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

[sciatrix]

As a butch lady I am very excited to see what you come up with! It's a weird fraught place to stand sometimes, so seeing what you know about and bring up is really exciting for me.

[typerare]

i'm really glad to hear that you're excited! i don't want to step on any toes or misrepresent anyone, which i was worried about. i'm excited too!

[sciatrix]

Hey, I figure that worst case, if you bring up something I don't see myself in, either

a) it will quickly become obvious that Butchness is a Magical Diverse Category of Diversity* and there are many potential experiences and variations within the category
b) it raises interesting discussions and we can have a pretty cool conversation
c) we will have One Cake to sit and talk about and converse over, rather than the zero we'd have without yours, or the theoretical Second Cake I might put together in response as we keep the conversation going? you know that thing, right?

*makes faces* There's also some weird shit about butchness I was talking to ladypolaris about the other day, where among queer women butch women are often held up as like, The Realest Lesbians/Queer Women Of All, but also no one is quite sure where the line is, and also also when do you know you've crossed it and you really count? And at the same time there is like zero representation out there--not zero exactly, but very very little even compared to lack of representation of queer women generally--and so I feel like many sets of queer women wind up awkwardly looking around and going "well, what does this even look like?" without mental references to real people in our lives. And on top of that, accessing community can be so tricky...

Like, I felt weird about claiming "butch" and still do--am I gender non-conforming enough???, despite the fact that when I look around to compare myself and my preferred gender shit to other people I invariably wind up comparing myself to people who do not identify as women.

Gender is hard, y'all.

*true facts: I know precisely one other person who IDs as a butch woman, and she's my therapist whom I sought out specifically for this reason; most folks I know who live along a FAAB-but-it's-complicated kind of spectrum ID as nonbinary when they're at home rather than female-but-a-specific-subcategorical-tradition-usually-lumped-in-that-whole-overarching-category like me

[typerare]

a) it will quickly become obvious that Butchness is a Magical Diverse Category of Diversity* and there are many potential experiences and variations within the category
b) it raises interesting discussions and we can have a pretty cool conversation
c) we will have One Cake to sit and talk about and converse over, rather than the zero we'd have without yours, or the theoretical Second Cake I might put together in response as we keep the conversation going? you know that thing, right?

yes, i do know the cake thing! i want to believe it applies here. i'm fresh out of Tumblr, so i'm leery of landing myself in a discourse minefield. (i fully intend to just compile the words of other people who actually have a horse in this race, rather than interject my own commentary; hopefully that will keep things legit.)

i've also seen the thing you're talking about re: butchness, where at times it is simultaneously considered Most Authentic and also so underrepresented that no one can tell what it actually is. that's such a tricky position to be placed in.

gender is hard, isn't it? i'm glad you have at least one other butch woman in your life and i hope you can locate more of your people.

[sciatrix]

Mm, I hear that! Well, I don't know how merelydovely intends to run her (got the pronoun right?) space. I can tell you that my personal preferences run to trusting someone to be well meaning and respectful unless demonstrated otherwise. If something does bug me, I try to say that early on and leave room for pleasant disagreement and human error without anyone being an irredeemable garbage person. I've missed conversations where I can chat with people who have difference lexicons and experiences and lives from me, and I'm really enjoying getting to have those again here.

Gender is super hard! I hope you have folks in your life who are gender neighbors to you, too.

[merelydovely]

I do indeed use she/her! It's up in my header text somewhere.

The art of voicing objections while still making clear you have faith in the other person's good will really ought to be, like, taught in schools. So often it seems like people have internalized the idea that enforcing boundaries of any kind is an act of rudeness!