[ SECRET POST #6461 ]

[case]

⌈ 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:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #923.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.