InsaneJournal

Tiny gunporn meta on power and dominance in slash
Sometime last year I wrote Shooting Your Mouth Off, a Pepper/Aubrey gunporn smut, which made me realise I have a bit of a gunporn kink. Last night, my brain wouldn't let me sleep until I'd gotten back up and penned Take Back the Night, a Jack/Ianto gunporn smut.

There's this whole feminist debate in slash about power dynamics. The one doing the penetrating has the power, the heteronormative mainstream declares, and in fandom there are endless debates and analysations of this sort of thing.

Mostly, just looking at these two fic, I find it interesting who does seem to hold the power in each one. SYMO is from the POV of, shall we say, the fellater, whereas TBtN is from the POV of the guy with the gun. In TBtN I think I can easily say that Ianto holds the power, despite being the one on his knees with the muzzle of a Webley in his mouth. It was his suggestion, and he's using it to empower himself - deliberately bringing to mind the comparisons between their current situation and how things stood between them at the end of Cyberwoman. He's not only on his knees, he has his hands up behind his head, execution-style, but instead of being at Jack's mercy he's sexualising the encounter, taking the anger and betrayal away and replacing it with want. And going from the gun to an actual blowjob, I think, makes the connections and metaphors even more obvious.

SYMO is slightly more ambiguous to me. On the surface, it's Pepper who's curious, Pepper who leads the encounter, Pepper who's showing all the signs of being the masculine force, and face it, Pepper is the dominant one in the relationship no questions asked. But Aubrey isn't exactly a doormat. He pushes the limits too, he doesn't always do as expected and really I mostly get the impression that if he's on the bottom it's because he wants to be, because he knows Pepper will make it worth his while and he likes how they fit together like that. He almost lets Pepper think he's in charge and then sits there quietly manipulating a bit when there's something he wants.

On that level, Aubrey and Ianto might actually be somewhat similar. Everyone sees Ianto as the butler, the tea-boy, Jack's sextoy, but there are so many moments in the show that portray him as having a lot more pull than that. That tiny moment in Sleeper when he comes back in with the radio Jack had duct-taped to the car and Jack flees is one of my favourites. He definitely leads the kiss in To The Last Man, and if you watch that scene you can actually see that Jack is opening up, emotionally, with full sentences and ideas and yearning, whereas Ianto's major contribution on this emotional level is just a matter-of-fact "Yep" when asked if he'd miss him. He doesn't respond to Jack opening up with a heart-to-heart. He responds by kissing him. If anything it almost seems like Jack is the one who's asking for more (see also: literally asking for more in the office scene in KKBB) and Ianto's saying "well.... I'll think about it after we shag a bit more."

Okay, and that went on way more of a tangent than I expected, considering I'm talking about boys playing with guns, but suffice to say, power is a funny thing that doesn't always depend on who has the firepower.