#fujoshi discourse

[just-antithings]

apparently romanticizing mlm is evil now too

[zzxid]

Much yaoi vs yuri / fujoshi shipping discourse is deeply frustrating because it's one that refuses to engade in nuance, because when you remove your bias you can tell both sides can come with very good arguments and feminist critical analysis, BUT at the same time also fall for very misogynistic rhetoric that they're supposed to oppose.

Because I think on the discussions on why M/M as being more popular than F/F in fanfiction, both the argument of "fans have bias towards men" and "source material has bias towards men so they prioritize M/M dynamics over other ones" are both true, and I think we can have a discussion how mainstream media does undermines its female cast and effect who the fanbase are most likely engage more with. But the most vocal outcome become "that's why I refuse engage with female characters" or the other side with "that's why I refuse critique sexist writers, because that's what the fujo want" and neither it's ideal, or "feminist" at all.

And it's important discussing that there is also internalized misogyny issues in fujoshi spaces along others forms of bigotry, but way too quickly any fair critique turns into treating M/M shippers into an acceptable target of misogyny or homophobia. Where a post can talk about the female character hated for getting in the way of yaoi just to be followed on calling shippers bitchy cock-obsessed hags and insisting gay ships only exist as a form of fetichization, to a point people don't care anymore if then misogynistic homophobic men are jumping into the conversation…

And it's become a cycle of of calling out misogyny but because the person you're calling out are women or LGBT it quickly turns into a excuse to endorse misosgyny/homophobia against them becuse "feminism". We're fighting misogyny with misogyny because people hate more a type of fictional than they actually care about addressing misogyny.

[dicklessthewonderclown]

what’s your opinion on fujoshis and the anti fujo discourse?

just gonna throw it out there, i have seen very very little of this discourse as it’s not really my corner of the internet. fandom is becoming more and more puritanical and people hate to see women having hobbies. if you’re that worked up about what other grown ass adults are reading, calm the fuck down and find something better to do with your time. signed, a gay man

[sheridan-le-fanu]

I’m a ride or die for lesbian fujoshis. They could commit murder and I’d still be defending them!!

[jinglebellrockstars]

fandom antis/fujo haters 🤝 homophobic conservatives

"why do you have to make everything gay? just let men be friends"

[eliyahu613]

"Gay trans men are all beautiful angels who belong in the gay community and deserve rights, but cishet women are all evil monsters and a cishet woman showing any small interest in gay culture is an evil awful demon who needs to be harassed" is a position that becomes harder and harder to defend when you realize that there is no 100% accurate way to tell a cishet woman from a gay & trans egg, and when you start to understand how willing your crowd is to deny gay trans men our identities due to the spaces we are in and the ways that we discovered ourselves.

[forgivenessissupposedtobeearned]

"mtfs are never fujos" anon go to twitter. go slightly deeper into any fandom tag and witness the sistine chapel-level fujo fanart and analysis being put out by the girls. you know nothing of our culture because transfems are making some of the purest yaoi cocaine out there. most don't even like men; sometimes you just do something for the love of the game, for the sake of the craft. yaoi is universal. there is no demographic immune to fujo'ing out. the fudan-to-fujo and himedan-to-fujo pipelines are real. wake up. wake the fuck up

Real and true, there are indeed trans fujos out there!

[4drian321]

Are Fujos Male Centered?

Posting this to share my thoughts on some discourse I saw on Twitter.

The practice of only shipping men is male-centered in a way, obviously, but I want to clarify some things about my position beyond this obvious statement. I don't think being a fujoshi is any kind of moral or feminist failing.

It makes sense that we, in a sexist world, are more interested in male characters on average. This is one factor in why someone would prefer MLM media. But equally impactful and inseparable is the fact that a sexist world leads writers to write women worse than they write men, on average. Someone with truly no bias favoring men would still like male characters more often than female characters because the male characters are most often written better. For a person to have a roughly equal amount of male and female favorite characters, they have to purposefully seek out media with good female leads or lower their standards for what makes a good female character.

There's a million reasons why fujoshis or people in general prefer male characters, and none of them are moral failings. Fujos aren't very secretive about centering men in media preferences. It would be silly to say shipping mostly or only men isn't a male-centered practice in at least one sense. Like no shit. But does that mean fujos center men in every aspect of life? Noooooo. It does not, at all! Does it make them "bad feminists"? No. Most of the world is taught to favor men. Decentering men is a purposeful effort, not a state most people grow into naturally.

Now, to talk about myself. Most of my ships are MLM. These are the main reasons:

I live in a sexist world and absorbed subconscious preferences from that.

There are more good male relationships in stories than there are good female+male or female+female relationships.

I'm a little bit damaged by sexism in a way where I feel more comfortable enjoying romances with no women involved. When I see a woman on screen, there's this dread that lingers in the back of my mind because I'm waiting for her to be treated shittily by the narrative or for her to prove to be just another two-dimensional female character.

If the story subverts my expectations, the dread goes away, but the dread exists for a reason: often women characters are treated or written in the ways I dread to see. Thank god for all media that subverts my expectation for shallow female characters. Media with well-written female characters did so much to heal my relationship with myself; being born with the body of a woman, having this body my whole life, and experiencing the gendered upbringing that comes with it.

I've made a huge effort to decenter men over the years, and I think I've done a damn good job. I don't think I can completely erase all the effects of sexist conditioning from my brain, but I deal with internalized misogyny when it crops up, and that's enough. I deeply love women now, and things associated with women. It took a long, long time to get to this point.

Everyone, let's stop faulting people for shit like being male-centered. No shit people are male-centered, we live in male-centric masculinity land. So if someone cares about women's issues and does the work to back it up, good enough. I don't call myself a fujo—I like yuri and sometimes het ships—but I don't think it would be a moral failing on my part if I only liked MLM ships. Internalized sexism isn't a moral failing, finding yaoi hot isn't a moral failing, being a fujo isn't a moral failing.

Most of my OTPs are MLM. That is a symptom of living in a sexist world. It's a wonderful mix of internalized misogyny (maybe. I've rooted a lot of that out) and the fact that there are fewer cool relationship dynamics written involving women than those written involving male friends. This does not at all indicate a failure on my part.

Moral of the story:

Getting through this world as a woman or as a person perceived as a woman is confusing as fuck and hard to navigate. Let's accept this reality and not be shitty to each other because of it.