Speaking as a curious outsider, do M/M fans really write more than F/F fans or are M/M fans just more common than F/F fans so there's just more M/M fic by default since more people like M/M? I feel like with fanart it's fairly equal but there's a big gap with fanfiction and I wonder why that is.
So, a lot of the discourse is about AO3 stats. That old AO3 census was pretty flawed, but the broad demographic patterns it showed match every other (also flawed) survey and anecdotal evidence about slash fandom spaces, BL fandom spaces, etc.
AO3 is mostly cis women with a hefty chunk of nonbinary people and some trans men. There's a scattering of other demographics, and when a site is as popular as AO3, that means that the total number of demographic X can still be pretty high even if the group makes up a tiny fraction of the whole. (So I don't want to hear any "My friend group is all cis men/trans women/whatever and..." style moaning.)
Lots of AO3 users are bisexual, but lots are asexual or straight. Other demographics share a smaller slice of the pie together.
Much of the discourse boils down to:
"AO3 is full of wlw. Why don't these wlw produce more f/f?"
The answer is that the question involves masses of assumptions that aren't actually valid.
If one looks at internet spaces broadly, one sees a mountain of het. In spaces with more cis men, the het reflects that. In spaces with more cis women, the het reflects that.
Looking broadly again, one also sees a lot of allegorical work. Think the literary equivalent of drag queens. Spaces with lots of cis men have plenty of art that focuses on female characters. It's partly because they're hot, but it's clearly also because some emotions are easier to express while playing with female barbie dolls than while playing with male ones. The distance is helpful. Some of this art is f/f, whether that's because two girls equals twice the hotness or because there's twice the distance or because guys are intrigued by the all-female social spaces they aren't privy to in real life.
AO3 is a space full of allegorical work for AFABs. There are some trans men doing very #ownvoices art, but a lot of AO3 is drag king stuff. It's people using cis male barbie dolls to express their insides rather than their outsides and the social role other people demand that they inhabit and relate to.
This doesn't sound like a direct answer, does it?
What I'm trying to say here is that:
There are not more m/m fans.
If we compare #ownvoices m/m with #ownvoices f/f, the amount might well be similar. It's always going to be relatively small in the grand scheme of things.
If we compare "Ooh, girls are neat and exotic" f/f with the kind of m/m that tends to be on AO3, both are popular and common. They are not both common on AO3 because AO3 was founded by a bunch of fujoshi and it has thus continued to attract fujoshi and adjacent fans more quickly than it attracts other demographics.
Wankers like to compare AO3 m/m to their desired and hypothetical #ownvoices f/f spaces, often with a heavy undertone of gold star cis lesbian #ownvoices f/f.
This is apples to oranges.
There is no reason these two numbers should ever resemble each other.
The reason fan art looks more even is that AO3 cannot directly host images and thus only a few fan artists bother with it. Fan art spaces are big social media or older art sites that have a wider and/or different user base.
With different demographics in the user base, there will naturally be different posting patterns.
The fanfic gap is partly because AO3 makes it easy to get shipping stats, while other fanfic spaces make it quite difficult.
The gap is also because fanfic, as a hobby, attracts fewer cis men than cis women. Everybody likes making shit based on preexisting shit they enjoyed. Not everybody calls it fanfic and puts it on a fanfic archive.
The reasons are complex, but the best explanation I've seen—and made—boils down to gendered socialization around unpaid labor. Cis dudes will code open source projects because that gets specific kinds of clout they are taught to value. They don't usually write free fiction for the purpose of deepening social bonds with their community.
As writing becomes more commercial or produces other kinds of rewards, it attracts more cis men. Cis dudes write spec scripts all the time. I've seen men talking shit about fanfic while writing a blog post speculating about what a sequel would look like in such detail that it's essentially one of those not!fic tumblr posts. Cis dudes write epic quantities of webnovel content, plenty of it focusing on female characters and plenty of it including f/f.
Fan art has always been socially different from fanfic. In some spaces, fan art is respected and seen as a stepping stone to pro work or at least to accolades of a type fic doesn't get. It aligns more with what cis men are socialized to value.
There totally are fanfic spaces full of cis men. I'm told that Worm fandom on those forum sites I never go on has plenty of dudes writing f/f, exactly as one would expect.
Both the wanking and the self-aggrandizing navel gazing about m/m stats tend to come from people who spend too much time around AO3 circles and only around AO3 circles.
The lack of a broader view of fan activities and spaces and original-ish art spaces leads to the huge disparity between m/m and f/f and to many stupid conclusions about why it's there.
If you want more f/f, invite the cis men.
If you want more #ownvoices, no matter which kind of own voices, curate your space but expect it to be smaller.
If AO3 doesn't satisfy, explore the many, many other places out there. If it does, stay put.
There are so many options one can pursue to look for fun and pleasure. I wish people were a little savvier about them instead of feeling stuck in place and feeling sad about what they can see from right here.
Not that you sound sad. You don't.
But to talk about the "gap", you have to look at the faulty assumptions that lead to AO3 shipping stats being taken as a valid stand-in for all of fandom.
Here is what fan art on AO3 looks like:
Sure, the fanart tag isn't exactly the same as the overall stats on AO3. Maybe we could say something about the larger share of gen. But one thing I think we can say for sure is that AO3 fan art reflects AO3 and not patterns of fan art everywhere.
This type of context is vital if we want to have a realistic conversation about this kind of topic.
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