I know people always say they write m/m because it's more equal or that female characters are less interesting/more poorly written/there aren't any, and these have been the narratives around slash for decades, but I still question them given that
1. a significant amount of m/m is very extremely unequal in dynamic. Lots of slavery, bondage, forced feminization--and you don't even have to read the story itself, you just have to read the summaries and it will be like "Protagonist is young and beautiful and has no power and now rich older powerful CEO King Man has bought him as a slave" or you can talk to people about their fic and RP and....you know what, I'm not giving examples because every real world example of something someone told me they were writing is too disturbing. iykyk
2. slash writers can and will take a male character who appears for two seconds or is only a name who never appears on screen and make him half of a wildly popular ship (I'm looking at you, Rosekiller) so clearly well written and interesting aren't pre-requisites.
3. I was involved in text-based RP for a long, loooooong time and it was a constant complaint among RPers that no matter where you looked for an RP partner, everyone only wanted to write "bottoms" aka everyone wanted to write a character who was being pursued, and they wanted their RP partner to write the pursuer character. "oh, I don't want to write with people who only write female characters, they're all desperate for romance and heteronormative" people would say while refusing to write non-romance plot lines and insisting that their character had to be aggressively (and often, in character, unwillingly) pursued. If I had to write romance I preferred to write the pursuer, but it was still....annoying. (maybe annoying in a different way than if you were part of the majority who wanted to be pursued, since for me it was more "and then you join and have to fend off constant thirsty IMs from other women about your fictional character")
Edit: actually, I say that, but thinking about the romance stories targeted at men and the male fans of romance I've met and I'll revise this statement: a very big romantic fantasy for both sexes seems to be that someone VERY SPECIAL (because she's a vampire queen or he's the CEO billionaire or whatever) chooses you and in fact ONLY wants you even though there's not any obvious reason they should choose you over the more powerful/competent/sexier people surrounding them.
4. the equivalent male spaces are full of nerdy awkward men who write all female casts/prefer media that is primarily female casts. And it's truly hilarious to me. Actually, disclaimer, some of my favorite female characters were written by men who write primarily female cast stories. I like their stories and characters, and one of the reasons I like them is because they don't write ABOUT being women. By which I mean, a lot of the similar stories that I've read by women is ABOUT being a woman. The female MC wants to be a hero and is alienated from the other women because of her interests. Whereas if the story is written by one of these guys who writes all/mostly female casts, his heroine is surrounded by other women and he's not writing about her feelings of alienation from women.
On a related note, a lot of those women will be more likely to brawl or be in the military or be assertive and aggressive in ways that remind me more of men (not because women can't be assertive, but the manner in which they assert...if that makes sense?) the same way a lot of the male characters written by women who only write male characters....they're shy and vulnerable and want to talk about their feelings (even when this isn't remotely how they're written in their source material) and people say oh, it's because men don't understand women/women don't understand men but I personally think the REAL thing going on is that people are working out their own issues in a manner that is distant from themselves. Nerdy, awkward dude writing a bunch of assertive female characters couldn't write a male character who was more assertive because he has hang-ups about his own assertiveness. The fangirl writing an emotionally vulnerable male character can't write a female character in that role because she has hang-ups about her own vulnerability.
I mean, also, yeah, in both cases a lot of these people are heterosexual and writing the sex they're attracted to, but I think that's only PART of it, since plenty of heterosexuals aren't afraid of writing characters and casts of their own sex.
Also, real talk, have you ever read women talk about, like, "what do your blorbos have in common"? because they'll always say trauma and being socially awkward and I'm like man. If this discussion thread is anything to go by, every single male cast member of this series is traumatized, and yet you only latched onto one of those? sooooo maybe trauma is NOT the theme here? What I actually have come away with is that the characters they latch onto are the ones they find sexually attractive and also are best able to project their own personal issues onto. I'm sure that's not confusing for your sense of self at all.
“I personally think the REAL thing going on is that people are working out their own issues in a manner that is distant from themselves. Nerdy, awkward dude writing a bunch of assertive female characters couldn't write a male character who was more assertive because he has hang-ups about his own assertiveness. The fangirl writing an emotionally vulnerable male character can't write a female character in that role because she has hang-ups about her own vulnerability.”
^THIS. It’s all dissociation ultimately though. Which is partly the popularity of porn, too.
My first reaction was "but that would imply all storytelling is a form of dissociation" but thinking about it, I guess I can't argue against that and in fact I'm conflicted! Because reading the quote about the woman who imagines herself in the role of one of the characters in stories she reads...I do not relate. The very idea of imagining myself *in the place of a character* is so uncomfortable. I don't imagine myself as the character even when I'm writing. It's only in aggregate that I can say "oh, I deal with X topic a lot. Hm. Why is that?" and I can't decide if that's better or if it means I'm dissociating more than other nerds...
Sometimes the first step to working out an issue involves coming at it indirectly through creating and storytelling. But if you can't differentiate between yourself and the filter you're using to approach an issue, then using the filter isn't going to be good for you.
Also, porn is an apt comparison since the way porn overshadows fandom is a really, really big problem. That and social dynamics that encourage people to remain stuck.
Oh I COMPLETELY agree that the narratives of “more equal dynamics” and “shallow female characters” are almost never true. I think this is just the language women use to express something they don’t quite have the words for. Specifically, heterosexual relationships feel too close for comfort for them. They can’t exactly feel comfortable with writing heterosexual relationships because, as you said, they insert themselves into their characters excessively, but they themselves have hangups surrounding their own sexuality because 1) they’ve been told heterosexuality is oppressive, bad, and boring, 2) in many cases, they’ll have had bad experiences with being sexualized by men in negative ways/too quickly or seen such things happening in porn, and 3) what it means societally for a woman to be attractive is constantly changing and subject to brutal intrasexual competition. A woman who doesn’t make the cut amongst other girls will naturally not feel confident about her ability to attract guys. For all those things, same-sex relationships don’t carry that baggage, even though the dynamic may still be grossly unequal. It just SEEMS different and more palatable somehow because of the woman’s emotional distance from the subject, and this gets expressed as “more equal.”
In my own experience, I cannot identify strongly with characters in media I consume because reality always gets in the way. The ways I am different from a given character in not only my personality but my history, and real-life situation immediately come to mind and “ruin” the moment, which I believe is why I never got into fanfiction all that deeply, despite participating casually in some fandoms and reading a few fanfics. But over the years I have realized that this is not the case for many others, including people I have been close to. It honestly surprised me/weirded me out at first, but closely identifying with characters does seem to be the more common experience for women in fandom.
The thing that gets me is that in most cases it isn't JUST over identifying with the characters. It's identifying specifically with characters they find sexually appealing. Like, the number of women I've met within fandom and RP who act like it's a simple fact that of COURSE nobody would ever write about characters they aren't sexually attracted to is astonishing to me. On the other hand, sometimes those types will be more honest that they only write about male characters because they're only attracted to men. I still don't understand why sexual attraction is a necessary component of creative engagement but I can't deny how integral it is to the fandom experience at large....
Also, re: getting into fanfic, I first got into fanfic because I loved the worlds in my favorite books and shows and there were so many story possibilities that weren't about the canon characters so I was shocked to find that WASN'T what drew most people to fanfic. Not that there aren't characters I find more interesting than others, but characters aren't what I find appealing about fanfiction. I'm not alone in this, but I'm definitely in the minority. In fanfic discussion groups if anyone who dares suggest they're considering writing something that isn't a shipping fic they're going to be bombarded with people who feel the need to tell them "nobody" wants to read a story that isn't about shipping and "everybody" reads fanfic to get more of their favorite characters. Guess I am not an everybody because I'd rather read about the OCs...I've seen young writers get so discouraged over that kind of reception to their ideas, though. (then people will turn around and say "write what you want! don't worry about popularity!" as if they hadn't all just told some aspiring fic writer they were doing fanfic wrong.)
Ah, fandom. So integral to who I am today and yet so infuriating.
That’s just…wow. “I’m sure that’s not confusing for your sense of self at all” is right. When you think about it that way, of course they all want to become boys, but the dynamic is so messed up and it does make me really want to figure out how it gets that way.
Were you mostly in fantasy fandoms? (Your name sounds that way.) The fantasy genre has such rich worlds; to me it makes sense that people would want to explore those in fanfics. But your comment about OCs made me remember, when I was dabbling in fanfic I found out very quickly to steer clear of fics labeled “OC” because so many of them were just awful. Super badly written wish-fulfillment character, obvious self-insert in a ship, etc. I probably would have thought the same thing, that no one wants to read OC fics, for this reason. But then again, I did not spend a ton of time in this fandom, and probably didn’t quite know how to find those diamonds in the rough.
Yep, fantasy fandoms for me. Specifically, book-based, which in my experience leads to stronger writing. I genuinely love many books outside the fantasy realm, but it's setting that inspires me to create fannishly :)
You're correct that often OCs are self-inserts written by inexperienced writers! I learned early on that the type of OC-centered fic I wanted to read were called Elsewhere Fic, so I looked on LJ for recommendations for good elsewhere fic in the fandoms I was interested in. Since the OCs in elsewhere fic exist to flesh out the world instead of interact with the protagonists of the books, they don't have the same kinds of issues that you get with the self-insert OCs. Of course, not everyone writing elsewhere fic is an experienced writer, but there's something uniquely excruciating about reading someone else's obvious wish fulfilment story. (But more power to them for believing they deserve wish fulfilment.)
" it does make me really want to figure out how it gets that way." oh my theory (at least for the creator side) is that it's social pressure. As I mentioned earlier, I was heavily involved in text-based RP. When I started, slash was a niche and very unwelcome in most RP groups and I experienced the culture shift into slash domination. Fanfic has overlap with the types of people who engage in text-based RP and has the same social pressures, albeit less directly.
The short version is you're creating wish fulfillment for other female fans, many of whom are hypercritical of female characters because they feel like they're in competition with them. If you want engagement then you need to appeal to them! Of course, in RP you literally can't participate if other people won't engage with you, but even within fanfic most people aren't writing just because they were inspired to--they're writing because they want engagement from other fans in some form. Thus you have a huge incentive to write men, since most of the other women in your community are straight women. And if you're the sort of person who overidentifies with the characters you're writing* then, well...there you go.
*Not necessarily due to how the character actually acts in the source material, though, since canon is treated almost as this personal FEELING of how the story ought to have gone or how the characters ought to behave
Edit: also, if you strongly identify with the characters you write/create and you have a need to belong to the fandom community you're in then you'll be DISINCENTIVIZED to write or create female characters. At worst, you'll be criticized directly. At best, you'll simply witness how your female character or female-centric story gets less attention and you'll pick up on the assumption that many people have that anyone who writes primarily/only female characters is an inexperienced writer self-inserting. Because most of your community is there because they want you (as an RPer or fic writer) to fulfil THEIR romantic fantasy.
Slash became so prevalent in RP because while some people were happy to play straight guys for their fellow women, most people made it clear they considered this a chore they did in order to get their own wish fulfilment--and they greatly resented that other women wanted wish fulfilment, too. But if you wrote slash, both people could get The Hot Fictional Boyfriend. But slash only gives the illusion that the underlying problem has been solved, because most people want to play a passive character who gets aggressively pursued and so now this is what everyone argues about instead of who 'gets' to play the female character.
ANYWAY if you identify strongly with your characters AND you want acceptance within the community AND (as with most fangirls) you are extremely super duper sensitive to rejection, why WOULD you write female characters?
(Also, sorry for saying this would be the short version, clearly I'm incapable of short!!)
The girls I teach - HS 11th and 12th grade - who identify as boys are all like Peter Pans. They are nothing like the actual boys in class, and don't want to identify or be friends with them at all. They just seem to NOT want to be girls. They have a similar uniform. Khakis, button down shirt, sneakers. They are often uncomfortable in their skin, not the most attractive girls. I can see that trying to be "pretty" in a traditional way would be intimidating, especially in this pornified, hypersexualized world. Far safer to remain Peter Pan - a prepubescent boy. Not a man, but not a woman either. At least 2 girls I know of are also on the spectrum. I wish I could tell them there is no wrong way to be a woman. To be proud of who they are. They don't have to be sexually active yet, with anyone. Grow up, learn, develop who they are. Later, a woman or man will love them for who they are. But don't make decisions now. They are babies in every way.
"I read lots of gay male fanfic because I had sexual urges but found male/female sex triggering because of my sexual trauma. I fetishised gay male relationships and could only ever see myself enjoying sex if I was a man. I felt safer as a man.”
I'd like to offer some thoughts about teen girls and young women whose trans fantasy has pushed past the written word and led them to identify as gay men.
It's a protean fantasy that allows youth who are bereft of real human sounding boards to fool themselves into thinking they can transcend the limitations of nature, their bodies and the culture in which they live.
So focused are they on themselves and their imminent liberation from the confinement imposed on them by sex and sex roles that they don't give a moment's thought to the real-world consequences of realizing their fantasy.
Being gay is not just a state of mind. We gay men have long and intimate histories with our male bodies that no trans man could ever have. Our gay male minds and bodies have long and complex experiences with our culture, society and other people that no trans man could ever experience or fully understand. The trans gay male fantasy is a narcissistic nightmare.
Mental health professionals (and everyone else) need to become more aware of what low self-esteem is. Most of the insecurities that are referenced in the above article sound like they are symptoms of low self-esteem: social anxiety, lack of confidence in one's desirability, felt inability to stand up to dominant others, rejection of one's own body, compulsion to get a new body, and lack of an internal sense of being on one's own side.
OMG, Eliza, I have to emphasize (again?) how talented you are at deciphering doublethink, elucidating the psychological hall of mirrors people construct to rationalize their impossible, coping-strategy, beliefs! This helps so much (presumably, many readers and listeners) in figuring out the questions we bang our heads against on this mind-boggling phenomenon. I would recommend readers always click on the "My latest at..." link for the deeper dive.
Tenderized, yes. It's worth putting all this in the context of what we know about the plasticity of the brain, the knowledge that the brain doesn't always clearly differentiate reality from non-reality. This is why we jump and sweat and pump stress hormones watching a scary movie, or risk walking into real walls when wearing VR headsets. It's why we become accustomed after a while to glasses that turn our visual field upside down, and can't immediately deal with normality when they're removed. It's why (if it hasn't been debunked) we gain some physical benefit just from *imagining* we're exercising! So, from that perspective, it's easy to understand that reading about, or watching, male homosexual acts, one can begin to identify with the protagonist(s). And the pressures you describe to avoid attributing this to drives considered unacceptable would only tip the balance further in that direction.
I wonder how transferable this function is to male transgender identification. Lesbian porn has a long history of use by straight males, and reading through some of the comment excerpts, I found it easy to see how they might apply to some trans-identified males, even if some of the social pressures to disinherit one's sex may be different.
Some may well be the same. To the degree that we're straight (since I think that is clearly not a binary), we have a natural revulsion to depictions of same-sex genitalia, especially sexually functioning ones, so porn absent of penises is attractive to straight men. Another impetus mentioned - abuse - would also apply whatever the sex, since if you disown the "bits" you've got, and aren't faced with them in sexual imagery, you can develop sexuality, and find relief for sexual desires, whilst repressing memories of the trauma. Some may be different: boys may, for instance, learn that they are guilty of "toxic masculinity," or in other ways assume the nature of male sexuality must be (just is) aggressive and violent (especially given the current trend in pornography). The two - enjoyment of female sexuality, and a desire to escape their own - might lead from lesbian porn to identification as a trans lesbian.
And we have these two awful mistakes being made: proto-gay kids transing from internalized or external homophobia, and straight youth turning pseudo-gay to avoid the bodies they can't accept.
Back in the Iron Age there was Star Trek Kirk-Spock sex fan fiction by and for lesbians (and also, possibly, straight women, wouldn't know about that).
Not trying to start a fight here, but isn’t that kind of like saying sex is a spectrum? “Human sexuality doesn’t always fall into these near categories” well you can be straight, gay, or bi. Since there are only two sexes, what other options are there? If a woman identifies as a lesbian and is attracted to women and has relationships with them, but is sexually aroused also by men and their bodies and penises but not directed towards her, then she would have to be bisexual with a preference for lesbian relationships, wouldn’t she?
not all slash is porn* and there is a subgroup of fanfic participants who don't engage in explicit material. Also I know I've read some comment by a lesbian who liked slash (maybe here? maybe tumblr?? I don't remember) who said she liked romantic slash stories because the men behaved like lesbians. I've also read some women who say they got into slash because they encountered the idea of lesbian as porn before they realized they liked girls themselves, so slash was a way of getting comfortable with the idea of same sex relationships.
It probably also depends on what fandom communities they're in and the extent to which they care about interacting with other fangirls. For some people there's a social element to which fanfic and which ships they read. Some people read fic because all their friends read it. Most people I know who *write* fanfic don't....do well if they don't get continuous engagement to the point where I know people who have made the decision to write fanfic that involves ships they don't care about because that will get the most engagement. I think this is nuts, personally, but....I wouldn't be surprised to hear some women write slash fanfic solely because the other fangirls will engage with their fic if they do.
*I read a breakdown of categories of fic posted on AO3--it was probably one of Toasty's, but I don't remember for sure--but the takeaway was that more NON porn is written and posted but that the porn had like fifty gazillion more views. And while I can't find it again, there was a survey in some RP group a few years ago about slash vs non-slash and the results uh really upset the gay and bi men because the slash fangirls pretty overwhelmingly said they liked slash because they wanted to write sexual violence and didn't feel comfortable inflicting it on female characters. Which was wild as I had only seen someone say something similar once before (a TIF who said she wanted to "punish cis men for being cis") and I have a hard time believing this is healthy....
Media that truly present male and female characters as equals can be hard to find. That's probably why it's easier for fanfic writers to ship characters of the same sex.
Fantastic article getting at the crux of this dynamic with erotica for women (which can also apply to video pornography for men) and how it can warp healthy sexual functioning in vulnerable people, thus leading to identity and mental/emotional health issues that can find an outlet in trans.
Most adults have no idea how distorted and weird the sexual content is that kids/young adults find/get up to online.
Two things:
- people can learn sexually disordered behavior (and therefore also sexually healthy behavior)- but it requires a choice to be healthy and may require support from family/society. Unfortunately, none of this is discussed at home or in school (how would this work? *parent to kids:* “hey kids- I know same sex sex scenes are like crack to your horny teenage brains, but maybe don’t masturbate yourself into a stupor over lesbian porn/gay slash fiction bc that’s disruptive to your sexuality as a straight person. If the only thing that can get you off is lesbians/gay guys then how will you be able to engage with YOUR OWN self as a sexual being with another person?” I’m guessing most people will give a hard pass on that convo.)
-I know someone who has a friend who agreed to a threeway with a heterosexual couple she knows. The guy wanted to watch his wife and her do sexual stuff together. A heterosexual man…had TWO women- his wife, AND her hot friend- willing to have sex with him…and he wanted to just sit back and watch them and presumably masturbate to them pretending to enjoy sex together. This was not some “autogynephilic” transbian-adjacent dweeb addicted to porn in his mom’s basement. This was a “normal” heterosexual man. To me this speaks volumes about how same-sex sexual content 1. Is a natural interest to most straight people and 2. can ultimately warp heterosexual sexuality in a way where one is left out and isolated from one’s own desires.
I'm curious if you know the Netflix show Young Royals, if so, what you think about about it, and how much this dynamic applies beyond fanfiction to actual fiction fiction. The show centers around a romantic relationship between two 17-year-old boys. It's very good, I highly enjoyed watching it, but it absolutely suffers a bit from "fictional-male-characters-written-by-women syndrome". We will likely see in the future more examples of healthy or idealized gay male romances depicted in the future, and I'm curious about to what extent it contributes to the same problematic pipeline.
IDK about that show in particular, but there's been professionally published gay male stories written by/for women for years and it's similar in terms of demographics--especially since a lot of the female authors of professional stories about gay characters began in the fanfiction world. I want to say some of the big name stories started off as fanfic? (although that's true of het romance novels, too, at this point....)
Also, notably, gay male fiction has had a problem with female authors pretending to be male and going through great lengths to hide their identity in order to have authority. Like. Um. I'm trying to remember the name of the one lady. Josh something? Landon? Lawson? lol okay after like ten minutes googling it was Lanyon. But there've been others. One wrote about being a gay prostitute and heavily implied it was based on her real life and hired someone to stand in for her at appearances but I can't remember what her name was or what the name of the book was, either. I want to say this was the late 90s? I don't know. I just remember reading about it in some pop culture magazine in a medical waiting room and it stuck with me because it was so wild lmao
Although now, of course, a lot of the professional authors call themselves gay trans men or queer non-binary people or whatever and even if someone did hide their sex, I figure the reaction would be the same as it is when there's drama about straight people writing gay stories which is essentially "but what if professionally publishing gay stories is how they're coming to terms with being trans" instead of being a big reputation ruining drama
I know people always say they write m/m because it's more equal or that female characters are less interesting/more poorly written/there aren't any, and these have been the narratives around slash for decades, but I still question them given that
1. a significant amount of m/m is very extremely unequal in dynamic. Lots of slavery, bondage, forced feminization--and you don't even have to read the story itself, you just have to read the summaries and it will be like "Protagonist is young and beautiful and has no power and now rich older powerful CEO King Man has bought him as a slave" or you can talk to people about their fic and RP and....you know what, I'm not giving examples because every real world example of something someone told me they were writing is too disturbing. iykyk
2. slash writers can and will take a male character who appears for two seconds or is only a name who never appears on screen and make him half of a wildly popular ship (I'm looking at you, Rosekiller) so clearly well written and interesting aren't pre-requisites.
3. I was involved in text-based RP for a long, loooooong time and it was a constant complaint among RPers that no matter where you looked for an RP partner, everyone only wanted to write "bottoms" aka everyone wanted to write a character who was being pursued, and they wanted their RP partner to write the pursuer character. "oh, I don't want to write with people who only write female characters, they're all desperate for romance and heteronormative" people would say while refusing to write non-romance plot lines and insisting that their character had to be aggressively (and often, in character, unwillingly) pursued. If I had to write romance I preferred to write the pursuer, but it was still....annoying. (maybe annoying in a different way than if you were part of the majority who wanted to be pursued, since for me it was more "and then you join and have to fend off constant thirsty IMs from other women about your fictional character")
Edit: actually, I say that, but thinking about the romance stories targeted at men and the male fans of romance I've met and I'll revise this statement: a very big romantic fantasy for both sexes seems to be that someone VERY SPECIAL (because she's a vampire queen or he's the CEO billionaire or whatever) chooses you and in fact ONLY wants you even though there's not any obvious reason they should choose you over the more powerful/competent/sexier people surrounding them.
4. the equivalent male spaces are full of nerdy awkward men who write all female casts/prefer media that is primarily female casts. And it's truly hilarious to me. Actually, disclaimer, some of my favorite female characters were written by men who write primarily female cast stories. I like their stories and characters, and one of the reasons I like them is because they don't write ABOUT being women. By which I mean, a lot of the similar stories that I've read by women is ABOUT being a woman. The female MC wants to be a hero and is alienated from the other women because of her interests. Whereas if the story is written by one of these guys who writes all/mostly female casts, his heroine is surrounded by other women and he's not writing about her feelings of alienation from women.
On a related note, a lot of those women will be more likely to brawl or be in the military or be assertive and aggressive in ways that remind me more of men (not because women can't be assertive, but the manner in which they assert...if that makes sense?) the same way a lot of the male characters written by women who only write male characters....they're shy and vulnerable and want to talk about their feelings (even when this isn't remotely how they're written in their source material) and people say oh, it's because men don't understand women/women don't understand men but I personally think the REAL thing going on is that people are working out their own issues in a manner that is distant from themselves. Nerdy, awkward dude writing a bunch of assertive female characters couldn't write a male character who was more assertive because he has hang-ups about his own assertiveness. The fangirl writing an emotionally vulnerable male character can't write a female character in that role because she has hang-ups about her own vulnerability.
I mean, also, yeah, in both cases a lot of these people are heterosexual and writing the sex they're attracted to, but I think that's only PART of it, since plenty of heterosexuals aren't afraid of writing characters and casts of their own sex.
Also, real talk, have you ever read women talk about, like, "what do your blorbos have in common"? because they'll always say trauma and being socially awkward and I'm like man. If this discussion thread is anything to go by, every single male cast member of this series is traumatized, and yet you only latched onto one of those? sooooo maybe trauma is NOT the theme here? What I actually have come away with is that the characters they latch onto are the ones they find sexually attractive and also are best able to project their own personal issues onto. I'm sure that's not confusing for your sense of self at all.
“I personally think the REAL thing going on is that people are working out their own issues in a manner that is distant from themselves. Nerdy, awkward dude writing a bunch of assertive female characters couldn't write a male character who was more assertive because he has hang-ups about his own assertiveness. The fangirl writing an emotionally vulnerable male character can't write a female character in that role because she has hang-ups about her own vulnerability.”
^THIS. It’s all dissociation ultimately though. Which is partly the popularity of porn, too.
My first reaction was "but that would imply all storytelling is a form of dissociation" but thinking about it, I guess I can't argue against that and in fact I'm conflicted! Because reading the quote about the woman who imagines herself in the role of one of the characters in stories she reads...I do not relate. The very idea of imagining myself *in the place of a character* is so uncomfortable. I don't imagine myself as the character even when I'm writing. It's only in aggregate that I can say "oh, I deal with X topic a lot. Hm. Why is that?" and I can't decide if that's better or if it means I'm dissociating more than other nerds...
Sometimes the first step to working out an issue involves coming at it indirectly through creating and storytelling. But if you can't differentiate between yourself and the filter you're using to approach an issue, then using the filter isn't going to be good for you.
Also, porn is an apt comparison since the way porn overshadows fandom is a really, really big problem. That and social dynamics that encourage people to remain stuck.
Oh I COMPLETELY agree that the narratives of “more equal dynamics” and “shallow female characters” are almost never true. I think this is just the language women use to express something they don’t quite have the words for. Specifically, heterosexual relationships feel too close for comfort for them. They can’t exactly feel comfortable with writing heterosexual relationships because, as you said, they insert themselves into their characters excessively, but they themselves have hangups surrounding their own sexuality because 1) they’ve been told heterosexuality is oppressive, bad, and boring, 2) in many cases, they’ll have had bad experiences with being sexualized by men in negative ways/too quickly or seen such things happening in porn, and 3) what it means societally for a woman to be attractive is constantly changing and subject to brutal intrasexual competition. A woman who doesn’t make the cut amongst other girls will naturally not feel confident about her ability to attract guys. For all those things, same-sex relationships don’t carry that baggage, even though the dynamic may still be grossly unequal. It just SEEMS different and more palatable somehow because of the woman’s emotional distance from the subject, and this gets expressed as “more equal.”
In my own experience, I cannot identify strongly with characters in media I consume because reality always gets in the way. The ways I am different from a given character in not only my personality but my history, and real-life situation immediately come to mind and “ruin” the moment, which I believe is why I never got into fanfiction all that deeply, despite participating casually in some fandoms and reading a few fanfics. But over the years I have realized that this is not the case for many others, including people I have been close to. It honestly surprised me/weirded me out at first, but closely identifying with characters does seem to be the more common experience for women in fandom.
The thing that gets me is that in most cases it isn't JUST over identifying with the characters. It's identifying specifically with characters they find sexually appealing. Like, the number of women I've met within fandom and RP who act like it's a simple fact that of COURSE nobody would ever write about characters they aren't sexually attracted to is astonishing to me. On the other hand, sometimes those types will be more honest that they only write about male characters because they're only attracted to men. I still don't understand why sexual attraction is a necessary component of creative engagement but I can't deny how integral it is to the fandom experience at large....
Also, re: getting into fanfic, I first got into fanfic because I loved the worlds in my favorite books and shows and there were so many story possibilities that weren't about the canon characters so I was shocked to find that WASN'T what drew most people to fanfic. Not that there aren't characters I find more interesting than others, but characters aren't what I find appealing about fanfiction. I'm not alone in this, but I'm definitely in the minority. In fanfic discussion groups if anyone who dares suggest they're considering writing something that isn't a shipping fic they're going to be bombarded with people who feel the need to tell them "nobody" wants to read a story that isn't about shipping and "everybody" reads fanfic to get more of their favorite characters. Guess I am not an everybody because I'd rather read about the OCs...I've seen young writers get so discouraged over that kind of reception to their ideas, though. (then people will turn around and say "write what you want! don't worry about popularity!" as if they hadn't all just told some aspiring fic writer they were doing fanfic wrong.)
Ah, fandom. So integral to who I am today and yet so infuriating.
That’s just…wow. “I’m sure that’s not confusing for your sense of self at all” is right. When you think about it that way, of course they all want to become boys, but the dynamic is so messed up and it does make me really want to figure out how it gets that way.
Were you mostly in fantasy fandoms? (Your name sounds that way.) The fantasy genre has such rich worlds; to me it makes sense that people would want to explore those in fanfics. But your comment about OCs made me remember, when I was dabbling in fanfic I found out very quickly to steer clear of fics labeled “OC” because so many of them were just awful. Super badly written wish-fulfillment character, obvious self-insert in a ship, etc. I probably would have thought the same thing, that no one wants to read OC fics, for this reason. But then again, I did not spend a ton of time in this fandom, and probably didn’t quite know how to find those diamonds in the rough.
Yep, fantasy fandoms for me. Specifically, book-based, which in my experience leads to stronger writing. I genuinely love many books outside the fantasy realm, but it's setting that inspires me to create fannishly :)
You're correct that often OCs are self-inserts written by inexperienced writers! I learned early on that the type of OC-centered fic I wanted to read were called Elsewhere Fic, so I looked on LJ for recommendations for good elsewhere fic in the fandoms I was interested in. Since the OCs in elsewhere fic exist to flesh out the world instead of interact with the protagonists of the books, they don't have the same kinds of issues that you get with the self-insert OCs. Of course, not everyone writing elsewhere fic is an experienced writer, but there's something uniquely excruciating about reading someone else's obvious wish fulfilment story. (But more power to them for believing they deserve wish fulfilment.)
" it does make me really want to figure out how it gets that way." oh my theory (at least for the creator side) is that it's social pressure. As I mentioned earlier, I was heavily involved in text-based RP. When I started, slash was a niche and very unwelcome in most RP groups and I experienced the culture shift into slash domination. Fanfic has overlap with the types of people who engage in text-based RP and has the same social pressures, albeit less directly.
The short version is you're creating wish fulfillment for other female fans, many of whom are hypercritical of female characters because they feel like they're in competition with them. If you want engagement then you need to appeal to them! Of course, in RP you literally can't participate if other people won't engage with you, but even within fanfic most people aren't writing just because they were inspired to--they're writing because they want engagement from other fans in some form. Thus you have a huge incentive to write men, since most of the other women in your community are straight women. And if you're the sort of person who overidentifies with the characters you're writing* then, well...there you go.
*Not necessarily due to how the character actually acts in the source material, though, since canon is treated almost as this personal FEELING of how the story ought to have gone or how the characters ought to behave
Edit: also, if you strongly identify with the characters you write/create and you have a need to belong to the fandom community you're in then you'll be DISINCENTIVIZED to write or create female characters. At worst, you'll be criticized directly. At best, you'll simply witness how your female character or female-centric story gets less attention and you'll pick up on the assumption that many people have that anyone who writes primarily/only female characters is an inexperienced writer self-inserting. Because most of your community is there because they want you (as an RPer or fic writer) to fulfil THEIR romantic fantasy.
Slash became so prevalent in RP because while some people were happy to play straight guys for their fellow women, most people made it clear they considered this a chore they did in order to get their own wish fulfilment--and they greatly resented that other women wanted wish fulfilment, too. But if you wrote slash, both people could get The Hot Fictional Boyfriend. But slash only gives the illusion that the underlying problem has been solved, because most people want to play a passive character who gets aggressively pursued and so now this is what everyone argues about instead of who 'gets' to play the female character.
ANYWAY if you identify strongly with your characters AND you want acceptance within the community AND (as with most fangirls) you are extremely super duper sensitive to rejection, why WOULD you write female characters?
(Also, sorry for saying this would be the short version, clearly I'm incapable of short!!)
The girls I teach - HS 11th and 12th grade - who identify as boys are all like Peter Pans. They are nothing like the actual boys in class, and don't want to identify or be friends with them at all. They just seem to NOT want to be girls. They have a similar uniform. Khakis, button down shirt, sneakers. They are often uncomfortable in their skin, not the most attractive girls. I can see that trying to be "pretty" in a traditional way would be intimidating, especially in this pornified, hypersexualized world. Far safer to remain Peter Pan - a prepubescent boy. Not a man, but not a woman either. At least 2 girls I know of are also on the spectrum. I wish I could tell them there is no wrong way to be a woman. To be proud of who they are. They don't have to be sexually active yet, with anyone. Grow up, learn, develop who they are. Later, a woman or man will love them for who they are. But don't make decisions now. They are babies in every way.
"I read lots of gay male fanfic because I had sexual urges but found male/female sex triggering because of my sexual trauma. I fetishised gay male relationships and could only ever see myself enjoying sex if I was a man. I felt safer as a man.”
I'd like to offer some thoughts about teen girls and young women whose trans fantasy has pushed past the written word and led them to identify as gay men.
It's a protean fantasy that allows youth who are bereft of real human sounding boards to fool themselves into thinking they can transcend the limitations of nature, their bodies and the culture in which they live.
So focused are they on themselves and their imminent liberation from the confinement imposed on them by sex and sex roles that they don't give a moment's thought to the real-world consequences of realizing their fantasy.
Being gay is not just a state of mind. We gay men have long and intimate histories with our male bodies that no trans man could ever have. Our gay male minds and bodies have long and complex experiences with our culture, society and other people that no trans man could ever experience or fully understand. The trans gay male fantasy is a narcissistic nightmare.
Mental health professionals (and everyone else) need to become more aware of what low self-esteem is. Most of the insecurities that are referenced in the above article sound like they are symptoms of low self-esteem: social anxiety, lack of confidence in one's desirability, felt inability to stand up to dominant others, rejection of one's own body, compulsion to get a new body, and lack of an internal sense of being on one's own side.
OMG, Eliza, I have to emphasize (again?) how talented you are at deciphering doublethink, elucidating the psychological hall of mirrors people construct to rationalize their impossible, coping-strategy, beliefs! This helps so much (presumably, many readers and listeners) in figuring out the questions we bang our heads against on this mind-boggling phenomenon. I would recommend readers always click on the "My latest at..." link for the deeper dive.
Tenderized, yes. It's worth putting all this in the context of what we know about the plasticity of the brain, the knowledge that the brain doesn't always clearly differentiate reality from non-reality. This is why we jump and sweat and pump stress hormones watching a scary movie, or risk walking into real walls when wearing VR headsets. It's why we become accustomed after a while to glasses that turn our visual field upside down, and can't immediately deal with normality when they're removed. It's why (if it hasn't been debunked) we gain some physical benefit just from *imagining* we're exercising! So, from that perspective, it's easy to understand that reading about, or watching, male homosexual acts, one can begin to identify with the protagonist(s). And the pressures you describe to avoid attributing this to drives considered unacceptable would only tip the balance further in that direction.
I wonder how transferable this function is to male transgender identification. Lesbian porn has a long history of use by straight males, and reading through some of the comment excerpts, I found it easy to see how they might apply to some trans-identified males, even if some of the social pressures to disinherit one's sex may be different.
Some may well be the same. To the degree that we're straight (since I think that is clearly not a binary), we have a natural revulsion to depictions of same-sex genitalia, especially sexually functioning ones, so porn absent of penises is attractive to straight men. Another impetus mentioned - abuse - would also apply whatever the sex, since if you disown the "bits" you've got, and aren't faced with them in sexual imagery, you can develop sexuality, and find relief for sexual desires, whilst repressing memories of the trauma. Some may be different: boys may, for instance, learn that they are guilty of "toxic masculinity," or in other ways assume the nature of male sexuality must be (just is) aggressive and violent (especially given the current trend in pornography). The two - enjoyment of female sexuality, and a desire to escape their own - might lead from lesbian porn to identification as a trans lesbian.
And we have these two awful mistakes being made: proto-gay kids transing from internalized or external homophobia, and straight youth turning pseudo-gay to avoid the bodies they can't accept.
Back in the Iron Age there was Star Trek Kirk-Spock sex fan fiction by and for lesbians (and also, possibly, straight women, wouldn't know about that).
I just don’t understand how lesbians could be fantasizing about guys?
I just report the news, I don't claim to understand it.
This I know, however: human sexuality is a lot more complicated and less clear than it's cracked up to be.
Roger that! I’m afraid any lesbian that fantasizes about guy on guy is a bisexual in denial in my book…
I don't think that label in your book is necessarily either accurate or useful. Again: human sexuality doesn't always fit into these neat categories.
Not trying to start a fight here, but isn’t that kind of like saying sex is a spectrum? “Human sexuality doesn’t always fall into these near categories” well you can be straight, gay, or bi. Since there are only two sexes, what other options are there? If a woman identifies as a lesbian and is attracted to women and has relationships with them, but is sexually aroused also by men and their bodies and penises but not directed towards her, then she would have to be bisexual with a preference for lesbian relationships, wouldn’t she?
If you want to put everything into neat little categories, then yes is the answer.
If you want to consider matters in their infinite variety, then no, not necessarily.
not all slash is porn* and there is a subgroup of fanfic participants who don't engage in explicit material. Also I know I've read some comment by a lesbian who liked slash (maybe here? maybe tumblr?? I don't remember) who said she liked romantic slash stories because the men behaved like lesbians. I've also read some women who say they got into slash because they encountered the idea of lesbian as porn before they realized they liked girls themselves, so slash was a way of getting comfortable with the idea of same sex relationships.
It probably also depends on what fandom communities they're in and the extent to which they care about interacting with other fangirls. For some people there's a social element to which fanfic and which ships they read. Some people read fic because all their friends read it. Most people I know who *write* fanfic don't....do well if they don't get continuous engagement to the point where I know people who have made the decision to write fanfic that involves ships they don't care about because that will get the most engagement. I think this is nuts, personally, but....I wouldn't be surprised to hear some women write slash fanfic solely because the other fangirls will engage with their fic if they do.
*I read a breakdown of categories of fic posted on AO3--it was probably one of Toasty's, but I don't remember for sure--but the takeaway was that more NON porn is written and posted but that the porn had like fifty gazillion more views. And while I can't find it again, there was a survey in some RP group a few years ago about slash vs non-slash and the results uh really upset the gay and bi men because the slash fangirls pretty overwhelmingly said they liked slash because they wanted to write sexual violence and didn't feel comfortable inflicting it on female characters. Which was wild as I had only seen someone say something similar once before (a TIF who said she wanted to "punish cis men for being cis") and I have a hard time believing this is healthy....
😂
Media that truly present male and female characters as equals can be hard to find. That's probably why it's easier for fanfic writers to ship characters of the same sex.
Fantastic article getting at the crux of this dynamic with erotica for women (which can also apply to video pornography for men) and how it can warp healthy sexual functioning in vulnerable people, thus leading to identity and mental/emotional health issues that can find an outlet in trans.
Most adults have no idea how distorted and weird the sexual content is that kids/young adults find/get up to online.
Two things:
- people can learn sexually disordered behavior (and therefore also sexually healthy behavior)- but it requires a choice to be healthy and may require support from family/society. Unfortunately, none of this is discussed at home or in school (how would this work? *parent to kids:* “hey kids- I know same sex sex scenes are like crack to your horny teenage brains, but maybe don’t masturbate yourself into a stupor over lesbian porn/gay slash fiction bc that’s disruptive to your sexuality as a straight person. If the only thing that can get you off is lesbians/gay guys then how will you be able to engage with YOUR OWN self as a sexual being with another person?” I’m guessing most people will give a hard pass on that convo.)
-I know someone who has a friend who agreed to a threeway with a heterosexual couple she knows. The guy wanted to watch his wife and her do sexual stuff together. A heterosexual man…had TWO women- his wife, AND her hot friend- willing to have sex with him…and he wanted to just sit back and watch them and presumably masturbate to them pretending to enjoy sex together. This was not some “autogynephilic” transbian-adjacent dweeb addicted to porn in his mom’s basement. This was a “normal” heterosexual man. To me this speaks volumes about how same-sex sexual content 1. Is a natural interest to most straight people and 2. can ultimately warp heterosexual sexuality in a way where one is left out and isolated from one’s own desires.
I'm curious if you know the Netflix show Young Royals, if so, what you think about about it, and how much this dynamic applies beyond fanfiction to actual fiction fiction. The show centers around a romantic relationship between two 17-year-old boys. It's very good, I highly enjoyed watching it, but it absolutely suffers a bit from "fictional-male-characters-written-by-women syndrome". We will likely see in the future more examples of healthy or idealized gay male romances depicted in the future, and I'm curious about to what extent it contributes to the same problematic pipeline.
IDK about that show in particular, but there's been professionally published gay male stories written by/for women for years and it's similar in terms of demographics--especially since a lot of the female authors of professional stories about gay characters began in the fanfiction world. I want to say some of the big name stories started off as fanfic? (although that's true of het romance novels, too, at this point....)
Also, notably, gay male fiction has had a problem with female authors pretending to be male and going through great lengths to hide their identity in order to have authority. Like. Um. I'm trying to remember the name of the one lady. Josh something? Landon? Lawson? lol okay after like ten minutes googling it was Lanyon. But there've been others. One wrote about being a gay prostitute and heavily implied it was based on her real life and hired someone to stand in for her at appearances but I can't remember what her name was or what the name of the book was, either. I want to say this was the late 90s? I don't know. I just remember reading about it in some pop culture magazine in a medical waiting room and it stuck with me because it was so wild lmao
Although now, of course, a lot of the professional authors call themselves gay trans men or queer non-binary people or whatever and even if someone did hide their sex, I figure the reaction would be the same as it is when there's drama about straight people writing gay stories which is essentially "but what if professionally publishing gay stories is how they're coming to terms with being trans" instead of being a big reputation ruining drama