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Thoughts on men writing f/f, and people writing for their kinks
I've decided to go through my tumblr drafts, which are full of posts I felt too nervous to post publicly in case I got reblogged into Discourse, and see which are worth posting here. In most cases I feel like I didn't quite capture my full thoughts on the matter, but sometimes you gotta let yourself be a bit incoherent to flail towards understanding.
So, let's begin with a post about men writing f/f! *starts out intending some mild edits for clarity, ends up doubling the length*
The original post:
I keep seeing posts like this and...that is a thing that exists? As a group they tend to have the same male gazey sexism issues as male het shippers, but they still very much care about the romances.
Like, that's what the bronies were famous for doing! They were obnoxious about it and made a lot of porn, but it was still built on genuine shippy feelings and love for the characters. I never got into My Little Pony but I've been in other fandoms with large numbers of male f/f shippers, and whatever their flaws they were definitely invested in the ships. Their fic wasn't even always bad or notably sexist.
As a non binary person I can't stand this idea that there's a neat distinction between what men and women want from fiction. People act like all men into f/f enjoy is live action f/f porn and that the idea of them writing shmoopy romantic f/f fanfic is ridiculous. But they totally do write it! For that matter, plenty of women like live action porn!
And I mean there is definitely critique to be made of live action porn, hoo boy. But if we're discussing the culture of fanfic then it's irrelevant. Does f/f fanfic by men have issues with fetishisation of queer people? Yes. Does it tend to be worse in that respect than slash? Yes. Is it all ireedeemable heteronormative trash? No.
The response to "Slash is all irredeemable fetishising porn, like f/f by men" shouldn't be "no, it's way different, because women care about the characters". Neither genre is all irredeemable fetishising porn. All fans care about the characters. F/f fic by men, as a genre, does have sexism issues that m/m fic by women generally doesn't, but the differences are more complex than "Men care about getting off, women care about feelings". Because the differences between men and women are complex! And some of us are neither/both!
I mean consider the Japanese yuri genre of f/f, where works are written and consumed by men and women without a neat distinction between the two sets of writers or fans. It includes plenty of sweet fluff by men and problematic porn by women. And in fact one of the notably male-oriented intersecting genres is moe, which is defined by being fluffy and generally very sexually innocent. Which is often a kink in and of itself, don't get me wrong, and as with My Little Pony a lot of these guys are also into porny associated works, plus the moe works often have a lot of 'innocent' fanservice. But the works are still often lovingly crafted stories about sweet romances between girls, with a lot of focus on their emotional growth etc, and that's not all a kink thing.
In general I feel like a lot of feminist media anaylsis responds to the (very real and common!) problem of male creators treating female characters as sex objects by acting like any time a creator's approach to a character is affected by kink/sexual preference etc that defines the creation entirely, and precludes any sort of sincere connection and thoughtful approach. Or they decide that certain kinds of sexual/kinky motivation are Subversive and Meaningful, eg women sexualising men, but certain kinds are always 100% shallow porniness, eg men sexualising women.
But it's more complex than that. Like...a male creator making his female characters sexy is certainly strongly correlated with sexism, but as a side effect of not seeing them as people with value beyond their utility to men.
Male creators who don't sexualise their female characters are still often just as sexist, it just manifests as female characters all being evil harpies, or innocent little girls etc. If the only female character is always a helpless damsel needing to be rescued, it doesn't stop being sexist if she doesn't throw herself at the hero romantically but instead just admires him as a father figure or whatever.
And it's more sexist, imo, than a female character who the male creator makes sexy to suit his tastes but still takes seriously as a character. Especially if he creates a variety of other female characters, not all of whom are sexy in the same way.
And either way, even moderately sexist male writers still generally care about their female characters inner lives a bit. Just not as much as with the male characters.
Which all adds up to a lot of works by men where the female characters behaviour/appearance etc is clearly influenced by what the writer thinks is sexy or otherwise Appealing In Women, and they don't get to have the full range of thoughts/actions/personalities as the male characters. But they still get to have a personality, and the writer cares about their arc etc a bit.
A lot of feminist critic acts like there's Feminist works where the female characters get to be people, and Sexist works where they're sex objects, but it seems to me that this division has more to do with whether the critic is personally squicked. Like, I would say that sexist male writers from Japan and the US are exactly as inclined to write female characters as thinly characterised tropey Ideals. But in the US, there'll be one female character who is dressed sexily and expresses interest in the male protagonist. And some Japanese works do this too, but there's also stuff like moe where there's an all female cast who wear pretty girly clothes and act super innocent.
So you'll get US/Western based feminist critics who are incapable of connecting with the sexist female characters in US media because they have such bad associations with this specific kind of sexism, but can enjoy moe because it doesn't ping as sexist, and while the characters are often thin they do still have fun characters and arcs even if you don't find innocent girls sexy.
And like, it's fine to prefer the less familiar form of sexism because it has less negative associations. I certainly do. The problem is when that kind of preference is treated like an objective difference. So you get arguments like "I connected with this female character so this US based work isn't sexist" versus "She is the only woman in the cast and is made sexy, so her character is pure eye candy with no other value and you're too stupid to notice". Or "this moe show is feminist because it passes the Bechdel test and there's no sex" vs "I find moe squicky, the female characters are pure fetish bait with no other value and you're too stupid to notice". There's no space to acknowledge that the female characters are limited by what the male creator finds appealing, which is sexist and going to be off-putting for a lot of women, but that they also have value beyond that, and that the creator has some genuine interest in the characters beyond them hitting his kinks etc. Which doesn't make him not sexist! But does mean you can't just dismiss the writing as pure sexism and act like it's clearly distinct from works that give female characters more depth. It's a messy and somewhat subjective continuum.
And so since f/f by men generally has at least some obvious elements of "created to hit the guy's kinks", women who understandably find that squicky dismiss it all as just about being sexy.
And like...it's not that my heart breaks that much for straight cis male creators of f/f porn whose ~subtle worldbuilding and characterisation is being dismissed. But one consequence of this kind of feminist criticism is this idea that it's automatically problematic for a work to have 'being sexy' as a motive, or to squick any viewers. You get this idea that the only Good way for a work to engage with sexiness or sexuality is to be like...an earnest example of Good Relationships and Personal Self Expression, where any sex or sexiness happens because it makes the characters happy, and any sexual enjoyment on the part of the creator or viewer is mild and of secondary consequence. There is an assumption that this is the only kind of sexual content Good People even like, that the only people who'd like anything else are gross straight men objectifying women.
And again this can cycle around to women who happen to like fluffy f/f and are squicked by oversexualised lesbian porn thinking explicit f/f porn by and for women is more sexist than fluffy moe by and for men. Who are then mocked by the women who find moe squicky and prefer, idk... literary queer fiction or whatever.
Some women who like Actual Porn too much instead prefer the idea that certain kinds of porn (eg, the sort they like) are Feminist and clearly distinct from Sexist Porn by Gross Men. The OP is clearly in that group: the difference is that slash cares about relationships, something men would clearly never do. Some argue that women are never into [specific tropes popular with men that a lot of women do in fact also like]. Those who do like 'sexist' tropes instead argue that simply being a woman automatically makes the difference, while men are obviously still gross even if they like identical things, and when pressed will come up with a way to divide non binary people into "effectively women" and "effectively men".
And I'm not saying they don't have any point. There is something different about how porn about women made by men treats women, and how the men into it treat women, both real and fictional. I'm just saying there's no simple, reliable way to draw a line between Good Porn and Bad Porn, or Good Fiction and Bad Fiction. We can talk about trends in simple terms, but for an individual work you have to actually engage with it as it is instead relying on 'is this problematic' tickboxes.
And if we don't, we end up with the argument I saw in a reblog of the OP, from a queer man arguing that slash is the problematic porn genre, and m/m by men is the unproblematic one. Which is in fact a natural extension of the feminist arguments above. It tends to gloss over sexism, but on the other hand acknowledges that, you know, men have feelings too.
The only way we can move past these dumbass arguments is to unpack our simplistic, binarist approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality. Not just argue for different simplistic binaries that define everything we make and like as automatically unproblematic, and everything we find squicky as problematic.
There are conversations to be had about the interplay between the gender and sexuality of writers, readers, and characters, but they have to start from a nuanced, informed position or we'll never get anywhere.
(You can tell where I started adding new content to the original reblog because that's where all the italics kick in haha)
EDIT: Oops forgot to explicitly state one of my major points: a lot of these arguments completely ignore the fact that trans people exist, or gloss over it in very transphobic and simplistic ways. Trans men are either erased, or 'allowed' to write f/f if they have 'enough' of a current or past connection to the lesbian community. Amab people are 'allowed' to sexualise women if they eventually identify as transfeminine 'enough'. Non-binary people are 'allowed' to write f/f if we're basically women, and m/m if we're basically men. When a creator comes out as trans, critics who aren't outright transphobes scramble to adjust where they put the creator's works within their binarist critical framework, without ever acknowledging that the existence of trans people proves that a binarist critical framework is unsound.
Another point I'm not sure I got across: all of this erases the variety and diversity of experience and tastes across and within different genders and orientations. So for example the assumption that only straight men enjoy explicit f/f porn without plot, and that this is gross, is pretty awful for queer women who like that sort of thing, unhelpful for any would-be-feminist straight cis men into it, makes trans people into it dysphoric, and so on.
EDIT 2: This post is more about how people write fictional characters than how they treat actual real people, but there are definitely some very gendered and sometimes very unfortunate dynamics in fandom and other creative spaces when people of different genders interact.
So, let's begin with a post about men writing f/f! *starts out intending some mild edits for clarity, ends up doubling the length*
The original post:
People comparing men’s fetishization of lesbians to slash fandom is always so funny like imagine a world where large amounts of men did get extremely emotionally invested in potential romantic relationships between fictional women
I keep seeing posts like this and...that is a thing that exists? As a group they tend to have the same male gazey sexism issues as male het shippers, but they still very much care about the romances.
Like, that's what the bronies were famous for doing! They were obnoxious about it and made a lot of porn, but it was still built on genuine shippy feelings and love for the characters. I never got into My Little Pony but I've been in other fandoms with large numbers of male f/f shippers, and whatever their flaws they were definitely invested in the ships. Their fic wasn't even always bad or notably sexist.
As a non binary person I can't stand this idea that there's a neat distinction between what men and women want from fiction. People act like all men into f/f enjoy is live action f/f porn and that the idea of them writing shmoopy romantic f/f fanfic is ridiculous. But they totally do write it! For that matter, plenty of women like live action porn!
And I mean there is definitely critique to be made of live action porn, hoo boy. But if we're discussing the culture of fanfic then it's irrelevant. Does f/f fanfic by men have issues with fetishisation of queer people? Yes. Does it tend to be worse in that respect than slash? Yes. Is it all ireedeemable heteronormative trash? No.
The response to "Slash is all irredeemable fetishising porn, like f/f by men" shouldn't be "no, it's way different, because women care about the characters". Neither genre is all irredeemable fetishising porn. All fans care about the characters. F/f fic by men, as a genre, does have sexism issues that m/m fic by women generally doesn't, but the differences are more complex than "Men care about getting off, women care about feelings". Because the differences between men and women are complex! And some of us are neither/both!
I mean consider the Japanese yuri genre of f/f, where works are written and consumed by men and women without a neat distinction between the two sets of writers or fans. It includes plenty of sweet fluff by men and problematic porn by women. And in fact one of the notably male-oriented intersecting genres is moe, which is defined by being fluffy and generally very sexually innocent. Which is often a kink in and of itself, don't get me wrong, and as with My Little Pony a lot of these guys are also into porny associated works, plus the moe works often have a lot of 'innocent' fanservice. But the works are still often lovingly crafted stories about sweet romances between girls, with a lot of focus on their emotional growth etc, and that's not all a kink thing.
In general I feel like a lot of feminist media anaylsis responds to the (very real and common!) problem of male creators treating female characters as sex objects by acting like any time a creator's approach to a character is affected by kink/sexual preference etc that defines the creation entirely, and precludes any sort of sincere connection and thoughtful approach. Or they decide that certain kinds of sexual/kinky motivation are Subversive and Meaningful, eg women sexualising men, but certain kinds are always 100% shallow porniness, eg men sexualising women.
But it's more complex than that. Like...a male creator making his female characters sexy is certainly strongly correlated with sexism, but as a side effect of not seeing them as people with value beyond their utility to men.
Male creators who don't sexualise their female characters are still often just as sexist, it just manifests as female characters all being evil harpies, or innocent little girls etc. If the only female character is always a helpless damsel needing to be rescued, it doesn't stop being sexist if she doesn't throw herself at the hero romantically but instead just admires him as a father figure or whatever.
And it's more sexist, imo, than a female character who the male creator makes sexy to suit his tastes but still takes seriously as a character. Especially if he creates a variety of other female characters, not all of whom are sexy in the same way.
And either way, even moderately sexist male writers still generally care about their female characters inner lives a bit. Just not as much as with the male characters.
Which all adds up to a lot of works by men where the female characters behaviour/appearance etc is clearly influenced by what the writer thinks is sexy or otherwise Appealing In Women, and they don't get to have the full range of thoughts/actions/personalities as the male characters. But they still get to have a personality, and the writer cares about their arc etc a bit.
A lot of feminist critic acts like there's Feminist works where the female characters get to be people, and Sexist works where they're sex objects, but it seems to me that this division has more to do with whether the critic is personally squicked. Like, I would say that sexist male writers from Japan and the US are exactly as inclined to write female characters as thinly characterised tropey Ideals. But in the US, there'll be one female character who is dressed sexily and expresses interest in the male protagonist. And some Japanese works do this too, but there's also stuff like moe where there's an all female cast who wear pretty girly clothes and act super innocent.
So you'll get US/Western based feminist critics who are incapable of connecting with the sexist female characters in US media because they have such bad associations with this specific kind of sexism, but can enjoy moe because it doesn't ping as sexist, and while the characters are often thin they do still have fun characters and arcs even if you don't find innocent girls sexy.
And like, it's fine to prefer the less familiar form of sexism because it has less negative associations. I certainly do. The problem is when that kind of preference is treated like an objective difference. So you get arguments like "I connected with this female character so this US based work isn't sexist" versus "She is the only woman in the cast and is made sexy, so her character is pure eye candy with no other value and you're too stupid to notice". Or "this moe show is feminist because it passes the Bechdel test and there's no sex" vs "I find moe squicky, the female characters are pure fetish bait with no other value and you're too stupid to notice". There's no space to acknowledge that the female characters are limited by what the male creator finds appealing, which is sexist and going to be off-putting for a lot of women, but that they also have value beyond that, and that the creator has some genuine interest in the characters beyond them hitting his kinks etc. Which doesn't make him not sexist! But does mean you can't just dismiss the writing as pure sexism and act like it's clearly distinct from works that give female characters more depth. It's a messy and somewhat subjective continuum.
And so since f/f by men generally has at least some obvious elements of "created to hit the guy's kinks", women who understandably find that squicky dismiss it all as just about being sexy.
And like...it's not that my heart breaks that much for straight cis male creators of f/f porn whose ~subtle worldbuilding and characterisation is being dismissed. But one consequence of this kind of feminist criticism is this idea that it's automatically problematic for a work to have 'being sexy' as a motive, or to squick any viewers. You get this idea that the only Good way for a work to engage with sexiness or sexuality is to be like...an earnest example of Good Relationships and Personal Self Expression, where any sex or sexiness happens because it makes the characters happy, and any sexual enjoyment on the part of the creator or viewer is mild and of secondary consequence. There is an assumption that this is the only kind of sexual content Good People even like, that the only people who'd like anything else are gross straight men objectifying women.
And again this can cycle around to women who happen to like fluffy f/f and are squicked by oversexualised lesbian porn thinking explicit f/f porn by and for women is more sexist than fluffy moe by and for men. Who are then mocked by the women who find moe squicky and prefer, idk... literary queer fiction or whatever.
Some women who like Actual Porn too much instead prefer the idea that certain kinds of porn (eg, the sort they like) are Feminist and clearly distinct from Sexist Porn by Gross Men. The OP is clearly in that group: the difference is that slash cares about relationships, something men would clearly never do. Some argue that women are never into [specific tropes popular with men that a lot of women do in fact also like]. Those who do like 'sexist' tropes instead argue that simply being a woman automatically makes the difference, while men are obviously still gross even if they like identical things, and when pressed will come up with a way to divide non binary people into "effectively women" and "effectively men".
And I'm not saying they don't have any point. There is something different about how porn about women made by men treats women, and how the men into it treat women, both real and fictional. I'm just saying there's no simple, reliable way to draw a line between Good Porn and Bad Porn, or Good Fiction and Bad Fiction. We can talk about trends in simple terms, but for an individual work you have to actually engage with it as it is instead relying on 'is this problematic' tickboxes.
And if we don't, we end up with the argument I saw in a reblog of the OP, from a queer man arguing that slash is the problematic porn genre, and m/m by men is the unproblematic one. Which is in fact a natural extension of the feminist arguments above. It tends to gloss over sexism, but on the other hand acknowledges that, you know, men have feelings too.
The only way we can move past these dumbass arguments is to unpack our simplistic, binarist approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality. Not just argue for different simplistic binaries that define everything we make and like as automatically unproblematic, and everything we find squicky as problematic.
There are conversations to be had about the interplay between the gender and sexuality of writers, readers, and characters, but they have to start from a nuanced, informed position or we'll never get anywhere.
(You can tell where I started adding new content to the original reblog because that's where all the italics kick in haha)
EDIT: Oops forgot to explicitly state one of my major points: a lot of these arguments completely ignore the fact that trans people exist, or gloss over it in very transphobic and simplistic ways. Trans men are either erased, or 'allowed' to write f/f if they have 'enough' of a current or past connection to the lesbian community. Amab people are 'allowed' to sexualise women if they eventually identify as transfeminine 'enough'. Non-binary people are 'allowed' to write f/f if we're basically women, and m/m if we're basically men. When a creator comes out as trans, critics who aren't outright transphobes scramble to adjust where they put the creator's works within their binarist critical framework, without ever acknowledging that the existence of trans people proves that a binarist critical framework is unsound.
Another point I'm not sure I got across: all of this erases the variety and diversity of experience and tastes across and within different genders and orientations. So for example the assumption that only straight men enjoy explicit f/f porn without plot, and that this is gross, is pretty awful for queer women who like that sort of thing, unhelpful for any would-be-feminist straight cis men into it, makes trans people into it dysphoric, and so on.
EDIT 2: This post is more about how people write fictional characters than how they treat actual real people, but there are definitely some very gendered and sometimes very unfortunate dynamics in fandom and other creative spaces when people of different genders interact.