There’s always a lingering question that I ask myself, which is why do I, a cis bisexual woman, enjoy romance between two men so much?
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 it’s much more difficult for me, and I think for many women, to relax and enjoy romantic and sexual stories when they involve female characters. We’ve been burned too many times by shitty depictions, by shallow role models, by abuse portrayed as romantic. We have developed a stress response, a trauma response to heterosexual romance. We are hyper-reactive to a wide variety of triggers in regards to it. But removing women from the equation makes stories safer for us. And maybe it shouldn’t? In an ideal world? But for many of us, that’s the truth.
So this post blew up in the last 24 hours, for whatever reason, and I was looking through people’s responses, as you do. I’m quite moved that so many found it relatable.
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.
But with m/m romance you can put yourself in the place of either character and…not compare yourself. You can enjoy a character being attractive without feeling bad about yourself, which is REALLY HARD to do for any woman in our fucked up culture.
oh my god someone put it into words!!!!!
there are soooo many nuances and reasons that many of us aren’t even conscious of which makes me doubly angry when it’s dismissed as fetishizing. fuck off and let me read my love stories pls.
nail on the goddamn head there
Also, a lot of m/m fiction offers the notion of an actual friends-to-lovers storyline that isn’t cluttered by sex-first. There’s a foundation there that doesn’t get allowed for in m/f fiction. If there’s a m/f friendship in any media, it’s usually either an automatic love interest on the immediate horizon, or it’s dismissed and not explored as any kind of important to a story. People complain about m/m fiction like “Why can’t two guys just be FRIENDS?!” and i’m over here wanting to know “Why can’t two -anything- just be FRIENDS?!” and m/m fiction is usually the only place i can get that. Also… “fuck off and let me read my love stories pls.” This.
fuck man, this post just summarized something I’ve been trying to put into words for years
Like, fetishization of same sex relationships is a serious issue but it’s very different from what this post talks about and its really important to distinguish between the two
This post is getting notes again and I have to thank @an-actual-corvid for their tags.
#this was very eye-opening for me thank you for writing this out so that I may understand#i agree with all of this but the last comment rang in my head#the distinguishing between fetishes and enjoyment of the romance is not something I’ve seen in conversation#which made me adverse to women consuming m/m romance. I only heard of the m/m fetishization which as a gay man makes me incredibly upset#i understand now that there are multiple sides to this idea of why women consume m/m media#and that the distinction is so important#thank you again for posting this#you have opened my eyes to new possibilities and I have new knowledge in my back pocket so that I do not make any more#hasty judgements on ladies who consume m/m romance#thank you for pointing out a prejudice that I held in such a way that wasn’t babying me or others while still being kind about it#i have some processing I need to do. some rewiring of my brain.#thank you again#(I hope I worded this correctly and that I didn’t upset anyone with my tags.)#I had a femme friend who would exclusively read yaoi and would gush to me about her ‘uwu soft bois’ and ‘how gay they were for each other#‘and how they should just fuck already.’#‘but they’re my uwu soft bois and they’re so cute’#fuck it made me nauseous#I know now what I knew then and that was that what my friend was doing was fetishizing m/m relationships#and that is what soured me on the idea.#this post has turned my head to new ideas and feelings. thank you#while the fetishization of m/m relationships still greatly makes me upset and uncomfortable#i now know that that is not the only reason why women consume m/m media.#thank you
Mostly for personal reasons, because I’ve gotten a good amount of animosity and anon hate from gay men (or those claiming to be so) as a result of this post, so this was nice to read.
As usual I think people need to be much less kneejerk in how they relate because all humans are complicated. A lot of women need to consider how they talk about objects of their gaze because it often makes me uncomfortable. But also we are all motivated by a variety of factors. For example perhaps your friend you mention was really drawn into nonthreatening portrayals of masculinity and that’s the aspect she focused on for a reason.
IDK the way we play with and interact with gender and sex in this fucked up world is messy. Queer men play with femininity and women play with queer masculinity. In different ways and for different reasons. And it’s very late/early and I need to stop typing.
