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?

[fucktheg0ds]

I think part of it is that female characters, especially queer female characters, often get a rough time in canon so the fluffiness is meant to subvert it. But I like more realism than that. Like you, I don't really enjoy established relationship fic but my fandoms are so small I often don't have a choice.

[sciatrix]

I don't know, but I see it too and it drives me nuts!

[merelydovely]

I'm glad I'm not the only one feeling this way! It's easy to think it's all in your head and that you're just internalizing misogyny, but no, there actually is a trend of surface-level fluff, isn't there?

[sciatrix]

This is a thing I am working on--but like, I'm in Guardians of the Galaxy fandom, and my weird niche ship that I would die for is Nebula and Mantis: two canonical abuse survivors in very different ways, both of whom have been complicit in killings of children, one of whom is more comfortable with threats than vulnerability and the other one who visibly terrifies probably the third tough, powerful woman in the cast because she is comfortable with emotions and a controlling empath--

and like, people have boiled this pairing down to like, jock/cheerleader high school au pairings and soft fluff with Nebula carrying Mantis' books?

I wrote a long cranky give me this rant a few months ago that was largely spurred by the kinds of soft, emotionless dollies I was seeing everywhere, and it was--I want to see people with conflicts! I want to see people with rich, complicated personalities and emotional dynamics and stuff! I want that in my f/f, too!

And everyone would reblog it and comment that oh, well, not everyone loves darkfic. Which I find hilarious: I hate darkfic too, and if I'm going to read angst I prefer it to all come right in the end, and I don't like angst for its own sake and I certainly don't care to be depressed in my reading. I don't want dark and gritty, I just want complexity. Aaaarugh.

[merelydovely]

Ugh, that last bit really grinds my gears. "Why complain that the entire buffet is made of sugar? Not everyone likes absinthe!" I just want something savory, dammit!

I think the phrase I used elsewhere in the thread was emotional arcs. Need me some emotional arcs!

[wanderingnork]

I’d conjecture that some of the fluff obsession comes from a social compulsion I’ve noticed among a lot of queer women. There can be a weird level of pressure to make a relationship “perfect” in real life because there are few highly visible relationships between queer women, so those that exist are held to crazy high standards. (Related to this is the low visibility of domestic violence between queer women within the community at large...but I digress.)

I think we (using that as a general term for people approaching f/f) tend to project some real life expectations onto our fiction. So many f/f couples in mainstream fiction are portrayed poorly/terribly that writers feel a pressure to compensate by presenting f/f couples in a specific way. Keeps things pretty firmly in fluffland, when you’re not “supposed” to write a relationship in any other way. Anything complicated gets accused of being “bad” and that is a pretty potent pressure.

At least that’s what I’ve noticed, from conversation among other writers and watching the general trends of the social climate.

[sciatrix]

I think this is absolutely a thing going on, fwiw. Especially among younger folks who might be less likely to have visible relationships between adult queer women in their own social networks and who feel isolated and scared about what options their future has. I'm trying to articulate this, but like... when any real relationship feels like an absurd fantasy, anyone saying that these relationships are complicated and messy and human feels like a threat on top of a scary threat.

[wanderingnork]

You put that more succinctly than I’ve ever been able to.

I’m lucky, because despite not knowing older queer women I’ve got a magnificent girlfriend who’s willing to do the messy human relationship work with me. But as a result, I certainly read less f/f...because it feels like a caricature instead of a realistic relationship. It doesn’t mesh with what I’ve seen of my very real relationship.

[merelydovely]

This may be kind of a personal question, but do you remember what kind of expectations you had for your first f/f relationship going into it? What assumptions were the most noticeable in their deconstruction?

[wanderingnork]

I opened the personal commentary, it’s all good!!

I typed out an entire reply Nd then realized that my current girlfriend is *not* my first f/f relationship. TW for summary discussion of mild sexual assault below. Apologies for the wall of text! 😅

My first one was me getting involved with a married couple, half of which is more technically genderqueer but who expresses herself (using her preferred pronouns here) in a largely feminine way. I personally had zero expectations except “aaa someone likes me I have a relationship,” but there was a VERY clear expectation on her end that we would Just Work Out naturally. Problematically, she was an enabler for her husband, who was...um, not great. Nothing severe ever happened to me, but there was a lot of lack of consent and general me being overwhelmed and feeling pressure to keep saying yes, because queer relationships are automatically good, right?

Wrong.

And she never helped, because our part of the relationship was Fine so why was I worried? We also never addressed her consent issues with regard to me—and it’s only recently I’ve admitted they happened, after spending a YEAR defending her out of the misguided assumption that a fellow queer woman could never do something like THAT. So the expectation of “queer=no work” was present. Oddly enough, with all of us dealing with at least one mental disorder, work was expected with regard to navigating mental health in relationships, but our relationship as women faced pressure FROM HER to be perfect. When it got tangled up with his behavior, things just...crashed. Hard, because fluffland isn’t a realistic expectation. I still don’t talk about this much because I’m concerned about stigma surrounding a failed relationship between women. (Disclaimer: I am also genderfluid but raised female, so take that for what it’s worth.)

Heading into my current relationship, I was ducking neurotic about communication and not just assuming things would work out. We may be women but both of us are very human. Messy emotions happen, you know? Mistakes get made and I’m pleased to have the chance to fix them. I expect to be in a relationship with a person, not a caricature of a person that queer women seem to be expected to be.

[doomhamster]

My own first f/f relationship wasn't AS complicated because it wasn't a three-way, but I definitely recognize a lot of it. The expectation that everything was and would effortlessly continue to be Just Fine because we were both women, that I would be able to intuit her needs and desires without her needing to communicate with me because we were both women... (Oh, and the pressure to "come out for real" because I kept insisting I was bi, which OBVIOUSLY was a sign I wasn't committed to the relationship or to my queer identity. That wasn't great either.)

And I can understand the desire to have things Magically Work Out in fanfic, but it feels really alienating to me given the experiences I've personally had.

[merelydovely]

when any real relationship feels like an absurd fantasy, anyone saying that these relationships are complicated and messy and human feels like a threat on top of a scary threat.

Great observation.

Certainly gives a darker cast to all those jokes about how useless young lesbians are at actually acquiring girlfriends.

[sciatrix]

Yeah, like, on the one hand I gently roll my eyes at them (and at young aces constructing elaborate alternative relationship structures without benefit of, you know, actual other people to complicate them). Because the useless fretting isn't actually improving the situation...

But on the other hand, those kids are scared and expressing it in the least vulnerable way they have any access to. And I was an absolutely terrified kid until I was in about my mid twenties. I mean that I got asked about my five, ten, fifteen year plans when I was sixteen and I gave detailed career ideas and then tentatively added that I'd like to have a dog, because that seemed realistic. It's hard when family feels so incredibly inaccessible as a basic context, and there are even fewer models of healthy adult f/f relationships that end well enough than m/m ones.

It's one of those things where reaching out and making those models and just being present in the community does a lot of good, but the desperation and loneliness and hungriness can (paradoxically) make it harder to do that in the first place. I just try to keep that in mind when I'm playing that role.

[merelydovely]

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts :)

[merelydovely]

Elsewhere in the thread, someone mentioned writing certain tropes out of spite, and hearing about this pressure to portray f/f as perfect or face consequences has got me raring to write some Deeply Problematic shit.

[wanderingnork]

DO IT. I’d read the hell out of it.