Cissexual Vagphobia

[Katvonblackdeath]

Dear plague spreading sisters!

Look! Here's another new thing for people to be. Yep. Vagphobic.

From the twitter feed Vagphobia is mainly suffered by gay men who have a weird sexual desire towards other people with penises.

Although I suppose females could be Vagphobic too although.
ARRGHHH what is that in my pants.

I think there's several intertwining things happening here:

Girls and young women - completely understandably - are wanting to remove themselves from girlhood/womanhood, because girls and women get such shit in life, and during puberty this is a real shocker. They also see how transwomen are validated and celebrated, and their wants and needs met, in a way that actual girls and women's are not. Being trans from this perspective looks awfully attractive.

Girls and young women are also being told that they can genuinely, really, truly change sex. That they will be loved and affirmed for being their "true" male selves, and everyone will celebrate them as actual men - and since actual men are celebrated all the fucking time, this is a very attractive proposition.

The third, related thing: girls and young women who hang out on places like tumblr (where they will have it constantly affirmed that it is indeed possible to change sex) may well also be reading slash (m/m) fanfic. Now, I'm not knocking slashfic at all - I really enjoy the thing of reading, at one remove, romances where I don't have to think about the gendered expectations put on women in relationships - but they are idealised, mostly are written by women and not by gay men, and they are fiction. But if I was very, very young, and was convinced I could really, truly become a man, I would find these fantasy depictions of wonderful gay male relationships - where of course the heroes could never be so mean and transphobic to differentiate between men who have dicks and men who don't - very attractive indeed.

Hence straight girls and young women falling into the trap that gay men will accept them as gay men too.

Gay men, being men and therefore not having a lifetime of "be nice, put your own needs last" drummed into them, make no bones about wanting dick and being completely uninterested in female bodies.

Cue all this anguish from these young straight women who have had their castles in the air shot down.

That’s what struck me about the two trans men on that channel four programme the other day. They either have to live with their original genitals and be “rejected” (or surely not feeling right about using those genitals for sex, since they are in the wrong sex) or risk bottom surgery which may end up not fully functioning and with no sensation.

Teens, especially if they’ve not gone through puberty and the accompanying increase in libido etc, can’t possibly comprehend the long term consequences of such a decision.

Much as I feel a bit ick even contemplating the sex lives of others it makes me so sad that they are condemning themselves to potentially missing out on such a huge part of adult life.

Depending on the type of erectile mechanism chosen, transmen have to get their ‘penis’ overhauled every 5-20 years, so even if they are lucky enough to get a decent surgical outcome the first time, they still have more risk to face.

Erectile mechanism?

I’m scared to google that. 😳 Would you mind elaborating please?

I think in some cases there's a pump in one of the pretendy bollocks and the squeeze it to inflate the neophallus, like what you'd do if your bike tire went flat.

Which I'm sure is super erotic for everyone involved.

Voila!

www.trans-health.com/2013/penile-implants-guide/

There are three different types to choose from. Apparently.

One sounds like a fleshy pipe cleaner, frankly. Or one of those foamy poseable toys from the 70s. The Bendy Bully of genital surgery.

Thanks both. I shall refrain from opening the link until my DCs aren’t next to me :o

But why why why are girls being encouraged down that road :(

They either have to live with their original genitals and be “rejected” or risk bottom surgery which may end up not fully functioning and with no sensation

yes, this. Transmen often pass really well. So well that I think it's unlikely that lesbians or straight men would find them attractive.

But as discussed above, gay men tend to want - yunno - 2 penises in the relationship

and straight women tend to want at least one penis around.

so dating must be pretty tricky I think.

It's interesting that the Guardian is currently running a series about the horrific impact of poorly-tested and poorly-regulated medical implants.

I wonder if anyone at the Guardian is capable of joining the dots.

www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2018/nov/27/untested-and-unsafe-the-medical-implants-scandal

I think soaps are playing h to this too.

There’s a transman character in Emmerdale now. Half an hour after startling his mother with the fact he’s now a man everyone in the entire village accepts he’s a man, and the hottest teen girl in the show has fallen for him.

This is ‘Mary Sue’ fanfic broadcast to millions of viewers every week night.

At times I miss having no-bullshit characters like Blanche in Coronation Street. There’s no way she’d play along with this stuff.

This is ‘Mary Sue’ fanfic broadcast to millions of viewers every week night.

Snorting with laughter at this. So true.

And Archery is right: slash fiction, as written by women for women, is in part about constructing a fictional space in which to examine what a romantic relationship could look like stripped of the power imbalance inherent in popular culture's depictions of het relationships. It's not about depicting realistic gay relationships or hook up culture. And most adult readers will realise this, but 13 year olds won't necessarily.

Who is Mary Sue? 😳

I read that implant page. Bloody hell

It seems you can catch stupid after all.
All this makes me need a lie down.
It's the sexual preferences & gender id equivalent of 47 double negatives in a sentence.
I can't follow it but I'm hoping the self-identifiers, in their quest to be the most oppressed, manage to eventually cancel out each others arguments.

This is ‘Mary Sue’ fanfic broadcast to millions of viewers every week night

So true!

Mary Sue is a fanfic trope whereby the (female) writer writes a female heroine who is an idealised version of the writer, who every male character falls in love with and every female character wants to be.

It's a way of protecting yourself into an idealised world where all your problems have vanished and your life is perfect.

But in this case they want to be Gary Stu and be the center of the adoring attention of lots of gay tops.

The people playing along with this nonsense really aren't doing the ones who believe in it any favors, given that they were bound to hit the brick wall of other people's sexual orientations eventually.

ArcheryAnnie

Now, I'm not knocking slashfic at all - I really enjoy the thing of reading, at one remove, romances where I don't have to think about the gendered expectations put on women in relationships - but they are idealised, mostly are written by women and not by gay men, and they are fiction.

I like M/M slashfic as well, for the same reasons you express - especially with a historical setting, where female characters realistically are so constrained - but I absolutely agree with you about it being potentially misleading for teenage readers. However, even more misleading are the ones about transmen/gay man, one of which I bought by mistake (misleading blurb). The delusional description of how the gay protagonist was abjectly grateful to the transman for the best sex of his life was utterly creepy and disrespectful of gay sexuality.

Slash fiction began with Kirk/Spock getting it on in science fiction settings that are largely sexless but I always fancied getting a bit of payback writing gay fiction that’s heavily punctuated by pages and pages of technical jargon about quantum fluctuations in the matter transporter and anti-matter containment failures in the warp field generators.

Ah yes, Kirk/Spock. I know people who were around when the early versions of that were 'zines run off on banda machines.

Though the most depressing sub-genre of slash is alpha/omega, which basically reproduces the power imbalances of 50 shades of shite, with added biological determinism and rapey-ness. (I can only assume its authors have soooo much internalised misogyny they can't help projecting it onto absolutely every relationship setup they can conceive of.)

Anyway, here for your delectation is the original Mary Sue story (deliberately written as parody)
www.deviantart.com/cinderburn/art/The-original-Mary-Sue-story-356068308

Ah yes, Kirk/Spock. I know people who were around when the early versions of that were 'zines run off on banda machines.

My first (and frankly, only) experience of one of those was given to me to read by an American friend with whom I stayed in New York back in the early 90s. She'd written it - she is very bright, ivy league college educated and writes well. She said I could take it home to the UK with me if I wanted.

I declined. It made my toes curl.

It's grossly homophobic, obviously. Gay men should in no way be shamed for not liking a bit of muff.

But I can't really see this as anything other than an attempt to run cover for the rapey cotton ceiling stuff that blokes have been pumping out for quite some time. After all, the cotton ceiling types will appreciate the opportunity to side step the misogynistic, homophobic overtones by saying "No no, the transmen suffer as we do."

Obviously most can see the vast power differential between a transman trying to get gay men to sleep with them, and transwomen playing on the considerable power differential between the male and female bodied of the species.

I really enjoy the thing of reading, at one remove, romances where I don't have to think about the gendered expectations put on women in relationships

There's some very good essays out there about slash fic being a way for women to escape gender stereotypical restrictions and identify with characters, social power, freedoms that are usually restricted to men.

After all, Uhura gets to stand around in a mini skirt saying 'its your mother on line two captain'. Spock gets guns, has power, is an equal, is a scientist, is stronger, doesn't have to mummy anyone.... etc etc.

You don't like your vagina.
They don't like your vagina.
Let's call the whole thing off.

Pro tip: Gay men don't want to have sex with females. If you like cock, there are millions of straight dudes who are all about the vadge.

I just want to say that if you're a man and you like sucking dick you're gay. There's nothing wrong with being gay.

Is the trans character on Emmerdale played by a trans actor?

So am I vagphobic if I am totally cool with my own vagina but wouldn’t touch anyone else’s with a barge pole?