My whole thing comes down to “if you treat people well in real life and do no intentional harm, then keep at it.” Like...if someone loves m/m in fiction but hates gay people in real life then that’s the issue—harm to real people. That is fetishizing. It’s not someone writing kinky, niche porn of two fictional characters.

Those fictional characters aren’t real. You can’t dehumanize them because they exist to entertain and to be tools for a writer to tell a story.

apparently you can’t possibly be fetishizing if there’s chemistry involved

Also what about non-straight people who ship just for hot faces or porn fodder? Is it fetishizing ourselves? Are we exempt bc abraca bobbidi leviosa? Do we just...not exist? What about straight people who ship m/f couples for these reasons? Is attraction illegal now? Horny jail is real??

"You enjoy mlm because you're sexist".

Actually I enjoy mlm in fiction because I identify as nonbinary and I feel more relation to mlm works of fiction more than wlw but go off I guess.

Just because one singular person enjoys a certain thing doesn't suddenly make the entire thing bad, nor does it mean everyone is the same.

Don't blame one artist for the actions of a fandom as a whole.

why r antis like this

there is so much wrong with this and I don’t have the spoons to do a full breakdown but yeah this is, I believe, made by a TERF if the reference to autohomoeroticism is any indication 

OH I DO I DO! *raises hand* I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!

Breakdown attempt 1 (more additions will probably come later because there is SO MUCH to unpack and I'm not throwing away the whole suitcase):

Transphobia/TERF shit:

Ableism:

SWERF/anti-kink shit:

Misogyny:

Queerphobia:

Horseshoe theory (you were the conservative Christians all along!):

WOO, IS THAT EVERYTHING?

I need a drink after that one. The amount of work to break down that shit has me thirsty.

You’re twenty, go outside and make some friends I BEG of you

forgot I followed this bitch for a sec. anyways how about you go outside and look at a library. they have alot of problematic shit.

Can you and OP like meet up somewhere outside of your bedroom or smth bc this is really embarrassing

>yes I also enjoy consuming m/m content,

there’s literally not one thing bad about consuming m/m content as long as it’s healthy and safe. even if the said content has dark themes which you anti antis absolutely fucking adore to use as a gotcha as long as it’s written with respect to survivors/victims and not romanticized there’s nothing wrong with m/m content featuring dark themes, so is m/m content in general

>I watch BL anime

have you ever seen any anti on the block who actually loves and actively consumes the bl genre? most of us, INCLUDING ME, have consumed bl anime only in the past for a period of time before we realized the wrongdoings of both ourselves and the genre itself. there are japanese mlm out there creating content (bara) to appeal to other fellow mlm, japanese or not, which is far different than what the bl genre is.

bara is made by mlm for mlm while bl/yaoi is completely for the straight female gaze. i’ve seen numerous mutuals (mlm or not) consume bara, but not a single one of them was a fan of bl.

>and most of my AO3 bookmarks are m/m fics.

literally what on god’s green earth makes you think that we use ao3 in the first place? anti antis such as yourself will cry and moan and piss and shit yourselves screaming about how ao3 will always exist despite antis being against it, and in the same breath claim that we actively use the website. you can’t have your cake and eat it too, so which one is it? do we use the site just as enthusiastically as you or are we against the site existing in the first place?

>no I am not a fujoshi, there is a fundamental difference between me and fujoshi

damn fuckin right chief

>which I will proceed to not explain at all

which i just did. thank you for listening.

So “turning straight men gay by raping them” is okay if a man writes it? Since you’re saying “bara”/geicomi is cool and totes different. That’s the plot of Priapus, a geicomi by Gengoroh Tagame himself - along with a side of “and if we turn everybody gay, humanity will cease to exist just like Zeus wanted”.

So you’re right, BL is completely different. In fact the Japanese gay men who refuse to read BL generally cite the boys being too pretty and the stories being too romantic and flowery as their reason.

But that doesn’t matter either, bc guess what a woman who reads geicomi is considered? A fujoshi.

There’s also men making BL (Okane Ga Nai, a famously problematic BL), and lesbians making BL - they’re literally just marketing categories, not some kind of judgment on the actual content, and there are authors who write for both using pseudonyms. 

Not to mention that the fujoshi stereotype, in the actual country of origin and not Tumblr.Com, America, is that fujoshi are all bisexual. Surveys tell us that around half of fujoshi are non-straight. So tell me more about the straight female gaze, o’ all-knowing one. You also can’t seriously pretend fujin and fudanshi don’t exist - men are literally out there reading BL and coining a label for how much they love it.

Not to mention aaaaaaall the countless BL that doesn’t even involve sex and stops at “I like you! - they lived happily ever after, the end”. Ganbare, Nakamura-kun!! is an example of BL that’s very relatable to gay teens. So terribly fetishy and straight-female-gazey, I know.

Firstly, how the fuck do you even know what the genre is like right now, if you no longer consume it???? Never seen someone being so proud to admit that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Secondly, yes. Countless times. Literally constantly. They just try to claim that it’s not actually BL, or whine about it on their tumblr blogs. One anti was bemoaning over finding out that the author of Ganbare, Nakamura-kun!!, a Wholesome And Relatable BL, was a fujoshi. Must’ve been a HUGE shock to discover that a Japanese author writing for a Japanese genre identifies as a Japanese term according to the Japanese meaning.

LITERALLY BOTH. That’s what we constantly mock y’all for! Because the loudest critics of AO3 always have AO3 accounts they actively fill with bookmarks. That’s not you and your friends? Cool, good job, here’s a chocolate medal. There’s more than 5 of y’all though, unfortunately.

TL;DR you didn’t explain shit. You made a bunch of bullshit statements based on your English-speaking mutuals on a US-based website, about genres you no longer even consume and aren’t up to date with. Fact is, BL is only as problematic as every single other genre of romantic fiction. So sit down and eat your crumbs.

DID YOU EVEN FUCKING READ WHAT I SAID?

there’s literally not one thing bad about consuming m/m content as long as it’s healthy and safe. even if the said content has dark themes which you anti antis absolutely fucking adore to use as a gotcha as long as it’s written with respect to survivors/victims and not romanticized there’s nothing wrong with m/m content featuring dark themes, so is m/m content in general

did you really get ““turning straight men gay by raping them” is okay if a man writes it?” out of what i said there? i gave bara as an example, i didnt say “bara is the epitomy ol m/m content you all should consume it even if it has super harmful stuff uwu”

>fujoshi are bisexual

still doesnt change the fact that it’s a genre aimed at women and not the people whom it depicts

>LITERALLY BOTH. That’s what we constantly mock y’all for! Because the loudest critics of AO3 always have AO3 accounts they actively fill with bookmarks. That’s not you and your friends? Cool, good job, here’s a chocolate medal. There’s more than 5 of y’all though, unfortunately

theres antis who use the site because nearly half of fandom is built on fics and ao3 is the run-to type of site AS OF NOW. a lot of us has tried and still trying to build a ton toxic site to host fics but so far ao3 is still the biggest site people, we included can use.

> fill with bookmarks” 

so… what?  just because we use a site does not mean we mindlessly read smut rape omegaverse fanfiction like you think we do. even on a site such as ao3 there still are sensible people and fics to be found and theres no harm in consuming nonharmful lgbt media, cue my first reblog. 

> You made a bunch of bullshit statements based on your English-speaking mutuals on a US-based website, about genres you no longer even consume and aren’t up to date with.

just because i dont consume a genre doesnt not mean im not up to date with it. i can and will read/watch critiques on the subject or even watch something from the genre if i ever feel like retraumatizing myself lmao.

also,  what makes you think my mutuals are english-speaking when im not even american/english and what makes you think just because the site is us based the content/userbase is also us centric?

> Fact is, BL is only as problematic as every single other genre of romantic fiction.

i Really Don’t Know How To Explain To You that fetish fuel for the female gaze is not on the same level as love, simon or moonlight

You implied geicomi is superior to BL by default. If you wanted to specify only the “good bara”, then maybe that’s what you should’ve said instead of:

(Btw, “bara” is a derogatory term for gay men in Japan, I’ve never heard from any of them who appreciate their comics being called that. If you’re going to posture about how geicomi is better bc it’s made by gay men, maybe respect those gay men a little.)

And you say there’s nothing wrong with consuming Wholesome BL, but then you keep talking about how enjoying BL anime is:

Pick an opinion, either all BL is bad and you will roast the entire genre at every given chance, or some BL is really good and it’s impossible to judge this category of fiction as a whole.

It’s a marketing category aimed at the largest assumed consumers of romance stories in Japan. If you have a problem with it, take it up with the culture of “girls like romance and boys like action, right???”.

And again, is there good BL then or isn’t there? If there’s good “healthy” BL, and there’s bad “toxic” geicomi, then that means sometimes the “genre aimed at women” is better than the “genre aimed at men”. So what exactly is your justification for hating the genre like that?

Also what it changes is the fact that one of your statements is complete horseshit, and you can’t just erase the masses of lesbians and other non-straights reading BL because straight women are easier to shit on.

You also shouldn’t ignore and erase the mlm who adore this fiction just because you don’t know any personally. With your stances, it’s actually highly likely that you repel every non-straight fudanshi from forming friendships with you.

I also don’t personally care that y’all use AO3, even if I find it hypocritical and funny, nor how you use it, and I don’t see why you’d bring the bookmarks bit up at all since it’s completely unimportant. 

You were the one writing a paragraph of questions about how bold it was of OP to assume that you might use “the run-to type of site”.  “literally what on god’s green earth makes you think that we use ao3 in the first place?“ ring any bells?? If you already knew the answers, then that was one disingenuous row of questions right there.

So another paragraph of horseshit again, full of questions you apparently knew all the answers to already and were asking only to, what, play coy?

Given all that, I highly doubt the non-english-speaking East-Asian fans on pixiv, twitter, weibo, etc. want anything to do with you, but I could always be wrong!

(And yes, I’m ignoring everyone else from countries elsewhere, bc mutuals from Europe, Africa, or the Americas aren’t really relevant to this conversation.)

And I really didn’t know you were this disingenuous, to compare an entire, highly-varied category of Japanese m/m fiction to two specific widely-accepted Western m/m movies (one of which is based on a book written by a straight woman, which would qualify it as BL had it been Japanese).

When instead the comparison is more like “there’s cute, wholesome shit among het romance, and there’s weird, offensive erotica. 

Same goes for BL, which includes anything from Rutta To Kodama to Okane Ga Nai. Same goes for geicomi. 

None of these is worse than the other. They’re all just as problematic as each other bc all their problems are inherent to flawed ideas of romance.”

They literally could not get any more misogynistic if they tried, could they?

I cannot actually believe "it's bad because women read it/it's aimed at women" is somehow a hot take on this website that claims to be progressive. I'm sorry, are we on 4chan?

"Feminine things are bad. Gay men wouldn't enjoy feminine things because if a gay man is feminine that's devaluing, it's weird, and no 'real' gay men would like feminine things."

You know that's what you're saying, right?

"Female sexuality disgusts me. A straight woman finding men attractive and being fine with it or open about it is inherently harmful and freakish. Open displays of sexuality are wrong."

That's also what you're saying, because fictional characters cannot be fetishised or objectified. If a woman was disrespectful and objectifying of real gay men, that would be concerning, and homophobic, to act like they were just there for her pleasure. But BL? Yeah, they're drawings. They literally ARE there for her pleasure. That is their express purpose.

Just admit y'all are racist and sexist and move the fuck on, damn.

writer: this is one of my male characters! he cares about his guy friends and loves them deeply.

tumblr: oh! so he’s gay!

writer: uh…no, he’s attracted to women.

tumblr: ….so he’s bi!

writer: uhh…no…….he loves his guy friends but he’s not romantically/sexually attracted to them.

tumblr: ….so you’re homophobic.

writer:

Healthy male friendships are almost as rare in mainstream fiction as gay male relationships, and maybe more rare in fanfiction. Let men be wonderful friends without pushing a romantic relationship, just like men and women should be able to be wonderful friends without the pressure of a romantic relationship.

*AGGRESSIVELY SLAMS REBLOG UNTIL I DIE*

This is literally the reason men are so terrified of being open about loving each other platonically, because they don’t want people to assume they’re gay just because they can be supportive of their fucking friends

I literally got anon hate about my response to this post, and I just want to say that I’m sorry…

for not reblogging it sooner.

Psyche bitch, this is a good post.

PREACH

This is like a direct response to half of Tumblr.

Not all relationships have to be romantic. Being close to someone doesn’t mean you are in love with them. Platonic friendships can be just as strong and wonderful as romantic ones.

Hey as a gay dude, I am beyond SICK and TIRED of mutuals I like reblogging this piece of crap post.

This post is thinly veiled homophobic propaganda, the OP is a homophobic conservative christian, and all of you are regurgitating this message uncritically.

Here’s the evidence, I’m just going to copy some of that below.

[Image reads: “Gay Christian is NOT an oxymoron.”

Comment: “Depends on what you mean by gay Christian. There are Christians that struggle with same sex attraction and there are false converts living unashamed and unrepentant in sin.”]

Reblogged 21 July, 2018.

[Ask reads: “Do you believe homosexuals who give themselves to Christ will go to heaven? I️ know it’s a big topic but I️ don’t see homosexuality as being a bigger sin than any other. All sins are equal in my eyes and we all sin everyday knowingly. So what does this mean for homosexuals?

Reply: “There is no sin that disqualifies someone from the grace of God. If someone confesses with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believes in their heart that God raised him from the dead… they will be saved. Being gay doesn’t change that… however, the Christian life is one of perpetual repentance where you constantly turn from away from yourself and your sinful desires and constantly turn to Jesus. Being gay doesn’t change that either.“]

Reblogged 3 December 2017

—

You get the idea.

Then there’s just. SO many post. Deriding gay ships. All of these STINK of homophobia. And blaming toxic masculinity on gay men and slash shippers.

But y’all eat it up. Because your insatiable need to get back at “yaoi/slash fangirls” makes you blind to the way this kind of rhetoric hurts gay guys.

This one really rustled my jimmies:

[Comment 1 reads:  #CS Lewis destroyed fujoshi I cannot believe

Comment 2:  I can’t believe a Christian writer in 19-freakin’-60 was forward and progressive thinking enough to discuss the toxicity of assuming men can’t form emotional connections with someone they aren’t dicking.]

Nevermind that C.S. Lewis was absolutely not “forward and progressive” by today’s standards: he firmly believed that homosexuality was a sin and that any love between people of the same sex is lesser/false, like most people at the time. His homophobia doesn’t show in his writing as much as his sexism and racism, though, lmao.

Can you tell that I don’t like C.S. Lewis very much?

But people are praising his Straight™ discomfort at two male friends being perceived as a couple as “““woke”““, ignoring the fact that gay couples can be just as much friends as two straight men (friendship and romantic love are not mutually exclusive, people!!!), and that being mistaken for a gay man shouldn’t make you so disgusted, because it’s not a bad thing.

The “CS Lewis destroyed fujoshi” comment is extremely revealing. You people don’t actually care about real life gay men. You just want to bash girls who like fictional gay ships.

Fun fact: I’m also japanese, and I see you people hating on fujoshi without having a single clue about how using “fujoshi” as an insult is misogynistic and homophobic, and that the slash/BL fandom in Japan is famous for being a safe haven for queer japanese women. Like. The stereotype for a fujoshi in Japan is a lesbian. Y’all are trashing japanese lesbians because they like gay ships.

—

Anyway.

I know many of you live in Tumblrland where slash shipping is the norm, but outside your little slash fandom bubble, being okay with two men being a couple is uncommon. My gay friends are asked all the time by their families to introduce their SO as their “friend” when family or kids go visit them. And that’s when they’re not beaten up or kicked out of the house when they come out.

There is also not a shortage of platonic male friendships in media. Have you forgotten that “buddy film” is an entire genre of cinema???

We’re more likely to get queerbaiting in the form of two “straight male friends” than an actual gay couple on screen, and even queerbaited friends are rare compared to “no homo’d” straight male friends.

And the “shippers reading gay romance in interactions that aren’t explicit romantic” thing that OP and other asshats on Tumblr love complaining about? That’s just a mixture of queer readings of media + picking up on subtle signals of queerness, which is like. A staple of queer/LGBTQ+ culture.

I don’t know if younger people/people who aren’t in the queer dating scene in a homophobic country realize how different the gay love language is. It HAS to be subtle and easy to be read as platonic, because if we get caught, we can end up killed. The signals we use are very often the same ones that shippers pick up on: lingering eye contact, casual displays of affection, hinting disinterest in the opposite sex, etc.

They’re also the same signals that academics use when applying queer theory to a piece of media. Especially since explicitly depicting homosexuality in literature and on film has been discouraged, if not forbidden, for a large chunk of the history of these media, and the only way to convey it was subtext. Here’s a video on that. I highly suggest you watch it. What slash/femslash shippers are doing is basically an unsophisticated version of that. “Baby’s first queer reading”.

If reading queerness in fictional relationships that aren’t explicitly gay makes you uncomfortable, maybe think on the fact that we all take it for granted that the M/F leads of a story are going to end up together, even if there was no set-up for the romance. Gay pairings often have the same or more romantic subtext as straight ones; we just have less payoff, less representation, and more haters. Reflect on that double-standard.

Also, I shouldn’t have to say this, but while it IS annoying when people assume you and your friend are a couple in real life, interpreting fictional characters as queer doesn’t hurt anyone. They’re fictional. They don’t have feelings. And people IRL are much more likely to assume you and an opposite-gender friend are a straight couple, because of heteronormativity.

The toxic masculinity that prevents male friends from showing more platonic affection to each other is the EXACT SAME toxic masculinity that makes them think that being mistaken for a gay man is a horrible thing. Blaming gay couples for that is homophobic. Blaming gay ships for that is misdirection.

“Gay couples are destroying male friendships” is an ancient homophobic argument, and I would appreciate it if you guys stopped recycling it. Thank you.

I don't know how people can read "eww slash ships" and NOT notice it's thinly-veiled homophobia.

I really fucking need all non m|m people stop fucking talking forever about how m|m people “really are” or “really like” and stop painting things we do like as purely “straight women fetishizing gay men”, immediately, right now, because if there is anything fucking clear is that not a single one of you has ever been on a m|m space, talked to a m|m person or even listen to any of us. Shut up, fuck off and stop speaking over us about things you obviously have no clue.

Honestly, if you think certain tropes are ONLY in woman-dominated fandom spaces? You never followed a 100 mlm on Y-Gallery, or read anything on the Nifty Archives (be careful there’s a lot of problematic content on there, be warned), or been watching gay porn or reading gay comics/erotica for years, all made for and written by mlm. 

There are feminine mlm, there are small and petite mlm, there are trans and nb mlm. Just because there’s size differences or one partner is more ‘feminine’ does not make it fetishizing! My uncle in-law is a feminine twink with a much taller and v masc husband, they aren’t a trope, that’s a reality of some mlm couples??! They’re not ‘heteronormatitive’. 

I’m a bi trans guy who likes pink and hello kitty, am I suddenly less of a man? Am I not allowed to consider myself mlm? A wonderful part of the lgbtqa+ community is that it encourages and allows people to play with gender and identity and goes against the rigid gender roles of mainstream society. If you’re willing to throw all rl mlm femmes, feminine men, twinks, trans and nb men under the bus because you hate the possibility of ‘women’ (this includes the nb and trans men that get accused of being women ‘trying to be men’) making or enjoying mlm content at all, you need to take a step back and look at your goals.

Mlm are not some kind of hivemind, gay/bi/pan men do not all think alike or have the same views or perspectives, and respecting us means respecting that.

For real. As an NB person who has repeatedly asked for “ewww you fetishising straight girl” Tumblr to respect my gender identity, they refuse. I’m bigender, use any pronouns, and would like not to be called a girl or ma'am in a condescending asshole way every time I speak about being AFAB. Yes, I am bigender, so I am fine with being called wlw or a woman. I’m not fine with the casual transphobia and nbphobia the anti-fujoshi community throw at me, because AFAB NB people are actually just Woman Lite™️. I am BIgender. Just like you don’t call a bi person heterosexual or homosexual if you don’t want to be a biphobic asshole, please don’t call mspec bigender people “fake mlm” or “fetishising fujoshi” for trying to enjoy gender-affirming content.

Seriously, it’s not fucking funny how much “anti fujoshi” ends up splashing all over trans people and they continue on as if nothing. As it is their bullshit would have never saved any cis guy from getting harmed, but sure does work as a wonderful excuse to shit on non cis guys and non cis afab people everywhere, because fuck those, I guess, who cares. It’s almost like it’s popularized by homophobes and terfs primarly or something, how strange.

I really fucking need all non m|m people stop fucking talking forever about how m|m people “really are” or “really like” and stop painting things we do like as purely “straight women fetishizing gay men”, immediately, right now, because if there is anything fucking clear is that not a single one of you has ever been on a m|m space, talked to a m|m person or even listen to any of us. Shut up, fuck off and stop speaking over us about things you obviously have no clue.

Honestly, if you think certain tropes are ONLY in woman-dominated fandom spaces? You never followed a 100 mlm on Y-Gallery, or read anything on the Nifty Archives (be careful there’s a lot of problematic content on there, be warned), or been watching gay porn or reading gay comics/erotica for years, all made for and written by mlm. 

There are feminine mlm, there are small and petite mlm, there are trans and nb mlm. Just because there’s size differences or one partner is more ‘feminine’ does not make it fetishizing! My uncle in-law is a feminine twink with a much taller and v masc husband, they aren’t a trope, that’s a reality of some mlm couples??! They’re not ‘heteronormatitive’. 

I’m a bi trans guy who likes pink and hello kitty, am I suddenly less of a man? Am I not allowed to consider myself mlm? A wonderful part of the lgbtqa+ community is that it encourages and allows people to play with gender and identity and goes against the rigid gender roles of mainstream society. If you’re willing to throw all rl mlm femmes, feminine men, twinks, trans and nb men under the bus because you hate the possibility of ‘women’ (this includes the nb and trans men that get accused of being women ‘trying to be men’) making or enjoying mlm content at all, you need to take a step back and look at your goals.

Mlm are not some kind of hivemind, gay/bi/pan men do not all think alike or have the same views or perspectives, and respecting us means respecting that.

For real. As an NB person who has repeatedly asked for "ewww you fetishising straight girl" Tumblr to respect my gender identity, they refuse. I'm bigender, use any pronouns, and would like not to be called a girl or ma'am in a condescending asshole way every time I speak about being AFAB. Yes, I am bigender, so I am fine with being called wlw or a woman. I'm not fine with the casual transphobia and nbphobia the anti-fujoshi community throw at me, because AFAB NB people are actually just Woman Lite™️. I am BIgender. Just like you don't call a bi person heterosexual or homosexual if you don't want to be a biphobic asshole, please don't call mspec bigender people "fake mlm" or "fetishising fujoshi" for trying to enjoy gender-affirming content.

There’s always a lingering question that I ask myself, which is why do I, a cis bisexual woman, enjoy romance between two men so much?  

There are easy answers, like that it’s just fetishizing.  And like, I find men attractive, yes.  But I also find women attractive.  I don’t have a problem with enjoying het romance, assuming I can find good ones.  I enjoy stories with female characters I can relate to.

But there’s something much deeper at play, IMO.  A friend of mine who is a gender studies professor was the first person to point this out to me, but a lot of women enjoy m/m romance and gay porn because of the lack of women.  It removes a source of pressure and sexism.  Without any women present, you don’t have to constantly evaluate the sexism of their portrayal, or be reminded of negative experiences in your own life.  It allows women to experience romance and especially sexuality without all the baggage that comes with it in our patriarchal society.

This was recently illustrated to me rather dramatically.  I read a recommendation for a het romance.  And it sounded cute, and came highly recommended.  The tropes at play were fun.  Until I read a snippet and realized this was a romance between a woman and her boss.  I had a visceral negative reaction.  

Instantly I’m thinking of sexual harassment stories I’ve read and heard from other women. I’m thinking of how uncomfortable it would be to have your boss develop feelings for you.  How icky the power dynamics would be, etc.  

And then I realized…this wouldn’t bother me if it were two men.  Now, there’s no logical reason for that.  Sexual harassment is just as wrong when its object is a man.  But I know I’ve read fics with a similar premise and never thought about it.  Because when it’s two men I can accept this is just a light romance, a fantasy, meant to be fun and sexy and not to represent the real world.

But I can’t when it’s a het relationship.  There’s too much baggage there.  Too much societal history of abuse.  I can’t relax enough with the premise to enjoy that story.  

Now some people can.  And that’s fine.  And some people are never going to be okay with power imbalances like that regardless of gender.  That’s also fine.  I don’t think having either reaction makes one morally superior.  It’s okay to just enjoy light entertainment for what it is without going into deep analysis.

But it’s much more difficult for me, and I think for many women, to relax and enjoy romantic and sexual stories when they involve female characters.  We’ve been burned too many times by shitty depictions, by shallow role models, by abuse portrayed as romantic.  We have developed a stress response, a trauma response to heterosexual romance.  We are hyper-reactive to a wide variety of triggers in regards to it.   But removing women from the equation makes stories safer for us.  And maybe it shouldn’t?  In an ideal world?  But for many of us, that’s the truth.

So this post blew up in the last 24 hours, for whatever reason, and I was looking through people’s responses, as you do.  I’m quite moved that so many found it relatable.

But I wanted to highlight one set of tags (via @reallifepotato​ )

Because I AM comfortable with my sexuality and fairly comfortable with my body, but still, this resonates so hard as someone who has always been overweight.  The amount that our society teaches women to constantly compare ourselves, almost always negatively with every other woman out there, can utterly ruin our enjoyment of this kind of thing.  Like how many times have you tried to watch a mainstream romantic comedy where some utterly gorgeous actress is bemoaning that she can’t get a date, or WORSE is made out to be less than attractive.  And you look at her and go…but she’s fucking perfect?  And you just want to puke.  

But with m/m romance you can put yourself in the place of either character and…not compare yourself.  You can enjoy a character being attractive without feeling bad about yourself, which is REALLY HARD to do for any woman in our fucked up culture.  

Huh. This is an interesting point.

Even if an author is female, I’ve definitely read things and gone “WOW she sure has some internalized misogyny going on there, and she really doesn’t seem to be aware of it” when looking at how a female lead is written and it’s just so distracting and tiring.

This is not a critique or slam against the op or anyone else on the post

This is a reaction to every single post about why women enjoy m/m, which I enjoy as well, that I have ever read

Why are we removing women from the equation?

Why can’t we remove the men and enjoy w/w relationships?

Why are we “exploring our sexuality” and having these light, fun, fantasies and expressing ourselves and still centering men?

The way women are depicted in media is unfortunately still in the hands of white, straight men so good female characters are thin on the ground

But crappy writing doesn’t stop us from writing thousands of words about male characters whose characterization is basically a card board standee that grunts and shoots guns

Or when fannish writers make one of the guys in the equation “emotional hot mess” or “a power bottom” or a single-crystalline-tear woobie who’s oppressed because they’re an omega or a sub or…

Basically a woman but not because we don’t write about women

And then fandom, consciously or unconsciously, still says “being a woman in our society sucks, let’s leave them out of these narratives that we write for ourselves too”

We can’t even write fantasies for ourselves where woman are treated with respect and get to have tons of orgasms and it really bugs me

We say fandom is where we can write what we want but then we make fun of self-inserts or female OCs or shipping one of the leads with a female character and we erase or scorn canon female love interests as only being part of the narrative because “no homo”

It’s not that m/m is bad because it’s awesome and it’s how I got into fandom in the first place, it’s that I feel that the conversations we have about why we write m/m should not stop with “well, women aren’t written well and being reminded about what real life is like for a woman isn’t fun and I’m here for fantasy, not reality”

Women deserve a lot of things, but you’re assuming that everyone is part of their own sexual fantasies or that this is the healthy and desirable way to be.

For many people, that simply isn’t how we fantasize.

We get hot for voyeuristic fantasies where we’re an outsider looking at two hot people and/or we have a kind of diffuse identification with a whole situation and dynamic but don’t really self-insert to any meaningful degree.

This is something that comes up again and again in sexuality research yet is constantly ignored, including by the crappier researchers. One can certainly still fantasize about women without it being a self-insert thing, but sometimes it’s harder for people.

For me personally, writing about vaginas having a good time will always be far more difficult than writing about dicks doing the same. That’s because a lack of realism doesn’t bother me when it’s anatomy I don’t have. If I write about what women like in bed, I come up against a number of problems:

Yeah, yeah, tmi, it’s a me problem, blah blah blah. But I’m not alone in this. A common complaint is: “I can’t relate to women having lots of orgasms, but I don’t want to read about people having my own difficulty having an orgasm.” That’s not my personal issue, but it’s hideously common.

As for the idea that we write about men who do nothing in canon… I know it’s popular to rag on Clint/Coulson and Kylux. They are outliers. Most of the big ships are more like Stucky where canon is aaaaaall over their epic bond or rivalry or history together. Canons that are all about the epic bond between a man and a woman produce fandoms that are all that ship. They’re not always on AO3 though.

Canons that are all about the epic bond between two women are Xena and… uh… Xena. Technically, there actually were some Joxer/Ares shippers back in the day, and there were definitely het shippers early on, but most of what people actually care about for that fandom is Xena or Gabrielle or Xena/Gabrielle because that’s what canon cared about.

You are severely overestimating how creative fandom is in adapting material. We build on common templates, and our culture has lots of them for men and for het relationships but few of them for women without a man around. What Can A Heroine Do? and all that.

Russ’ argument is that we must build new myths. I think that’s a fine idea for original writing, and, in fact, lots of people who write m/m in fandom do write female-centric original stories. But that’s not what they’re drawn to in terms of fic.

As for writing men as “the girl” instead of writing women, do you seriously not see why someone who likes icky gender roles for kink reasons might be happier with a/b/o than with similar tropes using real world genders/sexes? This seems like a no-brainer to me.

“We” are kind of shitty about OFCs. I definitely agree there. The “we” that post a lot of meta about m/m are usually not fond of canon guy/OFC or canon het or readerfic. Maybe we shouldn’t be such jerks about it…

But to suggest that it’s not popular in general is silly. FFN is overrun with canon(ish) het. Wattpad is wall-to-wall readerfic. Both have lots of original characters. The people who do like female characters are off happily writing them and commenting on each other’s fic and ignoring the people who navel gaze about m/m and rend their garments over not liking female characters enough.

These arguments make it sound like no one likes female characters because they’re pre-selected to be a category of people who are mostly consuming m/m. We’re the minority in culture in general. We’re the minority on many fannish sites other than AO3. We just get yelled at a lot, and it makes us defend ourselves in tediously repetitive ways. But of course we sound similar to each other: we’re a specific taste group that was already singled out to be similar. The many, many people who feel differently aren’t participating in these conversations.

I think it’s fine for the conversation to stop at “I’m too damaged by culture to enjoy art about women”. It’s sad, but what are we going to say to that person? That she has to get 20 years of therapy before she’s allowed to read fiction? Rewire her brain before she’s allowed to masturbate to a sex scene? No thanks!

Why can’t we remove men from the equation entirely? For the same list of reasons everyone always gives in all posts on this topic, which you’ve already read. Is “I don’t want to” or “I can’t” not reason enough?

I think some of the really popular ships are really popular because they’re very much canon-supported (Stucky, Drarry). 

But others are there not because we went strictly from the source material to the imagination, but because of the detour through fandom. Fan theory, other stories we enjoyed, head canons that spread out in memes, fanon… I mean, they might not grow out of canon, but they grow out of something. I know I have ships I started shipping not because of canon, but because of the really good fic out there.

I had the impression that the popularity of Q/Bond grew out of people having been fans of Q’s actor prior to the movie. (Dench!M/Bond 4eva! >:( )

Popularity tends to breed popularity. Disparities only increase over time.

Also, just possibly adding in my own personal experience here as an AFAB bigender person: I already know all that stuff. Clitorises having orgasms? I know! I have one! Please let me also have fantasies about the other sex characteristics (and just experiences in general) I wish I could have as well. If people try to force me to focus only on being female and not experience both "sides" of my gender identity, I get horrible dysphoria. I will fight for my right not to get horrible dysphoria in peace.

Even without dysphoria coming into play, some people just want to imagine being AMAB. As said, for cis women this can relieve a lot of the pressure of power dynamics and societal biases that hang over everyone.

Let people write their slash in peace, you gremlins.

The great problem with my friend is that she isn’t in fandom spaces, BUT she knows a shitton about queer history (she wrote an incredible essay about how Sherlock is canon gay, sadly its in German so, yeah…)… ‘Fetishize’ as she uses it really means to make something an object, and to like, make something about somebody but not for them

I genuinely think the problem is that she never liked women-written m/m herself, or any sort of pornography, tbh…. It’s easy to judge a group from the outside

Also I do have to stand up for gay romance writers, though. I mean, there aren’t THAT many around that also appeal to women’s tastes, but if you just like raunchy af smut in historically more-or-less-accurate settings, you really, really should at least take a look at James Lear’s work. Like. So good.

(I like reading gay authors because they sometimes aren’t quite as precious as some female m/m authors tend to be… I mean, its often very violent, but the kink is just so good…. But then, I’ve spent enough years in the furry fandom to appreciate some queer guys’ weird fetishes tbh)

Hee! True, there are some.

If that’s your friend’s take on things, I would 100% go for Halperin’s analysis of why representation of our insides trumps representations of our outsides. There are things you cannot say when you make art that is too literal and not allegorical enough. That’s not just true of women.

He started out assuming that oldschool gay culture was passé because now we have real representation… and then found that his students loved appropriating The Golden Girls and loved the subtexty stuff and didn’t connect with the literal stuff.

Even when it comes to sexual fantasies, there are two major schools of experience: People who fantasize about themselves in a scenario and people who never appear in their own sexual fantasies. Why should the latter group be doomed to never consume anything they enjoy? Why should all art have a self insert option?

If your friend can’t accept that, she doesn’t know jack shit about other people’s experiences and she should be ashamed as a feminist and queer history buff.

You could always just throw Lucy Neville’s book at her.

But if she’s being willfully ignorant because Porn Bad and Representation Good, then she’s never going to listen.

anyways theres no reason to be prideful in being a fujoshi cause it quite literally is just on the same level of fetish pride. if youre lgbt or not dont fucking be a fujoshi its literally just based around fetishizing and objectifying gay men. theres no excuse for it.

congratulations on stopping homophobia by attacking queer / lgbtqia+ women op

it wasnt targeted towards lgbt women it was targeted to ANYONE that's a fujoshi

Sorry, you're right, I left a word out. It was meant to say *primarily queer/lgbtqia+ women. Point stands that you're taking a reclaimed misogynistic slur and using it as a slur again.

sweet ok let me rephrase my point @ardwynna

fujoshis AND fudanshis are fucking disgusting in general for fetishizing gay people

Oh now we're just on "gay men looking at gay porn is disgusting "

Just please admit that you have no idea what you mean

gay men looking at lesbian porn is gross

lesbians looking at porn of gay men is gross

jesus christ

What are you talking about

On the off chance that you’re actually serious that gay men looking at lesbian porn is gross, etc., etc....

Y’all need to go outside and get some fresh air, and maybe read something that isn’t a hot take written by a 14 year old that has no fucking clue what they’re talking about.

I’ve been noticing when people say shit they don’t know what they’re talking about, get corrected and still insist they’re right.. I just choose to no longer engage because the level of willful ignorance is something I dont have the patience to deal with.

Fucking. Fudanshi means man who consumes M/M CONTENT. NOT F/F. That's himedanshi. You need to learn more about Japanese fandom culture before making startlingly gross takes on it, OP.

Reddit porn subs absolutely hate m/m content unless it's specifically labeled gay (especially if this is fictional, you should see how hard anime porn subs hate yaoi, it's like 2000 in here), it's hard to find Doujins for my fav ships, and I don't have the money to commission/support a Patreon.

Tumblr you RUINED my porn resources, ESPECIALLY for m/m content. You know. Which doesn't trigger my dysphoria. And has all the kink choices I want.

Like seriously. You don't have to specify which gender you want domming or subbing and you don't get all the weird inherent power dynamics in most classical male dom/female sub stuff (which is why I like gentledom/femsub so much). And if you have any specifics beyond that you can just add those and bam. You're done.

That's the reason I stick to m/m content, folks. Because AFAB NB dysphoria/power issues. Not because I wish to fetishise the gays and be an evil objectifier.

Watch antis read this and say "actually this still makes you a fujoshi, I don't care what gender you identify as or what issues you have, you're an evil fujoshi, also how dare you ever consume porn ever"

- homophobes in fandom, 2010, or antis, today

IKR. "Pure" intentions don't mean you're not parroting the same rhetoric as homophobes who yelled "ew yaoi fangirls" ten years ago.