[ SECRET POST #7026 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #7026 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1003.
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

[fscom]

04. https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/3835ced95d05.png

Transcript by OP

[fscom]

Collapsed for length!

Re: Transcript by OP

[fscom]

I wish there was a bit more awareness in fandom that liking slash / M/M is a very normal part/expression of straight women's sexuality in the same way that liking lesbians / F/F / femslash is a very ordinary part/expression of heterosexual male sexuality.

Like, I get that the ships themselves are homosexual/queer/LGBT (so appreciation of them is also partly a function of LGBT acceptance), but not only do you not need to be LGBT yourself to appreciate M/M and F/F stories, but in some sense being very straight can lead to stronger/more intense appreciation of M/M and F/F pairs because of strong sole attraction to only one sex. (Of course you can also be interested in these stories as an LGBT/queer/ace/etc. person. But I'm just saying you don't HAVE to -- there's a pathway that gets there via dominant straight sexuality.)

And though I say "sexuality" here, I don't think this tendency applies solely to sexual stories. I think if you ask most straight men, they'll find a romance between two women more compelling than a romance between two men. Because they're attracted to women and that includes being more interested in hearing in detail about female characters' love lives with other women than male characters' love lives with other men.

In short, I find the "female-dominated fandom doesn't like F/F because misogyny" line so implausible. Guys, it's because fandom is dominated by straight women. I feel like more people would know this, too, if they actually hung out in places with straight men or had more straight male friends they're comfortable talking about sexual tastes with.

Re: Transcript by OP

[(Anonymous)]

My (straight male) partner likes any media 50% more if there are lesbians in it, whether there's sex or not.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not disagreeing with you exactly, but this seems more a general Touch Grass problem than a having straight male friends problem

You simply can't berate people into finding something they don't find appealing, appealing

[(Anonymous)]

I've noticed this tendency in fandom to try to justify slash away by explaining that it's LGBT+ content by LGBT+ creators for LGBT+ so it's not sexualization and so it's Fine Actually, and sure, there is some of that, but as an aroace woman myself, I do believe that trying to erase straight women out of fandom is just ridiculous. Some of it is sexualization, because straight women like men. Deal with it.

[(Anonymous)]

I honestly don't know if it means anything, and I honestly feel a little weird/guilty about it, but as a bi woman, I honestly find M/M and F/F hotter than M/F. Part of it is because the women in M/F are generally always written in a certain way in the sex and relationship-related stuff, and I just don't relate to that at all. But some of it is just that M/M and F/F feels more voyeuristic to me, and that feels hotter. IDK.

[(Anonymous)]

The people who need to admit this already know and they don't care. They're basically terfs who think the thing everyone needs to strive for is being seen as Superior, which for them means no nasty men. Any woman who not only admits her attraction to men (even if only fictional ones), much less revels in it, is a threat to the Feeling of Superiority, because those women should be suffering for politics or internet points, too, goddamnit. How dare they have a good time by embracing a part of themselves they should hate???

[(Anonymous)]

Uh...whut?

[(Anonymous)]

The amount of lesbians who enjoy m/m and the amount of gay men who enjoy f/f want to talk

[(Anonymous)]

This... Idk how to express it exactly but also most of the fans of slash of whichever gender seem to be queer themselves to me?

[(Anonymous)]

I guess it's good we had the secret yesterday about general statements vs. specific instances. If you know of a fanfiction archive that is dominated by lesbian or gay men writers and the lesbian archive is clearly dominated by M/M fic over F/M and F/F and the gay men archive is dominated by F/F stories over F/M and M/M, then sure I guess we can talk. I don't know of any archives like that, though.

[(Anonymous)]

And are all the straight men who are super interested in F/F relationship dynamics in the room with us right now, or by "compelling" do you just mean "hot"?

Because sure, I agree, fandom is by majority straight women, straight women find men hot, two men is better than one man, therefore M/M is more popular. I'm just stuck on "straight men love hearing stories about F/F" because that just veers back into fetishization, which is fine and all, but not what your secret seems to be implying.

[(Anonymous)]

Anime/manga with majority-female casts are extremely popular with men in Japan. I'm sure not all of them are straight, but just by sheer numbers, there's probably a sizeable contingent of heterosexual attraction among them.

On a similar note, I stumbled across some straight guys on a forum talking about shoujo they enjoyed some years ago. They got some flak for it from other posters, so yeah. I think we tend to hold those cards a little closer to our chests for several reasons.

Anyway, "Yuri made me human" by Iori Miyazawa explores just how deep a man's passion for F/F can go. And I wouldn't call "Otherside Picnic" fetish material in the least.

[(Anonymous)]

People will do anything but find a female character, or female character's relationships with other women, compelling. Women AND men do this (and tbh, men more than women, which kind of disproves part of your point).

[(Anonymous)]

While obviously fandom has a misogyny problem because SOCIETY has a misogyny problem, I think going to war about the very EXISTENCE of trends within fandom is not a useful or interesting debate. If fandom is largely straight women, and straight women are more inclined towards ships with men they find appealing in them, then M/M and M/F are just going to be more popular than F/F. I don't see that as a crisis or anything worth all of the discussion it gets.

One thing that I DO think is worth discussing, though, is how fandom treats the female characters broadly. You can't tell people what they need to find interesting or compelling, and I think there are some valid reasons for finding female characters less compelling. But broadly female characters aren't rewarded a lot of respect by fans vis-a-vis their male counterparts, which feels much more actionable and important than increasing the percentage of F/F fics on AO3. As if people who can't be baseline normal about women would write good F/F ANYWAY.

[(Anonymous)]

+100

[(Anonymous)]

Well said!

[(Anonymous)]

OP here.

Hm. Well, this would need to be its whole own secret I guess, but I don't really find the idea that female-dominated fandom has a misogyny problem that compelling either, to be honest. I mean, I agree with it in the sense that it is kind of impossible not to be at least a bit misogynist in a society that is misogynist -- you can't fully unlearn that, and if that is all that people meant by it, I would agree. I also am not saying you can't find examples of outright misogyny by women in women-dominated fandom, because you absolutely can.

However, I don't think people are saying JUST that. I think usually people are saying that the low attention given to female characters and F/F ships is itself a sign of / example of fandom misogyny and I just don't agree with that. The reason behind this skepticism is because ALL the social spaces I have ever been in, IRL or online -- whether it's leftist political orgs, hobby clubs, including all-female book clubs, choirs, etc., schools, companies, academic departments, online forums, etc. -- none of them have ever had the same level of (1) buy-in to feminism, and (2) knowledge of feminism, as female-dominated fandom spaces have had for me. I am not joking. I cannot think of a single social space I've been in where I've felt as comfortable voicing feminist opinions and where people are feminist by default and where people are actually fucking informed about feminism and have intelligent opinions on it. I guess the only thing that could probably rival fandom is IDK, a gender studies department, maybe, but that's not a social space I regularly hang out in. In other spaces, including very leftist spaces I've been in, and very liberal spaces online, saying I'm a feminist or voicing a standard feminist opinion like giving an example of something that contributes to rape culture or whatever, will at the very least get me uncomfortable reluctant agreement and may get me serious pushback or outright dismissiveness of my intelligence. Female-dominated fandom can be sexist, but boy it is doing leagues better than the rest of society. So I don't really see why female-dominated fandom is being singled out as having a misogyny problem when it's basically the only social space that I feel has a credible case for NOT having a misogyny problem. (And I'm NOT saying it's perfect -- I am saying it is just the least sexist social space I have ever encountered in my life.)

Meanwhile, I know so many male-dominated parts of fandom that are obsessed with female characters and F/F ships, which I would not call feminist in any way (just to list a few: MLP/brony fandom, PMMM fandom, Umamusume fandom, Touhou Project fandom, etc. etc.). I just think if we are using "interest in female characters" and "interest in femslash" as yardsticks for measuring misogyny, that is an incredibly poor yardstick that seems to be leading to low-quality/inaccurate conclusions.

I don't disagree that you can point out and call out misogyny in fandom where you see it. It feels a little bit to me, though, like focusing on a leak in a bucket when the whole wider ship is sinking.

[(Anonymous)]

In my experience every "straight woman" into m/m I've met would come out of the closet within 2-4 years.
Actual straight women mainly read published m/f romance more than fanfic.

[(Anonymous)]

Hello, your statement does not at all mesh with my experience of fandom.

And now you've met one of the many straight women who have been reading exclusively m/m fic for longer than 2-4 years - going on two decades, in my case - and are still soley attracted to men.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah no, that's not been my experience at all.

Like there are queer women who figure that out through m/m fandom, but there are also many, many straight women in m/m fandom and shipping m/m ships. There are certainly m/m ships that attract more queer women to them, but m/m by itself is not mostly shipped by queer women.

[(Anonymous)]

OP here.

Actual straight women mainly read published m/f romance more than fanfic.
This is correct! It is also 100% in line with my secret. Het romance is also very popular among straight women for similar reasons -- it involves at least one male character who is purposely meant to be attractive to straight women (paired with a female character who is meant to be viewpoint/relatable).

It is just ALSO the case that straight women are major contributors to and often the biggest enthusiasts of M/M fanfiction too. Both of these facts are true because of base rates!

I am another person for whom your first statement is just not my experience. I know a lot of straight women who are into M/M -- and F/F too, for that matter -- and still very much straight. I don't know what to say. Honestly, I don't have any straight friends who don't have at least a few M/M AND F/F ships they like (although I run in liberal circles where that's pretty normal; obviously if you were in more homophobic straight circles, you'd encounter more people without a single M/M or F/F ship they like). Sometimes you're just into the characters and dynamic more than the gender of the characters and this too is very common among het people as anyone else. I don't think anything in my secret rules this out; all that I'm saying is that heterosexuality plays a role in how popular M/M is among women and how popular F/F is among men, even if that sounds strange because M/M and F/F ships aren't heterosexual in nature.

[(Anonymous)]

While I agree with some considerations, your vision of fandom seems to be pretty limited and this influences your pov. For instance, women do not dominate fandom.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe not the cons and Discord side of things, but fanfic and shipping-focused fandom, they do, which is clearly what the secret is about. Those have been woman-dominated spaces for as long as they've existed.