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

[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.

[lunylovegoodlover]

Seconding this - Arthur/Eames from Inception, for example, have maybeeee 5 minutes of screentime total and zero character development, yet they have a huge (and pheonomenal) fandom. But I do think you have a point - most pairings only really take off if they have a well developed canon or fanon, more male characters have that canon, and creating that fanon is a lot of work (that people tend to only do for male characters)

[merelydovely]

Arthur and Eames don't really have enough screentime for character development, true, but they have more than enough time to establish an "adversarial allies"/"flirtatious banter" baseline, and they both have pretty strong characterization, with Arthur buttoned-up, slick, competent, right-hand man, and Eames the lax and relaxed talented troublemaker. It's exactly the kind of thing that invites people to fill in the blanks with additional fanon about how they developed the dynamic they dispaly onscreen.

My point is, I think there are plenty of examples of fandom going overboard to develop white dudes with no canonical characterization or relationship, but I don't think Arthur/Eames fits the bill.

[captainlordauditor]

It's exactly the kind of thing that invites people to fill in the blanks with additional fanon about how they developed the dynamic they dispaly onscreen.

There it is! It's the difference between "fill in the blanks" and "nothing but blanks". If a character doesn't have strong characterization or enough screentime to rewatch it and analyse every interaction with the other characters, they end up in the latter category.

[merelydovely]

It's the difference between "fill in the blanks" and "nothing but blanks".

Well said! It's not that I want to make endless excuses about why people don't love on female characters/brown characters more, but we do have to actually take the screenwriters to task for their part in things too.

[captainlordauditor]

Absolutely. There are definitely times when the case is sexism/racism/both*, but given how female fic writing demographics tend to skew, I don't think we can pass it off as sexism only on the part of the fic writers. Especially when tv writing rooms often skew male, and are overwhelmingly white.

*I have silently sworn never to write an Albert DaSilva-centric fic out of spite for him having twice the number of fics tagged on ao3 as Medda, who falls much closer to the "fill in the blanks" side of the spectrum than Albert does.

[captainlordauditor]

While that's true, I think it helps that there's a much larger pool of one note archetypes that male characters tend to fall into, so it doesn't feel quite like you've seen the same character a hundred times, only half a dozen. With female characters it's pretty much 'love interest' and 'sister/mother'.

[merelydovely]

I've often seen this argument ("people pay disproportionate amounts of attention to flat ten-second male characters") levied at male characters who actually have a fairly strong characterization, just not a ton of screentime – see nearby comment about Arthur and Eames! Sometimes it seems like people don't necessarily have a robust sense of what "one-note" or "three-dimensional" actually means in the context of a very brief media appearance, akin to the way "strong female character" gets warped to mean "woman with no realistic flaws or foibles."

That's not to say I disagree that fandom itself is sexist (and racist! can't forget racist!!) about how it doles out meta and fanon love – it absolutely is – but I also feel like the whole "briefly-appearing white male characters get inexplicable amounts of love!" tack ignores the genuine disservice that media regularly does to its briefly-appearing female and/or nonwhite characters, which does actually contribute to why people tend to be less interested in building out those characters' empty spaces.

Basically, I feel like the "fandom is too interested in otherwise uninteresting white male characters just because they're white and male" thing gets applied with a very broad brush, and I typically want to hear what characters someone thinks are "otherwise uninteresting" before I'm sure we're on the same page. Like, I see this sort of thing said a lot about – brace for controversy – Kylo Ren and General Hux, who have more works on AO3 dedicated to their ship than Finn and Poe Dameron do. While I'm upset there isn't more Stormpilot content, I can also clearly see why Kylux captured shipper's imaginations and grew legs. The interplay between Kylo and Hux is clearly meant to be intriguing and entertaining, whereas you can see by the second movie that the filmmakers went out of their way to keep Poe and Finn apart. Poe and Finn are mainly just straightforward allies that are adorably terrible at flirting, whereas Kylo/Hux has a "reluctant allies" + "shifting power dynamic" thing going on. It's not actually that surprising that people find Kylo and Hux so interesting to write kinkfic and crackfic and all manner of darkfic about – that kind of stuff is classic shipbait! Consequently, I'm much angrier at the filmmakers for shutting down the chemistry between Finn and Poe than I am at the fandom for shipping a ship served up for them on a silver platter.

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.

[merelydovely]

Yeah, the actual numerical differences are definitely where the problems start, but I sort of intentionally sidestepped that because it only explains why there aren't more femslash ships period, not why I'm less interested in f/f ships and femslash when I do encounter them.

It's an interesting point about Suki. Contrasting her against characters like Ty Lee or Mai, I do feel like I have less of a sense of her character besides "is totally badass" and "likes Sokka." Funny how that happens!

[captainlordauditor]

Even with Mai I felt like I didn't get a great sense of her character because it kept shifting to suit the writers' needs. I blame most of that on the fact that season 3 had to be rewritten very quickly, though, when they found out they weren't getting a fourth season.

But, if you take Team Avatar as an example, since it's an even split... Numerically, there's three possible m/m ships, three possible f/f ships, and however many f/m and poly ones. Most of the het ones have pretty strong, if small, followings in fandom. Zuko/Sokka and Zuko/Aang also both have pretty strong followings. Katara/Toph has a small, but definitely present, following, too.

By contrast, Suki/Sokka, Suki/Toph, and Suki/Katara are all super rare - the latter two are virtually nonexistent. Suki/Zuko has a decent following, mostly thanks to the comics - we see Suki interacting with Zuko more than we see her interacting with her canonical boyfriend, Sokka.

If we remove Suki from the equation, since her entire character is "Badass love interest", thereby rendering her uninteresting for fic writing purposes, the only f/f ship left is Katara/Toph...which happens to be the only f/f ship of Team Avatar with enough of a following that you can stumble across it accidentally. And shipping is like gravity, the bigger it is the more people it draws.

This doesn't explain why Katara/Toph is smaller than, say, Aang/Toph, other than the possibility that it's not as thematically pleasing, though.

[merelydovely]

Yeah, I'm waaaay more interested in Katara/Toph than Aang/Toph; really not sure why the numbers break down as you say for those two. But your point about Suki is well-made. She is very much there as Sokka's love interest, and it shows. Mai is saved by her strong relationship with non-Zuko characters, even if her character is a bit of a puzzle at times.

[captainlordauditor]

The interesting thing about Mai is that I rarely see fics with her as part of the center ship unless it's with Zuko. It's not uncommon for fics to have her dating Ty Lee/Jun/whomever in the background, but it's very much in the background. Mind you, I haven't gone archive trawling for Avatar fic in a very long time, so it could have changed.

[merelydovely]

I haven't even looked at ATLA fic since my livejournal days a decade ago, back when I was juuust starting to learn what a "kink meme" was. I didn't really read actual longform fic, I was just quietly awed by the weird shit people posted to the kink meme, fumbling my way through not-quite-NSFW roleplaying with the CAPSLOCK_ATLA crew. Mai sure got her share of action there. Good times.

[captainlordauditor]

Ah, that was farther back than me; My heaviest period of reading was roughly 5 years ago. I tended towards longform fic, and it's still my go-to fandom when I have a hankering for that.(Especially with interesting AUs - the Zuko/Katara segment in particular has come up with some spectacular longform fics based on "what if" scenarios.)

[merelydovely]

Yeah, I think my favorite-ever comment about Zutara was this one, which I believed I screencapped from a DeviantART comment:

Not that I hate the whole Zutara idea fan girls seem to love. Personality wise they should go together well. Only trouble is everything that has happened from the first episode till now.