interrogating one's preferences: the femslash gap

[merelydovely]

I was going through my drafts on tumblr as part of my doomsday prepping for December 17th, and I came across a personal essay I wrote in reaction to a "callout post" of sorts about female fen who claim to not be able to "relate" to f/f. While I've certainly never claimed to not be able to relate to f/f, the thread did prod me to do a bit of navel-gazing. I feel like posting this on tumblr would just be a hot mess, but I'm honestly trying to work through my shit and I'd really like to be able to talk it out, so I'm posting it here for you lovely people to peruse.

Note: This isn’t an attempt at a rebuttal to the posts linked above, it’s just me musing on my own general disinterest in femslash – an ongoing personal disappointment – and from whence I think it stems.
To summarize, here are the reasons other than internalized prejudice that I am not into femslash:

• it takes a lot more work to find high-quality femslash content and I am drawn to whichever ship has the most content in a fandom.
• there are fewer female characters onscreen with the ship dynamic I like
• the femslash that is on offer seems dominated by fic trends I don’t like
• seeing women demonstrate emotional complexity and romantic depth is not rare in real life and I don’t feel as much of a subconscious need to make up the deficit like many of us do when it comes to men
• smut only: reading about women having sex in ways my body does not work can trigger an uncanny valley feeling

The first thing is pretty obvious. As a shipper, I am pretty lazy. Fanfic is for fun and I will read whatever there is the most of as long as it doesn’t actively turn me off. I’ve been a Stony shipper since before The First Avenger because comics, but I slid into Stucky shipping simply due to volume. The more fic you read for a ship, the more fanfic you see for it, the more familiar and normal it feels; I think that goes a long way to explaining why many fans are more likely to read fic about two male characters cisswapped than they are about two characters who are female in canon.

I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not proud of being lazy, but it can’t be surprising that many readers aren’t interested in putting a ton of extra energy into making sure their escapist pastime is proportionally diverse when they’re starting from a 90%-10% content split. So it’s self-perpetuating, just like real-world overrepresentation of men in business and media.

I actually work pretty hard to overcome my disinclination toward femslash. More than half my AO3 works are mature or explicit f/f, solely because I made myself a promise that I would commit to upping the number of f/f works in my fandom by writing the kind of femslash I wanted to read. I go out of my way to look for it so I can promote it on my fandom-specific sideblog. I even helped organize and host the 2018 femslash week for my main fandom and I've spent hundreds of dollars commissioning original f/f art just so my fandom would have it. Maybe this sounds defensive. I just want to make it clear how weird and frustrating it is that femslash rarely grabs my attention.

I am very slightly bisexual – I thought I was straight for most of my life and am primarily attracted to men, with my attraction to women being a lot more ephemeral, easy to mistake for something other than attraction. I have been making an effort to get more into femslash partially in an effort to get over any internalized homophobia/biphobia I’m still harboring and in so doing discover my own sexuality more fully. But none of the (many many many) fandoms I read for have female characters with the dynamic I like.* Either they’re sisterly best friends or they just never interact with any chemistry at all.

And when I go looking for it anyway in defiance of the lack of on-screen dynamic, I don’t find the kind of things I find when I look for other genres of shipfic. The femslash I’ve encountered seems to operate on entirely different trope axes than either het or “classic” (i.e. male) slash. I’m looking for fake dating, arranged marriage, enemies to lovers, mutual-pining fuckbuddies... Like, if you have some good femslash recs that fall into these categories, please hit me up! I really like anything that follows a fairly basic Pride & Prejudice format where the protagonists clash badly at the outset of the story and then unravel into angsty longing on both sides in the middle of some other crazy drama they have to fix.

I’m not sure if it’s just what I’ve happened to find, but rightly or wrongly, it feels like a preponderance of the femslash I have read is really... fluffy. To the point of being shallow. Maybe a little bit of pining or a teensy nod to despair over a girl’s presumed straightness, sometimes, but overall I’ve encountered surprisingly little actual drama of any weight. Waaaaay too much of the femslash I’ve attempted to read has followed a sort of double-pedestal approach that goes “hey I see you are a strong female character” “ah yes I see you are a strong female character as well” “aren’t these men stupid with their silly emotional fumblings” “yes let us go be awesome together in this corner.” Like the people writing the femslash don’t want to let their characters be messy, be lustful, be anything other than flatly awesome.

Am I just reading in the wrong fandoms? Am I imagining it? Quite possibly. Like I said: Please send recs!!! But I’ve seen other readers complain about the same issues.

It’s sort of an extension of the way female characters have come to be treated in male-centric slashfic. Back in the day they’d get rewritten as unlikeable bitches so that there’d be nothing preventing the men getting together, but backlash against that approach gained momentum sometime in the late 2000s (???) sparking a move in the other direction, i.e. writing a fandom’s female characters as Scarily Awesome Always & Forever. Which of course meant you could get away with writing them very very shallowly, so long as you had the male protagonists express slight fear and awe about the all-powerful intuition and competence of Lydia Martin, or Pepper Potts, or Black Widow, or Uhura, or whoever.

So yeah, there’s this issue of shallowness, of pedestalization, of fluff, that over time has led me to doubt the ability of femslash to deliver the emotional and narrative catharsis that makes fanfic fun escapism for me. I still go out of my way to read it! I keep trying! But at least in my experience, the femslash on offer isn’t just dudeslash with female characters.

Assuming it was, though... I can admit I’d probably still be more into guy-guy slash. Why?

I once read an analysis of the draw of male-centric slash in which an LJ user postulated that for women interested in men, slash is a fantasy not (just) because it features hot dudes, but because the hot dudes in question are (typically) having powerful and vulnerable emotions, displaying rather complex emotional landscapes, and generally being quite a bit more emotionally introspective than the average man is expected to be.

It’s not something I would have thought of on my own if you asked me “why do you read so much slash?” but once I heard it laid out like that, it made a lot of sense. There are too many men in my life who really do have the emotional range of a teaspoon, or who at least do not have the vocabulary to describe more than a teaspoon’s worth of emotions. I started dating a (male) trained psychologist last year, and being with a man who articulates his emotions so openly and so proactively is honestly incredibly disconcerting. Awesome! But jarring.

And yet if it’s a woman doing it, that’s just sort of... normal. It’s not wish fulfillment for me to see women having and expressing basic emotional depth, especially about romance, because I’ve been watching my female friends doing that since forever.

On the flip side, when I read genfic or original fiction, I gravitate toward female-centric stories, because I want to see women having emotions about things other than romance. I want Uhura and Gaila as roommates grappling with alien cultural mores; I want Gwen Stacy fumbling her way into being Spider-Man, I want Martha Kent protecting her growing son from time-traveling assassins, I want Hermione taking ownership of Tom Riddle’s diary, I want Susie Derkins playing Calvinball with Death, I want Matilda the hacker who goes by @~. Women are heavily overrepresented in my genfic bookmarks.

Anyway. I think I would read more femslash if it didn’t seem so sugar & spice. I want more plot, I want more drama, I want more ridiculous angst tropes, and I want more lust. I’ll be the first to admit that internalized misogyny is a factor here, but I don’t think slut-shaming is. Why? Because part of what turns me off about femslash is the lack of sexual desire.

But once I actually find femslash with unapologetic smut, I run into kind of an uncanny valley thing. In the same way that a cartoonish doll seems more approachable than one that’s almost-perfectly-human-but-not-quite, reading about female sexual experiences that diverge from my own often feels more unfamiliar than reading about a type of sex I’ve only ever experienced secondhand. Kind of like a doctor who hates watching medical dramas because of how many inaccuracies there are. Except it’s not inaccuracies, it’s feeling like I’m weird and wrong because I know that particular sexual thing being described is not how my body works.

*She-Ra and the Princesses of Power hadn't aired when this was drafted. The f/f landscape might shift for me a bit when I start tracking down Catradora fic.

So that's my take on my own personal femslash problem. What are your thoughts? Do you ever feel guilty about not being into more media that reps minority demographics? What is your feeling about the line between bemoaning bigotry-driven fandom trends and shaming people for their sexual preferences?

Comments

[fucktheg0ds]

Very interesting post!

I have to admit, I identify as a femslasher and have complained (quite a lot) about the lack of femslash in general. At the same time I agree that it's often too fluffy. I like serious, often dark femslash and that can be quite hard to get, even when the pairing isn't fluffy in canon.

A great example is the Eve/Villanelle ship from Killing Eve - it's a dark ship where the two women are obsessed with and want to kill each other but a lot of the content has them as domestic girlfriends. That's just not the dynamic they have.

So you have two problems: there's not enough femslash, and the femslash that exists isn't serious enough. You can't win!

[merelydovely]

Admittedly that whole "the show is grimdark but the fanworks are fluffy"/"the show is a ray of sunshine but the fanworks are pure angst" thing is a common enough trend throughout fandom, but I know exactly what you're talking about when you say "domestic girlfriends." I can barely even read any established relationship fic; if it doesn't also have some tags on there like "developing relationship" and "miscommunication" on there, you can forget it. What is it about f/f that makes authors keep their feet so firmly planted in fluffland?

[rainsometimes]

I'm a fairly low-effort shipper - I do get into rarepairs sometimes, but then they tend to be rare because they're not seen as good-looking or cool enough to interest many shippers, not because there's not much canon dynamics and interaction to build on. So when I'm into an f/f ship it's usually for a canon that has prominent female characters who mean a lot to one another, like in a good number of manga/anime canons. I'm more used to thinking of them as "yuri" rather than "femslash". Shonen manga often have a lot of problems with sexism, but they do tend to be good at providing female characters with other women to interact with, and shojo is even better. (Nami in One Piece has pretty much chemistry with every woman she interacts with, for instance.)

That being said, I do write and read m/m and het more than f/f, and that may indeed have something to do with being more into male characters being vulnerable and emotional. Possibly. But I see my shippy fanfic preferences as just a small part of my fannish and media preferences overall. I'm more into genfic than shipfic to start with; I'm very often deeply into a canon without having any urge to read or write fics for it; and a lot of my favourite canons do have good reps of minority demographics. It's often how they become my favourite canons, in fact...

[merelydovely]

Any yuri out there that's good for onboarding newbies? I'm not hugely into anime myself; I used to read manga as a teenager but now I basically just dabble in whatever the anime obsession of the moment is, like Free!, Attack on Titan, Beyond the Boundary, or Yuri on Ice. I wrote a little bit of Christa/Ymir and definitely appreciated that ship, but I never read much in the fandom; it was more of a fanart-driven fandom for me.

[ineptshieldmaid]

Number 5 was/is a significant barrier to me writing both het and f/f. I have a (bullshit i know) hangup that my body's physical reactions are Not Normal, I don't really want to read about people whose bodies are as difficult as mine, but I get the uncanny valley feeling or feel like I'm producing a fetishising fantasy if I write women whose bodies are Just Way More Fun than mine. I've worked around that block, mostly, but I'm still far more likely to write about sex with a woman where the narrative focus is on 'how it feels to make love to this woman' rather than 'how it feels to have sex as a woman'. (It doesn't map onto a top/bottom or active/passive dynamic, it's more about... what part is the erotic focus? What's going on in your POV character's bits, or how much they're enjoying having their face/hands/etc all up in someone else's parts)

[merelydovely]

I don't really want to read about people whose bodies are as difficult as mine, but I get the uncanny valley feeling or feel like I'm producing a fetishising fantasy if I write women whose bodies are Just Way More Fun than mine.

Oh my god, this, SO MUCH. Because the universe hates me, even though it's highly statistically improbable given what I've read, the women I've slept with were both able to come multiple times – from penetration, no less! – so not only do I have an inferiority complex about fanfic, I also have one from real life. SIGH.

I'm still far more likely to write about sex with a woman where the narrative focus is on 'how it feels to make love to this woman' rather than 'how it feels to have sex as a woman'.

I struggle with this too. Writing more little drabbles where I can zero in on a single feeling is helpful.

[hebethen]

FWIW I also experience sexual attraction toward men, at least abstractly, but I can't say I've ever been interested in dudeslash in its own right -- like, I'll read it if it's an interesting premise from an author I like, and I have a few m/m ships (primarily in extremely male-character-dominated fandoms), but it's not something I go out of my way for.

It could be a factor that after I left Homestuck fandom -- which for all its notoriety also had a very large amount of f/f, including the angsts and the screwiness and the literal hatelove -- I next went to TF2 (nearly all men, so I was stanning for the Rule 63s) and then... tapered off traditional fandom interaction overall. On the other hand, I've kind of always been into rarepairs? So it's not like "I love this ship but nobody writes for it" is anything new for me, haha.

Anyway, the popular tropes on display definitely seem like they'd be influenced by the fandoms or fandom types in question, for sure. printfogey mentions anime/manga... but maybe it's animation in general??? Like, okay, hear me out -- I haven't been super plugged into SU fandom, but Pearl/Rose was angsty even before the Big Reveal, Blue/Yellow is a villainship, everything with Lapis has got to deal with her Issues, etc... I've never even watched Kim Possible, but I Hear Things about Kim/Shego being a popular f/f ship for that, and I know Evelyn/Helen from the Incredibles movie is pretty popular. (Checking the AO3 on that, the two top tags for E/H are "slow burn" and "angst", haha.)

I think the phrasing of the last a bit telling: you get a choice between bemoaning or shaming! It's really an age-old thing that isn't just about fandom, though: personal preferences have always been influenced by societal pressures, and that's where you get your debates about personal empowerment vs. class liberation. I don't think anyone has come to a satisfactory conclusion about how to deal with that (other than this kind of self-reflection as a first step, and after that things get hazy).

[hebethen]

P.S. If you want to, you could crosspost at fem_thoughts! It's been dormant for... uh... a while, but hey, who's counting :P

[merelydovely]

That's an interesting point about animation! Steven Universe really has been a godsend. I'm also extremely excited about SPOP. I never got to watch Kim Possible as a kid, but I definitely appreciate the Kim/Shego villainship aesthetic.

I think the most touching animated femslash moment I've had in my life thus far was with one of the students I tutor, a 10-year-old girl, who came up with the phrase "my OTP is the best" as a mnemonic to remember that the latin root "opt" means "best."

Of course I asked her who her OTP was. She was too shy to tell me at first, but I prompted her for the fandom – Steven Universe – and when I shared my own limited knowledge of the show she opened up and admitted her OTP was Lapidot. I was able to remember this meant Lapis and Peridot, which I described as "the blue watery one and the green triangle-head one."

Just the idea that a ten-year-old girl has a f/f OTP based on her favorite kid's show and the show actually supports her kind of blew my mind. The next generation is going to grow up with so much more f/f than we did!

[adrianners]

I (over)identify with a lot said above, but especially the "soft lesbians" phenomenon and the majority of f/f plots being limited to strong women, who are strong in vague but identical ways, experiencing no conflict whatsoever because Women are Naturally Better and would never have relationship struggles.

And then there's spite, the greatest motivator of all time. A fandom wants to take canonically male-attracted characters and insist that they're all really lesbians? (I'm not talking about doing whatever you please in fic, obviously, more like... well, it's basically the same attitude as the soft lesbians thing: the subtext that if you say they could also be bi/not-soft, you may as well go join Westboro Baptist, so homophobic are ye.) Enjoy these female characters being explicitly bi and either single or in relationships with (also bi) men in my fic, fandom!

I'm also a little weird, fandom-wise, because I don't get transformatively interested in 99% of the media that I like. It tends to be anime and video games that make me want to see the gaps filled in, for some reason. And then when I do seek out transformative works, I'm usually fixated on one or two characters, so if those characters aren't women? I'm probably not gonna be looking at much f/f. Given that my jam is best defined as "men who don't cope well with vulnerability," that tips the scales even further.

Edit: It strikes me that basically I prioritize writing good, varied women over making sure those women are in relationships with other women, and on a fandom-specific level I'm spitefully disinterested in catering to people who have made it clear they already view me as lesser.

[merelydovely]

Yeah, I could really do with less of the "bisexuality doesn't count if the pairing is m/f" thing. I haven't quite seen enough of it to start writing m/f out of spite. I like exploring the concept of lesbians becoming convinced they have crushes on men, because it fits well with one of the characters (Éponine) in my main fandom (Les Mis), but it does kind of grate when people can't just say "bisexual." It definitely has become the norm in most of my fandom spaces, though.

For most fandoms, I'm interested in other people's transformative works, while my own impulse to create is more limited. But then there are the fandoms where I'm not transformatively interested at all, like Fringe or Elementary. It's also interesting to think about what the perfect cocktail is to make a given intellectual property into bait for transformative fandom.

[lyssie]

And then there's spite, the greatest motivator of all time. A fandom wants to take canonically male-attracted characters and insist that they're all really lesbians?

...but isn't this what a lot of m/m slashers do? Why should femslash be any different?

And I'm saying this as someone who spite ships many things and has on occasion written lesbian-topia (er, I think. It was probably BSG or Atlantis-related, back in the day).

It just feels a little double-standardy (and putting the onus of being inclusive on female characters who already have to be extra-special and quadruple-dimensioned just to get noticed).

[hlagol]

Thanks for those gen recs, our tastes seem similar.

I'm with you on several points, namely that part of 'escape' for me is not thinking about female bodies because that's just more fraught as a reading topic for me because it's not outside of myself. I don't want to think about how I have sex or how society thinks I should have sex, or any of that. Which is probably why I don't go in for M/F much either. It just isn't fun. "Uncanny Valley" more or less works as a description, thanks for that.

I'm really almost never in it for the porn at all, tbh. I'm in it for the emotional porn. The longing, the pining, the obtuse mental gymnastics of an A+ slow burn, and the lust therein. I've been known to skim the sex scenes, even when they're well written. I'm in it for the slow emotional growth and vulnerability and domesticity and communication, and all of those things are less satisfying from female characters because, as you say, they're already good at it (or I expect them to be, so it doesn't feel like character growth). The sex is more or less a metaphorical culmination of the 50k I just gleefully burned through.

I guess I just like domestic dudes because it's a thing that is lacking irl whereas domestic ladies I just get my feminist hackles up and wonder why I'm reading it? so much to unpack.

(Fandom-specific aside: I think the only fanon female characterization who slots into the tropes I enjoy reading is Parker from Leverage, she fits well into an ot3 of similarly emotional dysfunctional dudes and it all works out. Also frequently see her written as ace, which probably helps with my sex thing).

Anyway, thanks for sparking the discussion. Lord knows the relative volume of writing on offer (and complex being-a-woman feelings) play into it all, but it's nice to try to think a bit more specifically, too. I'm unwilling to cop out with "the id wants what it wants" because the id sure as fuck doesn't exist in a vacuum. But at the same time, I do identify with most of what you've said here.

[merelydovely]

I don't want to think about how I have sex or how society thinks I should have sex, or any of that. Which is probably why I don't go in for M/F much either. It just isn't fun.

Yeah, as a rule, I'm reeeeeally not interested in reading m/f smut. I'll occasionally read it if it's standard character-exploration romcom fic, but I'll skim the sex. Just don't wanna go there.

The sex is more or less a metaphorical culmination of the 50k I just gleefully burned through.

I'm the opposite in that I'm far more likely to skim the sex scene if it happens after the relationship has been resolved. I like my sex to come with angsty pining baked in!

[isabellerecs]

Okay, I pretty much feel honor bound to try to find you some recs that fit what you are looking for. You mentioned MCU but I don't know any of you other fandoms so I'll just work from what I got. Oh and I should probably say, I'm not big on angst but I'm also really not big on the cloying domestic girlfriends (it is totally a thing, and I hate it). So I do hope at least one of these is to your taste. :)

Agent Carter-
The Hustle by anamatics: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3948985/chapters/8852683. Fake dating, women being badass but also emotionally wounded and vulnerable.
The Lady Is a Tramp by maggiemerc: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3199361/chapters/6957389. Miscommunication, assumptions.

Jessica Jones-
Rumour Has It by thecrackshiplollipop: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5275235/chapters/12173645. Fake dating, emotional constipation, and spite.

Star Wars [Sequel Trilogy]-
Percussive Maintenance by Ias: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5556494. A rare f/f enemies to lovers.

Supergirl-
Oblivious by BiJane: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8666203/chapters/19867276. Fake dating, but more lighthearted with lying and foolish pining.

Once Upon a Time-
Incoming Messages by hunnyfresh: https://archiveofourown.org/works/647108/chapters/1176001. Fake dating sort of, more of a You've Got Mail kind of situation.

[merelydovely]

Thank you so much!!! I am conversant in all of those fandoms so it should be a bunch of great reads ( ´ ▽ ` )b

If you want a sense of the fandoms I read in, you can check out my AO3 bookmarks – there are over 800.

[sanguinifex]

For me, a lot of it is I have a difficult relationship with gender. I often have trouble confronting my own body, or bodies like it.

Second, there are far fewer names for female genitalia and especially its component parts that aren't overly "anatomical." Add to that, a lot of the writers don't really know what they're doing. (This isn't about their own level of sexual experience, but about more pervasive problems. I'd say most people with vulvas don't know how to find their g-spots, or mistake the cervix for the g-spot. And g-spot isn't a very sexy word; we need something better, but that word doesn't exist yet, or at least not as a common word.) This makes depictions of sex very vague. It's all "spots" and "folds," and at that point it starts to sound like laundry. I think people also subconsciously see female arousal as shameful or unfeminine, and avoid portraying it as much as mslash often does. All in all, this makes E-rated femslash often only about as explicit as M-rated mslash.

Third, there are very few butch or kinky characters in most femslash. Everyone wants soft, pastel, femme lesbians these days, it seems. It's especially difficult to find anything from the perspective of a dom or top. So even though a lot of the things I'm into are distinctly dykey, they (and similar themes) show up a lot more in mslash than in femslash, so even though I have to go through a process of translation to imagine the sensations, it's still a lot closer to what I'd want to be doing.

[implicated2]

Third, there are very few butch or kinky characters in most femslash. Everyone wants soft, pastel, femme lesbians these days, it seems. It's especially difficult to find anything from the perspective of a dom or top.

Yeah, I came here to say basically this. I'm mostly looking for kink fic, and a lot of the tropes I associate with explicit femslash are about things high on my DNW list, like sex that relishes being gentle and tender and egalitarian.

There's also something about cis male bodies feeling more like blank slates than other bodies. In some ways that feels messed up--why should a cis male body be the default? But I think there's something about trauma there too, like a cis male body feels like a less traumatized body and therefore easier to write erotic scenarios onto without unpacking a whole lot of stuff first. If you're going to write a fun erotic story where everyone has a good time, it just feels simpler to make cis male bodies the setting of that story. Which, now that I've articulated that thought fully, I feel more inspired to push back against it, because I want stories where all kinds of characters get to have fun, but I do think that's one of the dynamics at play, at least for me.

[merelydovely]

It's all "spots" and "folds," and at that point it starts to sound like laundry.

Oh dear. I can't say I've ever had this hilarious a reaction to reading f/f smut, but I know exactly what you mean. I've commented on your tumblr before about my experiments with geological terminology (coastline, delta, etc) but it's slow going.

That's also a good point about the lack of butches. I'm always very worried about getting things wrong, so my protagonists tend to be confused bisexual disasters like myself; either femme or not especially noticeably aligned, like myself; and more than a little subby, like myself. Trying to write my way through a dom's perspective is a challenge for sure. I should really try it more often, though, and now that you've said what you've said about the dearth of butches in f/f I'll definitely see about doing some research so I can include that angle next time I write. Any resources you'd suggest, or perhaps your own surface-level do's and don'ts?

[typerare]

Third, there are very few butch or kinky characters in most femslash.

just popping in to say that this is a big point of disconnect for me also! i am very into butch women, and i prefer my smut kinky. especially with the relative dearth of femslash, it's hard to find anything that pushes those buttons.

[havocthecat]

So you don't want fluffy femslash, but when you do find non-fluffy femslash, it turns you off, because it isn't the femslash you would want for yourself on a personal, attraction level?

It sounds to me like you've set yourself up for a condition of zero femslash that makes you actually happy? Which is fine, if you aren't into femslash. But you want to get more into femslash, it also sounds like?

But it also sounds like you're saying it's maybe the writers and artists fault for not giving you what you want? Which I don't think you mean, but it sounds like you're saying "I want all of this stuff, and they're not giving it to me. But when I get it, I'm not happy with it either. But what do I do about it?" (Or I think that's what it sounds like this post is saying? I may be misinterpreting.)

I mean, I'm a huge femslasher, a writer and a reader of it. I mostly don't jam on the sugar and spice femslash either. But that's what's out there! There's a lot of it and it makes a lot of people happy! Passion and Perfection ran on that for years and it's one of the great-great-grandmas of femslash sites (which is still running, I believe) and femslashers love it.

While it's not my first choice, I do love a lot of that fluffy, non-porny fic and I finish reading a story and think, "That's great! It would be perfect if it only had porn too. But I did like it." Then I either add it to my pinboard recs or I move on.

If I wish it had porn of the type I want, I either hope someone writes it for femslash_kink or I save a note to prompt it for that during a run.

Instead of setting yourself up for a zero-sum condition on femslash you want, why not request something you think you might like and see if you get something you want? Femslash kink and porn writers are out there. They're just not the majority of femslashers - and that's okay too. There's nothing and wrong with being a sugar and spice femslasher and I don't want to make it sound like I think there is.

[merelydovely]

So you don't want fluffy femslash...

It's not fluff in and of itself that makes it hard for me to get into a fic, it's the oversaturation of fluff combined with the lack of emotional arcs.

I didn't bring this up because I rarely see it in f/f, but I don't like fics that are one-note angst either. "I can't be with the one I love, I am sad" and "I love my girlfriend, we are happy together" both make for great fanart, but there's a reason published books never take place on an emotional plateau. And as you can see from the other comments, plenty of other readers feel like "fluffy pastel femmes who have no emotional tension" is so prevalent in f/f they can't find a compelling reason to get emotionally invested in any of it.

...but when you do find non-fluffy femslash, it turns you off, because it isn't the femslash you would want for yourself on a personal, attraction level?

I don't usually read things for pure titillation. Titillation helps, of course, but I don't exclusively read E-rated fic; as mentioned, I like a basic Jane Austen comedy of manners setup just as much as a kinkfic, if not more.

It sounds to me like you've set yourself up for a condition of zero femslash that makes you actually happy?

When I find f/f fic that does have angst/pining/emotional journeys, there is a good chance I'll like it, despite the other difficulties described in this post. I do collect femslash that I like, and I write it myself, and I've prompted folks to write it, and I've even literally paid other people to write it for me on multiple occasions! I'm not just sitting here complaining that it's not enough for me. I'm explaining why I don't like it more than I currently do.

While it's not my first choice, I do love a lot of that fluffy, non-porny fic and I finish reading a story and think, "That's great! It would be perfect if it only had porn too. But I did like it." Then I either add it to my pinboard recs or I move on. If I wish it had porn of the type I want, I either hope someone writes it for femslash_kink or I save a note to prompt it for that during a run.

Fanfic is so much bigger than just what you can get out of requests. Despite the steps I personally take to put more femslash of the type I like into the world, fanfic is an escapist pastime and our reading habits are always deeply influenced by what's easy to find. If 90% of femslash is a certain way, I can maybe involve myself in the creation of a dozen or so fics that are more to my taste, but it still makes sense to discuss why the category as a whole isn't more appealing to me as-is.

I don't really understand why you think I've "set up" a zero-sum condition. I just happen to have multiple personal difficulties with femslash that unfortunately often stack on each other. I didn't create or choose those conditions myself.

I only joined Dreamwidth last week, so I didn't know there was an active femslash_kink community. There's a reason I asked for recommendations throughout my post!

[lunylovegoodlover]

Oh, wow, this is fascinating! Partly because I also definitely have had that moment of “oh god why am I reading about so many men” and then just...completely failed to get into femslash. Despite the fact that I absolutely adore every genderswapped fic I can get my hands on.

Part of it, for me, is that femslash and slash fandoms don’t seem to interact much? Looking at the ones mentioned in the comments above, and thinking about things like Supergirl or the 100, I know very few people who got into those fandoms from, idk, Supernatural. And as someone who is also insanely lazy about fandom hopping, my intro to a fandom is almost inevitably when fic writers I already know start writing in new fandoms. And so the slash just keeps being self-perpetuating.

But at the same time... I’m ace. Porn in fic serves a pretty unique purpose for me, in that it’s all the sex I’m probably ever going to get or want. So at first - yeah, it was insanely helpful that the bodies involved didn’t look like mine at all. But eventually I hit a point where I wanted to see what sex (can) look like for bodies like mine. And then I ended up reading ao3’s entire offering of explicit m/f. Coming from m/m, the power dynamics there are v uncomfortable, but I just could not find the level of intense (kinky) porn I wanted in femslash. So I have no helpful suggestions, but I would lovelovelove any recs for good femslash, plotty or porny or both!

(Also take that, tumblr - in six years I never once posted anything nsfw and now it’s been less than a day here and suddenly I’m talking about porn?)

[merelydovely]

Despite the fact that I absolutely adore every genderswapped fic I can get my hands on.

I know, right?? Rule 63 tends to keep most of the same character dynamics as its ship of origin, which is often what makes it work better for me.

Part of it, for me, is that femslash and slash fandoms don’t seem to interact much?

This is an excellent point I didn't articulate. I definitely got a sense that people were into Clexa from The 100 when it was big, but none of my favorite authors were luring me into the ship, so I never really got into it.

I would lovelovelove any recs for good femslash, plotty or porny or both!

Here are my f/f bookmarks – which involve an annoying amount of background f/f – and my own works if you wanna see what I got! I definitely need to up my kink game. This comment actually inspired an idea about a dark, kinky incarnation of my main f/f pairing, so thanks!

[aaronlisa]

This is an important question.

I think the issue re: the lack of f/f fan created content is not something that can be easily answered. There are a variety of answers that are dependent on both the fandom and the fan.

I recall one very poignant discussion about why it's easier for some women to write m/m over f/f and even f/m is that the actresses that we see on a daily basis don't look like most of us who generate fan-content. I started writing fic when I was in my late 20s. I get tired of writing about teenagers. I get tired of seeing older men with much younger women. I get tired of seeing a younger woman play a role for a women in her 30s/40s/etc. I get tired of seeing women who always look perfect, who always are the perfect weight. So sometimes this turns me away from writing for a female character that I am not absolutely in love with. And I am not alone. Sometimes creating and/or consuming m/m content is easier to people because it's easier to relate to the male characters than the female characters as presented in fandom.

And let's talk about the fact that there's not always a lot of female representation much less gay or bi rep in mainstream media. It's a very disturbing trend. And sadly, there are fandoms that are popular - for whatever reason - that are mainly male focused. It'd be great if we focused more on inclusive media but that's not the way fandom works.

What we can control is our reaction to fan created content. Sure we all have preferences for certain pairings and/or fandoms but if we make an effort step outside of comfort zone every so often and provide praise for content creators regardless of the pairing, genre, etc that they are creating for. There's been times when I've stepped out of my comfort zone to praise a fic that I enjoyed even when it's not normally my cup of tea. It's great when we create the content that we want to see on a regular basis but if we're not encouraging people to create similar content, even if it doesn't check off all of the boxes, then it discourages people from publishing that content. (And I am not saying that you aren't doing that but that a lot of people don't.) We can also encourage people to create the content we want to see by asking for it appropriate fannish exchanges. By talking about it in our semi-private platforms of what we want to see. And even by hosting exchanges or running communities that show a love for that genre, pairing, etc that we feel is missing from a fandom (or fandoms.)

And in addition about our reaction to the fan created content. There's very little incentive to publish fanworks when no one responds to it and/or you only get negative reviews for what you content you do create. No one wants to feel like they're shouting into a void when posting content, it's even worse when no one takes the time to give you any feedback. On A03, when you see that over a 100 people have looked at something you published there but only two people have said anything whether as a comment or giving kudos, it can be disheartening. This is why I think that feedback exchanges (i.e. instead of asking someone to write a fic, you ask for people to give you feedback on your works) is something important and something we need see more of.

I think it comes down to two things at the end of the day: not only do we need to be consuming more diverse media but we need to be producing more diverse fanworks. There's no easy answer to the quesitons that you raised. I think fandom is going to keep coming back to this over and over again until we come up with that easy answer.

[merelydovely]

That's an excellent point about feedback. I had actually forgotten about feedback exchanges until just now! I write for both the most popular Les Mis m/m ship and the most popular Les Mis f/f ship, and the m/m definitely gets more attention, that's for sure. So I keep up my femslash creation less because of personal interest and more because of an ideological commitment to diversity.

I aim for about a 100:10:1 ratio of hits:kudos:bookmarks on AO3 with my M/M. With poly ships or f/f ships I revise my expectations downward, but that's still more or less what I'm aiming for. Comments I don 't really put a percentage on. Commenting is so personal, and some stories are more conducive to comments than others – the really funny, farcical extremes get ASJGFDJK!!!-type comments and the deeper, plottier character work gets deeper comments, but lots of my work doesn't quite fall into either extreme, so I'm more just looking for a few comments to know I'm on the right track and after that I'm moving on to the next work.

I do ask for f/f in fandom exchanges, but they usually have multiple options, so I'll put a few of my top ships, and people hardly ever pick the f/f ones. I guess I should be more picky next time I join an exchange!

[captainlordauditor]

I'm a bi man, so I don't know if my opinion is wanted on this, but I do try to like femslash, and after about several fandoms this has been my conclusion: sometimes it goes farther than "there are fewer female characters onscreen with the ship dynamic I like". Sometimes it's "there are fewer female characters onscreen who are actual characters at all." In one of my fandoms, there's a total of four named consistently female characters in the canon. Two of them are older, and the fen skew young, so the only femslash ship with any real following is Sarah/Katherine. This is fine...except that Sarah is, well, a total lamp. She doesn't pass the sexy lamp test at all, and she isn't written well enough to give you a strong sense of what her personality is like. In order for me to become emotionally invested in any romance she has you first have to convince me she's an interesting person to have as a main character or love interest. Which is really difficult to do when 95% of the fics on ao3 are under 15k, and 80% of them are oneshots*. So I'm a lot more interested in Sarah-centric gen that fleshes her out as a human being rather than a character whose sum total of lines in 2 hours is less than a page**.

I've noticed this in other fandoms/characters, too (Suki from Avatar comes to mind). They're not characterized enough for me to be emotionally invested in relationships if the fic writer doesn't do that for me. I admit that as a bi man I'm more interested in seeing myself in works, but I wonder if women have this problem too?

*okay, these aren't real statistics.
**this actually IS a real statistic. Also it doesn't help that she's not plot relevant and doesn't have ties to most of the other characters, unlike some of the male characters who have very few lines.

[lyssie]

Sometimes it's "there are fewer female characters onscreen who are actual characters at all."

The problem with that argument is there are tons of one-note, ten-second male characters who will still be fandom darlings with fic/meta/art about them.

It's only female characters who are held up to this weird higher standard where they have to be more complex and interesting than their male counterparts in order to attract fandom to them.

[felinejumper]

Then there's questionable examples like Mycroft/Lestrade from the BBC Sherlock fandom, which is eyeroll-inducing, as the characters have never met in canon, but it's unclear what f/f ship would make more sense.

*looks around nervously* a brave statement in fandom but it's truee!!!

I am hopping around on all of these comments (good! discussion!!!). And just, same! Same same. I do feel it's a little bit the 10%/90% thing -- there isn't enough femslash for the 10% that's good to be anywhere near visible.

My disappointment/frustration has been acute because the thing that got me into fandom was how the mouth changes its shape (rule 63 1950's Holmes/Watson, novel length), and consequently I came into fandom, generally, and Sherlock, specifically, expecting lots of complex difficult queer women having complex difficult hot sex (I probably do not need to elaborate on my disappointment there, although I have otherwise had a thrilling Holmesiana experience).

I hadn't realized why the rule 63 stuff is so good -- that it gives male complexity to women! Of course and obviously! Re: above, for example, I would read 1000 more fics of lady!Mycroft being a lady and wearing heels and doing weirdo surveillance.

An addn'l sidenote for me is that, generally: good femslash >>>> good slash >> shallow femslash > shallow slash. This internal ranking is strong enough that if the slash meets some esoteric criteria, I characterize it in my head as "feeling like femslash", because GOOD femslash is a level of complexity an order above good slash. I think that's because it is an additional emotional level of twistiness, of people who nominally *can* deal with their emotions, but are in this case failing because emotions are hard.


Also, I'm sure someone has pointed you at this, but there's a f/f rec fest. Annnndddd I know there were some good fics from the femslashexchange this year, if you were to wade through those!

edit I saw someone mention the way you can follow authors from femslash to femslash - have you found that to be true at all?

[sciatrix]

Oh my god I was literally gearing up to rec that story because I love it SO MUCH that I can't even. I too was very disappointed there was not More Of That Shit in BBC Sherlock fandom. Although there were quite a few corners of that fandom that were definitely doing some interesting things with sex and gender, that particular story set one hell of a high bar.