I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

[frogfriend]

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Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

The thing is, I've never even been convinced this is true! Yes, f/f is rare...if you're in a megafandom known for m/m, with a large percentage of screentime going to male characters, and a fanbase full of migratory slash fans. That's all fine, more power to them, but that isn't where you'd look for f/f any more than you'd look for pineapples growing wild in Antarctica. That doesn't mean there's a pineapple shortage!

I have definitely been in several large fandoms where F/F leads the statistics by a wide margin. There are other factors why F/F might seem less liked than it actually is--AO3 having a specific fandom heritage as arising from Livejournal slash fandom (a lovely thing and I'm glad they built it, but it does show considerable stat biases--compare M/M on AO3 to M/M on FFN, or the proportion of animanga to western live action fandoms on the two platforms) and that very specific Western live action slash culture being insular (as a result of the fandoms they were in very specifically being legally against their male mains being portrayed as gay by fans, historically--in the 80s and 90s at least if not in the 60s) while f/f fans tended to be in fandoms with canons less openly hostile to them, e.g. Xena. That insularity made for a tight-knit culture with record keeping and stories retold, so that many people can trace a line from K/S through to the Sentinel fics on Usenet to SPN to MCU and onward, often leaving out J7 or Xena's "altfic" and "Ubers," or Sailor Moon and Utena. I don't think this is malicious, I think people who felt particularly visible and attacked from outside just made extra sure their history was remembered, and they only spoke for what they themselves were there for. (I'm certainly not saying that f/f fans never encountered homophobia, or that no one bothered to record our history at all! Just that there were these subtle differences in how the fandoms were treated by copyright holders and consequently who ended up in charge of/creating the OTW/fanlore/etc.)

I've seen some fans convinced that het fandom barely exists too, which makes me laugh because female-oriented het is demonstrably, statistically more popular than female-oriented m/m, if you step out of your slash juggernaut AO3 bubble for a second. You remind them the entire Twilight fandom existed and was huge, and they pause for a second, remember that existed, and mention they shipped Edward/Jacob. (I sigh. "Of course you do. And I shipped Alice/Bella, but that is not the point.")

So people skew where they pull their numbers from, skew their memory of fandom history, and then also, skew what counts as a "fanwork." I had someone's acafandom paper bookmarked on another computer (sorry) about how vidding was a f/f juggernaut haven. There's plenty of f/f art, as well! Fic is valid and there's more f/f fic than any fan could ever get around to reading, but there's so much more out there in terms of fanworks! I've seen Discourse on why f/f fans tend to produce more art than fic, with some concluding (of course, sigh) that it's because they don't have much to say about their ships. Drawing is work and it takes a lot of time? I don't sit around lovingly detailing ships I don't care about. I don't memorize how to draw my OTP without refs unless they're actually my OTP. When men like images of sexy ladies more than they like descriptions, it's just oh, it's natural, they're visually oriented. If m/m art was bigger than m/m fic, we'd hear the feminist thinkpieces on how women are visually oriented too, and just like the sexy manmeat. But femslash art is vegetables? Get real! There's tons of it, and it's popular, and that's because lots of people like it!

I personally don't think the "most women like men, duh" argument holds much water. As has been pointed out, shipping is not orientation, and plenty of lesbians like m/m. I've also met plenty of straight women who love f/f, who if you give them a chance will rhapsodize about it more than most lesbians. A popular reason for straight women to like f/f is the focus on female pleasure and female sexual response. Even het can sometimes get too focused on the male character's penis and orgasm. You also get more descriptions of varied sexual acts, e.g. breastplay, that are rare in het. Or they might simply get into a fandom where they think two female characters have great chemistry!

More troublesome for f/f fandom, I think, can be the presence of straight men. Not gonna lie, sometimes straight men make some good f/f content I'm not complaining about, but they very often have different tastes and different priorities, and ways of portraying the female characters that can be offputting to women of any orientation. There's also the fact that while any group of fans will have members who do not know how to behave themselves, women may have less tolerance for that coming in the form of sexual harassment from straight men. The thing is that female-oriented het and female-oriented m/m are very much Straight Man B-Gon, an affront to his very masculinity, while f/f can attract them. Thus, there are some f/f spaces which are heavily male-oriented, and a lot of "moe yuri fandom" in particular suffers from this, where even the canon is male-oriented f/f rather than female-oriented f/f. So that's a whole huge sector of fandom that fans who don't touch Boy Fandom with a 20-foot pole wouldn't know exists. (Boy Fandom always struck me as Girl Fandom's pathetic younger brother, picking up our terminology 10 years out of date and going "ew kissing" at shipfic while secretly hoarding hentai.) Most male-oriented fandom fanworks are female character/male viewer (OMC, disembodied peen, or sometimes the Relatable Male Protag but clearly still not the focus), female solo, or f/f, though there are also non-hetero male fans who create other kinds of content for sure--still, the homophobia in Boy Fandom hubs like Reddit and 4chan mean that's also underrepresented. There's almost no overlap between the female-oriented het fandom culture (which is descended mostly from romance novel culture) and the sort of dude het you'd find on HentaiFoundry. F/F has a harder time straddling that line, because of yuri fandoms specifically courting the male fandom, and a shortage of woman-produced f/f canons--which again, they exist, but there is definite sexism in who gets to write and produce movies, TV, anime, etc. Which can lead to some women liking f/f a lot, but getting sick of the titty anime fanboys (and the poorly drawn titties, god, touch a boob you losers) and end up going, "I'm headed to the yaoi-est yaoi to ever yaoi, where straight boys will never find me!"

And yet all of this doesn't stop f/f from being hugely popular, sexy, and widely enjoyed by many, many women. You will get the occasional sealioning, "Why is femslash so rare? Why are women's bodies so unsexy? Why are there no good words for pussy? Why are there no interesting sex acts between women?" but to be honest they're not much different from the age-old slash trolls that would ask, "How could any man find a vagina sexy? They're dirty and smell bad and breasts are also ugly! Surely a man could never feel truly emotionally close to someone so much weaker than him as a woman, right?" (Will also never forget the mpreg fic that said men were vastly preferred for childbearing, because women are weak and bad at being pregnant and will make the baby weak. ASSBABIES FOR STRONG SONS.) Or for that matter, the anti-m/m trolling about how buttsex is disgusting. There's always some fan who will say shit like that, I'm just annoyed that people take it literally and assume women really do all find female bodies revolting and no one thinks f/f is sexy, not even all the people writing, drawing, vidding, and consuming it!

There is no real "Why isn't f/f popular?" because f/f is popular. "But why isn't it popular on AO3?" "Because AO3 has a history of being a slash-centric space, also, that in mind, it is pretty popular on AO3." "Why isn't it popular in my fandom about men?" "I dunno, think on it?? There are fandoms about women too you know." "But why isn't it really popular, I mean, why don't *I* like it?" "Oh bud, friend, look...maybe it's just not for you. People like things you don't, and you're not sexist or homophobic for liking what you like? You do you, just don't put horseblinders on and say how funny it is that everything to the left and right is completely dark and no one can see anything over there."

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

What exactly is the point of going on about fanart when a conversation is clearly about fic producing fandom, though? Saying they scratch different itches isn't putting down visual artists, lol.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Because fanart is fandom too? There's this very AO3-centric mindset of, "fandom, oh, and I guess also anime," or "fandom, oh, and I guess also fanart" that's unnecessarily narrow. There are fans, and they're women, and they're expressing their love of f/f, but their numbers don't "count" therefore women don't like f/f.

This is specifically in response to the assertion that f/f is less popular and that there are Reasons why women like it less, which is why it's relevant that women do in fact like it. Fanart is very popular, it's huge on platforms like tumblr and twitter and pixiv, it has plenty of history with sites like deviantart and oekaki boards, it's reposted like heck all over imageboards like 4chan as well as sites like pinterest and weheartit. Saying that doesn't count for anything because it doesn't scratch your itch in particular is like saying all the het on Wattpad isn't really het statistics because it's all readerfic and you don't like that. Someone likes it! That's the point! People make it, share it, love it! Not every work of f/f will be rtyi, but it's okay, because there's loads of it and I'm sure some of it will be up your alley--and the stuff that isn't counts as f/f fandom too. Only counting stuff you're personally interested in as f/f sure is a way to artificially deflate f/f's numbers and popularity.

There is enough f/f fic and f/f fic history to make my argument that f/f is popular and lots of women love it anyway, it was just important to me to count other parts of fandom, some of which I've personally been in, that are important to many female f/f fans and part of that broad shared history and community. If it doesn't resonate with you, it's okay, don't worry about it, but maybe take solace that even way off over there where you have no intention of going, women are loving f/f there too.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

There’s the mindset of wanting fandom content that takes me more than 30 seconds to consume but sorry you don’t enough reblogs on your art or whatever.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

nayrt

Were you just reading the recent comments on ffa that said this meme wasn't all that wanky and decided to do something about it?

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry you're mad my femslash art gets thousands of reblogs when you're bound and determined to say no one likes it?

I've seen ridiculously popular femslash writers whine that no one likes them because they write femslash, which is especially noticeable when the same author has het or m/m content that has less than a third of the comments/kudos as their f/f stuff. What is with femslash writers and needing to believe that no one likes them, and no one likes anyone else who does f/f either, despite evidence to the contrary?

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

The conversation isn't really "clearly" about that, no.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

You're unpleasant.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Love the snide implication that some fandoms are just About Men and true femslash fans know better than to bother with them, btw.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

If you're determined to read in bad faith, you'll find people are attacking you everywhere.

This is in response to people bemoaning that certain fandoms have a higher percentage of m/m or f/m than they do f/f, and saying that is a universal experience and pretending no fandom ever has more f/f, or there are no f/f juggernauts, no f/f fandom history, etc. Look: it is a statistical fact that some fandoms really do have less f/f than they do other types of fanwork, just as it's a statistical fact that there are some fandoms where most fanworks are f/f. It irritates me when people pretend the latter doesn't exist or doesn't count. But I'm not saying that f/f ships in fandoms where f/f is less common are less real, like femslash less, etc. I've been in fandom a long-ass time (15 years, give or take?) and I've done it all. The juggernauts in megafandoms, the tiny fandoms, the crossover ships, the little enclaves in bigger fandoms that are just doing their own thing. One fan can easily move between those things. Some days you strike gold and everyone loves the thing you love. Other days you love a thing almost no one seems to care about and you're desperately producing content in the hope of attracting someone into the depths like an anglerfish waving its bright shiny head-tentacle around.

And I also know that sometimes you hit a fandom that has great f/f chemistry, but due to inscrutable forces of fandom migration patterns, all anyone cares about are those two boys in the background who had like one line. And short of triggering a migration from a different demographic, there's not a lot you can do about that. Are there some fannish demographics that are "just About Men"? You know...I think there are. A migration from Supernatural fandom rarely bodes well for female characters, no shade on the canon or those who like it and femslash in it! (If you've been there, you know exactly what I mean.) Just as there are some fannish demographics that are just gonna readerfic. And some fannish demographics where it's all A/B/O, some where it's all barista AUs, some where it's all hanahaki disease. That doesn't mean people who don't like whatever's taken hold as popular in a space don't count, or are stupid for staying. Just that, and again, this was my actual point, something being popular in one localized space doesn't mean it's popular everywhere. Lots of femslash fans are in fandoms that aren't femslash-heavy, but "wah, no one in my fandom likes femslash" is a very different complaint from "wah, women in general hate femslash because lesbian sex is gross to them!" It's the latter I'm disagreeing with, using spaces where it's demonstrably untrue as evidence.

If you're a femslash fan in a fandom that doesn't like what you like very much, well, as the kids these days say, you are valid!

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Oh now it's about the dynamic of the people in the fandom and not the canon being About Men? Nice backpeddle.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

DA

You're weird and aggressive, ayrt is tl;dr, and frankly I have no idea wtf either of you is on about.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

"I've seen some fans convinced that het fandom barely exists too,"

LOL recently on FFA someone said most James/Lily fic was probably Remus/Sirius fic with J/L as a background ship. It was a big "oh man, there ARE people here who do think het's rare" moment for me. If you go to ff.n, there's more J/L than R/S...

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Seriously! I guess the fics I've read about how James and Lily came to care for each other (including bodyswap, hurt/comfort, and every other trope under the sun) are all just secretly Remus/Sirius???

(There should be more Alice/Lily. I know why there's not, but there should be.)

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, and right there we see the problem with basing ANYTHING on AO3 stats, even though acafen on Tumblr and Twitter are happily trying to make careers out of it.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, they'll defend that by saying that AO3's API is friendlier to that, that FFN and Wattpad are more difficult to scrape usable data from, and many older archives aren't accessible or don't exist anymore.

That doesn't mean the data from AO3 is representative, of course. It still has all the aforementioned flaws. They tend to just tack a disclaimer to that effect on it, and carry on anyway.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

Nonny, I really enjoy this essay! I'd never thought of it as separate traditions before.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

DA +1!! I found the point about our history evolving differently really interesting, as someone who primarily ships f/f but has been involved in enough m/m fandoms to be able to recite the whole K/S to Sentinel to SPN migratory slash timeline by heart. I wasn't in fandom for K/S or Sentinel or Xena or early Utena, but I know one history so well, internalizing it as "our" universal history, and the other so, so peripherally.

One of my friends who was into Xena was telling me about Uber fic like 5 years ago, and I remember being mesmerized by this world of fandom I never even knew existed.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

If you posted this on tumblr, I'd reblog it.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

DA

This! Femslash, slash and female-oriented het shipping really are different traditions (as is the more dude oriented het side of fandom and the mixed-gender gen tradition). And even now, they tend to hang out in different online spaces. Thank you for mentioning this, and for writing this out so well and so coherently.

M/m slash fandom tended to be pretty tribal and insular back in the day, but that was for a reason. Strikethrough was aimed mostly at m/m content. M/m was the thing that was banned from most archives, even ones that allowed porn, and had to go to its own mailing lists.

Femslash fans did face homophobia back in the day, but it tended to take the form of "this is really hot, but it would be even better with man in it" and " a relationship with another girl keeps her pure for her future True Love boyfriend/husband/the male viewers" and "but the f/f relationship doesn't really count; she'll grow out of it and get together with a dude as is proper." Whereas m/m faced more "this is evil and disgusting and shouldn't exist!"

And yeah, the presence of straight men did and does have an effect on femslash, both canon and fandom, in general. I don't think it's an accident that the canon gay relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned out to be f/f, or that the f/f on Babylon 5 was actual canon, while the m/m was Undercover as a Couple.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

DA And it's worth noting that M/M and F/F are still banned in some fannish places even today. And not just tiny fandoms, e.g. whatever's going on in Trixie Belden fandom over at Jixemitri -- Psychfics.com, the main Psych archive, still bans all slash. (Not sure if "slash" for them means M/M only or both M/M and F/F -- Pysch fandom wasn't exactly given a lot of options for F/F, although I've seen a few R63 fics on other sites.)

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Yep, and oh man how I hate the "she'll outgrow this, it's just a phase :)" lesbophobia. (Additional hatred: since you're bi, you'll break up with your girlfriend you're very committed to and meet a man and marry him, of course! Being bi is fine, it just means you'll end up with a man eventually. I'm not bi myself, but I've gotten that from people just hoping I was bi, and it's terrible! Sympathy to bi nonnies who hear that shit more often.) Very frustratingly, that attitude can work its way into canon. I'm thinking specifically the "Class S" precursor to the yuri genre, which saw romantic/sexual interest in other girls as sort of a phase for young women who don't need to worry about getting a husband yet, a lovely part of female bonding but something it would be sad if you didn't grow out of. It's less overtly hateful than other kinds of homophobia in that it isn't like "you're disgusting and should be murdered," but it's still insidious and painful.

I do think people can see f/f stuff as less "threatening" (specifically, threatening to straight men's fragile masculinity) which is why Ally McBeal can have sloppy makeouts with a lady for Sweeps, but you'd never see a previously-portrayed-as-straight male character do that. But that's frustrating, too, because it feels like if we're not being used as "the kind of low-risk gay the network will let us show," we're not included at all. You get to be the "something for the dads" titillation, or the social justice checkmark that gets accused of not rocking the boat (c'mon, we still rock the boat a little), or sometimes, a metaphor for Female Closeness that's sort of a vaguely fetishized friendship? And each time we're like, "You know what, I'll take it! No takebacksies! If you'd like to fetishize or checkmark some butches too I will not be complaining."

Another example of what's canon and what's subtext is how Steven Universe has one very very explicitly canon f/f ship (Ruby/Sapphire, they literally got married and kissed on screen), one heavy heavy subtext and "basically canon but you can't prooooove it" f/f ship (Pearl/Rose, and their...complicated mess of an Everything) and some other more subtexty stuff (Lapis/Peridot, Amethyst/Vidalia, Pearl/Mystery Girl is hard to read as anything but romantic but SHE HASN'T CALLED HER so I'm putting it here for now) as well as tons of stuff that's just plain shippable, but there's supposedly a "canon" m/m ship in the background (Mr. Smiley/Mr. Frowny) that didn't actually get anything to really upset a homophobe in the text. It's not that I personally blame Rebecca Sugar for her priorities--she's a bisexual woman, and the Crystal Gems are actually main characters, while Smiley and Frowny are not. But it is still telling what the network was willing to allow.

I still hate how it's seen as some kind of contest, or oppression olympics. But it is what it is, and the homophobia comes in different flavors with different challenges, and that totally did shape our communities in different directions.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

I personally don't think the "most women like men, duh" argument holds much water. As has been pointed out, shipping is not orientation, and plenty of lesbians like m/m. I've also met plenty of straight women who love f/f, who if you give them a chance will rhapsodize about it more than most lesbians. A popular reason for straight women to like f/f is the focus on female pleasure and female sexual response. Even het can sometimes get too focused on the male character's penis and orgasm. You also get more descriptions of varied sexual acts, e.g. breastplay, that are rare in het. Or they might simply get into a fandom where they think two female characters have great chemistry!

Hello, that would be me and the Expanse (Bobbie/Chrisjen, Drummer/Naomi) and a whole ton of pairings on Dark Matter and 12 Monkeys.

It actually took me a long time to get into slash as a bb straight fan because I felt so excluded, as a woman, but now I do find MM slash hot. But I'm also happy I started reading slash mainly after the "now he realized why he had always felt so unfulfilled kissing a woman (unflattering details)" stage, because I have enough gender/body dysphoria all on my own, thanks. (I do still see some misogyny like that in particular fics, but it seems to have fallen out of favour as a general thing.)

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Yeah! I feel like f/f tends as a rule to describe women's bodies much more positively. I find het often tends to idealize the female lead into what they assume the reader wants to fantasize herself as, the "curvy in all the right places" wasp-waisted waif with amazing hair and some not-even-a-real-flaw flaw to be a little self conscious over. I've also read such a surprising amount of romance novel and het fanfic stuff where the protag starts out as slightly chubby, then through Hardships loses weight and emerges like the ugly duckling as ~beautiful~. It's very clearly tapping into an iddy fantasy of its own, but somehow, I think this might make a lot of women feel even more inadequate. It's not that lesbians never have body issues, I could tell some Stories, but in general I get this feeling that wlw are somehow more interested in women who actually exist, rather than the perfect fantasy pin-up girl you're supposed to wish you were.

I've also never been fond of the "Let's Compare Kissing Men and Women" thing, because when I'm kissing someone, the last thing I want to be happening is them running a tally comparing me against everyone else they've ever kissed, I don't care if they're bi or bicurious or what--I'm kissing you, be here, kissing me! Maybe after some makeouts you kind of run an analysis on what just happened and go hey, this is probably an orientation thing, I have Feelings that I didn't know existed or that I wanted to be there before but just weren't. But while you're kissing, please, just focus on who you're with!

I like m/m too, as do several of my lesbian friends, but I think I'm the sort of lesbian who ends up being even more into het than m/m. Sometimes it's "I just love the character chemistry," but sometimes, honestly, I just paste myself onto the dude and enjoy the lady. If a video game only has het romance options, I always play as a man. I actually knew quite a few women in an old het-centric fandom I was in who were like that, who mostly shipped het but would privately say they found men boring. (They varied quite a bit in orientation--from gay to bi to straight but can see the appeal in girls kissing.) There's an assumption in het fandom that it's all about how dreamy the guy is, and if anything is done with the girl it's just to show off how "spunky" and "useful" and "resourceful" she is, so you don't feel ashamed of relating to her. Which is such a waste! It's one of the reason I like a lot of Disney films--they're het, but it's all about the princess's character arc, she just kind of gets thrown a boyfriend as a trophy for winning in the end.

And a lot of the same things hold true that are true for lesbians and m/m--you can get caught up in the dynamics of their relationship and the strength of their feelings for each other. The sex is hot because it's sex and they're enjoying it! It's exciting to read about different kinds of sex you haven't had and don't intend to have. The distance from your own life can make it easier to enjoy without projecting too much, if you don't like projecting. You can tell pretty people are pretty even if you personally wouldn't bone them. And of course all that stuff about having women described and treated so positively is, well, sexy! It seems a weird thing to go on about, and I don't mind that f/f spaces often center wlw, it's just that when that gets used to say, "oh how sad, you're such a minority with no crossover appeal at all," I have to go, blatantly untrue!

And aside from which, a significant chunk of fans self-report as bi on surveys. I'm sure this varies from space to space, and you might find Deep Straight territory somewhere in the het fandoms on FFN or Wattpad, but I also think part of it is that het romance novels exist and are thriving, so it's possible fandom is more attractive to readers who aren't getting their needs met elsewhere, regardless of what those needs are.

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

NA

There's an assumption in het fandom that it's all about how dreamy the guy is, and if anything is done with the girl it's just to show off how "spunky" and "useful" and "resourceful" she is, so you don't feel ashamed of relating to her. Which is such a waste!

YES. It is! It's a key reason why I don't read that much het anymore, even though I'm into it in theory. There's just not enough about the girl in there, and her arc and development and emotions (except inasmuch as her emotions are fixed by loving the guy).