Pondering why m/m fandom sometimes makes me uncomfortable

[sqbr]

Fanworks fandom is for many women(*) a way to create a space where we can express ourselves freely and escape the oppressive sexist heteronormativity of mainstream fiction. (If that's not how it works for you, you may not get much out of this post)

There is to some extent a division between those who find their joy through m/m, and those through female protagonists. These aren't neat divisions and there's people who do neither or both (I've written male protagonist m/m, m/m/f and gen myself) but to some extent they're mutually exclusive approaches.

Sadly, the women of both groups are inclined to get into "All het is heteronormative and sexist" vs "All m/m is mysogynist and sexist" arguments, which, beyond ignoring femslash, as Hoo boy, thoughts on yaoi (let me tell you them) points out isn't helpful or accurate. That is definitely not what I'm trying to get into here.

What I'd like to express, because it's been niggling at me ever since I first encountered m/m fanfic nearly a decade ago, is the way that while m/m slash fandom clearly acts as a feminist self expression thing for it's fans, and I realise it isn't actually just an extension of the Patriarchy and it's hatred of female characters, that is how it feels to me a lot of the time. And I'm not sure what if anything can be done about it (mainly I just needed to get this out of my head).

My brain's a bit mushy today, I apologise in advance for any giant holes in my argument, feel free to poke at them though I may take a while to reply.

Also: I am not accusing m/m slashers generally of sexist intent. I mean I think some of them are being sexist, but they're no worse than anyone else on the whole imo and my m/m slashy friends are all awesome feministy people. This is about the effect of m/m fandom on me as someone outside it.

So: I tend to identify with female characters in fiction. Attacks on them often feel like attacks on me. I realise that fictional people are not the same as real people, and that a bunch of women writing about men is not equivalent to able bodied people never writing disabled characters etc, but that's what it feels like from my POV and no amount of intellectual appreciation of those women's reasons seems able to change that.

If there are no major female characters in a work, or none I can remotely identify with (and this doesn't require them to be similar to me, eg my deep love of violent morally ambiguous bad girls which is…not me :D) then I can still enjoy the story but a part of me will feel unfulfilled and excluded, and if the female characters get treated like crap it feels like a sexist attack. And I feel that way a lot, because female characters tend to get short shrift in most mainstream fiction.

If the fans of a genre I'm reading put down the female characters or don't even remember they exist this makes me feel excluded and attacked again. Since I'm a scifi geek I've had a lot of this in mainstream fandom as well.

And for me, m/m fic and fandom often feels like more of the same. More stories about male protagonists, more putting down of female characters and not seeing them as worth concentrating on or caring about. It's not as heteronormative, and has other nice touches which appeal to my geek girl heart (EDIT: And often treats it's female characters quite well, even if they're not the romantic leads), but it's still about men, and I get enough of that everywhere else.

(Het writers can be pretty bad too, with the "all the female characters except the one I like are evil harpy whores I want to stab in the face" thing. But at least they like one of them)

Now the fic itself I can simply not read, and there's generally enough het and to a lesser extent female centred gen and femslash etc that I can only read m/m when the story looks particularly appealing or I'm in the mood. And for fandoms where slash is rare I like seeing more of it, since m/m relationships are as valid as any other and it feels skeevy to ignore them (especially if they're canon!).

But for example it was like a kick to the gut when I looked at the femslash tag for Supernatural on delicious in the vain hopes of finding some stories about the female characters and it was mostly girl!Sam/girl!Dean. And I totally understand why people would do that: the female characters in Supernatural are all WAY more shallowly written than Sam and Dean. For me, that's an impetus to write them better or draw them etc, for others that's an impetus not to write them at all (the third option is to add fleshed out female characters from other shows. Faith works very well ^_^) You could say "Then why read SPN fic?" but you might also ask…why be in scifi fandom? Why consume mainstream fiction? Sometimes the types of stories I'm interested in come with a hefty dose of sexism, and fanworks are how I try and deal with that, and it makes me sad sometimes that most fanworks aren't 100% helpful in that regard.

Beyond the fanworks there's the meta.

For a start there's all the female character bashing, the "I would write female characters if they weren't all boring and stupid and girly" argument. And on the one hand people can't help not liking those characters, and they generally have a point about them being less well written and full of sexist cliche, but on the other as someone who doesn't feel able to just switch to using the male characters as avatars if people go beyond "I have trouble identifying with these characters" to "pretty much all female characters suck objectively" it again feels like an attack, yet more "girls and girliness sucks".

There's also the meta that isn't about slash at all but still sets it up as the default. To give an random example I encountered this morning: on the whole I found the post The Riches of Embarrassment: Or, Why I Don't Have a Humiliation Squick really interesting but I was struck by the line In fandom at large, I'd say that 90% ... are about people being humiliated specifically for wanting sex - which is slut-shaming, and gay-shaming, and the rest of the paragraph makes it pretty clear that for her "fandom"="m/m fandom", even though afaict her argument would make just as much sense for other types of fic.

It's not a big deal in that individual post (especially since I'm not into humiliation stuff anyway so don't feel unfairly excluded) but it's everywhere. And since my brain pings slash fandom as to some extent part of the Patriarchy it can feel pretty oppressive, the equivalent "Go away, you and your girliness isn't welcome, you are Doing fandom Wrong" feeling that I get from all that sf meta that assumes geek=male geek. And it feels particularly unpleasant when I encounter sentiments that all fanfic outside of m/m is boring and sexist and blech, because it's basically saying "Your escape from sexism is sexist, and the only way to be feminist is to stop caring about women" (of course I'm sure m/m fans feel the same way about a lot of anti-slash meta, and I hope this post isn't having that effect on you). See for example the various links and examples on this post and it's comments.

EDIT: It's been pointed out that I'm conflating things that are true of ALL m/m and m/m fans with stuff that's just a general unfortunate trend. This is Very Unfair, and I apologise. So, to summarise my issues:

Things which are not inherently sexist but still sometimes make me uncomfortable, even though I understand intellectually why people do them: Writing lots of stories whose protagonists are male and which focus on the emotional journeys of the male characters. Explaining why you are not drawn to write female characters.

Things which are common but not universal in m/m fandom that are kind of sexist: Saying that All Female Characters Suck. Writing stories which totally ignore or put down the female characters of canon. Ignoring or belittling any fanfic which is not m/m.

Are there other equivalent issues beyond m/m? Hell yes. I'm pretty sure that if I was a lesbian or trans or poly or otherwise queer but still focussed on female protagonists then I'd find het just as oppressive as m/m and be annoyed that those were assumed to be my only two choices. Even as a straight cis woman femslasher who writes a lot of gen it grates.

And of course then there's the glaring absence and poor representations of characters who are non-white/POC, disabled, fat, non-Western etc.

What should people do about it? Well, they could stand to stop putting female characters down so much (that goes for most of fandom, really, but m/m writers are more likely to talk about how ALL female characters suck) It is possible to say "I did not identify with this character" or "Aspects of how this character was created and written are sexist and off putting" etc without saying "this character sucks and is crap and unlikeable". Which is not to say female characters are never sucky and hard to like, but when considering how to express such sentiments consider the effect of your words on women who identify with that character.

And obviously remembering the existence of f/f and m/f and gen and polyfic and fic that doesn't fit into any of those boxes, and seeing them as just as valid and relevant as m/m and only excluding them from your meta when it's necessary to do so would be much more inclusive, and shouldn't harsh anyone's squee.

I'm definitely not saying people shouldn't write m/m. Hell, I've written it, it's a valid creative genre and from all accounts one many peoples find freeing, and I'm not going to try to take that away from them. I like a lot of Very Heteronormative Romances and I can understand how many people (especially queer ones!) find them oppressive. Sometimes the things we need to be happy make other people unhappy, and there's no easy solution.

I do think all creators should stretch themselves and think about the voices they're not representing, but what that means for any given creator will vary.

Sidenote: despite being mostly a fanartist and constantly annoyed at the way fanart gets ignored in meta, here I am doing it myself by pretty much only talking about fic. But this doesn't feel like oppression in the same way, it's just irritating :)

Relevant to this topic: discussion and links to a brand new Bechdel-passing slash comm.

(*)There are plenty of people in fanfic fandom who don't identify as female, but the dynamics there are more complicated and tend not to have sweeping generalisations made about them that I feel the need to poke at. (Apart from being excluded by sweeping generalisations about all fanfic writers being female of course :))

Comments

[furikku]

There's also the meta that isn't about slash at all but still sets it up as the default.

This is my big Thing. It's like, "OK, yes, people be writin' about the boys, yes, BUT WHAT ABOUT US OVER HERE?" Because I really LIKE reading meta, but when there's the Big Boyslash Party over there and tumbleweeds over here.... :(

Like I don't want to pass judgement on what people want to write, and I don't want to stop them from writing it, but I would like to have stuff I like get some attention, too.

(I'm not even sure what kind of meta one would do for fanart. But then, I'm not so much a meta writer as a meta consumer.)

[polyserena]

It is possible that I'm looking for holes to pick since it is hard not to get defensive, but it seems to me like you're having a hard time separating "misogynistic tendencies of some m/m fans" from "m/m stories". Slash doesn't have to exclude female characters or downplay them or bash them, all it means is pairing two guys romantically. Yes, large portions of the fandom have serious issues with women (I hear that Supernatural fandom is one of the worst for this, but I'm not directly involved in it. Contrast with something like White Collar where AFAICT people love the wife of one of the two men most often paired with each other) and it is extremely problematic to assume that fandom = m/m fandom but that's not inherent in m/m fandom itself. Depending on which canon you're talking about it's likely to be better or worse (Being Human seems to be particularly good about it I think), it's not a universal.

The issues you're talking about are serious issues, in fact they're issues that slash fandom often has with itself. But I think they're better described as problems that exist within some areas of the fandom than a problem with it as a monolithic whole.

That said, I haven't been quite as involved as I used to be so maybe it's gotten that much worse and I haven't noticed.

[sqbr]

I definitely see sexist m/m as a small subset of m/m in general which is no larger proportionally than sexist het etc. I apologise for coming across as saying that all m/m is sexist, because it's not, and I know that's a really common accusation we non-m/m people like to trot out.

I shall ponder how to edit my post to make the distinction clear, because I was too vague and that's unfair to the rest of you that don't suck.

Something I should have made clear (and meant to, but forgot, I'll add it in) is that yes, m/m can still have lots of awesome female characters who it treats well, and that's the kind of m/m I most like. But even at best the protagonists are, by necessity, male, and the story is going to mostly focus on them and their journey(*). That doesn't make the story sexist, but it does make it much less appealing to me as someone who is primarily interested in stories which focus on (and don't just include) the female characters of canon.

EDIT: See EDIT in post!

(*)Unless you include all stories which mention m/m at all (such as for example my most recent femslash story which has a m/m couple in the background but is still definitely about the female characters) or include m/m/f etc, but that's not the definition I'm assuming.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

You know, this may actually go to a division between ways of experiencing (and writing) fiction that has only a tangential relationship to the vexed question of fan writers writing (or not) male characters. I was struck by the clarity with which you identify the basis for your own discomfort with a lack of female characters here:

If there are no major female characters in a work, or none I can remotely identify with (and this doesn't require them to be similar to me, eg my deep love of violent morally ambiguous bad girls which is…not me :D) then I can still enjoy the story but a part of me will feel unfulfilled and excluded

I have the impression that this kind of representation is deeply important to the way a lot of people experience fiction. And by "this kind of representation" I don't mean merely the existence of an important character (or ideally, more) who matches with the reader in terms of physical sex. There's a wide range of aspects of self that may be deeply important to any person's sense of who they are, and my impression at least is that the feeling of being represented or not in a text, or excluded or not, can depend on any of a constellation of physical and social factors for any given person. I don't mean to slight the importance of any of those factors here, nor to dismiss the importance of that sense of representation.

But it occurs to me that there may be a simple data point that hasn't been clearly stated anywhere in the arguments that rise out of these discussions. And that data point is that unless I'm an even more eccentric outlier than usual, there are readers for whom whether or not they're represented in a story is a trivial aspect of whether they (we) enjoy it.

I'm not sure I can even explain this in terms that will make sense to someone for whom representation is important. The best I can do may be to say what I often say in the course of discussions in general: I already know what it's like inside my head; I want to know how it looks to people who aren't me. I don't need fiction about me, and anyway no one who isn't me could write any. For me as a reader, fiction is about having some way of seeing, as best I can, through other perspectives. (Some of those perspectives may turn out to be, in my opinion, stupid or despicable or trivial, but no one says I have to finish those. Or that I can't come back to the Internet and rant about their objectionable qualities. And some of those perspectives will be glorious things that would never have been available to me if the writers hadn't made these gifts of them.)

So from my own point of view, requests for representation are utterly baffling. As a writer, I'm writing from the inside of my own head: a reader's going to get aspects of the way the world appears to me and to no one else. The characters and situations that grab my imagination for any length of time are going to be those around whom I have anything remotely interesting to say. Even if it's true that I'd be a better and more enlightened person if it were different characters or circumstances that caught that part of my mind -- and I'm not ready to concede that -- my best work is going to be the best I can do in the areas of my natural strengths, not the best I can do if I try to work in areas of natural weakness. (Yes, there's a good argument for stretching yourself in any discipline. But that shouldn't be a reason to insist on doing what you're not good at to the detriment of what you are good at.)

And what I want from other writers is their versions of the world. I don't care if there are no white people in their stories. Or if there are no women. Or no human beings, for that matter.* It just doesn't matter to me.

If I'm not alone in this, it seems to me that this may explain a certain amount of the incomprehension and annoyance on both sides -- if only because it would mean that the writers who're failing to represent you aren't failing because they don't respect women, or don't notice that women are there. If we read for different reasons, using different protocols, it may simply be that at least some of the work people are complaining about is simply trying to do something for which their preferred reading protocols are unsuited.

It's like -- oh, to pick an unreasonably grandiose example, if I sent a romance fan off to read Mansfield Park without warning her it wasn't a genre romance, and she tried to read it as if it were. If she comes back annoyed because the Crawfords aren't a hero and heroine after all, I can't blame her. But I won't be blaming Austen for it not turning out that way, either.

*Offensive representations are another issue, of course. But they're beyond the scope of this comment.

[amonitrate]

hi I am here via lo_rez's post! And I just had to say YES to this:

And it feels particularly unpleasant when I encounter sentiments that all fanfic outside of m/m is boring and sexist and blech, because it's basically saying "Your escape from sexism is sexist, and the only way to be feminist is to stop caring about women"

And while I of course don't think all m/m slash is sexist, I've run up against that viewpoint and related viewpoints, as well as the endless amounts of m/m that just replicates really regressive m/f relationship patterns, enough to get really annoyed any time anyone celebrates m/m slash as oh so much more subversive and better and feminist than gen or het (especially het).

And I don't like the fact that large portions of fandom erase women, who make up the majority of fandom itself, from our own stories, here in this place where we have the freedom to imagine anything we want about the shows we love.

[lo_rez]

There's not much that's more compelling or important than the lived experience of individuals, and any analysis that ignores it is not just incomplete but incorrect. But it seems like once we start connecting individual lived experience to the ways in which we collectively value and devalue things, there's not really a "my preferences are excused from consideration" position any of us can credibly take.

The stories I've written from POV $male_character are, every one of them, actually about one or more female characters. They're about activating and elaborating the (canonically subtextual) complications of the women's stories, and how that man or men consequently should think/feel/relate to/interact with those women, from my female point of view, instead of how they did/do. That's been important to me, that power to rewrite the male.

But it means I'm also heaping another few fics on the metric fuckton of fan stories in the male voice, from the massive collection of canon sources that are all about the primacy of the male voice at the expense of the female. The fact that I am queering the narrative in a particular way does not somehow wipe out my contribution in other respects to the maintenance of the status quo.

One of the things I've noticed in the course of discussions like this is how often we slide in and out of "I" and "we" -- the register of individual experience/point of view and that of collective or aggregate behavior/effects -- while ignoring the enormous difference that makes to the discourse. Individual preferences contribute to aggregate effects. It's realistic that not everyone will concern hirself with that, fannishly speaking; we all have to pick our battles. But once one enters that conversation, it seems pretty disingenuous to argue either explicitly or (as the OP on the where_no_women comm did) implicitly that resistance in one direction cancels out complicity in another.

Shorter: I appreciate this post!

[sqbr]

I don't so much mind people writing boyslash specific meta that really is about boyslash specific things (if they don't enjoy reading femslash, say, then it's hardly reasonable to expect them to write a 3000 word essay about it for fun), it's when it could be about fanfic etc in general but they make it boyslash specific for no reason beyond laziness and narrow focus that I get annoyed.

[sqbr]

That's the thing: I definitely do not mean to imply that my way of relating to fiction is the Only Right Way. Clearly women writing m/m slash don't relate to fiction the same way I do or the genre wouldn't appeal to them either. This doesn't make them more sexist, it just makes them different.

Obviously this point still isn't clear (probably because it's so contrary to 99% of "Why I don't like slash" posts) but I'm not saying women who write m/m are bad or extraspecially sexist, just that their actions inadvertently have a bad effect on me.

Anyway: Thankyou for describing what you look for in fiction, it was interesting. I was pondering my own preferences after writing this and I rather oversimplified, one way in which we are kind of similar but also different is that what I look for in fiction isn't perspectives that are different to me(*) but that are different to other fiction I have consumed.

Thus I don't just hunger for fiction from female and disabled (and Australian :)) POVs, but also non-white/POC, trans etc, and when I find such fiction it's like a cool drink of water on a hot day. (I also want fiction with original ideas and plots etc, at least when I'm not just in the mood for bland comfort reading)

Anyway: I agree that looking for female POVs in m/m is like expecting Henry Crawford (or Wickham etc) to be a traditional romantic hero, and that's why I don't generally read m/m.

(*)If all the fiction I read had perspectives like mine I might get sick of it, but there's so few fictional characters I identify with on many levels that the novelty has yet to wear off

[sqbr]

Of course it must be admitted that some het writers respond with "We're all celebrating women, not like you mysogynistic m/m writers!" when a lot of het is pretty dire gender-wise too. People always want to set up their tastes as morally superior rather than just...their tastes.

But yes, I'm not sure if it's just because I'm not really into m/m but the "Boyslash is the ultimate transgressive creative act" meta does irritate me rather a lot.

[sqbr]

The balance between acknowledging and satisfying our desires (given that, historically, women have tended to be attacked for doing so) and taking responsibility for the effects of doing so is one of those really core conflicts that seems to come up a lot in fanworks fandom, and imo it's not as easily resolved as a lot of people seem to want to believe.

I mean social justice seems to always be in that double bind, it often feels to me like every time you go against one of the injustices of society you just end up reinforcing a different one. Every action we take is probably supporting the Kyriarchy in one way or another.

Because on the one hand, writing m/m really does seem to be huge positive thing for a lot of slashers, and from the sound of things they're just not going to get that from het or femslash. And it's absurd to expect women to never write from a male POV. But on the other hand it's Yet More Fiction About Dudes.

And het is Yet More Stories About Straight People Heterosexual Relationships. Femslash is neither, but it is harder to find canon relationships to draw on and it's less actively transgressive-of-social-norms than m/m (I still think people should write more of it :)) And there's probably other issues I'm missing.

So, yes. And yeah: if you're going to crow about the Social Benefits of your preferred genre you have to acknowledge the way it's complicit with social evils too.

[amonitrate]

Yeah, a great deal of het is dire. And I think that it comes from the same place, those dire gender roles in slash and het, so I personally don't see one much different from the other. If you ignore the gender of the characters in the pairings, often the stories read *exactly* alike.

[amonitrate]

So, yes. And yeah: if you're going to crow about the Social Benefits of your preferred genre you have to acknowledge the way it's complicit with social evils too.

THIS. THIS.

[amonitrate]

whoops I think I forgot to log in. the above reply was mine.

[sqbr]

*nods*

Yeah it's the same crap with a slightly different veneer :/