Meta: Sort of. Lots of pointless rambling, bits of snark.

Meta
Title:	Meta: Sort of. Lots of pointless rambling, bits of snark.
Creator:	lyssie
Date(s):	January 27th, 2009
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Fanfiction, Femslash, Slash
External Links:	Meta: Sort of. Lots of pointless rambling, bits of snark.
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Meta: Sort of. Lots of pointless rambling, bits of snark. is an meta post by lyssie that was prompted by several other meta pieces written about femslash fandom at the time. This included Why should girlslash be more like boyslash? No, seriously, why?, The State of Femslash: January 2009, Why do we femslash? and Genderswaps in Fanfic - Looking For A Femslash Perspective.

The post has 91 comments.

Excerpts

One of the things that stuck out and struck me was the comment that boyslashers notice the lack of women more. To which I say: bullshit.

I can't count the number of times boyslashers have told me to my face that the female characters just don't interest them. That the canon spends no time on them so why should they?

To bring up ancient history, I'm sure some of you remember the gaytopia debates of Pegasus B. I'm sure more of you remember how those icky women started getting written into the universe. And some of you, iirc, were gleeful about writing them in, too. tsk.

Which is not to say they aren't noticing. But I think things like writing genre identity to be pretentious are a bit harder to pin down these days with so many of us wearing different hats.

And let's be clear, here: there is no section of fandom that has a better grasp on female characterization than any other. They all suffer from ingrained and learned traits ascribed to women, from what the media tells us, from what the canon tells us (or what it doesn't tell us, which is usually more likely these days). There is no utopia of characterization. There are excellent writers out there, who fail spectacularly at breaking those molds, and there are awful writers who come up with ridiculous concepts, but sparkling characterizations.

What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter who 'notices' this trend more (though, I dare anyone to read the last several BSG posts from me and tell me I'm not noticing). What matters is what they're doing about it. Are they writing meta about the female characters? Female-centric fic? Are they poking their femslash friends into writing more with feedback and encouragement? Are they making women a central part of their boyslash epics? Or is everyone paying lip service to this idea of "gosh, the women are under-written in canon, that's so sad" and leaving it there, as though that's a solution all on its own?

It is hard to constantly write one gender or the other (and that's leaving out everything in-between, I suppose, which is also hard to write just one of). Sometimes, you just don't want to.

There have been 'fuck you, she's awesome' memes (I think it only went around once, though); and a 'which female characters have you written' list (which I started). We had a 'because we are awesome' fic challenge, and there's galpalficathon and femme_fic and femslash ficathons (06, 07, 08, 09...), and more that I'm quite honestly forgetting. There are, about every six months, femslash ficlet battles on fslash_today.

Do we need more? Less? Is something different required to sucker seduce new writers and old?

Reactions

[havocthecat]: You know what, though? I think that's just a facile excuse, honestly, and I'm not saying that maybe it used to be true, back in, what, the seventies? Even still, we had Wonder Woman to carry us through, and even syndicated reruns of Trek had Uhura, at the very least.

But even in the eighties, we had things like Scarecrow and Mrs. King and Remington Steele, and in the nineties, we had female characters, like Tessa Noel on Highlander, and Xena, and Dana Scully on XF, and later, on the same series, Monica Reyes. Even bridging the eighties and nineties, we had things like Star Trek: The Next Generation, which gave us Tasha Yar and Kate Pulaski for a season each, plus Deanna Troi and Bev Crusher, and spawned other series with other, highly awesome characters, and a bunch of wonderful secondary characters.

Saying "television and other popular media used to be focused entirely on male characters" is talking about decades ago, and the media sources are different now. They have have changed, even if not to the degree I want. It's not the seventies. The young fen are the ones who've grown up with thngs like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with gobs of women, and Charmed, again, with gobs of women, all of whom are the stars of the show, with special, sparkly destinies and the power of sheer awesome to carry them through the plot.

So why is it that now, not in the seventies, do we still get all of this "women wanted to identify with men if they wanted someone to identify with" stuff?

For the record, I grew up when there weren't as many female characters on tv, and I still found women to identify with. I hunted high and low, and I found female characters to love. If I could do it, when I was a kid and less discerning than I am now, then fen now can do it too. I don't know, I think fen of this generation can find more female characters to identify with in one night of television than I could have in a month back when I was growing up.

[prozacpark]: One of the things that stuck out and struck me was the comment that boyslashers notice the lack of women more. To which I say: bullshit.

Well. Nothing annoys me like boyslashers claiming that their wanting no female characters in their fiction is actually a feminist impulse because at least the women aren't being written badly (which is something I have seen way too often). And, you know, as crappy as badly written females are, I'm sure no women at all is a lot worse?

media talks about women through the eyes of a man. They're the gateway drug and women are sort of the after-shock.

I think that possibly plays a large role in women not identifying with female characters, too. I mean, looking at the point of view positions in fiction as Subject vs Object or I vs Other, women, when seen through the male gaze, are almost always in the Object/Other position. So when women approach literature/TV/whatever, they have to make a choice: either identify with the OTHER/object position or continue to see themselves as a Subject/Self and therefore identify with the man, who is more often in the Subject position. And, I guess, that can be a hard choice for some?

So I do think that generally, the way our texts are written sometimes makes it harder for women to identify with other women (and, really, even within the texts, this isolation in seen in the almost complete lack of female/female relationships). But I also think that at a certain point, people should realize how they're approaching these texts and make a conscious decision to *like* female characters. (Or, at the very least, not ignore them?) I have a tendency to strongly dislike certain types of female (and male) characters, but I see that as a flaw in my own reading and try to look past my instant hatred to what may be good in these characters and often end up genuinely liking them. But, yeah, it does take effort, and unfortunately, most people aren't willing to put in that much work in their entertainment.

So, really, as you said, it's very much about what you, as an individual, choose to do about what you're being exposed to. Like, Ron can think Kara is a slut, but if the fandom refuses to read her that way, then his view, even though he is the creator, is the one that becomes kind of obsolete. And that's the fun thing about fandom: that it can evolve and to a certain degree, it has some influence over canon and sometimes, it allows for multiple interpretations and different readings. Many of female characters I like are the ones that fandom hates, but my reading of them is often different from theirs. So really, people finding all female characters boring are lacking something in their own approach to the text. There have been interesting, compelling, awesome women in every fandom I have ever been in, in every text I've ever read, even the crappy ones from classes where the cool women always had to prove their worth by suffering or dying, and I kind of feel sorry for the people who refuse to read them the way I read them because they're missing out on, well, half the world by ignoring the female half of the fictional experience.