Something that bears mentioning: I get why we need to shame straight girls who fetishize mlm ships but. To any straight girls who consistently relate to or resonate with mlm dynamics on a deep level or see themselves in queer male characters. if by any chance this post from a tiny tiny blog crosses your dash. Please take this moment to very privately consider the possibility that you might not be straight. Or a girl.
this is just a callout post for my younger self
no we do not need to shame anyone who “fetishizes mlm” because that shit was made up by TERFs and yinz need to stop repeating their talking points without actually considering what they’re talking about.
By “fetishizing mlm”, TERFs and the children that do their bidding without knowing mean “a woman who enjoys fiction involving two men”. They do not mean “women who go up to men in real life and accost them because they’re ‘their otp’”, because that sort of thing is rare and not worth harassing teenagers writing fanfic over (and it’d be something absolutely everyone would condemn). What kind of fictional porn people enjoy in their free time is no one’s business - it is a victimless crime, because it’s all made up. Who the fuck cares.
Straight women enjoying yaoi in the privacy of their home hurts no one, and OP is right: many of them are not actually women, or straight, and that’s why TERFs hate it. This is part of their anti-porn or “kink critical” agenda, and it’s how they weaponize people who claim to be against TERFs against other young, often queer people. They don’t actually give a shit about mlm, and they ESPECIALLY don’t care about gay trans men.
I am so tired of this “fetishizing mlm” shit that everyone talks about, because I have yet to see proof that this is some rampant problem the lgbtq+ community needs to address. I see so much written about this and, like, nothing written about all the porn straight men make of fake lesbians. A lot of this comes from a place of internalized misogyny AND internalized homophobia (because no one talks about hets being “fetishized”. It’s almost like you assume gay men are just fetish material and that depictions of their sex is something more obscene).
Unfortunately I can’t find many resources to people who explain this better than me because it’s not exactly a highly researched topic, but zombie jerusalem on Twitter has been talking about this for a while and has compiled many receipts on how this pipeline from TERFery to “uwu your ship is problematic” works:
https://twitter.com/zombiejerusalem/status/1294758516163596300
Also, Queerios has made some helpful Twitter threads on the politics around fujoshi and racist ideas of what ‘fujoshi’ means:
https://twitter.com/_queerioes/status/1257759613652537344
Anyway, I would heavily advise people to lean away from this “thought crime” kind of stuff, because it will fuck you up. What sort of fiction you harmlessly enjoy in your free time does not hurt anyone. You are not some mean old homophobic harpy for enjoying fiction of Batman fucking Superman. Determining who can enjoy what and DEMANDING that people tell you their sexuality and gender identity so that you’re “allowed” to enjoy something is MAJORLY fucked up, and it’s not healthy. It’s an extremely stunted view of how romance, erotica, sex, and porn works, and I would advise stepping away from any community that insists you reading smut is somehow homophobic or harmful to real people. Straight men do not get this treatment for their porn. Somehow the ire is reserved for women, or “women”, many of whom are not straight or cis. It’s homophobia, transphobia, and sexism all the way down.
Please forgive me for hijacking this post, I would just like to throw a couple personal perspectives and a whole lotta TMI on it:
Firstly, people who throw around the word ‘problematic’ in the BL circles, and those who want to shame straight girls enjoying mlm NEED to read those twitter threads! I don’t remember when I’ve seen it put better; they’re so direct yet it lays out the importance of the nuance and history of sexism towards fujoshis and BL, and the racism of trying make these stories more like the Western ideal. The notion of wanting fully-fleshed out and healthy relationships in BL is an understandable one, but immediately shutting down anything that doesn’t fit into that tiny ‘perfect’ couple is fundamentally misrepresentative.
Secondly, I consider myself a queer asexual now, but I only came to learn that about myself through how I consumed BL and mlm media. I’m what’s called autochorissexual, so for me sex is mostly only enjoyable in the abstract, i.e. fanfiction, erotica or porn; any avenue where I’m not directly involved in the activity. And I grew up in a sex-positive home; hell I borrowed my mom’s Harlequin paperbacks until I found books of my own. But for years I was still too shy (repressed is probably the better word) to look up porn directly on the internet. So when I found a yaoi doujinshi archive through deviantart, a whole new world was opened to me. It was somewhere safe online that could be my sexual outlet, but I could still rationalize to myself that it wasn’t *technically* porn. And through it I was able to acclimate myself to the idea of actually seeking out what I liked in porn. As I got older, I tried ‘inserting myself’ into those scenarios through fantasy, but it did nothing besides make me feel gross and uncomfortable. I thought for sure there was something wrong with me, because I did have preferences, and I knew what turned me on in those paperbacks or doujinshi, but I didn’t like the idea of actually doing it myself. It was a long time before I found out about asexuality, and even longer before I found autochorissexuality, but let me tell you that when I did discover what it was, I almost burst into tears because there was a WORD for what I was feeling! I wasn’t “broken” or a “freak,” I was just this awesome polysyllabic word, and moreover THERE WERE OTHERS LIKE ME! IT WAS A COMMUNITY! The queer/panromantic revelation came even later than that but when I considered myself straight, if I had been ‘shamed’ away from exploring mlm, aka one of the only things that revved up my libido, I would still be repressing myself to this day. I’d be forcing myself to keep to soft, heterosexual erotica, as opposed to gay or lesbian porn, and worse still I might’ve tried to force myself into liking direct-involvement with sex.
That stuff and a lot more is why I’m opposed to fan-policing and shaming. A transgressive couple may be ‘problematic’ to YOU, or a fujoshi might be ‘gross’ to YOU, but kindly keep that misplaced piety off my blog.
