Interrogating one's preferences: the femslash gap

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Title:	Interrogating one's preferences: the femslash gap
Creator:	starfieldcanvas
Date(s):	December 9, 2018
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Fanfiction, Femslash
External Links:	Interrogating one's preferences: the femslash gap
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Interrogating one's preferences: the femslash gap is an essay by starfieldcanvas on the much discussed topic of Why Isn't There More Femslash.

It has 111 responses.

Excerpts

I was going through my drafts on tumblr as part of my doomsday prepping for December 17th, and I came across a personal essay I wrote in reaction to a "callout post" of sorts about female fen who claim to not be able to "relate" to f/f. While I've certainly never claimed to not be able to relate to f/f, the thread did prod me to do a bit of navel-gazing. I feel like posting this on tumblr would just be a hot mess, but I'm honestly trying to work through my shit and I'd really like to be able to talk it out, so I'm posting it here for you lovely people to peruse.

The first thing is pretty obvious. As a shipper, I am pretty lazy. Fanfic is for fun and I will read whatever there is the most of as long as it doesn’t actively turn me off. I’ve been a Stony shipper since before The First Avenger because comics, but I slid into Stucky shipping simply due to volume. The more fic you read for a ship, the more fanfic you see for it, the more familiar and normal it feels; I think that goes a long way to explaining why many fans are more likely to read fic about two male characters cisswapped than they are about two characters who are female in canon.

I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not proud of being lazy, but it can’t be surprising that many readers aren’t interested in putting a ton of extra energy into making sure their escapist pastime is proportionally diverse when they’re starting from a 90%-10% content split. So it’s self-perpetuating, just like real-world overrepresentation of men in business and media.

I’m not sure if it’s just what I’ve happened to find, but rightly or wrongly, it feels like a preponderance of the femslash I have read is really... fluffy. To the point of being shallow. Maybe a little bit of pining or a teensy nod to despair over a girl’s presumed straightness, sometimes, but overall I’ve encountered surprisingly little actual drama of any weight. Waaaaay too much of the femslash I’ve attempted to read has followed a sort of double-pedestal approach that goes “hey I see you are a strong female character” “ah yes I see you are a strong female character as well” “aren’t these men stupid with their silly emotional fumblings” “yes let us go be awesome together in this corner.” Like the people writing the femslash don’t want to let their characters be messy, be lustful, be anything other than flatly awesome.

I once read an analysis of the draw of male-centric slash in which an LJ user postulated that for women interested in men, slash is a fantasy not (just) because it features hot dudes, but because the hot dudes in question are (typically) having powerful and vulnerable emotions, displaying rather complex emotional landscapes, and generally being quite a bit more emotionally introspective than the average man is expected to be.

It’s not something I would have thought of on my own if you asked me “why do you read so much slash?” but once I heard it laid out like that, it made a lot of sense. There are too many men in my life who really do have the emotional range of a teaspoon, or who at least do not have the vocabulary to describe more than a teaspoon’s worth of emotions. I started dating a (male) trained psychologist last year, and being with a man who articulates his emotions so openly and so proactively is honestly incredibly disconcerting. Awesome! But jarring.

Comments

[wanderingnork]: I’d conjecture that some of the fluff obsession comes from a social compulsion I’ve noticed among a lot of queer women. There can be a weird level of pressure to make a relationship “perfect” in real life because there are few highly visible relationships between queer women, so those that exist are held to crazy high standards. (Related to this is the low visibility of domestic violence between queer women within the community at large...but I digress.)

I think we (using that as a general term for people approaching f/f) tend to project some real life expectations onto our fiction. So many f/f couples in mainstream fiction are portrayed poorly/terribly that writers feel a pressure to compensate by presenting f/f couples in a specific way. Keeps things pretty firmly in fluffland, when you’re not “supposed” to write a relationship in any other way. Anything complicated gets accused of being “bad” and that is a pretty potent pressure.

At least that’s what I’ve noticed, from conversation among other writers and watching the general trends of the social climate.

[havocthecat]: So you don't want fluffy femslash, but when you do find non-fluffy femslash, it turns you off, because it isn't the femslash you would want for yourself on a personal, attraction level?

It sounds to me like you've set yourself up for a condition of zero femslash that makes you actually happy? Which is fine, if you aren't into femslash. But you want to get more into femslash, it also sounds like?

But it also sounds like you're saying it's maybe the writers and artists fault for not giving you what you want? Which I don't think you mean, but it sounds like you're saying "I want all of this stuff, and they're not giving it to me. But when I get it, I'm not happy with it either. But what do I do about it?" (Or I think that's what it sounds like this post is saying? I may be misinterpreting.)

I mean, I'm a huge femslasher, a writer and a reader of it. I mostly don't jam on the sugar and spice femslash either. But that's what's out there! There's a lot of it and it makes a lot of people happy! Passion and Perfection ran on that for years and it's one of the great-great-grandmas of femslash sites (which is still running, I believe) and femslashers love it.

While it's not my first choice, I do love a lot of that fluffy, non-porny fic and I finish reading a story and think, "That's great! It would be perfect if it only had porn too. But I did like it." Then I either add it to my pinboard recs or I move on.

If I wish it had porn of the type I want, I either hope someone writes it for femslash_kink or I save a note to prompt it for that during a run.

Instead of setting yourself up for a zero-sum condition on femslash you want, why not request something you think you might like and see if you get something you want? Femslash kink and porn writers are out there. They're just not the majority of femslashers - and that's okay too. There's nothing and wrong with being a sugar and spice femslasher and I don't want to make it sound like I think there is.

[aaronlisa]: This is an important question.

I think the issue re: the lack of f/f fan created content is not something that can be easily answered. There are a variety of answers that are dependent on both the fandom and the fan.

I recall one very poignant discussion about why it's easier for some women to write m/m over f/f and even f/m is that the actresses that we see on a daily basis don't look like most of us who generate fan-content. I started writing fic when I was in my late 20s. I get tired of writing about teenagers. I get tired of seeing older men with much younger women. I get tired of seeing a younger woman play a role for a women in her 30s/40s/etc. I get tired of seeing women who always look perfect, who always are the perfect weight. So sometimes this turns me away from writing for a female character that I am not absolutely in love with. And I am not alone. Sometimes creating and/or consuming m/m content is easier to people because it's easier to relate to the male characters than the female characters as presented in fandom.

And let's talk about the fact that there's not always a lot of female representation much less gay or bi rep in mainstream media. It's a very disturbing trend. And sadly, there are fandoms that are popular - for whatever reason - that are mainly male focused. It'd be great if we focused more on inclusive media but that's not the way fandom works.

What we can control is our reaction to fan created content. Sure we all have preferences for certain pairings and/or fandoms but if we make an effort step outside of comfort zone every so often and provide praise for content creators regardless of the pairing, genre, etc that they are creating for. There's been times when I've stepped out of my comfort zone to praise a fic that I enjoyed even when it's not normally my cup of tea. It's great when we create the content that we want to see on a regular basis but if we're not encouraging people to create similar content, even if it doesn't check off all of the boxes, then it discourages people from publishing that content. (And I am not saying that you aren't doing that but that a lot of people don't.) We can also encourage people to create the content we want to see by asking for it appropriate fannish exchanges. By talking about it in our semi-private platforms of what we want to see. And even by hosting exchanges or running communities that show a love for that genre, pairing, etc that we feel is missing from a fandom (or fandoms.)

And in addition about our reaction to the fan created content. There's very little incentive to publish fanworks when no one responds to it and/or you only get negative reviews for what you content you do create. No one wants to feel like they're shouting into a void when posting content, it's even worse when no one takes the time to give you any feedback. On AO3, when you see that over a 100 people have looked at something you published there but only two people have said anything whether as a comment or giving kudos, it can be disheartening. This is why I think that feedback exchanges (i.e. instead of asking someone to write a fic, you ask for people to give you feedback on your works) is something important and something we need see more of.

I think it comes down to two things at the end of the day: not only do we need to be consuming more diverse media but we need to be producing more diverse fanworks. There's no easy answer to the quesitons that you raised. I think fandom is going to keep coming back to this over and over again until we come up with that easy answer.