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merelydovelyNote: 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?
no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 03:22 pm (UTC)I went to my f/f bookmarks for recs and was like "...oh, I have twenty, but they're 90% breathedout. Hm."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 03:29 pm (UTC)That one's definitely gonna be on it, though.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 03:53 pm (UTC)grabby hands give me recs!!I'm so glad you're managing to prioritize your work. But yay! I look forward to that list & new authors!(I'm also veryy excited for Yuletide reveals, because all my requests were "f/f and complicated, please!")
no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 07:20 pm (UTC)To some of the larger questions on this thread: I wrote a long piece (now archived on AO3 but originally posted to @femslashrevolution on Tumblr) about some possible explanations for the tendency to shy away from meaty, morally grey characters, or substantive conflict more generally, in f/f stories. As with people who write about other marginalized groups, I think there's a pressure of tokenism on f/f writers: writing about women is perceived as inherently political in a way that writing about men is not. And there's this idea that when you write about queer women—ESPECIALLY non-white queer women, holy smokes—your queer female characters (of color) are representations of All Queer Women (of Color) Everywhere, and therefore can't be assholes (or poor communicators, or kinky sex fiends, or whatever) because if they were assholes/inarticulate/kinky then you would be implicitly arguing that Queer Women (of Color) Are All Assholes(/Inarticulate/Oversexed), and what are you, a misogynist racist? Writing about white men is perceived as easier because white male characters are able to be perceived, accurately or not, as complex individuals, rather than politicized representatives of their demographics.
Unsurprisingly, given that writing lady-lovin' kinky female assholes (sometimes of color) is one of my favorite things to do, I argued in the above essay that that line of thought is bullshit and that we should all try to write all characters as individuals, albeit individuals informed by their political and personal contexts. (This goes for male characters as well as female, and white characters as well as POC—whiteness and maleness are not actually neutral, "default" categories; we're just conditioned to process them this way!) But putting that into practice is, you know, difficult! I don't think it's surprising that a lot of people who set out to write f/f shy away from taking risks that could expose them to criticisms of misogyny, even if reducing all female characters to "unproblematic" cardboard cutouts is KIND OF UNDENIABLY also sexist. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Frankly I also feel like I've been able to read and write as much good f/f as I have because I've done the work of looking outside the big fandom juggernaut media sources and sought out ones that do have complex female representation. Like, doing the heavy lifting of building a female Sherlock character into a fully-rounded person as you write her is not the only game in town: there are actually shows that care about giving their female characters flawed humanity right there on the screen! In addition to Killing Eve, which was mentioned above: Jessica Jones, Black Sails, Grace and Frankie, GLOW, The Hour, The Fall, Penny Dreadful, Person of Interest, Bomb Girls, Call the Midwife; even, for all their faults, Buffy or the first season of Agent Carter; comedy fandoms like Archer, Heathers, Spy, Brooklyn 99 and the The Good Place, book fandoms like Carmilla, Dangerous Liaisons and basically anything by Sarah Waters (Fingersmith; Affinity)... the list goes on. But as noted above, these fandoms are smaller and there is less reader response to works written in them.
I've also cultivated a small cadre of writers who often produce f/f or stories involving women, whose stuff I'll read regardless of the unfamiliar fandoms they may write in: because I know them, I trust them, and I know I'll like what they make. I'm thinking of holyfant, kathryne, lbmisscharlie, tiltedsyllogism, thatyourefuse, peninsulam, undoubtedly other folks I'm forgetting. But again, this is a more expansive reading strategy than most people in fandom have: it's more work and more of a leap of faith than just going into the tag for a given pairing.
This response is getting long, but to the points about f/f sex writing not matching up with how people's bodies work in real life: I actually feel like I encounter a lot more sexual realism in the f/f stories I read than in the m/m ones? This could be a function of the stuff I personally read, but overall, the VAST majority of the time when I'm reading m/m, even if it's super hot, my reaction tends to be "this author has read a lot of fanfic sex scenes." Whereas a lot more often, when I'm reading f/f, my reaction is "this author fucks women." That said, I do think, like... the majority of erotica is written in a heightened register, and involves a good deal of fantasy. Think of how often one encounters male characters in fanfic who can come from prostate stimulation alone: not statistically probable. It's an interesting reflection—though not super surprising, given how many women have trouble getting out from under body anxieties enough to enjoy sex in real life—that for a lot of female readers, that fantasy register might become a distraction when applied to bodies like theirs, even though it's a plus when it's applied to bodies that differ.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 11:42 pm (UTC)Piggy backing on your last:
The latter point is actually why the former works for me: it is a body physically like mine, and also a body that, like mine, is being constituted through both the physical and the fantastical. I think the element of imagination in sex is...not undersold, but I wouldn't have known to fantasize about certain desires for this body if I hadn't seen them in f/f technicolor desires, even though I knew the names and technical details before-hand. So seeing very intense physical reactions in bodies like mine was very much a "hm, I wonder if that's accessible to me after all?" (Reader, it was.)
There's a thread additionally of "fantasizing about women is normal" (teenage me thought "all girls do this" and also "I'm a mere ally to the gays", the usual), but that fantasizing about oneself is abnormal, especially if oneself is not a cis dude1 -- so f/f grounds itself in the first and expands to the second, kind of.
So basically, I'm interested in all the people saying that is not the case for them.
I ALSO wanted to say to the general discussion, that in the context of bodies&gender&fantasy it would be remiss to exclude build your wings, since it absolutely hits my fantasy/embodiment buttons in ways similar to good femslash (for obvious ch 56 reasons, but also way before that in a much more tonal/less explicit way). I'm feeling weird that it doesn't quite belong here, and thus the bigger thought that I have not seen any discussion on this thread of ostensibly-male-femslash-y or transfemmeslash, which. I realize is an ask in a small genre for an even smaller subset, but does inherently complicate imagination/body-empathy threads. And I want it!
And, ofc, opening tabs on all those cadres of writers you mentioned!
1. what's the deal with language here, are we still in this awkward format? What I want to say is: people who primarily/complexly identified with womanhood or felt complexly unidentified with manhood as teenagers
2. to be clear I am not even saying byw is in those categories,
no subject
Date: 2018-12-21 08:01 am (UTC)Yeah, I don't think I've ever had a problem with sexual realism in what little f/f I've read. It's more the heightened register thing. I've had sex with women who could come multiple times from penetration and stuck their tongues out like they were starring in a hentai, so I'm well aware that these are real experiences it is possible for real women to have, it's just not what happens to me, ever, and I'm stuck in that weird place between "I don't actually want to read about people who have my problems" and "I can't relate to this girl having yet another orgasm, what even ARE multiple orgasms???"
I think I probably just need to get better rec lists and find sources I reliably like and, basically, get over myself.