On misogyny in fanfic
(Note: I am speaking specifically of fanfic about cisgendered characters and the issue demonizing women in the way of a M/M relationship.)
Look, I get it. You want your two favorite characters to kiss, and there’s someone in the way. It’s super easy to paint an inconvenient woman with a tarred brush. Make her snappish, impatient, easy to irritate. Make it obvious why your character will finally come to his senses and break up with her, or she’ll dump him because she’s tired of him not knowing what he wants.
You need your characters to get together. You need your character to have a realization about his identity, and the easiest way to do it is to compare how someone might feel when he’s with a woman to the first time he’s with another man. Suddenly it makes sense why he’s never been able to focus when he’s with a woman! No wonder he thought he was doing something wrong, could never quite find them enough. No wonder the world feels shiny and bright and new, now that he’s finally with the person he should be with.
Every time you do this, every time you take the easy way out and make it the woman’s fault that he was never happy before now, even though you may have absolutely no idea you ARE doing it, women in general lose. We lose a step in the fight for equality. You deem us lesser, yet again. You make the prize pairing two men and make the woman as unsympathetic as possible, and you reinforce the central belief taught from birth that men are superior and women are just in the way, to be discarded and never thought of again.
Women are allowed to be snappish, impatient, easy to irritate. They’re allowed to be human. That doesn’t mean you should make them the scapegoats for men having a Big Gay Revelation, because every time you do, you just shore up the neckbeards and incels who are convinced we’re all scum, only you’re doing it much more subtly than they are.
Being an LGBT+ ally doesn’t give you a pass to make women the bad guys. You can do better than that. You can be better than that. You can show your character realizing he likes men without comparing them to women and having women be lesser than. It might take a little more work, and you might have to get your characters to actually communicate with each other, but I believe in you. You can do this.
