Why Can’t A Hobbit Be More Like A Man?
Deep Thoughts for the day: To paraphrase Henry Higgins, why
can't a hobbit be more like a man?
Not like a Man;
like a man-in-lower-case, defined for the purposes of these musings as
"someone with a y chromosome, male genitalia, and testosterone." The
question I would like to throw out, and let's see if I can do it without
offending anyone, which for once I don't mean to do, is:
Why is it better to make your characters girls than to make them little boys?
Don't both of them mean that it squicks you to have grown male characters
behave like grown men? And if it squicks you to write or read about grown men,
what's the attraction in m/m slash in the first place? Is the author of the
lamentable Frodo/Samantha fic only being more honest about what she's doing
than the rest of us are willing to be?
Testicles produce testosterone.
Now, if you've read my LJ on anything like a regular basis, you know my opinion
on the rampant infantilization of Pippin in M/P fics. It grosses me out, it
offends me deeply, and given the choice between reading feminized characters
and infantilized ones, yeah, okay, bring on the bonbons. But I really prefer to
read about grown male characters acting like, well, grown male characters
(hereinafter referred to as GMCs). To take only one example, part of what I
like about Mary's PGY is the sheer number of hobbit hormones floating around in
the air. The first time Rosie gets into bed with Frodo, his reaction, while
there is a big element of "Ack!" to it, is not "Ack! Get out of
my bed, person who is not my One True Soulmate!" It's something along the
lines of what the reaction of someone with balls (physically, not
metaphorically) would actually be, which is "Ack! Girl. In bed. Offering,
um, girl things. What did you want me to do again? Because, yes."
(Note that I'm not going to get into the issue of whether Frodo should have had
any other lovers besides Sam, except to say that while much is made of Tolkien's
morality and mating-for-life and all that, even in his day it was pretty
uncommon for upper-class youths to get all the way to settled adulthood and the
marriage bed without losing their virginity along the way, and a damn good
thing for upper-class girls, too. The Frodo's-other-lovers thing is really
material for a different discussion.)
To a certain extent, as I've said before, guys in slash are always emotionally
feminized, because it's written by and for women. I've read gay porn written by
and for men, and it is almost invariably of the insert-tab-a-into-slot-b
variety, and meh. (Gay erotica is a different matter; I've only read one of
those, and while one of the characters was indeed a raging femme he still
wasn't devoid of all male characteristics.) I don't personally like slash like
that either, and reading about macho jerks, even hot macho jerks getting it on,
doesn't do it for me. However, neither does femmeslash, especially femmeslash
masquerading as m/m slash. So that's a difficult line to judge, it seems to me,
because what is just right for one person will be over-girly for another, and
it's a trick to make them emotionally androgynous without making them
feminized.1
Emotional feminization is OOC.
However. When Frodo in a given fic has no male characteristics at all
beyond what's between his legs, and even that issue is sometimes skirted with
varying degrees of tact, it makes me look a bit askance. He ought not to be a
macho jerk, please let's not make him one, but what's so bad about him being a
GMC? I'm all about Frodo being a total bottom too, but why is it bad for him to
occasionally back Sam into a corner and say "Look, I've had blue balls all
day and I'm dying, you are now going to put down the damn clippers, come
to bed, and fuck me right through the mattress, and no, foreplay is not
required right now, just grab the lube and come on"? I can't imagine that
Sam would object overmuch to that particular variety of manhandling. You could
argue that it's OOC for Frodo, but Frodo, in any canon, is physiologically
male; and physiological masculinity does bring along with it certain
imperatives. If you're going to make him sexual at all, it seems to me, you're
going to have to deal with those imperatives. Frodo is not a woman; he's a man,
and male sexual response is different from female sexual response, and while
some fudging of that issue is usually necessary, there's only so far that you
can ignore the fact without tipping over into unrealistic characterization.
However, it's not only sexually that Frodo is so often feminized; he's also
often feminized emotionally (and Sam is too, but mostly it's Frodo so I'll
frame the discussion in those terms). Hobbits in canon are damned emotional
little creatures. They burst into tears at the slightest provocation, they
respond to new things with an unabashed "Oooo!", they follow their
feelings and trip headfirst into a big-ass vat of trouble and then don't
understand what happened. But while they do diverge that far from our current
cultural standards of masculinity, they're still recognizably male. Book!Frodo
is the type who under normal (non-Quest) circumstances wouldn't stop and ask
directions on a car trip if it meant the firing squad; he'd keep insisting that
he was just fine with the map, thank you, and had everything under control, and
the fact that he'd passed the same tree four times did not at all mean that he
didn't know where he was. Sam, presaging Sean Astin's on-set behavior, has
built a huge part of his identity around being the provider, the protector, and
generally the person who could move the world if given a place to stand and a
big enough roll of duct tape. Merry fantasizes about charging to Pippin's
rescue and leaving slaughtered orcs littered in his wake. Pippin's first act on
meeting Denethor is to offer not his wit or his tales or even his pipeweed but
his sword.
Remember when they're leaving Rivendell and Frodo forgets a bunch of stuff?
Does Sam say outright, "Hey, Mr. Frodo, you forgot some things"? No.
He sticks them in his own pack, so that when Frodo goes "Ack, what a flake
I am, I left Item X in Rivendell" Sam can pull Item X out of his pack and
go "Looking for this?" This, O my sisters, is a Guy Thing.
Those characters that you liked to begin with, remember them?
So the canon characters are recognizably male, physically and emotionally. So
are the movie characters, though if anything they're a bit more androgynous
than book canon hobbits. When we, as writers or readers or movie-goers, fell in
love with these characters, they were guys doing guy things. So why does
introducing romance or sexuality into their relationship mean that their
GMC-ness has to be peeled off and stuffed into a trunk in a dark corner under
the bed? Why does at least one of them need to be made into a woman, with
female sexual and emotional responses, before they can be slashed? Why is
guyness squicky? Granted, it's difficult for female writers to get their heads
around a male/male relationship dynamic, but it shouldn't make people
uncomfortable to at least try.
It seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong, that the same process underlies both
character feminization and character infantilization: in either case,
masculinity and adult male behaviors are seen as threatening or a turn-off or
both and have to be minimized or disposed of altogether. In extreme cases even
secondary sex characteristics get whitewashed, and even sexuality itself, so
it's not so much m/m people write as neuter/neuter, or eunuch/eunuch, or
something to that effect. If we all like m/m slash, and m/m slash by definition
is about hot guys getting it on or at least having the urge to, then why is
masculinity (which is not macho jerkhood and should not be mistaken for it) problematic,
and so often simply not to be found?
Wow, this turned out to be hugely long. Must go back and put in headings to
break things up. Congratulations if you've read this far. Now: discuss.
1. This is one area
where the feminization issue is different from the infantilization issue.
CompletelyFeminizedExceptForThePenis!Frodo can be argued to be more or less a
matter of taste; at least he's still a consenting adult.
EmotionallyTenButFuckingMerryAnyway!Pippin, I'm sorry, should not appeal to
anyone who is not carrying around seriously weird and icky issues surrounding
sex.