What’s Really Demonstrated Here is Women Be Reading
The chart is about who reads and who does not but also who’s reading what. Women read everything men read *and more* but men don’t - that’s the tweet!
These long-standing sex differences in media consumption struck me viscerally when watching two men do a YT reaction to Revenged Love yesterday. Their commentary reflects male reading and knowledge consumption patterns and how these limit innovative creativity, aspirational depth and empathetic understanding.
Likewise, you can always tell when a BL Director *does not read* by what he thinks constitutes love and even intimacy - even more worryingly he can declare “we’re gay we love sex” and still be celebrated a a queer media auteur. You can tell not only that he doesn’t read but specifically that he doesn’t read WIDELY - philosophy, history, theory, *literary fiction* and therefore his creativity is truncated and shallow because it’s funnelled primarily through a lens of “lived experience”. For more on the limits of lived experience for progressive politics see here:
A Director who declares he doesn’t need feedback from “cis straight women” BL fans has no understanding of how engaging more widely with the world of ideas helps increase human empathy and prevents him from degrading a potentially emancipatory space while increasing the likelihood of him creating speculative fiction that’s progressive, ie constructed in ACTIVE OPPOSITION to the world view of the power-holders in society - men.
Just think of the way straight and queer women’s development of feminist critiques of sex and sexuality gave queer as well as straight men the intellectual tools to challenge heteronormativity and patriarchy, and how this solidarity would’ve been non-existent if they leaned on their own personal identity to reason or construct alternatives to sexual oppression.
Same as when BL fans give opinions or review a BL and concentrate on quantifying the budget, describing the cinematography and CGI but don’t notice the emotional moments highlighted all centre around what’s selectively made *visible* like physical interactions and familiar aesthetics, over what’s purposefully invisiblised - giving sexual expression to reactionary homonormative politics, which is the very point of foregrounding the physical interactions and familiar aesthetics in particularly aggressive ways.
Reading more widely, especially the kinds of literature and knowledge men avoid, would prevent so much of this backwardness and remove the true source of violent toxicity evident in male-led BL spaces - and now in GL spaces too.
