This is a good post! I have SO MANY ISSUES with ye olde "m!slash: threat or menace sexist or misogynistic?" argument, and chief among them is the pleasure some people seem to take in issuing putdowns to Those Other Less Enlightened Women. I find most "my fannish preferences are more JUST than yours!" claims v. suspect; sometimes the criticism is legitimate, but sometimes it turns into cynical borrowing of social justice concepts for insta-win points.
The term "whitecock" seems to have lost all meaning. I've seen it used to describe a pairing in which both characters were clearly non-white (granted, this was the depths of Tumblr), so... yeah. A lot of the equivalencies that get drawn here are baffling (mslash = writing about white people, het = more diverse than M/M and in the same extreme minority position as F/F, criticising fannish white people's racism = assuming that [queer] female mslashers must have internalised misogyny, and so on).
I also wish more of the debaters would remember that "fandom" doesn't equal "Superwholockmerlmarvelvengersetc.". People often talk as if all fandoms are just miniature versions of juggernaut ones, but the stats/dynamics/trends don't apply across the board. Of course canons that focus on men's heroism, men's villainy, men's backstories, men's character arcs, men's emotional/psychological states, and men's relationships with each other will spawn more m!slash! This is doubly true if the women who do feature are given less complex/more archetypal characterisation, sidelined in favour of dudes, or treated in sexist ways by the narrative. What are your options if you want to write film-only Avengers femslash or female-centric fic? Well... er... there are three whole women, I suppose, and two of them worked together briefly in one of the previous installments - but they don't so much as wander into each other's vicinity in this one... oh. On the flipside, you've got a team of men plus one woman who have every type of interaction going (tense rivalry/friendly bonding/brainwashed into unwilling enmity? It's all here!), the male agent they have a long-standing history with, and their complicated/angsty male antagonist (the films present Loki as unambiguously male, at least). And Avengers is better in terms of representation than some major canons; it may be sparse, but there's very little active sexism. I'm not saying it's all the creators' fault, but this trend of blaming mostly female and relatively powerless fans for problems that existed in the original material bothers me. There are fandoms and archives with different femslash/het/mslash ratios; they just tend not to be the ones that come up when Capital-F Fandom is discussed. This isn't the sole or main reason for M/M's dominance - that'd be as simplistic an "explanation" as the "it's all misogyny!" one - but it's a huge variable I almost never see considered.
...it appears I have A Lot Of Feelings on this, sorry. Some of them are tangential and in any case this is getting looong, so I shall split them off into their own post.
*is late to the party*
threat or menacesexist or misogynistic?" argument, and chief among them is the pleasure some people seem to take in issuing putdowns to Those Other Less Enlightened Women. I find most "my fannish preferences are more JUST than yours!" claims v. suspect; sometimes the criticism is legitimate, but sometimes it turns into cynical borrowing of social justice concepts for insta-win points.The term "whitecock" seems to have lost all meaning. I've seen it used to describe a pairing in which both characters were clearly non-white (granted, this was the depths of Tumblr), so... yeah. A lot of the equivalencies that get drawn here are baffling (mslash = writing about white people, het = more diverse than M/M and in the same extreme minority position as F/F, criticising fannish white people's racism = assuming that [queer] female mslashers must have internalised misogyny, and so on).
I also wish more of the debaters would remember that "fandom" doesn't equal "Superwholockmerlmarvelvengersetc.". People often talk as if all fandoms are just miniature versions of juggernaut ones, but the stats/dynamics/trends don't apply across the board. Of course canons that focus on men's heroism, men's villainy, men's backstories, men's character arcs, men's emotional/psychological states, and men's relationships with each other will spawn more m!slash! This is doubly true if the women who do feature are given less complex/more archetypal characterisation, sidelined in favour of dudes, or treated in sexist ways by the narrative. What are your options if you want to write film-only Avengers femslash or female-centric fic? Well... er... there are three whole women, I suppose, and two of them worked together briefly in one of the previous installments - but they don't so much as wander into each other's vicinity in this one... oh. On the flipside, you've got a team of men plus one woman who have every type of interaction going (tense rivalry/friendly bonding/brainwashed into unwilling enmity? It's all here!), the male agent they have a long-standing history with, and their complicated/angsty male antagonist (the films present Loki as unambiguously male, at least). And Avengers is better in terms of representation than some major canons; it may be sparse, but there's very little active sexism. I'm not saying it's all the creators' fault, but this trend of blaming mostly female and relatively powerless fans for problems that existed in the original material bothers me. There are fandoms and archives with different femslash/het/mslash ratios; they just tend not to be the ones that come up when Capital-F Fandom is discussed. This isn't the sole or main reason for M/M's dominance - that'd be as simplistic an "explanation" as the "it's all misogyny!" one - but it's a huge variable I almost never see considered.
...it appears I have A Lot Of Feelings on this, sorry. Some of them are tangential and in any case this is getting looong, so I shall split them off into their own post.