Dreams of a Shark

so I used to be (still somewhat am, probably??) a part of the "most fandoms are misogynistic because they are so male (character)-oriented, and if in ANY media you consume you only care about male characters, you should probably at least ask yourself why that is".

this is probably projecting on my part, because I grew up in a very misogynistic environment, and, personally, for a long time, didn't give a shit about fem characters no matter how well they were written/drawn, - to me they as well could be cardboard cutouts, because I fundamentally was unable to see women as people.

this is obviously a me problem, and I try not to project my experiences on other people, no matter how common these experiences may be.

obviously there is no right or wrong reason to like male characters and dislike female characters, and nobody owes you an explanation for their preferences so you can make judgment on whether they like your yaoi in the "right", god honoring way or whatever. and in the end, your taste in fiction is just that - your taste in fiction, it doesn't necessarily tells anything about you as a person.

but I can't help but ask myself, time and time again, this old ass question: why is this preference for male characters is so widespread in almost all fandom spaces, when fandom itself is so varied, full of people of different genders, sexualities and backgrounds?

If it's not misogyny, when what is it?

--

A lot of people started out liking m/m because it was at least queer, then finally found f/f they liked and "graduated".

They come back with the passion of the newly converted to preach to the rest of us.

The trouble is, this is exactly like every other time the newly converted are the Very First College Freshman To Ever Discover Philosophy or any other such case.

First, the people you're talking to might turn out to know a million times more than you. Their apparent apathy might be because they're so far beyond the discussion level you're at. (Not just you specifically, but every college freshman who was ever That Person.)

Second, the fact that you find femslash or Christianity or freshman philosophy class deeply emotionally fulfilling does not mean that everyone else will also find it equally fulfilling. If you go too far down this route, you end up in the JKR place where "I was a tomboy because my dad wanted a boy" turns into "You must be a trans man because you hate womanhood because your dad was like my dad".

You can ask why other people find m/m or atheism or whatever fulfilling. There's an interesting conversation to be had.

But when you assume, you just sound like a dumbass and, often, a bigot.

--

I have asked myself.

That's the first thing to understand. Slash fandom tends to be pretty queer, so a decent number of slashers are, like me, bisexual women. It's going to be a rare bi girl who didn't go "Jeez, why don't I like femslash more?" at some point.

Coming in and going "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED?!?!?!" is basically poking a bunch of people right in their biggest insecurity.

Not everyone feels bad about it, of course, but a lot of people do. They try to change what they're unconsciously drawn to and it does not work.

Why the lizard brain likes men so much is complex and varies, but some common reasons include:

Oops, turns out I'm not a girl.

I don't want to deal with the baggage society inflicted on me as a woman right now.

I identify far more with my bisexuality than my gender. Can you stop pretending everyone identifies with gender first, radfem lite?

There are great female characters in media, but they're rarely in the genres I like and/or they're not the horny one, the class clown, the brutal fighter, etc.

Casting directors are allowed to hire men I find hot. Actresses are all a desolate wasteland of size zero, ultra feminine, hetero catching-a-man makeup looks. Where are my butches? Where are my femmes who look queer? Where are my silver foxes? Where are my ladies with an average waist size?

etc. etc.

We've discussed that to death, so I'll leave it at these representative examples. I don't think this is nearly as relevant, however, as the false assumptions that underpin the question itself.

--

AO3 looks nothing like other spaces.

What the actual fuck are you talking about with that "almost all fandom spaces" garbage? AO3 is riding that dick hard because it was founded by fujoshi.

FIMFiction is full of dudes who love cartoon lady horsies.

Stop hanging out in fujoshi spaces and ex-fujoshi, I've seen the error of my misogynist ways spaces and go find the rest of fandom.

A few years ago, I got shipping stats for FFN and Wattpad because I was so mad at how many little whiners had been too coddled by the archive I helped build to understand what fandom actually looks like. This required hand-classifying thousands of fics. I have not repeated the experiment. I hoped other people would do it to check my work, but of course, it was too much effort when people want to just say "Fandom only likes slash" whether or not it's true. Here's what I got at the time:

Repeat after me:

A.O.3. Looks. Nothing. Like. Other. Spaces.

--

Het counts as liking female characters.

I know you didn't deny this above. You only said that fandom focuses on men, but... does it?

For everyone drooling over Edward and using Bella only as a placeholder, there's someone who ships Reylo because they're obsessed with Rey and think her most interesting tension was with Kylo. Or, hell, someone who actually likes Bella. Plenty of the readerfic spaces include people who flesh out the female reader and like her as a character. OFC-writing spaces often like each other's OFCs.

--

Fandom is varied, your reference sample isn't.

That's really what it boils down to.

Yes, the biggest fandoms tend to come from media with audiences in the hundreds of millions, and because society is sexist, the important characters tend to be men, and where there are important women, all of their important relationships tend to be with men. That may skew things a little if you only look at the biggest fandoms, especially on AO3, home of slash.

There's still plenty of media with interesting female characters, and many fans seek it out and do fandom about it.

If you go look at Witcher game fan art, it's all dudes making horny stuff about Ciri because they love Ciri. If you go look at SpaceBattles, there's little m/m and plenty of plottier stuff focusing on a heroine.

--

If you're like most people who ask this question, you only know two kinds of fans: fujoshi and ex fujoshi with a chip on their shoulders.

The key is that AO3, FFN, and Wattpad all have oldschool URL styles. Works are just numbers that increment.

On FFN and Wattpad, they appear to increment by 1. On AO3, they incremented by 1 until... 2014? (I'm sure James or someone can remind us.) Thereafter, they incremented by 3.

First, you find a recent work and use that as your highest number. You take zero as your lowest number. Use that to generate X random numbers in that range. (4-5k for FFN and 10k for Wattpad should do it.)

Use those numbers to create hypothetical URLs. I do this in a spreadsheet with formulas. You could do it even more efficiently with a script, but I didn't feel like learning how to do that.

Open the hypothetical URLs and record which are a real work vs. deleted/invalid.

Once you have a reasonable number of live URLs, you either scrape them if you have the skill (because shit gets deleted constantly, and they will disappear while you're doing your project), or you start straight in on the hand-categorizing.

Open a work, check the headers. Mark the obvious category if there is one. Read the work if you have to. And on Wattpad, you will have to often. It can be hard to tell if something is even a fanwork, never mind what it was supposed to be about, when the author only got as far as 1/?? and it's like one line of incoherent lapselock. Is it the start of a fic? An epigraph? Them using Wattpad as a notes app on their phone? The world may never know!

For FFN, you can pull full archive size from the index pages. They aren't completely accurate, both because there's rounding and because they don't update exactly in line with deletions. Use your invalid URLs to calculate how much has been deleted over time if you like. I think this will be accurate. FFN does appear to still increment by 1.

For Wattpad, you will have to estimate how many works are on Wattpad in the first place and also how many of them are fic. Use your number range and the proportion of valid to invalid URLs you generated to estimate. After hand-classifying your sample, you'll have a ratio of non-fanwork to fanwork as well.

FFN wasn't too bad to hand-categorize. It has less metadata than AO3, but people usually did and do indicate ships and main characters fairly clearly in author's notes and summaries. (Don't use the ship feature. It was introduced too late and is used too inconsistently to be of much use.)

Wattpad was a nightmare. I chose to err on the side of assuming things are het if the 1/?? nothing of a work seems to mention an OFC and a canon guy even if there's no plot yet and no metadata about what it was supposed to eventually be. You could choose to get a much larger sample and err on the side of leaving more things uncategorized.

Don't do what Toast did while crowdsourcing another Wattpad analysis and tell people to mark 'gen' if they're not immediately sure. Gen-as-default is a terrible assumption for Wattpad.

--

However, if you want data on femslash or on anything that isn't like a third of these archives, I would start with a much bigger sample.

When I originally posted some analysis in 2020, people were disappointed that I wasn't more clearly listing the exact percentages of the tiny slices clearly on the graphs, but that was entirely intentional. I don't think we should be taking the exact fractions of percentage points too seriously here for the samples that might have ended up being like 12 works.

Fans looking at stats love to overestimate their precision.

The one big thing I should note is that my Multi & Other category included anything marked with multiple categories, e.g. tagged with M/M and F/F but not Multi on AO3 or anything with both snarry and snamione in the summary on FFN.

The reason I did this is that there were virtually no works that mixed ship types in my FFN and Wattpad samples.

This is consistent with my experience of older spaces. You even had archives with a slash section and a "gen" section and nothing else. Your m/m/f? Unthinkable! And also unpostable simply by way of hostile or indifferent infrastructure.

Because URLs increment, you can also easily do a secondary analysis on whether the first half of your sample by date shows the same pattern as the second half of your sample. (In this case, I saw less of an obvious trend towards deleting m/m than I would have expected. The two halves were reasonably similar.)

--

Anyway, if you can scrape things yourself, a whole world of other possibilities opens up.

At a conference/festival last year, there was a Shibari workshop on the schedule for some reason, although the topic of the event was prediction markets. This led to the following exchange (all names changed):

Adam (who at the time was basically a stranger to me): Hmm, "Shibari"... What is that, some kind of Jewish ritual?

Me: No, it's-

Barbara: EVERYONE SHUT UP! Ok. Nobody tell this man what shibari is.

Everyone: ...?

Barbara: We’re playing 20 questions.

Thus began what was by far the best game of 20 questions I have ever witnessed. There were... appreciably more than 20 questions.

[literally ten minutes of questions later]

Adam: Ok, so! Shibari... is a Japanese social export, it's an activity somebody does, it's in some way artistic, it does not involve drawing, it does not involve writing, it involves an inorganic object and an organic object, and... the organic object is a human, right?

Everyone: Right

Adam: And the inorganic object...

Barbara: Well...

Chris: The inanimate object

Adam: The inanimate object, which, oh, which is organic, which suggests that it's clothes... Is the inanimate object clothing?

Everyone: No

Me: To clarify, the inanimate object is always organic in terms of 'organic chemistry', but might or might not be, like, made from biological material

Adam: Ok. And so, you have an inanimate object, and you have a person... The person does not have to do anything during the... shibari activity. You are doing a manipulation to the inanimate object, with the person, for purposes that are fun... Is it for the entertainment of a group?

Barbara: Could be? ...

Adam: So it could be for the entertainment of a group, but it could be for the entertainment of the individuals?

Everyone: Right

Adam: Ok. The inanimate object - the equipment - right? It is not specialised, but is a common object, correct?

Everyone: yeah

AI

Adam: Does it have anything at all to do with AI?

Everyone: [laughter] No

Adam: I had to check. In this setting, everything turns back to AI at some point

Me: I would say no

Frank: Not yet!

Me: Right, not yet. But yeah, 'No' is definitely the answer to that one

George: I trust Rob Miles on this

Barbara: As an expert in shibari?

Frank: As an expert in AI Shibari. I think that's what it's called.

Chris: Oh, yeah it kind of is!

Can one shibari by accident?

Adam: Ok. Is it something that one might do without knowing that it is shibari?

Everyone: [cacophony of disagreement]

Me: Interesting question!

Frank: Very interesting question.

Barbara: It's totally plausible that someone would do something that would qualify as shibari without knowing the Japanese artform

Me: Yeah, and they might also have seen things about it but not know the name of it

Chatting during shibari

Adam: Does it involve talking?

Everyone: No, not necessarily

Adam: God Dammit. Agh, I thought it might be... talking using some prop or something

Barbara: For me it always involves talking, but it's...

Adam: One doesn't have to?

Barbara: It's just 'cause I don't stop talking

[laughter]

Adam: And it doesn't involve betting markets in any way?

Everyone: No

How technologically advanced is shibari equipment?

Adam: Ok. Is the object technologically difficult to make?

Everyone: No

One guy: Yes

Everyone: What? No it isn't!

Adam: Is it only available in an industrialised economy?

Everyone: No

That one guy again: Yes!

Everyone: NO!!!

The guy: No, you're right, I'm sorry... But it is difficult to make

George: Every object is difficult to make!

Barbara: Maybe you're confused about what shibari is

Ed: Yeah, you should be up there with Adam

Adam: Would it have been available before industrialisation?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Ok. Um... is it a stick?

Everyone: It's not a stick

No cheap tricks allowed

Adam: I feel like I'm gonna get close to covering everything...

Me: I feel like we were very close just now, when you were like "Well what could this object be?"

Adam: Ok so the object is important. It's... before industrialisation... Does it begin with a letter before-

Everyone: No, no, we're not doing that. N/A

Adam: Ok so it starts with an N and an A...

[laughter]

What is this dang object?

Adam: Ok... so... is the object artificially pigmented?

Everyone: Can be, but not necessarily

Adam: Is it commonly painted?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it commonly dyed?

Everyone: Yes

Adam: Ok, is it something that it's very common to dye in other purposes?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: Does it involve a vegetable, of some kind?

Everyone: ...No?

Adam: Does it involve a plant?

Everyone: [confusion about what 'involve' means]

George: The object can have... some relation to a plant

Me: eehhh, that's more confusing than helpful. We already said that it can be biologically derived

Adam: But it would have been available before industrialisation?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: So it's got to be something that is... around. Is it something that requires human modification to make into the form we know and love?

Everyone: Yes

Adam: Uh.. does this processing require specialised skill?

Everyone: Yeah, some skill for sure

Adam: Would I be able to do it? Like, without training?

Everyone: Probably not

Ed: On a long enough time horizon you'd figure it out, but the answer is basically no

Adam: Like, you throw me in with the tools to make it and say "come out in an hour", could I...

Everyone: No, probably not

Adam: But other people would be able to make it in an hour?

Everyone: Yeah, with the right skills

It’s not a weapon

Adam: Does it involve a weapon of any kind?

Everyone: No.

George: How creative are you allowed to-

Everyone: The answer's no

What shape is the object?

[long pause]

Adam: Well... does anyone else have any questions?

Barbara: You're asking such good questions though!

Ed: Yeah you're doing a good job

Danielle: I think you should ask more questions about the shape of the object

Everyone: Oh, great suggestion

Adam: Ok, is it spherical?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it cylindrical?

Everyone: Yyeeaahh, sort of, yeah.

Adam: So it's not a pure cylinder but it's cylindrical-ish?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: Is it an ovaloid?

Everyone: No.

Adam: Is it an ellipsoid?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it uh... hmm... But it's longer than it is wide?

Everyone: Yes!!!

[scattered applause, we're close now]

Adam: Is it a plank of wood?

Everyone: No!!!

Barbara: It still isn't that!

Frank: No, his previous guess was stick

Adam: Yeah, a plank of wood requires processing and I couldn't make it... like it fits a lot of the other questions

Barbara: No you're right, that's fair, I'm convinced. It is a plank of wood.

Where is the object?

Adam: Could I find it inside a building or outside a building?

Everyone: Yes...

Adam: Wait. I mean. Ok, can you find it in a bathroom?

Everyone: Not really

Adam: Can you find it in a kitchen?

Everyone: Probably not

Adam: Can you find it lying on the ground?

Everyone: Yeah possibly

Adam: Is it something that people commonly use?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: Is it something that people would pick up if they saw it lying there?

Everyone: Nah

It’s really not a weapon

Adam: Is it something that is dangerous at all?

Everyone: Can be, but not especially

Adam: Is any part of it sharp?

Everyone: No

Adam: Can any part of it fragment?

Everyone: [???]

Adam: Like, is it brittle?

Everyone: No

Adam: So it's firm?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it flexible?

Everyone: Yes!!

Adam: Ok! Is it a pool noodle?

Everyone: [laughter]

Adam: Which is cylindrical, flexible, and organic, dyed but not painted...

Everyone: No, we're so proud of you, you're doing great

Me: But we did say "pre-industrial"

Pinning down the object

Adam: Ok ok. Is it a solid?

Everyone: Yes

Adam: Is it any of the solid hybrids, like a colloid or a gel?

Everyone: No

Adam: Does it retain its shape after being bent?

Everyone: Uh... yes?

Adam: So it doesn't spring back with any force?

Everyone: No, it doesn't spring back

Adam: Ok... so... Is it Japanese in origin, or is it found around the world?

Everyone: [assorted contradictory statements]

Me: The origin of the practice is Japan, but the origin of the object is all over

Adam: Is the object put on a person?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Is the object... um... is the object rope?

Everyone: YES!!

[scattered applause]

Me: The object is rope!

Adam: Ok!

Me: Now bring it home

Bringing it home?

Adam: Are things hung upon the rope?

Everyone: Uuuuummmmmm. Ambiguous? No.

Adam: Is the rope itself... does the rope look good?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Ok! Is this putting-on... a mark of esteem?

Everyone: No?? ???

[laughter]

Adam: So the object is a rope, and you're putting the rope on somebody

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: You're... putting rope on somebody!

Everyone: Yeah!

Adam: Is that... is that not the practice?

Everyone: No, no, it is, it is!

[confused cheering. Are we done?]

We’re not done

Chris: But, no, come on, there's more to it!

Ed: You're missing something critical!

Chris: You're so close!

Adam: Ok. Do you... hang someone?

Everyone: [strongly conflicting opinions]

Barbara: Only if you're doing it extremely wrong

Adam: Ok. But you can tie knots?

Everyone: YES!

Adam: Ok! Do you tie... is it a bracelet of some-

Everyone: No!

Adam: So it's not an adornment of any kind...

Everyone: Well...

Where on the body?

Adam: Is it put on your neck?

Chris: No

Danielle: Well, can be...

Adam: On your head?

Everyone: Can be

Adam: On a limb?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: It's on a limb

Me: Not exclusively

Adam: On an arm?

Everyone: Can be

Adam: On a leg?

Everyone: Can be

Adam: On... uh... I've run out of limbs...

What does it mean?

Adam: Ok, it's rope, you put it on somebody, it's Japanese in origin... does it... signify something?

Everyone: Not really

Adam: Hmm. Do you tie the rope in a loop?

Everyone: ...Yeah??

Adam: I'm wondering, is it the casting of ropes upon people, like uh...

Chris: It's not a lasso, no

Frank: I like the idea of shibari as, like, a carnival game...

Barbara: I'm unclear on what the win condition is here...

Ed: I feel like there is a really important component that we haven't got yet

Everyone: Yeah, when he gets that component, he’s won

Are people into shibari?

Adam: Hmm... Did you find yourself fired by enthusiasm to do it upon being told about it?

Several people: Yes

Me: Personally no, but...

[laughter]

Adam: So it has mixed appeal?

Barbara: That is absolutely correct

Can one shibari... too hard?

Adam: Is it um, does it involve the tying of knots?

Everyone: YES

Adam: Ok. Are there knots that are peculiar to shibari?

Everyone: yeah

Adam: Is the learning of knots, or the tying of knots upon other people the important part?

Everyone: Uh... yes?

Adam: Do you tie someone up and they attempt to escape?

Everyone: Uh, not necessarily, but like, often.

Me: Yes is closer than no, I think

Adam: Ok, you tie rope on someone. Do you have to use some sort of special rope for it? Can you use any rope?

Barbara: You can use any rope, but some are better than others

Adam: So you wouldn't want to use any rough ropes, or...

Danielle: No, you do, that's actually preferred

Adam: You prefer rough ropes?

Chris: Some do

Frank: It depends

Danielle: Natural fibers tend to be rougher

Adam: Does it chafe?

Danielle: It can, but ideally not

Adam: Would you do it even if you were injured in the process of doing it?

Frank: No

Barbara: You would not want that to happen generally

Adam: Uh... Does it look cool?

Everyone: Yes!!

Origami?

Adam: So you're tying knots that look cool... is it like an origami for knots?

Everyone: [confused disagreement]

Ed: It's not about the knots

Chris: It's totally about the knots!

Frank: It's all about the cones...

Adam: Like, in origami you fold paper in ways that look cool, maybe you tie knots in ways that look cool?

Everyone: [loud disagreement]

Diagnosing the problem

[long long pause]

Chris: Ask the question in your heart!

Adam: ...Neckties?

Everyone: No?

Barbara: I keep thinking "But, he already has it", and then he asks a question that makes me say "No, he doesn't have it at all"

Frank: I think there's a question you want to ask, but you're not...

Everyone: Yeah

Chris: Yeah, ask the question that you don't want to ask

Danielle: I don't think he has the question...

Adam: Would it cause any gratification in someone?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Would it... Would it cause sexual gratification?

Everyone: Yes!!

Adam: Is it a practice... under the category of kink?

Everyone: Yes!!!

Adam: Is it tying somebody up for bondage purposes?

Everyone: YEAH!!! [Pandemonium, hollering, applause, Adam is lifted above the cheering crowd]

After the hearty congratulations were done, I wandered off, elated from the experience, and I bumped into a group of friends.

"Friends!" I said, "I just had the funniest experience. This guy didn't know what 'shibari' was, so we-"

"Shibari?" a friend interjected, "What is that, like, a Jewish building?"

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.