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

[frogfriend]

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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.