The Same Five Fandoms On Repeat

No one can be completely unbiased, and in a well-written character this also means that characters will have their own personal biases. However, there are times where the creators’ biases bleed into the characters they are writing, and sometimes it becomes difficult to tell the difference between what’s intended as a character choice or what’s simply unintended author bias. A very simple and obvious example of this is something Helen/all-pacas has discussed at length before, being that the show’s writers/creators being Jewish heavily influenced the references to Judaism in the show, and in House’s character (despite House himself not being Jewish). However, there are more subtle examples of this that I will get into later, tying back into the original biphobia conversation that sparked this.

To begin, let’s talk about something that gets brought up often in discourse around Chase: fatphobia. In Heavy, Chase makes several fatphobic comments. Most of his bias here is clear; he’s an athletically-built, attractive man. He doesn’t experience issues with his own weight, and he’s influenced by both popular culture and the medical system to believe that to be “fat” is to be unhealthy and lazy. But there’s something else here I want to talk about that goes a bit deeper: a non-American’s biased view of Americans.

In the episode, Chase says this:

CHASE: What I haven’t seen lately is a kid eating an apple or riding a bike. You Americans can’t even compete with the rest of the world in basketball anymore, unless, of course, it’s the type you play with a remote control on a big screen TV.

There’s a commonly held idea by many people worldwide that “everything is bigger in America”, with larger portion sizes at restaurants and larger clothing sizes pointing to a country majorly affected by an obesity epidemic. Chase, as an Australian, is more likely to hold these beliefs. These are his biases.

Now to move on to the related fandom biases. There is a large portion of the House fandom that hates Chase, and a lot of that hate is rooted in his behavior in this episode. Obviously he was wrong to say the things he did, but other characters have said much worse, so why condemn Chase and not the others? The answer is fandom’s personal biases, of course! The House fandom’s demographics are more likely to be affected by fatphobia than other issues (such as racism, especially on a website that’s largely white, but that’s a topic for another day), therefore their biases affect the weight of these characters’ actions. House fans can hate Chase for being fatphobic, meanwhile disregarding every racist or other discriminatory comment from House, because they are affected more by the fatphobia than anything else.

Coming back to the biphobia issue, in Unfaithful there are a few comments that point directly to common stereotypes about bisexuality.

Example 1:

KUTNER: Or the hardship'll bring 'em closer together. She'll invite friends over for Foreman to share.

This relates to the stereotype that bisexuals are somehow more “sexual”/have more interest in sex than monosexuals, which is of course entirely untrue. Taub does counter this idea: “she’s not a nympho. She’s bisexual…”.

Example 2:

TAUB: It's just a matter of time before one of you finds the other in bed with another woman.

This perpetuates the stereotype that bisexuals are more likely to cheat (or, to cheat with someone of the opposite sex than their monogamous partner). Which, from Taub, kind of makes sense—he’s a chronic cheater, after all—but the phrasing of “with another woman” is a blatant dig at Thirteen’s bisexuality.

We can agree that this kind of rhetoric is bad, right? That these stereotypes are harmful? Great. Now, let’s talk about fandom’s perpetuation of biphobia.

The biphobic rhetoric I’m going to discuss differs from the kind of biphobia the show itself displays; while the show is a product of an era where bisexuality in characters was used often to sexualize women and/or sapphic relationships, the fandom of the modern era takes it in a completely different direction, instead participating in bi erasure in favor of seeing only same-sex relationships represented in fandom content.

The phrase I hear so often is “she should be with a woman”, and not only applied to Thirteen, a canon bisexual. But let’s talk about her first, since she is the only canon queer character in the main cast. Statements like the one I just mentioned come from a place of bias, of course: the queer members of fandom would prefer to see a “queer” relationship to a “straight” one (which, let’s be honest, is harmful language to begin with, because a m/f relationship does not imply by nature that either party has to be heterosexual, and calling it a “straight” relationship erases the identities of queer individuals within that relationship). Queer people want to see themselves represented in the media they consume, and there’s nothing wrong with that! As a queer person myself, of course I’m going to be biased in what I want to see! However, it’s the language used that creates the issue: “she should be with a woman” has much different implications than “I would like to see her with a woman”. “She should be with a woman” implies that the bisexual character should “pick a side”, and that same-sex relationships are superior.

This rhetoric extends, as I mentioned, beyond the canon bisexual character: this statement is often put onto both Cameron and Cuddy as well, women who are canonically interested in men. Instead of headcanon-ing either character as bisexual, fandom would rather disregard their relationships with men entirely and claim they should be lesbians. This rhetoric is influenced by so many various biases I couldn’t even begin to list them all, but the main two I’ve seen are: 1. sapphics who are biased against men, and 2. People who see lesbianism as a way to completely remove a female character from being in competition with a m/m ship.