In one of your posts you mentioned straight "fetishization" of gay people, what do you mean by that and why you you think it happens?
(Disclaimer: I am not an expert, I’m not even a gay person, I’m just trying to form words from experience and hope to god this makes sense and I don’t hurt anyone. If something in this is problematic please correct me.)
I did mention it anon, and I also didn’t put it in quotation marks because it’s not something that is in question or hyperbole. Certain straight people do have a fetish for queer couplings. Whether it’s men watching lesbians act out sex scenes or women writing slash fic of their favourite non-canon-otp. I worked for an erotica company, the biggest writers and consumers of male gay erotica were women, some women even pretended to be gay men so as to infiltrate the rest of the market, and if you don’t see what’s wrong with that then I don’t even know where to begin.
I’m not saying it’s unhealthy or wrong to be aroused or enjoy these things if you primarily identify as hetero (I fully believe that sexuality is fluid and at different times different things can be appreciated more so than others), what I’m saying is the problem arises when you have males who scream about f*ggots and vote against basic human rights with one hand, while jacking off with the other to lesbian porn, and women who call other women d*kes and think gay marriage is wrong, while gleefully indulging in say, Johnlock. (Which comes from a show which imo is problematic in of itself for queer baiting but that’s another topic)
And the problem arises from thinking of other human beings as “lesser” as “things”, as toys that are there for your naughty pleasure and can be put away when you’re done with them. It happens with race, Asian women are “exotic”, black men all have big dicks and white women are either frigid or they’ll do anything to keep a man. Those are stereotypes based on a westernized (primarily male) gaze spanning hundreds of years, reducing other people into appealing abstracts rather than nuanced wholes. Something you can hang on your wall and say “look at how diverse I am with my one piece of tribal art...but of course I also have a Rembrant and Money...I’m not an animal...”
It’s the same with straight people fetishizing gay people. It’s that thrilling little part of your mental collection, of things you can take out and say “but I’m not homophobic, I love reading about X/Z!”
And that’s just not how it works. People are not things. They are not dolls, you cannot play with them and then put them away. And you most certainly cannot get angry when those people turn round and say “well hey wait a minute...” But inevitably people do, they get angry when their dolls argue back, they get angry when their reality isn’t accepted. And that’s when you know it’s an unhealthy fetish. You see it all the time in fandom tags.
As for why it happens...well speaking as a woman who doesn’t get much from watching lesbian porn despite being a tiny bit curious (mostly because it’s not real lesbian sex, it’s actresses acting out what people think men want to watch and usually culminates in degradation which I could write screeds about if you let me) I can tell you it’s pretty to look at? But to be honest, most mainstream porn makes me consider vows of celibacy and taking up residency in a nunnery. Erotica however...well...you’d think after working in an erotica publishing house my brain would be deadened to that kind of stimulation. But I will happily sit back and read screeds of it, I love reading fluff, I love reading kink, I love reading the stupid things where all the people do is hold hands and watch the other person eat. I love it regardless of gender, binary or otherwise. It’s so much more human, and so much more appealing to me. It makes an emotional connection, which if you’ll allow me one stereotype, I think appeals to women more. I like looking at Chris Hemsworth without his shirt on, but tell me he just rescued some orphans from a burning building, adopted them all and spends his weekends baking and I’ll be in hospital for an ovary transplant quicker than you can say “emotions”.
Which is where the popularity of M/M slash comes in fandom. It’s not just men being sexual because we’re always being told that men are sexual. It’s men being kind, it’s men being vulnerable, loving, dorky...it’s men exposing themselves without the veil of hyper masculinity which has always been a popular trope in “chick lit”. But unfortunately we as a society are so damaged by gender roles that somewhere along the line the idea of a softer side to masculinity became inherently linked to femininity and queerness, which don’t kid yourself, is still seen in a very, very dangerous light by many people. It took until 2015 for the USA to allow gay marriage, and there’s still homophobic assholes frothing at the mouth over it. Imagine that. There’s people out there jacking off left right and center to people like you, but you couldn’t marry the person you loved because of them. How fucked up is that? That’s what it’s like to be an object.
M/M slash is the ultimate expression of male vulnerability for a lot of people, and while some of it can be cute and heartwarming...that’s rarely the case. There’s normally a lot of pain, a lot of shame and degradation, the kind that goes on with cis-hetero porn, the kind that leaves women feeling objectified and used, and a lot of “kill your queers” which I mentioned in my previous post. And considering the media still does that kind of thing, baiting people along with the promise of a queer pairing only to “reset” the “norm” by killing one of them off (I actually edited a piece of trash which eventually got left on the editing floor where a female pairing was destroyed brutally but the epilogue “remedied” it by having her married to a man with three kids and happier than she was with her female lover because she was able to lead a “normal life”, and I just fucking WHAT?!) it’s really not okay. It’s not.
And you can try and defend it by saying you just enjoy the pairing and you think there’s not enough LGBTA representation in the media so you have to make up for it...but if that’s the case, then why is so much of it about pulling people apart? Why aren’t you shipping actual gay characters too, why just the pretty male leads? Why are lesbian female characters demonized in fandom? Why do they have to suffer? Why? Think about it. I’ll wait.
