There are a lot of issues here getting entangled (quite apart from personal feelings).
Wendy said:
In which case, let me make it clear that I wanted to bring the S/M discussion out into the open,
Other posts in this thread have also referred to h/c, and to differential treatment of suffering by male and female characters.
There are stories about S/M as a consensual activity between series characters, and stories about pain and humiliation inflicted on characters without consent. Some of these stories are intended to be erotic, some operate as erotic even if not intended, and some are potent turn-offs to readers who were intended to be turned on by the writer! I'm quite uncomfortable about stories that eroticize violence, and especially that eroticize rape. (I also LIKE stories about kinky sex, as a voluntary choice between adult partners, but YMMV.)
Personally, I've written about 55 B7 stories, about 10% of which involve ANY kind of violence at all. But I'm quite aware that there's something perverse about pioneering genres such as "B7 drawing-room comedy" and "slash stories with no explicit sex." I mean, B7 canon isn't ABOUT peaceful exploration of space-- they're not boldly going where no man has gone before, they're blowing up !@@#. Canonically, the Federation achieves its objectives through genocide, perpetual warfare, torture, and slavery. So writing about such things is entirely canonical. In a science fiction series about a war, it's pretty much to be expected that people will get hurt, and any writer with a less contemptuous view of canon than I have would be likely to write about situations in which violence occurs or is a real possibility.
H/c stories don't have to be slash--they often are, but in large part because slash is such a large percentage of the fanfic corpus. However, if they're NOT slash they may involve eroticization of harm to female characters, so it's Scylla and Charybdis. Furthermore, as this thread has shown, fen often value the strong emotions between the characters (not necessarily sexual, and if sexual not necessarily homosexual), so the h/c writer and reader may see these stories as a way to highlight bravery, or compassion, or to elicit emotions from a normally stoic person. I don't really like h/c stories either, but in part because I think they're often an evasion of writing slash--which is NOT the general opinion!
-(Y)