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

[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.