it in the SGA big bang, whom you did not disagree with. Perhaps if you are not a creepy homophobe but are in fact supportive of gay rights and accepting of queerness in reality and slash is simply not something you find hot because you prefer a sex scenes to have a woman in it for you to identify with, or you just don't like any pairing fics, het included, you could say that, and make it easier for me to tell you apart from the squicky kind of non-slasher?

3. Halfway through re-reading Lover Awakened, it occurs to me that JR Ward has no less than three major characters who have been raped or suffered some form of sexual abuse. All three are male. (Bella's captivity at the hands of that one creepy stalker villain is spared from rapetasticness only because the bad guy is an undead guy without a sex drive, though, and it's very sexually-threatening and rape/abuse-vibe filled otherwise). This is actually pretty unusual in a romance novel, and what's especially unusual is that she actually does not do a horrific job of dealing with it. Not a stellar job, but considering the general quality level of her books, it could be much, much worse. Yet it's not. I've read a lot of fiction that does it better, but also a lot of wince-inducing fanfic that does it worse.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

And unless you're some flavor of LGBTQ yourself, all anti-slash sentiments sound creepy.

Very much so. I will happily read fic by someone who doesn't write any slash, as long as they don't have to tell me about it, or make excuses.

[elspethdixon]

I kind of wish ff.net just made you click through a giant "No one cares about your thoughts on yaoi" message in order to join, or something. Because the urge to tell everyone all about why you don't read/write/like it in, say, the author's note of your gen fic or on your profile page seems to be much stronger there.

[melannen]

Have you seen The Road to Bali? They get married in that one.

(Also, there is Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis. Just to make it clear that they know that we know that they know.)

[elspethdixon]

Road to Bali is next on our list (we got four of the "Road To" movies on sale from Amazon).

[grey_bard]

I'll give people leeway on the "No icky sex stuff EW" if - and only if - they don't single out gayness as the particular ick and are equally unwilling to write het.

[elspethdixon]

I have run across some gen writers who are evenhanded in their lack of interest in/lack of desire to read sex scenes or pairings of all kinds (when I was a teenager just getting into fandom, I read both het and slash but didn't want to read NC-17 anything, for example). But I've also run into mailing lists and comms out there that allow gen and het but not slash, or that make you rate all slash fic PG-13 and up even when it's G-rated, though there seem to be less and less of those in LJ/DW circles these days.