Optimist With Depressive Tendencies

i don't remember who said this so i'm having a hard time finding the source and am about to butcher this anecdote but it's like. some musician woman talking about how all of her songs are assumed to be autobiographical and intimately personally revealing, and her thought on that is something along the lines of "why can't anyone ever say I'm a good storyteller." To me that's part of the same line of misogyny that makes people relate to f/f works this way.

In general there's a pretense that women's fiction skews towards the autobiographical in a way men's doesn't. like phoebe waller bridge accidentally making shit really hard for her family after releasing fleabag because of how large a portion of the audience thought it was an attempt to depict her own family's real life dynamics [x]. Like it couldn't have been Fiction, it had to be a Fictionalization in these peoples' eyes.

Basically like either as creators or as the audience women aren't afforded the capacity to engage with fiction as intellectually interested third parties. you have to be either reproducing your own immediate emotional landscape, or you have to be projecting that immediate emotional landscape onto one of the characters.