Just Fiona

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 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.  

… And so now I am going to revel in fic with shitty depictions of one-dimensional, stereotypical gay men and which portray abuse and codependency as romantic. Because women have been traumatized by heterosexual romance. Because it’s fun and totally okay for a marginalized group to take out their trauma on another marginalized group of people for their pleasure and “safety.” Because fics exist in a vacuum where only women read them, certainly no queer men exist in fandom and wonder if the female writers have ever met a queer man before — or even any man at all! And if they did feel confused or offended, who cares!? Fuck men. This is just fantasy, after all. Except when women are involved, in which case it is inextricably tied to all historical female trauma ever. Surely there is no historical or societal trauma with queer men, so I don’t have to worry about that! lol here I go back to my sexual harassment porn…!

Ok. Look, I don’t have insurmountable problems with women writing and enjoying m/m fic. But major parts of OP’s explanation are myopic homophobic rubbish. Your discomfort with the crap ways women are portrayed and legit awful rampant societal misogyny is NOT a justification for writing and enjoying m/m fic portraying the shitty things you are raging against. Just write your fics, do your craft, read your shit, own what you are doing, and know that you may be subject to criticism if the portrayal of queer men is not careful.

After taking some time to chill the fuck out, I’m resisting the temptation to go back and edit my original response, because the first part of my response in particular is reactive and emotional and pretty shitty. But I’m not deleting it, because I think it speaks to how much this topic brings up for people, which OP rightly pointed out.

After reflection, I realized that OP and I are on the same side here. I want to smash the patriarchy, too. I am an unrepentant feminist. But damn, some of this really rubbed me the wrong way, and I’m trying to work through why.

OP draws on a lot of home truths about the shit women experience in the world from men, and she describes m/m fic as refuge from the real baggage that women face because of misogyny, cultural expectations, rape culture, you name it. And I get this. I really, really do.

And if queer men were just fake unicorn-like creatures that someone made up that existed outside of the real world, I would be like yassss, read all the unicorn/unicorn fic you want gurl, go get some. But that’s just not the case here. When people write and read m/m fic, you are writing/reading about actual humans who exist in the real world. Queer men have their share of shit to deal with, such as higher rates of childhood trauma and sexual violence relative to their heterosexual counterparts and other types of victimization and discrimination related to being sexual minorities. And we could devote a whole host of posts to intersectional identities and gay men and bisexual men and queer trans men and “men who have sex with men” and all sorts of individual categories of men who fall under the general Queer Man umbrella who are being portrayed in these fics that (mostly) women are writing and reading to escape their own oppression.

And it’s not a competition of suffering, right? Women and queer men are both marginalized by the cis/het patriarchy. Hooray. I think we have established this.

Now, this is where I start to see some potential problems. Women come to fandom for many good reasons, to feel better, to escape shitty patriarchal shit, to get turned on, whatever floats your boat. But the way this happens is by creating men who are, more often than not, poorly - if not terribly - written. Maybe one partner is “the man” and the other is a thinly veiled woman. Or they are strange hyper-masculine caricatures of men who spout a constant stream of quippy and wildly masculine things to each other the whole fic long (like, no homo, don’t want it to get too gay while we fuck). Or the characters have no character at all. It’s just one dude shoving his dick in some hole or another. I can’t even complain about queer erasure because there’s no other personality or identity characteristics, either. It’s basically person erasure. Two male bodies fucking. A pure distillation of fetishism.

I think the worst for me is when women who write m/m fics neglect everything that goes along with gayness/queerness altogether. Everyone is Happy, nobody is really gay, they’re just two people who put their dicks in one another in some post-sexual-identity-utopia (oh, wait, putting dicks IN ONE ANOTHER would be switching, which is a big no-no). Everyone does everyone. Nobody struggles with anything. This makes fucking and romancing easy and uncomplicated, so readers can just sit back and enjoy and escape their real world problems. Calgon, take me away!

But in the end, you have to sift through sometimes dozens of m/m fics to find one that is a semi-realistic portrayal of a human man, let alone a queer man. If queer male writers wrote heterosexual fic and had that kind of hit rate with their depictions of women, women would rightfully go bonkers. And there are consequences to these portrayals. Women get to kick back and enjoy their fantasies about what men should be, avatar themselves into their (queer male) bodies, have a (gay) old time, but queer men read these fics also and get to see baffling and sometimes patently insulting versions of themselves written so women can feel better about themselves.

Queer men are not imaginary. We are real. We are not just fuck toys. We cannot be divorced from our orientations and identities and the problems and realities that go with that, just like female bodies should not be divorced from the cultural and historical oppression that OP talks about. So many writers just want to write all the fucking and sucking and not any of the real world shit that goes with it. Many writers don’t want to write men in real relationship. They don’t want to write real men at all. They don’t want to take the time to research how men talk and move and relate, which isn’t that hard because you just need to mindfully observe the men around you and convey a few choice details. They don’t want to write real queerness and the trappings that go with it. They want to write idealized versions of these things or version of versions that have been recycled throughout their fandoms. There is no one way or correct way to be queer or a man or be masculine, but some people clearly don’t even try (ROPES OF COME?!?!???).

Now, there are plenty of m/m fics written by women that are BEAUTIFUL. Sublimely written and extremely engaging with phenomenal characters. There are even ones that are basically porn that are written with care and attention to the characters, and guess what? They are usually way hotter for it, because it’s EMOTIONS that are erotic, not cocks.

So, I think my main point is still the same. But I want to express much more compassion for the reasons OP and other female readers come to fandom. I get wanting a respite from the shit in the world. That’s why I’m here, too. But writing men and queerness poorly means something, even if you don’t experience the consequences of it. Contributing to the demand for these fics means something. It doesn’t take much just to flesh out characters a little bit. To encourage writers who make the extra effort. To challenge each other to think about how our work affects one another. And we can say all day long that fandom is a place to come relax and just be free, but you just try tagging something incorrectly or not providing enough content warnings or breaking some sort of Ao3 etiquette, and you will see in one millisecond how dead-fucking-serious fandom is.

Grief phase 3: