Honestly I hate how so many antis say "women can't write m/m!!" because they think it's fetishizing...
As a fag myself, I think it's more homophobic to say slash is fetishizing than for a straight woman to write slash.
And even if it's an effeminate male character that's being sexualized then antis will say "this is fetishizing gay men!!!"
No, it's not. You saying it is is pushing a stereotype that all queer men are effeminate.
And I don't really believe in the fetishization of fictional gay men anyways.
Oh no, someone's bringing sex into sex! How horrible!
People get turned on by sex. It's 2024.
I don't care if the person saying it is a queer man themself, this just isn't okay to keep saying... Please please please stop saying "yaoi is homophobic!!!1!"
HOW IS A QUEER RELATIONSHIP HOMOPHOBIC??????
Meanwhile owl house is being called "so progressive!" and "so brave!" And I can GUARANTEE YOU that there is at least one non-woman attracted to women that worked on that cartoon.
Jesus Christ, the double standards sure are something...
It's all just a "target who they can reach and praise the rest to cover up their harassment" game to them, I guess.
Enjoying Queer Content Is Not Fetishizing Queer People
So, lately on Twitter there's been a lot of drama surrounding a VA who has made a lot of inflammatory comments in an effort to promote his own book.
"How A Cookie Tried to Sell a Book" sums it up pretty well. The article mentions that his best-known voice acting role is as Cream Unicorn Cookie in Cookie Run, and the only other known role (as per behindthevoiceactors.com) is in Given, a BL game. I've seen people here claim he also had a role in Genshin Impact, but that's not listed; however, JD Riley's article mentions that a Genshin Impact VA did come to King's defense.
(Also, yes, we're all reeling from the irony that one of his roles was in a BL game, and he's trying to tear down BL to promote himself. Gross.)
I'm sure this is all well known, but I wanted to provide context for this next statement: People who enjoy queer content, including fujoshi and women who do not identify as fujoshi, are not fetishizing queer people. They literally cannot be, because the people they're reading about aren't real.
Why is that important? Let's look at the definition of fetishize:
make (something) the object of a sexual fetish (women's bodies are so intensely fetishized) and
have an excessive and irrational commitment to or obsession with (something) (an author who fetishizes privacy)
Typically when people talk about cishet women fetishizing gay men by reading BL or MlM, they're talking about the first definition.
Fetishizing would be objectifying real gay men. Reading about fictional gay men in a relationship isn't objectifying real gay men. Reading about fictional gay men having sex isn't objectifying real gay men. Enjoying a fictional relationship between fictional gay men is not objectifying real gay men.
This also applies to other queer content.
In fact, continuing to insist that cishet people, women in particular, aren't allowed to read/view/enjoy queer content encourages the idea that somehow our content is dirty or needs to be hidden away from "the straights." This actively discourages having our communities accepted and normalized.
For example, queer romance should be just as available on bookshelves as cishet romance. If we put say, ten mlm romance books and ten cishet romance books on a table, people are going to see and buy them, including people who aren't in the target audience. If we keep insisting that people who aren't the target audience (in this case, fujoshi and other cishet women) aren't allowed to read the mlm romance books, fewer will be sold. If fewer sell, the store won't buy as many to put out, or just stop stocking it altogether. This encourages the idea that that content is gross, unsuitable for sale or view (even though that's not why it was pulled), and feeds into existing homophobic propaganda.
If someone actually fetishizes a real queer person, by all means, call out their behavior. It's harmful; it actually negatively affects a real person.
But let's stop it with "cishet women aren't allowed to read/watch this fictional content because it's fetishizing real gay people!" It's a false statement and getting tiresome.
The idea of queer stories (BL) being written by mostly straight women is so utterly bizarre to me because I know cis straight women. I knew them for most of my life. I was friend to them or was in fandom groups with them
They don't care about queer stories. They groan when they have to see them. They whine about how they are boring because it doesn’t connect with them and complain that “not everything need to be gay” when they see one queer story getting any kind of attention. Cis straight women on average see queer stories as oddities or trends that will pass eventually, that aren’t needed, required or desirable by themselves.
Cis straight women, usually, not always but the vast majority, don’t care about pretty anime boys kissing each other.
To believe that a large portion of straight women are out there making gay shit and doing it exclusively for fetishistic/homophobic purposes, then you would be admitting that you don’t know a lot of cis straight women and have a god awful opinion of them overall.
But more than that, you also admit you have absolutely no fucking sympathy or compassion for queer people who live on more homophobic places than yours and only have fiction as their only refugee. You don’t trust on any of us to tell stories that connect with us and each other. You don’t think that we would be capable of creating queer escapist fantasies in a world that concede that to cis straight audiences all the time. You don’t think that queer people can be big enough, talented enough or driven enough to basically create an entire genre by themselves, and keep it alive mostly among ourselves.
You can’t rationalize queer people having that much power and agency so you take it away. You twist it, make it evil and give credit to someone’s else so we have to be treated as the passive little victims who are there being little uwus.
The narrative that you prefer to tell is that we are all sitting at home doing jack shit, maybe only creating the stories that YOU like once every blue moon, and those evil cis straight women are the ones putting out all of that work because gay shit is just so hot for them. You all can’t even admit that we like those stories too, that little faith you have in queer people as actual invididuals.
No, it has to be written by cis straight women FOR cis straight woman and everyone else who is queer is just watching paint dry at home apparently, because queer people just couldn’t make all of that content by themselves because those were the stories they wanted to tell. It has to be part of some nefarious homophobic agenda since queer people could NEVER make an entire industry run as much as cis straight woman could.
i will always support trans mlm who figured out they were trans mlm because of bl, slashfic, shipping, etc. your gender and sexuality are real, and if you’ve been misgendered by being called a fujoshi, told you were “fetishizing gay men”, or anything of the sort, i’m so sorry. you deserve for your identity to be recognized, no matter how you discovered it.
I presume my prior post inclined an anti to send me multiple hateful anon messages. It's curious they chose the anon option when telling someone to catch the virus.
In any case I do believe I'll say it again for good measure.
The Keroro Platoon are all super proship and anti harassment!
The Keroro Platoon are for freedom of fiction and see antis for the vindictive, two faced, virtue signalers that don't care about anything but social brownie points, social media dopamine addicts that they are.
For everytime an anti sends hate I'll repeat this fact for the fun of it. Have a wonderful day!
"Anti" this, "Anti-anti" that. Why not say what they mean. People that have healthy boundaries between fiction and reality and people who think anime characters have rights.
