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

[adrianners]

I (over)identify with a lot said above, but especially the "soft lesbians" phenomenon and the majority of f/f plots being limited to strong women, who are strong in vague but identical ways, experiencing no conflict whatsoever because Women are Naturally Better and would never have relationship struggles.

And then there's spite, the greatest motivator of all time. A fandom wants to take canonically male-attracted characters and insist that they're all really lesbians? (I'm not talking about doing whatever you please in fic, obviously, more like... well, it's basically the same attitude as the soft lesbians thing: the subtext that if you say they could also be bi/not-soft, you may as well go join Westboro Baptist, so homophobic are ye.) Enjoy these female characters being explicitly bi and either single or in relationships with (also bi) men in my fic, fandom!

I'm also a little weird, fandom-wise, because I don't get transformatively interested in 99% of the media that I like. It tends to be anime and video games that make me want to see the gaps filled in, for some reason. And then when I do seek out transformative works, I'm usually fixated on one or two characters, so if those characters aren't women? I'm probably not gonna be looking at much f/f. Given that my jam is best defined as "men who don't cope well with vulnerability," that tips the scales even further.

Edit: It strikes me that basically I prioritize writing good, varied women over making sure those women are in relationships with other women, and on a fandom-specific level I'm spitefully disinterested in catering to people who have made it clear they already view me as lesser.

[merelydovely]

Yeah, I could really do with less of the "bisexuality doesn't count if the pairing is m/f" thing. I haven't quite seen enough of it to start writing m/f out of spite. I like exploring the concept of lesbians becoming convinced they have crushes on men, because it fits well with one of the characters (Éponine) in my main fandom (Les Mis), but it does kind of grate when people can't just say "bisexual." It definitely has become the norm in most of my fandom spaces, though.

For most fandoms, I'm interested in other people's transformative works, while my own impulse to create is more limited. But then there are the fandoms where I'm not transformatively interested at all, like Fringe or Elementary. It's also interesting to think about what the perfect cocktail is to make a given intellectual property into bait for transformative fandom.

[adrianners]

Agh, dammmit, I meant disinclined. That'll teach me to comment as I'm walking out the door. (DW, I know and respect the reasoning on not allowing edits on comments with replies, but I am too much of a typo-ridden mess to have this option taken away from me.)

The fandom-specific contexts definitely complicate the matter. Yuri on Ice is the only thing I've been this interested in for ages, and it's the first fandom to make me produce fanworks in about fifteen years. But the only f/f ship (out of several reasonable possibilities before we hit serious kinktomato territory) that gets any attention is a perfect storm of No Bi, Only Lesbians (despite them both swooning over dudes in the show), Afterthought F/F to stand aloof and undeveloped in the background of all-m/m works, and being anti-shipper favorites despite having a bigger age gap than the popular m/m ship that brought the antis in the first place. If I liked them as a ship more, I might feel the need to tip the scales, but I'm sorta meh about them as anything but friends. This discussion, however, has me wondering if I can think up a plot for some of those other ships that get ignored (because, I suspect, everybody involved is over 25 while 90% of the fandom is like 16-21, and most of them are bad at writing actual grown-ups). Now that activates my spite powers just fine.

[merelydovely]

I once got into Andy/Sid (you know...from Toy Story...) because somehow I stumbled across some fantastic futurefic, so I firmly believe that anything is shippable if you're a good enough writer. Pick up that underloved ship and give it a shot... then link me when you're done!

[lyssie]

And then there's spite, the greatest motivator of all time. A fandom wants to take canonically male-attracted characters and insist that they're all really lesbians?

...but isn't this what a lot of m/m slashers do? Why should femslash be any different?

And I'm saying this as someone who spite ships many things and has on occasion written lesbian-topia (er, I think. It was probably BSG or Atlantis-related, back in the day).

It just feels a little double-standardy (and putting the onus of being inclusive on female characters who already have to be extra-special and quadruple-dimensioned just to get noticed).

[adrianners]

I think the stuff in parentheses right after what you quoted here basically answers your question, doesn't it? I'll take another stab at it, though. It's not "making them gay" that's a problem--as you say, that's the nature of slash-type fanwork (especially if the characters are suggested to be straight in canon) across the board--but wider fandom-specific attitudes that it's unacceptable to ever suggest that, hey, bisexuality is also a queer identity worth exploring, and bi people are still queer when they're single or in a binary-opposite-gender relationship. Trends swinging toward fandom writing the characters of Hypothetical F/F Ship A as self-IDed lesbians: Awesome, trends happen, fandom gonna fandom. In that scenario, people who prefer a different approach can put their oars in or hope the pendulum starts to swing both ways (couldn't resist, sorry), but they aren't automatically treated as enemies to the ship. Fandom policers going after anybody who depicts the same characters as bi: Not awesome. I don't like that attitude applied to characters of any gender (we need to make Your Sexuality Headcanon Is Not My Sexuality Headcanon, and That's Not 'Phobic Unless Somebody Is Actively Being 'Phobic About It a thing, but somehow I don't think it'll catch on like kinktomato), but it's gotten practically memetic for the female characters in my particular fandom contexts.

So how that translates in my fanwork is my female characters are bi 99.9% of the time, and I don't ever plan to write the only significant F/F ship of the fandom (or if I did, they'd be bi and have that come through clearly in the text, which is how I already write them when they're single or in M/F[/M, in one case,] relationships). That said, per my comment lower in this thread, I am interested in writing for a rarepair in the same fandom because I think it has less of that policing attached to it... probably because it'll get me my scarlet letter for age gap reasons instead, even though they're both 30+. Spite life! *peace sign*

Maybe you've lucked out and haven't spent time in the fandoms that push this attitude the hardest; I've seen it most in animation, especially fandoms of the last five-ish years that have sizable anti-shipper contingents who manage to worm their talking points into the general fandom populace. I think those cases also often have the old "They're gay so they can't be sexually attracted to the characters in my m/m ship" motives in play, which is its own set of issues. As I hope is coming through in my comments, my fandom history is also a bit weird compared to what I think many people view as "normal," because I've got twenty years mostly limited to deep dives into one or two fandoms at a time for years on end, and I wasn't in a lot (any?) of the Fandoms That Ate Fandom after Harry Potter. My perspective on fandom experience is going to be really different from someone who went for breadth or watched, say, Supernatural. Does Supernatural even have much in the way of f/f options? All I know is all the women die, apparently.

Did that help? Based on your comment, you seemed to be seeing the female characters held to higher standards, while my issue is with specific fandom cultures exerting social pressure to hold the (usually female) fanwork creators to strict standards of Acceptable F/F, wherein those standards are limited to conflict-free Kinsey 6s. Again, I'm also not down with people pushing those kinds of purity tests on characters and ships of other genders; it just tends to be most prevalent and focused these days--in my experiences, which may not match yours--in f/f ships.

[breathedout]

FWIW, both I and (even more so) my partner and beta, have DEFINITELY encountered this kind of biphobia in reader reactions to stories of ours that were primarily m/m but had scenes involving one of the male leads in a sexual situation with a woman, even when the dude in question is canonically into ladies. People have this kneejerk "ewwwwww, girls!" reaction, equate any position other than a Kinsey 6 to homophobia on the writer's part, and then vomit these views all over our comments. It's not a good look.

Which is not to detract from the fact that it happens in the policing of f/f ships as you cite, but it's CERTAINLY present in m/m ships as well.

(FWIW I say this as a Kinsey 5.5 more-or-less-lesbian who writes a ton of f/f as well as m/m and m/f.)

[adrianners]

Man, that's unfortunate to hear. =/ I'd come to associate that attitude with the Bad Old Days and hoped it had gone the way of character-bashing and, like, cutesy author's notes in the middle of paragraphs. That's why it's been super frustrating for me to see it wearing a progressive hat wrt f/f ships.

As a total tangent, your comment brought this to mind: A couple years ago on AO3, I stumbled across an older story that hadn't been backdated when the author crossposted it from ff.net, and it was astonishing how much physical violence was acceptable against the competing love interest to get her out of the way. It was M/M with an icky girl to remove this time, but it brought back memories of so many fic regardless of the main ship's genders. I couldn't believe that was normal when I was a teenager, and it was even more surprising how fully I'd blocked it out in the years afterward.

[merelydovely]

It strikes me as an issue with fanfic as an escapist buffet in which people don't go in to be led by the author, they go in to have their expectations met and their needs satisfied. With the average novel, I'm emotionally prepared to be jerked around a bit, to be Challenged, but generally when I go in a fanfiction direction I'm there for a particular taste, like I'm a five-year-old child and I have to keep all the flavors on my plate separate or some bullshit like that.

Because I'm not actually a five-year-old child, I would never complain if I suddenly discovered an unexpected flavor mixed in with what I thought was pure mashed potatoes, but that really does seem to be the level of reasoning that goes on when people object to the presence of m/f or f/f in their m/m.