I may be swinging a bat at a hornet's nest with this post, but there's this sentiment on here that i've been starting to see increasingly more often and it's starting to piss me off.
It's the notion that the popularity of M/M ships compared to F/F ships within a fandom indicates a fandom-wide problem with misogyny of some sort.
I really thought this was common knowledge, but uh. People who engage in fandom culture online and people who write fanfiction as a hobby overwhelmingly happen to be people who are attracted to men. These are hobbies that tend to be quite common among women, actually. And the majority of women in the world are straight women.
Logically it might seem that if there are this many women who think yaoi is hot pumping out these fics then surely there must be men who think girl on girl is hot who would be pumping out F/F fics at a similar rate, but comparatively there aren't a lot of straight men who get into the hobby of writing fanfiction for some reason.
It could be because straight men tend to go to video sites for their porn instead, whereas women are more likely to consume porn in the form of erotica. It could be because women are more likely to engage in the fandom practice known as "shipping" for the same reasons why romance novels tend to be more popular among women than they are among men. It could be because they see that these online spaces tend to predominately consist of women and so they decide not to engage with it because it's a "girly hobby". Who knows.
But since the majority of people who write fanfiction happen to be women and the majority of women happen to be attracted to men, it's kind of a no-brainer that the majority of fics are going to be M/M. Like no shit.
And since gay men are less likely to avoid "girly shit" than straight men are and they are also attracted to men, their presence is also going to be adding to the amount of M/M fics there are.
And if people are attracted to men, of course men kissing each other and fucking each other is what they're gonna wanna read and write about. That's what they think is hot.
And part of why this narrative that M/M is more common than F/F because of misogynistic reasons is weird to me is because it sort of insinuates that it's misogynistic to be attracted to men. And not only is that notion homophobic, it's kind of misogynistic in and of itself because the majority of people who are attracted to men happen to be women.
What got me to write all this was seeing a post on my dash that had a screenshot showing the total number of spamtenna fics that are on AO3 alongside the number of suselle and krusie fics, and saying that the discrepency was because people don't wanna relate to or engage with female characters.
Like buddy, you are using shipping as a metric for that. Within a female-dominated hobby. And someone not being attracted to women doesn't mean that they hate women. If someone is attracted to men and not women, of course men kissing and having sex is what they're going to find more captivating than women kissing and having sex. And that's what shipping is, it's making fictional characters kiss and have sex.
If you're a woman who likes women I can understand how that might make you feel isolated within fandom spaces, since you are a minority within that space. But technically men who like men are also a minority within fandom spaces, they just share something in common with straight women that allows them to find community with each other: being attracted to men. And they can't really help being attracted to men. What causes the discrepency between the amount of F/F fics and the amount of M/M fics is really the lack of straight men within these spaces, because the majority of people in the world are straight. And is more straight men in these spaces really what you want?
Also, what's actually stopping you from writing a suselle fic. Seriously. There is no force of censorship out there that prevents F/F fics from being written that doesn't also prevent M/M fics from being written.
Fanfics on AO3 are not like cakes on display in a bakery that has a limited amount of display room; there can be as many cakes as you want there to be. Just because a lot of people there who like chocolate cake are making chocolate cakes doesn't mean they're forcing you to have chocolate cake or make chocolate cakes, and it doesn't mean they're stopping you from making any other kind of cake. There just happens to be a lot of people who like chocolate cake.
It's really, truly not that deep.
janainaart
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
dededos
