fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6461 ]

[ SECRET POST #6461 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6461 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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07. [WARNING for discussion of abuse/rape/etc]

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08. [WARNING for discussion of abuse/rape/gore/underage]

Notes:

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My theory is that fandom is largely made up of women and many women don't want to read about other women, it hits too close to home. But reading (and even projecting) onto men gives it a step of separation.

Also many women think m/m is hot and are just not into f/f.

Not gonna lie, I never understood the "it hits too close to home" explanation. I'd get it if it was a realistic setting with sexism/racism or homophobia because that gives me the ick, but just reading about women existing "hits too close to home"? How?

For me, by hits too close to home just means I don't want to read about my own body or representation at all.

I don't want to read about anyone who could be me. I start thinking about what I would do in that situation and I get distracted or if the female character does something I think is stupid I get frustrated.

Well I don't enjoy regular porn with women in it because I can tell they're all faking (and it's aimed at men).

M/M fic feels like it's directly aimed at my perversions. And if a character gets hurt emotionally or physically, I have a level of remove and am glad it's not happening to a woman, who are exploited for stuff like this in SO many movies and shows, mostly for the manpain.

I'm not talking about porn, that's a matter of sexuality. I don't care for a lot of M/F or F/F porn either. But just reading about something that features women in general being "too close to home" is what confuses me.

Here's a secret: More women than like to admit it only read fanfic if there's going to be porn in it. It used to not be a secret, and fic writers who wrote more G and PG level fics would be open about how discouraging they found it. Now fandom is puritan so there's a lot less of this open sentiment, but you can still confirm by seeing which fics have the most Kudos in a fandom on AO3. They're almost always M or E. So yes if you're not talking about just porn, your statement may as well not apply to a probable majority of fandom. "I like men" means "I like to read about men fucking" in fandom.

I stay far away from fandom puritans and am in spaces where if people are talking about porn instead of genfic, they specify it. I'm sorry if level-headed attitudes like that are rare now but you don't have to be pedantic.

I am in a lot of ships for porn and or romance. That is all.
I am interested in female characters when it gen or if I like f/f or f/m ship I just skip porn most of the time. I just don't want reading about body similar to mine.

I don't want to read about me, and if I read f/f or female pov I can't help but projecting me onto it and I get frustrated with how dumb and wrong it is or get uncomfortable with how right it is. Write the same exact character pov but make it male and I don't have that problem.

Canon female characters aren't *you*, though? Is having the same gender really enough to maje you automatically project onto them?

yes.

Da (2)

(Anonymous) - 2024-09-14 17:25 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-09-14 18:32 (UTC) - Expand

I don't think that it's the explanation for anything but I do think it's a real thing. I experience it in het, specifically, though. There's a very neurotic insecure part of my brain that looks at characters and goes "I'm not as attractive as that, I'm not as worthwhile as that, she's so much better than me, she's so much hotter than me, this could never happen to me" and it just reminds me painfully of all my insecurities. Doesn't happen with all het pairings but it does happen with many.

It's nice that you don't think reading about other women hits too close to home, but that other people are different and feel differently than you about some things should not be a hard thing to understand.

I don't get it either anon, I've always preferred reading about women than men because I am a woman and thus like to see stories about women doing cool things, be that fighting bad guys or succeeding at her job/life/getting the love-interest she's into. Reading about guys can be fun too but I am so much more likely to read a book or watch a show if a woman is the main character, always have done. If anything the only reason I used to read more fantasy books with male protags is because that was the majority for a long time. Now not so much and I love that.

For me, it's just... fiction and not about me. Female characters aren't me nor reflect me, so I don't feel a need to insert on or distance myself because *gasp* that's a woman like me. Even if they're similar to me. It's a very weird and immature way to approach fiction IMO, I get "it hits too close to home" when it comes to not wanting to see abuse or misogyny, but geez.

Oh for sure, I don't project myself onto female characters either I just like consuming stories about them because I just think ladies are fun. I'm also gay so yanno, pretty women doing cool things is appealing for obvious reasons. xD

But even then it's not all about hotness or whatever, I like characters that are entertaining and the gender of one is not going to put a hard limit on that because it seems really reductive and limiting of my options?

I have plenty if male faves too, I'd say my ratio of characters I like platonically is equal. My original works skew more towards female characters but I make the guys interesting abd important too. Fiction has different possibilities for all kinds of people to read about. Hotness is a different story since I have a very specific type, heh, but this isn't about who I'd smooch.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-09-14 17:43 (UTC) - Expand

DA
I often feel disconnected af reading/watching about women. Their experiences, their expectations are absolutely foreign to me. And I think that I have to connect because I am A Woman (tm) but I just fucking don't. And that frustrates me.
Yes, I have favorite female characters, I enjoy female-dominated stories actually. Because I don't need to constantly project to enjoy something. But in fanfiction I scratch absoluty different itch and I prefer m/m most of the time.

Fic writing fandom in particular, yeah.

Porn drawing fandom skews wayyyy into the other direction outside of anywhere besides Tumblr.

+1000

I can't really believe that when the opposite isn't true: men don't have an aversion about reading about other men. In fact, they sometimes seem to have an aversion to reading from the perspectives of women. It's come up in several articles that male readers read mostly male authors.

Moreover, there's this bit from David Graeber's book the Utopia of Rules:

"Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence. A popular exercise among high school creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagine they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Usually, a good proportion of the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and are outraged at the suggestion that they should have to think about it."

TL;DR version: Women are expected to figure out and understand men, but the reverse isn't true so women tend to identify more with men more than other women.

It's very easy to believe. Women don't want to read about other women because they're taught to hate themselves and live up to impossible standards, and end up with lots of subconscious insecurities that they can escape from in fiction. Men are taught that they're the default and being mediocre is fine, so they just don't grow up with the internal baggage about self-inserting that women do.

And for nuance, no, not all women deal with this issue by not wanting to read about women. There's still plenty of popular m/f media for women who like to self-insert as another woman, like romance novels and female-targeted dating sims.

And for nuance, no, not all women deal with this issue by not wanting to read about women. There's still plenty of popular m/f media for women who like to self-insert as another woman, like romance novels and female-targeted dating sims.

Given the target demos for these two groups, respectively (overwhelmingly queer per AO3's many surveys and overwhelmingly straight) I'd say there's probably a reason one finds projection so uncomfortable and the other is more fine with it. Speaking as a queer woman and having talked to many others about this, straight female romantic fantasy is so completely unrelatable it might as well have been written by an alien. (As is a lot of "f/f" as written by dudes to be totally honest.) That "m/m" is the projection onto and beginnings of expression of affection for fellow women in many cases, as we're told what "women" think and feel in romantic situations and relationships and it's so utterly at odds with what we do that it's easier to imagine men having the feelings we feel.

For me, it's that I'm a straight woman and I don't project onto fic at all, so F/F fic has zero appeal to me because I just don't find it sexy. But M/F fic or M/M fic? Yes, please.

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