You pose interesting questions, because while a lot of these things are general slash tropes (and I've been reading and writing it for thirty years now), TW is at the end of a very long development, both as a TV show that actually deals with gay sex in canon (one of the reasons that slash developed in fandom was as a subversion of canon - Kirk's chasing all those women on screen was clearly over-compensation), and as an international/internet fandom (unless they had 'out' gay friends who were willing to discuss the practicalities of gay sex early slash writers didn't have access to any information - The Joy of Gay Sex was only published in the early 1980s and not widely available - even when not banned outright (incidentally, the judge's comments in the Canadian obscenity hearing are relevant: "However repugnant the concept of anal sex may be to the heterosexual observer it is, I find, the central sexual act of homosexual practice. To write about homosexual practices without dealing with anal intercourse would be equivalent to writing a history of music and omitting Mozart.")
Taking your tropes: Lube (in the 'over-the-counter-everyone-has-some-in-the-nightstand-drawer' sense) is relatively new - both in rl and fanfic - the people who complain that there isn't enough of it may be remembering the days when half the fic had to be devoted to raiding the kitchen cupboards for a tub of lard - compared with which the 'flick of a cap' is a relief (not least to Ianto).
Tightness - yeah, slash is (mostly) written by het women, and while they may be writing two blokes, what they're imagining is Jack's cock in their vagina... And nothing wrong with that...
Scissoring - I suspect that this can be traced back to a specific fic published online in the last 10 years - I've never seen it in zines, but I have seen it right across a number of online fandoms - indeed, I just beta-ed it out of a Harry Potter fic. I did replace it with 'corkscrewing' in one fic, purely to see whether anyone picked up on it - they didn't.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
here from metafandom
Date: 2008-12-12 09:01 am (UTC)Taking your tropes: Lube (in the 'over-the-counter-everyone-has-some-in-the-nightstand-drawer' sense) is relatively new - both in rl and fanfic - the people who complain that there isn't enough of it may be remembering the days when half the fic had to be devoted to raiding the kitchen cupboards for a tub of lard - compared with which the 'flick of a cap' is a relief (not least to Ianto).
Tightness - yeah, slash is (mostly) written by het women, and while they may be writing two blokes, what they're imagining is Jack's cock in their vagina... And nothing wrong with that...
Scissoring - I suspect that this can be traced back to a specific fic published online in the last 10 years - I've never seen it in zines, but I have seen it right across a number of online fandoms - indeed, I just beta-ed it out of a Harry Potter fic. I did replace it with 'corkscrewing' in one fic, purely to see whether anyone picked up on it - they didn't.