i will be honest i am so torn about the m/m shipping thing. i see m/m shipping as a refuge from the misogyny perpetuated on women both in real life and in fiction, so i write a LOT of fanfiction for m/m ships. i sometimes write f/f or f/m side ships, or even main ships (i've written a lot of female dragon age characters, for example). i just write for m/m a lot more. writing f/f or f/m means reckoning with whatever misogyny they experience in their canons, like imagine being a fan of the women in The Pitt and wanting to make fanworks set in the canonverse but not having to deal with its misogyny. R-I-fucking-P, my condolences. and canon or not, writing f/m is even worse than f/f because tropes that aren't inherently unequal in a same-gender ship suddenly look a little different with the lens of real world gender based discrimination and violence put over them. fandom is my escape and my refuge, so i just plain don't want to reckon with the forces making my real life worse daily in every fic if i can avoid it. it would suck all the joy out of it.
having explained my reasoning, i still feel like a hypocrite. i have a lot of opinions about female characters and ships and the way they are so poorly treated, and i want better for female characters and female ships - but i rarely am the one to put my money where my mouth is and make stuff for them.
i don't know how to reconcile this. i'm sending this ask because i bet i'm not the only person struggling with this issue, and i wanted to support anyone else who feels the same way. loving female characters can be tough no matter how genuine.
look. no one is telling you not to write m/m fics if that's what you enjoy. this is fandom, it's for fun, and this blog is not about making people feel bad for things they like. with that said, i personally really don't agree with the argument that m/m is the only possible refuge from having to deal with misogyny.
writing about women doesn't have to be about misogyny if you don't want it to be. i mean you could make a similar argument that because m/m is about queer men, you necessarily have to deal with homophobia if you write yaoi. but a lot of people don't do that because it's fanfiction. you can write about whatever scenario you want and deal with whatever issues you're comfortable dealing with. you gave the pitt, as an example, right? write about mel and santos having crazy omegaverse sex after singing karaoke together; write an au where aliens exist and mohan and mckay go on a date in a spaceship (look we all have our crack ships, this one's mine, leave me be); write about dana missing collins so much that she moves to portland to be with her. get creative, go crazy. i just really dislike the idea that it's impossible to write women in a fun escapist way.
another issue i have with this idea is that often the male characters being shipped in popular m/m ships are themselves misogynistic. so, for example, the two most popular ships for the pitt, at least according to ao3 numbers, are robby/whitaker and robby/abbot. now robby is a character that i personally really like and enjoy, but i don't think there's any denying that he's sometimes casually misogynistic (and a little racist) in a condescending old liberal white guy way. so when you say writing m/m frees you from writing about misogyny, what do you do about robby or dean winchester or any other beloved male character who is pretty obviously misogynistic. do you only have to deal with misogyny if a character experiences it, but not if a character perpetuates it? i don't really get that logic.
also, i understand if you turn to fanfiction for escapism from real world issues, but speaking for myself, i sometimes like seeing characters deal with misogyny in fic. i think it can be pretty cathartic to see people actively confront the systemic ways they're mistreated. i totally understand that not everyone enjoys that sort of thing, but i must assume that at least some m/m shippers do actually enjoy it, because i know a lot of m/m fic does actually address how homophobia affects its characters. so if we can do that for homophobia, why can't we also do it for misogyny and racism and ableism and other kinds of bigotry?
again, i'm really not trying to call you out or anything, anon. like i said, if m/m is what you enjoy writing for, then the last thing i want is to make you feel bad about that. but i do think that there are plenty of ways to engage with f/f and f/m without having to deal with misogyny if you don't want to, in the same way that people write about m/m without really engaging with homophobia (or misogyny for that matter). and i kind of resent the idea that the presence of women in a story necessarily sucks the fun out of it.
