He's Just My Little Guy: Fandom's Overwhelming Bias Towards Men
It's MY turn with the ultra-comprehensive mic on the fandom misogyny topic!
Introduction
Mea Culpa
It’s (kind of) Not a Crusade for F/F
★ PART ONE: DATA COLLECTING ★
A Close Reading of the Most Popular Ships of 2024
Male-Loving Mathematics
Why Do You Get a Ship and I Don’t?
Charts From 2024 and Beyond
2024: More Ship Configurations
All Time: Decade at a Glance
All Time: Top 20
★ PART TWO: TAKING FANDOM TO COURT ★
If We Go Up the Chain of Command, We’ll Find the Real Sexists!
There Aren’t Enough Female Characters (& the ones we have aren’t interesting)
Male Characters are Better (or are we paying more attention to them?)
Fandom Begets Fandom
Voyeurism
Straight Women are Attracted to Men & Fandom is Mostly Straight Women
Straight Men Don’t Write About Women (so we can’t take the reverse for granted)
Is Attraction the Only Reason to Love a Character?
Gay Women Love Men Too (in the Therapist’s Office)
Female Insecurities; Male Security
Queering the Norm
Conclusion
Performative Culture of Rage
What Do You Want Me to do About it?
Introduction
Here, take my hand. Let’s go into the bowels of fandom shipping together.
If you’re new to this topic (I can’t imagine!), here’s the rundown: fandom loves dudes and making dudes kiss each other. Generative fandom, I mean—I’m shoving the guys who buy anime figurines and leer at cosplayers in a locker where they belong. We’re talking about the fanartists, fanficcers, fan theorists. We’re talking about the ladies and our big, beautiful brains and all the fanworks we make. We’re talking about the Anal Sex tag on AO3. We’re talking about the Onceler.
A lot of digital ink has been spilled on the topic—some accusatory, some defensive, all annoyed at how everyone else is missing the point. I’m continuing the tradition. However, I propose this modest, chickenshit theory: none of the reasonings for M/M’s (and M in general’s) reign are 100% wrong, nor are they 100% right.
I want this to be thorough, debating each reasoning on its own merits, so…hey! Don’t look at the scrollbar! Don’t! Stop it!!
Notes:
All data is from Archive of Our Own. Different fic sites (like Wattpad or Fanfiction.net) have slightly different userbases and preferences (like Wattpad isn’t so into M/M), but the adoration of men is obvious everywhere in creative fandoms.
A huge thank you to the Queen of AO3 Number-Crunching, centrumlumina (aka centreoftheselights), who has been gathering fic, ship, and user data since 2013. Even when I’m citing someone else’s article, their numbers likely came from her.
At times, I slip into using “you” when phrasing a rebuttal. I mean the “royal you,” referring to M/M fans at large. Unless, of course, you’re squirming in your seat. Then maybe I do mean you.
Mea Culpa
I love my boys.
IRL men are stupid and boring. Fictional men are messy, fun, kickable, breakable, stylish. I not only adopt them and their Flanderized personalities from the fandoms I join, but I make my own too. I’m actively adding to the population of fictional men. I’m poisoning the well and I’m sorry!
But why am I drawn to male characters like they have their own planetary orbit? Why are the gates to every fandom guarded by the boy blorbos (boybos?), and I give them little waves and girlish giggles on my way through? Why, when I find female characters I like, am I stuck with plastic-looking, big boobie waifu fanart drawn by 30-year-old men who blew their inheritence on gacha games, while the male characters get cool symbolism and 50 000-word fanfic epics where they bed down with the nearest eligible bachelor?
This phenomenon has a series of interlocking reasons, some small, some obvious. Some unpleasant, some reasonable. Some apply to me, some I’m not so sure about, but part of getting us out of this decades-deep trench is being willing to be unsure and look in the mirror at your fandom habits.
It’s (kind of) Not a Crusade for F/F
This topic is often brought up to show the lack of F/F fics. While F/F is vital to the fandom ecosystem, I want to clarify that I’ll be questioning the lack of women in general—especially the lack of women without a man at their side, platonic or otherwise.
★ PART ONE: DATA COLLECTING ★
A Close Reading of the Most Popular AO3 Ships of 2024
Centrumlumina’s data begins here, with her yearly AO3 round-ups. These charts reveal which ships got the most new fics in the assessment period. Keep in mind that these charts do not show the top ships of all time. (We’ll talk about that later!)
What Was AO3 Shipping in 2024?
“Other” means a characters’ gender is ambiguous (such as Reader or Player Character). “Gen” means the pairing is platonic. “N.H.” means the character isn’t human or is stylized to have a non-human skin colour (like much of Hazbin Hotel).
↬About that race column…
I’m not gonna be discussing the other elephant in the, uh, spreadsheet: the sea of White.
But I’ll say this—can we agree that many of the characters labelled as non-White are not understood to be non-White by fans, subconsciously or otherwise (especially in anime)? Sanji from One Piece is styled as a blonde White man (in the live action adaptation, he’s played by Spanish actor Taz Skylar). Calling Kaveh and Alhaitham from Genshin Impact anything but paper-white is hilarious, when the only “Middle Eastern & North African” thing about them is the dev team keysmashing their way into making their home region sound exotic. There’s also this message informing centrumlumina that teeeeechnically, Anna and Elsa from Frozen are Indigenous.
↬↬Further reading on the topic by smarter people than me:
Slash Shipping, Pseudo-Progressivism, and Reinforcing Patriarchal Standards in Fandom (“Nothing that continuously comes at the expense of female characters, characters of color, and fans of color (female and otherwise) can actually be progressive enough to excuse that.”)
Who Gets Shipped and Why? (race is discussed in chapter 2)
What Does a ‘Person of Colour’ Look Like in the AO3 Ship Stats? (To my point: “[T]here is a clear and obvious preference for lighter-skinned characters, some of whom are ‘white-passing.’”)
Male-Loving Mathematics
65% are M/M romantic pairings.
77% are pairings (romantic or platonic) with two men (there are no Gen pairs on this list with even one female character).
94% are pairings (romantic or platonic) with at least one man (there are no x Reader pairs with female characters). 95%, if I insist we stop counting Aziraphale/Crowley as anything but M/M.
Why Do You Get a Ship and I Don’t?
Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, Regulus Black, & James Potter (Harry Potter; ranks 2, 6, 22, 56). If you’re not a big fandom person, you might be missing some vital context. The Marauders fandom is barely the Harry Potter fandom. They’ve essentially turned these guys into their collective OCs.
Notice who’s missing from the various Marauders ships? The character who I’d argue is the most complex in canon: Peter Pettigrew. But he’s ugly, fat, and gross, which is important later in this essay.
I looked up the Marauders on Tumblr to illustrate this OC-ification, and I found a bunch of people talking about “the Slytherin Skittles,” and I’m even more confused than before. Is this a nickname for the Black family? Why is the top post on the tag about Dumbledore growing weed in the Forbidden Forest? Why are 300+ people certain that Regulus would have a wobbly cat? Why are we writing chat-scripts for Barty Crouch x Evan R—oh.
Barty Crouch/Evan Rosier (Harry Potter; rank 39) and Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadowes (49). Do you remember Evan Rosier? You shouldn’t. He’s the Death Eater that Karkaroff tries to sell out to Barty Crouch while in court. So Barty Crouch knows Rosier was arrested…and that’s all…? Oh, yeah, what a thrilling ship! I bet there’s lots of canon to dig into with that one!
As for Marlene and Dorcas, I have to applaud them, because they’re an F/F ship with even less canon. A r/harrypotter post asking who tf they are has this top comment: “We know practically nothing about them.” Incredible.
All RPF entries are M/M (almost all Kpop bands; 19, 47, 87, 88, 92, 94, 98, 100). I’m glad F/F isn’t anywhere near the Top 100 in that case. (I’ll discuss RPF in the “Therapist’s Office” section!)
Rui/Tsukasa (Project Sekai; 62) pisses me off. Maybe they’re the reason I wrote this essay in the first place. More on them in “Taking Fandom to Court.”
CALL OF DUTY IS ON THE LIST?
CALL OF DUTY IS ON THE LIST TWICE?!
A genuine congratulations to Lucanis Dellamorte (Dragon Age: Veilguard; 74) for hitting the Top 100 when his game was barely a year old by the end of 2024.
I have no idea what 9-1-1 is (rank 1) and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.
As I wrote this essay, I heard a lot of Marlene/Dorcas naysayers, so I investigated. Out of 30 Recently Updated fics, only 4 are focused on Marlene/Dorcas, with the other 26 having them as a background ship to another ship (mostly M/M with the Marauders).
I did the same experiment with Barty/Evan: 12/30 fics were focused on them (they, too, usually play second fiddle to the gay-ass Marauders).
(This shows the Top 100’s biggest flaw that can’t be mitigated without centrumlumina doing a prohibitive amount of work: side ships are counted the same as main ships.)
Charts from 2024 and Beyond
2024: Even More Ship Configurations
Some of these don’t add up to 100 because I removed some tiny categories. Be sure to read the bars as quantities and not as percentages.
Platonic and Poly share the typical overwhelming skew towards M &/ M.
x Reader, where the reader ships themselves with a canon character, has only 6 entries that aren’t about men. (There’s also a very good chance that the Reader is female, as we’ll explore in “Voyeurism.”)
If you ask me, shipping an Original Character with a canon character is like the more sophisticated version of x Reader (I’m only teasing a little) so the fact that M/F rules there too is very unsurprising.
All Time: Decade at a Glance
Alright, alright, I’ve really been picking on 2024. Maybe that year was…an anomaly?
JK. Plotting all the data from 2013 to 2023 shows how absolutely nothing has changed in AO3’s trends. Maybe we’re bleeding F/M, but that’s it!
Of interest:
The highest M/M is 71. The highest F/F is 8. The highest F/M is 25.
The lowest M/M is 57. The lowest F/F is 3. The lowest F/M is 11.
M/M and M&M tend to volley each other entries on the list (ie. when M/M is at its highest, M&M is lowest and vice versa).
2022 and 2023 had a glimpse of our only NB ship in the Top 100: Eda Clawthorne/Raine Whispers (The Owl House). That’s F/NB…double points!
See that insane drop in M/M in 2021? Blame Minecraft YouTuber RPF.
Notes:
Some miniscule ships were removed to keep the bottom of the graph from getting too confusing (ex. a singular F/Reader that lasted one year).
2013-2015 tallied the top ships overall. 2016-Today tallies which ships get the most new fics within the assessment period. Therefore, I put them on different graphs.
But I think that if 2013-2015 were tallied like the rest, the charts wouldn’t change that much. Those were the years where fandom at large was migrating en masse to AO3 and off of other fic platforms like LiveJournal or Fanfiction.net, so there wasn’t much of a backlog.
**If you’d be interested in a closer reading of the last decade—like more “this was what tf happened” re. the Minecraft Earthquake of 2021—please let me know! I love exploring quantitative fandom history like this. centrumlumina also has femslash only lists for most of the decade and that would be cool to peer into as well!
All Time: Top 20
Here, I used data from Who Gets Shipped and Why? and recreated some charts for my purposes.
Here’s the Top 20 of All Time, calculated as of 2024, with their total fic quantities:
Something’s a little…funky here, huh?
There’s one woman in the entire chart.
I’d be remiss to not mention that her ship is canon, as well. Who Gets Shipped and Why? discusses how M/F and F/F ships that make it to the big leagues are often canon, while M/M is the stuff of giddy fantasies. While the fine details of that are outside my scope, I recommend checking out the article (there’s unique art and interactive graphs!).
Here’s the top 3 of M/M, F/M, and F/F (in that order), with their total fics.
↬It’s Dramione with the steel chair!
Oh. Hey. Proofreading Vanessa here. At the eleventh hour, I realised an oversight!
The Pudding article was from 2024—that is, it didn’t have the complete 2024 numbers yet. I thought surely it would take more than one year for a ship to break into the Top 20, a list filled with fandom standbys like Marvel and BBC Merlin.
But Hermione/Draco shoved out Merlin completely with 32 339 fics!!
You know I’ve been working on this essay for too long because I’m so excited about this!
Unfortunately, it’s a little tough to figure out exactly who those spicy enemies-to-lovers dethroned. The latest Top All Time is from August 2024—not even Dramione’s totals are correct there (they jumped 3 000 fics in six months). Some Top All Time ships aren’t on 2024’s Top 100 (ie. Magnus/Alec, Kylo Ren/Rey), so I can’t be certain what their totals are. Either way, I’m proud of Dramione.
Speaking of Harry Potter, the fact that Harry/Draco elbowed into the Top 3 All Time is…unheard of. Shuffle Destiel, Johnlock, and Sterek? Insanity. (What the fuck happened with the Harry Potter fandom?)
What Do All These Numbers Mean?
I hope that now, I don’t need to convince you of the trends. If you’ve been in fandom, you’ve likely noticed it, participated in it, or heard the arguments for and against it.
Let’s dive into the reasonings people give for this seemingly unsolvable phenomenon: fandom, too, loves a good ol’ patriarchy.
★ PART TWO: TAKING FANDOM TO COURT ★
If We Go Up the Chain of Command, We’ll Find the Real Sexists!
It’s not the fanfic readerbase’s fault—of course they’re attached to the ships that get the most frequent and engaging fan-created content.
It’s not the fic writers’ or fanartists’ fault—they’re working with who’s got the most on-screen attention in media.
It’s not the media creators’ fault—they see what characters fans love the most, and so they give fans more of the same to fawn over.
While I think fandoms always kinda felt the absence of women—and especially of femslash—no one could say with definitive proof that fandom was creating yet another culture where women didn’t exist. As soon as fans started number-crunching, people couldn’t ignore it anymore…so then you got all these heated, embarrassed excuses from M/M purists trying to foist the blame for their behaviour onto anyone else.
All parties—from the stat compilers to the defensive fans—tend to insist that no one’s required to put down the yaoi, not even for a second. That’s not quite fair. How do we escape this pattern if everyone shrugs off their participation in it? How individual are the choices we’re making?
There Aren’t Enough Female Characters (& the ones we have aren’t interesting)
Recently, I started watching Penny Dreadful, a 2014-2016 series that I’d consider a good portrait of generic paranormal television for adults. Take a gander at the seasons 1 & 2 cast (minus our secondary MC’s Fridged daughter, however).
2 women, 6 men. While Penny Dreadful, like so much of Western television, favours attractive, young, White folk, note that the characters who don’t fit that are all men: a Black man, an old man, and an ugly man (spot him in the shadows? He’s literally Frankenstein’s Monster).
Sound familiar?
When women outnumber (or draw even) with men, it’s weird. Plus, even when every character slots neatly into familiar archetypes, men seem to get the better ones. Just looking at Penny Dreadful, men get to be rakish sharpshooters. Men get to be deranged, vain creeps and socially-inept, cowardly necromancers and hideous adults resurrected without even a hint of Born Sexy Yesterday. Women get to be Fridged.
In my experience, SuperWhoLock-era fandoms were more-or-less justified in falling back on this (I didn’t love that thing where they bullied actresses, though). The big, mainstream shows of the era tended to have a procession of bland women passing through arcs, one at a time, checking off checkboxes like “be saved by hero,” “act like a rude feminist and be proven wrong by hero,” and “kiss hero longingly” (bonus: “be outed as an evil nasty whoreish LIAR!!!”).
Is it really that simple? If we had lots and lots of women to pick from, would we be good and responsible and fill a fandom with femslashery?
↬Gacha gambling
Project Sekai: Colourful Stage!! is a rhythm game with 20 female characters and 6 male characters. Genshin Impact is a role-playing game with 62 female characters and 32 male characters. Honkai Star Rail, a sister game to Genshin, has 42 female characters and 22 male characters.
And which of these fandoms’ ships got on 2024’s Top 100?
For Honkai, it’s Aventurine/Dr Ratio (M/M) at rank 21 and Blade/Dan Heng (M/M) at 32 (plus a variation on the same ship at 66. Don’t ask).
For Genshin, it’s Neuvillette/Wriothesley at 18. Close behind at 20 is Alhaitham/Kaveh (both M/M). Childe/Zhongli (whaddya know, M/M) brings up the rear at 82.
As for Project Sekai, Rui/Tsukasa (come on, guess!) is at rank 62.
I’ve never been in a fandom with as much yuri potential as Genshin Impact. It’s great! It’s fun! It’s not enough to let a SINGLE FEMALE CHARACTER into the 2024 Top 100! Or the All Time Top 100! Not even the straight ships are popular enough! I’m living in a nightmare!!!
The characterization in Genshin is equal for the guys and gals. There’s a ton of work put into backstories, and everyone has something quirky and knife-twisty about them. Genshin’s girls sometimes get stuck with “uwahhh! I’m gentle and sweet~!” as a personality, but the boys just as often get a blandly polite flat affect and half-asleep line reads, the anime-male version of generic.
One thing I can say for certain?
There is no female character who is so awful, so dull, so irrelevant, that if she were a man, she wouldn’t have people tripping over themselves to make her the most complicated character around.
With 62 women, you have your pick of looks, personalities, and theming. Spin me a wheel, land on two random ladies, and Genshin’s attachment to strong tropes/archetypes would guarantee you a F/F pair that perfectly matches fandom’s favourite smutty dynamics. And the three—not one, THREE—ships in the 2024 Top 100 are all slash.
Am I a little bitter because you cowards won’t write my ships?! A little bit. Mainly, fandoms like this (these three are not that exceptional) take the novelty out of the breathy, tearful excuse that there aren’t enough female characters, and when there are female characters they’re just so boring…to the point that the top M/M ship in Genshin (Childe/Zhongli) has 12 397 more fics than the top F/F ship (Ei/Yae Miko).
If you know anything about these characters, I want you to just sit and think about how ridiculous this disparity is. Yae Miko and Ei cannot shut up about each other and their quests are often interlocked; there are few characters in this game so explicitly reliant on each other. Childe and Zhongli haven’t even mentioned each other in at least 3 years of the game being out, since Genshin’s story releases in patches.
Male Characters are Better (or are we paying more attention to them?)
It’s still quite rare to see multiple female characters who are complex and interact within a shared narrative (as contemporaries, partners, or rivals), and even when they do, it’s easy to pass off intimate interactions between women as platonic rather than romantic. Furthermore, female characters are more likely to be paired up with a partner or have their relationship status serve as a central plot point in their arc, often at the expense of developing deep connections with other characters.
For some people, this will ring true—if you’re knee-deep in shounen, danmei, or action/superhero flicks, you might be like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, searching the room for interesting women. The All Time Top 100 betrays a remarkably lame basic taste in male-written, male-focused media (Supernatural, Sherlock…are there any women in Good Omens? This is a real question; I’ve literally never seen one).
But for a lot of us, we just wanna shake people and ask, “What the hell?” Have they ever touched shoujo? What about modern fantasy novels or webcomics? Yellowjackets? Why was Orange is the New Black Tumblr’s gifset darling and yet it never became a fanfic whirlwind like fuckin’ 9-1-1? Do they like sticking with the most mainstream of mainstream? Here’s my essay as to why Madoka/Homura should be on the All Time Top 20 list and I hate all of you!
These Valid Interesting Strong Female Character media exist in droves, and they do get fandoms, but they rarely have the same wide-reaching, manic power as male-led media.
I feel like the Onceler’s reputation precedes him, but if not, he was the main character of a 2012 adaptation of The Lorax and he spawned his own fandom where people shipped him with AU versions of himself. Like, it was madness. It was frantic. Roleplay blogs, fanart, new AUs that everyone built upon and expanded and shared. Sans, Alastor, Bill Cipher…they all wish they were the Onceler.
Every time fandom latches onto a new blorbo, I see fractals of the Onceler-brand excitement that always backs M/M fandom. This is something I can’t cite numbers on and can’t explain, but I’m not crazy, right? Fans like and appreciate female characters, but they go nuts for men. Everything he does is deep and precious and perfect and if he doesn’t do anything, then they invent things for him to do. They invent entire Alternate Universes so he can fuck himself.
I was only sort of joking about Madoka/Homura. Where did it go? Where do all the girls go?
[W]e have a very well-known fandom phenomenon such as Slash Migratory Fandom. For those who aren’t aware, it describes a cyclical fandom occurrence where shippers of a juggernaut M/M ship will “migrate” to a new form of media and locate two male characters to project a certain dynamic/personality type onto, jamming them into it like a square peg into a circle regardless of how well it suits their canon characterisation. You might be wondering why this is relevant, and well, it’s because fandom has had no issue twisting male characters into pretzels and smashing them together like plastic dolls if that’s what suits their fancy.
I am Phoenix Wright, smugly tapping my file of evidence as this quotation scrolls across the screen.
In my recent return to fanficcing fandom, this phenomenon has hit me right in the face, especially since I’m following a game that releases new characters regularly. Fans decide that, according to looks or a vague vibe, the (male) character acts like this in a romantic relationship and like that in bed. He’s pigeonholed into favoured tropes that are almost invariably based on smutfic keywords. Fandom decides which man in his vicinity provides the appropriate countertrope (oh, the debates that have raged over who’s a top vs who’s a bottom!).
There you go—another neatly packaged M/M pairing. Another adrenaline shot to the fandom, spawning heaps of fic that outpace the quieter, female-focused fandoms.
Perhaps I’m being reductive. But are female characters uninteresting, or are you primed to use the Ikea nuts and bolts of male characters to reshape them into a dynamic that has tickled your fancy before?
Do you take a female character exactly as she’s presented—lamenting the gaps in her backstory and her boring role in the plot—and shrug, saying there’s nothing that can be done to make her fun? Do you wait until two female characters express explicit flirtation on-screen to bother seeing them as a potential ship, or do you create those red-string connections on your own, using headcanons, fanon, lore, and logic to tie the women together? Do you like a female character, but love the males around her?
Yeah, so we don’t have female characters in the source material. We don’t have queer ones either, and when has that ever stopped us? People can invent entire AUs for a story, but they can’t invent a compelling backstory for a woman? We can bring Coulson back from the grave, but we don’t say a peep when Supernatural or Teen Wolf slaughter female characters indiscriminately? […]
My point is this: not that society doesn’t have it’s share of blame, because it does, but because we also have to hold ourselves personally responsible. Subverting society’s expectations is what fandom does best, so why is this the line we have found ourselves unable to cross?
centrumlumina (emphasis mine)
↬She’s too interesting (she holds the braincell)
Maybe there is a female character who surpasses a fandom’s high standards. We’d never say she’s irrelevant or nothing more than T&A—the writers worked hard to ensure that, and we don’t want to be sexist.
She’s too smart to play along with the shenanigans of our male favourites (that would reduce her to being the Smurfette). She’s too dignified and self-possessed to be the object of lust in a ship war (that would reduce her to a love interest).
She’s the team mom.
She’s the girlboss.
She’s the braincell holder.
She’s—oops! Now she’s boring.
If you ask me, this is a strategy to safeguard oneself from being lectured about hating or ignoring a female character: fans become very complimentary towards her. Is it self-aware? I have no idea. “I complimented her, what else do you want? She’s Mommy! Step on me!”
Thing is, no one actually cares about the “mommy.” According to Who Gets Shipped and Why?, the most-used fic tags include Angst and Hurt/Comfort—what tears can you squeeze out of the mild-mannered babysitter? Fandom also loves memes, #hilarious fake quotes, emotionally-fraught character playlists, and tragic art. What emotion can you pull from Team Mom when her only value is to roll her eyes at the shenanigans of her rowdy men?
Fandom loves messes so much that they invent psychological trauma for their male faves. They love poking fun at characters, imagining shenanigans and disasters for them to go through. They love a man covered in blood. By making a woman stand by with a proud, motherly smile while her two sons confess their love, fandom takes away her freedom to be silly, sexual, flawed, and adored. But it’s not bad because they respect her.
Fandom Begets Fandom
Stop me if this sounds familiar.
You’re on Tumblr. A lawless, beautiful place with no algorithm…so you have no choice but to see the new anime your mutual is into. You try to ignore all the art reblogs, but their favourite guy gets stuck in your brain: you recognise him right away when another mutual debuts their cosplay of him. You pick up on his iconic quotes. You know that the fanart of him is gorgeous, the jokes people crack about him are genuinely funny—plus he seems to have a fun dynamic with that other male character.
You give in. Watch the anime. He’s not…well, he’s not exactly how the fandom portrays him, and turns out all those gifsets of his big ship were from only a handful of episodes… But you like the fandom version of him too much to let him go.
When you enter a fandom that started long before you noticed it, you inherit headcanons, opinions, and ships. And if you’re introduced to a media via overblown content about a male character…chances are you’ll keep an eye out for him. It isn’t the media that persuaded you to like him—or ship him—it was the fandom.
Consider how, for some goddamn reason, I can pick almost every man on the All Time Top 100 out of a lineup. I don't watch these shows! I don't play these games! I have never watched a Marvel film in my life, but I exist in fandom spaces and go to fan conventions. I am your patient zero.
Fandom is not purely reacting to the source material - it’s also reacting to the rest of fandom, and to the fandoms around it.
This rabbit hole goes down forever. The more people ship an M/M pair, the more people read your fic of it. They leave kudos and comments, making you feel included. So you write more. And they comment more. And a new fan opens the archive, ready to see what ships rule, and there’s your portfolio of adored M/M, made more rich, unique, and complicated by a whole fandom-worth of headcanons and feedback. And it’s (essentially) always M/M this happens with.
The Marauders is an exaggerated but pure example. No one’s getting giggly over the love triangle of Sirius, James, and Remus (and…Regulus? Incest is allowed in that fandom, right?) through reading The Order of the Phoenix.
This is a supplemental reasoning, explaining not the source of nor the love for M/M in fandom, but the popularity of it. We started the snowball at the top of the hill with some honest M/M—a Kirk/Spock here, a Hannibal/Will there—and down it went, gathering more tropes and more predictable pair-offs along the way. According to our current fic landscape, the more M/M people see, the more they’ll make and the more they’ll want to make new M/M ships.
Tumblr user Feynites doesn’t exactly use the words Migratory Slash Fandom, but they describe it pretty perfectly:
Slash is a fandom genre unto itself now, and people know how it works and what to expect from it, so they perpetuate it and look to mainstream content to provide specific tools for it - regardless of what got them into it in the first place. Even when there are other viable and prominent alternatives in media, even when things get more diverse, the ‘slash fans’ now look for specific elements to reshape in particular ways for an audience who knows how to look for it.
feynites (emphasis mine)
Look, no shame. I have ships where the characters have barely spoken in canon, and I’m working off inspiration from other fans. I’m responding to canon and fanon, whether my ship is M/M, F/M, or F/F.
But I don’t need to say it, do I? Readers always respond better to M/M.
[…] m/m stories are easier to find than f/f ones. Good m/m stories are easier to find than good f/f stories. If you are learning how to write good fanfic by reading other people’s stories, then you are probably learning how to write good m/m fic.
Straight Women are Attracted to Men & Fandom is Mostly Straight Women
This reasoning makes the most sense to me, accounting for a good subset of the slashers—and it also seems to make fandom the most embarrassed.
Like, I dunno, pal… I don’t think you’re writing slashfic where the most PG tag is “face fucking” because you think he’s compelling and tragic. I don’t think it was a belief in star-crossed lovers that had the Thranduil girlies headcanoning a whole life for a background extra so Thranduil could get a blowjob.
I think they’re creating porn for the sake of porn. Forgive me for sparing you, dear reader, the citations, but you know what I mean, right? They insist they’re morally spotless and actually #progressive (as opposed to the disgusting men who fetishize lesbians!) and then gleefully tell TikTok about all their new kinks from slashfic. (No, I don’t think you picked up your obsession with egg-laying from having sex with real-life people.)
↬Heterosexual moving target: AO3 gender demographics
It’s a vast oversimplification to claim the entirety of fandom is only interested in “pretty white boys” because that’s what they find attractive - and, at least for my own experiences in fandom, it’s a patently untrue one. (Most of the people I know in fandom are not cishet women.)
When people discredit this reasoning, they often pick at the “heterosexual” and “women” parts, while sidestepping the main point: slashers are people who find men attractive.
Also, this reasoning often implies a fetishistic angle and an overtone of straight women “claiming” gay men as their own toys (I don’t wholly disagree, but that’s a subject for another time), so I think it makes female slash fans feel defensive.
The general assumption, as we know, is that the average slash fan is a heterosexual female fan. However, centrumlumina’s results suggest that perhaps the combination of “heterosexual” and “female” ought to be questioned. About 90% of survey respondents were fans of M/M, but only 30% identified as both female and heterosexual. […]
If the majority of fans are female or female-identifying, but not straight, what does that mean for the assumption we started out with?
Why is There So Much Slash Fic? (emphasis mine)
It’s phrased as a “gotcha” that only 30% are female heterosexuals. That is…well, um, not the only sexual orientation that includes men. People who have sex with men sure seem to like thinking about men having sex!
The survey allowed users to select multiple categories (for example, 159 respondents said Nonbinary + Agender; 209 respondents said Women + Questioning). My graph uses data from people who gave only one answer.
If you’d like to see the full array, here it is!
The caveat about only using single answers applies here as well. Here’s the full array. For curiosity’s sake, the most frequent pairs of answers were Bi/Pan + Queer (953—almost as much as the entire Queer & Questioning category!) and Asexual + Queer (599).
We actually have three categories that are dick lovers attracted to men on display here (hetero, bi, and pan) (note that bi and pan would make the respondent attracted to men regardless of their gender identity). Asexual and the asexual spectrum does not discount a romantic attraction towards men, nor a sexual attraction when it comes to folks on the ace spectrum, so I’d argue that we cannot discount that whole category. Queer can mean anything, especially since Tumblr, where this survey got the most traction, decided that people with kinks or polyamorous people are queer—which again, does not discount an attraction to men.
I promise, I’m not being snarky when I say, “They just wanna write about people they think are hot!” Come on, guys. We as a society used to know we had crushes on Kakashi from Naruto. We used to proudly “marry” Cloud Strife on Facebook. We used to have a culture!!
However, you’re not off the hook! That’s a lot of attraction to men…and also a lot of attraction to women (not to mention the ace spectrum women who are our wild card). There’s another layer of weirdness going on if even the bisexual women are defaulting to the male-centric side of their sexuality with such a high frequency.
Straight Men Don’t Write About Women (so we can’t take the reverse for granted)
Men think they’re the most fascinating, amazing things on the planet. There’s fandom misogyny, and then there’s run-of-the-mill misogyny, and unfortunately, when it comes to humanizing men to a ridiculous degree, the men have us beat, ladies!
All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. […]
Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.
Marilyn Frye
Meanwhile, women grow up being told that…well, that men are the most fascinating, amazing things on the planet…and a handsome man is the most special of all. Men and women are socialized to inflate the importance and complexity of men, while reducing women to two-dimensional tropes.
I don’t exactly need to trot out examples of how fictional women in mainstream roles are often young, sexy, underutilized, forgotten, and disrespected (and perfectly styled to fit the male audience’s median object of lust). Recognising this was Tumblr’s bread and butter once they woke up to their own misogyny—it is a truth universally acknowledged that Dean Winchester’s girlfriend-of-the-week is written like crap and is gonna get killed off without a lick of character development. But she had to be sexy. All. Women. Must be. Hot.
Sexy Lamp Test is a thing for a reason. The Bechdel Test is still a bar insurmountable to much of male-written media. (This section also supports the “female characters aren’t interesting” reasoning, so yay!)
This dynamic is also at play in romantic/sexual fantasies. Think of the two main media that “deliver” sexual fantasies: men have porn, women have smutty romance novels.
Smutty romance novels might advertise themselves with their heinously annoying “spicy peppers,” but no matter how much dicking down happens between the covers, the male leads are romantic, passionate, and devoted to their woman. You’d be hard-pressed to find a novel where the cold-hearted, eight-foot-tall demon with two cocks (with organic ridges!) and a proclivity for kidnapping virgins doesn’t eventually tenderly kiss our female lead, revealing his heartbreaking backstory and deepest insecurities.
In the rare case where the domineering man doesn’t have a chocolatey center and the ending doesn’t bind our leads together forever, readers expect to be warned accordingly. In women’s sexual fantasies, loyalty, depth, and connection is the default.
Porn, meanwhile? When the actresses have names, they’re mere categorizing hashtags. Racist, sexist, dehumanizing categories reign supreme. “Female love interests” are spambots, scam emails, and pop-ups, because these sites know men will happily click on disembodied female body parts. (Please don’t tell me that in 2025, I have to explain to feminists how porn is misogynistic. If you’re invested in the fandom misogyny topic but think the billion-dollar porn industry is #valid, your values got turned around somewhere and I will not provide a map.)
Of course men don’t write about women like women write about men, when this is how the sexes learn to fantasize about loving each other.
↬What about the ugly guys?
I’m also inclined to blame this ultra-humanizing instinct for. Uh. Well. Let’s be honest, here…
Slashers are mainly occupied with shipping pretty, young White men—part attraction, and part the general Halo Effect-ification that permeates all of our silly monkey brains. But pretty often, this particular wrench gets thrown in: some of these dudes are a little rough around the edges…in a way no woman in any ship configuration has managed.
This is often brought up to dismantle the attraction theory. I think it both succeeds and fails at that endeavour, depending on which fans you’re talking about.
On one hand, yes—there’s likely something else at play, here, in the minds of our teenage girl fans, as opposed to when they’re writing about Jungkook. Similar to how bi women still favour the men they’re attracted to.
On the other hand, no—fans will wax poetic about the leathery grooves in David Tennant’s forehead. There’s definitely a sexually-charged obsession, especially among adult fans: as women age up, their attraction ages with them.
On the other-other hand, isn’t it part of the female socialization I just explained to grant men more depth and adoration than they deserve? I think it’s reasonable to assume that this can also make women transform a man into a heartthrob. His personality can create a reverse Halo Effect, especially if hundreds of other women are inventing a personality for him.
Is Attraction the Only Reason to Love a Character?
So, clearly, I believe attraction is to blame for a good chunk of the fic landscape. For example, scroll up to the charts on OC and x Reader shipping: when writers imagine themselves in romantic scenarios, they sure seem most inclined to pick male partners. (What self-respecting fujoshi has not imagined herself in a Cloud Strife/Zack Fair sandwich?)
However, like every other reasoning in this essay, it isn’t tidy or free of scrutiny.
[W]hether or not I am attracted to men should hold no basis on whether or not I would be drawn to writing them more. It implies the only reason to get invested in a character is through sexual titillation. Or that women are somehow uniquely male-focused and male-centred to the point it gravely infringes on our empathy.
A Response to Some Thoughts on Femslash (emphasis mine)
Okay, okay, so far, I’ve been teasing fanfic by framing it as being exclusively about sex. It’s not, I promise!
According to Who Gets Shipped and Why? the Top 10 tags across all fics are: Fluff, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff & Angst, Slow Burn, Angst with a Happy Ending, Smut, and Alternate Universe (Canon Divergence, Modern, and General).
Now those are some emotionally-charged tags! Not to mention Canon Divergence, which comes from fans saying no, actually, I want something even more knife-twisty or more satisfying, and I’m gonna think hard about the plot and characters and world to do it.
Clearly, fans of all kinds love a therapy session (maybe with a blowjob on the side). But when it comes to pure numbers, they’re just…not that interested in writing emotional intimacy with female characters.
Is there a reason this manic, giddy energy of theory-crafting hurts (and comforts) can’t extend to female characters? Is there a reason the attraction (or…something else?) is stronger than the empathy for or interest in her, whoever her is? When people write Adrien/Marinette, are they writing from her POV to reflect on their own crush on Adrien or to understand what attraction feels like for Marinette?
Do they know what attraction feels like for her, this lead female character with 131 episodes all about her?
M/M relationships are often idealised, which for some people is a form of escapism - but it’s also a part of a societal pattern which privileges men’s emotions and relationships over those involving women, and trying to separate those two motivations is always going to be messy.
Gay Women Love Men Too (in the Therapist’s Office)
Let’s get psychological.
The most basic, overarching answer to the “Why M/M?” question, that no one wants to say too loudly or else they’ll suffer a tidal wave of wrathful @’s, is “misogyny.”
The media we love—and the media we make—takes place in the grand framework that is patriarchy, wherein we all subconsciously disregard and devalue women real or imagined (and men sure seem to murder women a lot about it, that’s weird). There’s one root to damsels swooning with a breast popping out of their dress and Destiel having 100k+ fanfics. It’s the way we’ve been taught to see women and, as a community of mostly women, to see ourselves.
…Ta-dah!!
So, let’s turn the mirror on ourselves and ask some deeper questions about what created our current fandom landscape.
Female Insecurities; Male Security
↬A matter of feeling unrepresented
Since popular culture is catered to a “male gaze” that fetishizes women, fans struggle to identify with on screen women. Characters are often white, skinny, hyper-feminized, and lack agency, alienating fans looking to escape through characters they can relate to.
I #don’trelate. On a serious note, it’s because I’m a thin, (generally) able-bodied White woman, so while I have never felt represented for my own reasons, I also have never felt the weight of media furiously resisting representing me. On a jokey note, I tend to like my women devastatingly cool and hot. (On a middling note, I don’t write or consume media looking for people to relate to.)
Still, this ghoul hangs over many women: how can they relate to the on-screen ideal when the ideal is so far away—or even impossible?
This can translate into a resistance to connecting to female characters or exploring their “faraway” (or envy-inducing) problems or triumphs. Imagine a pretty, skinny, teenage girl character whose arcs revolve around her boyfriends (we’re real short on those!). Would a real teenage girl, who feels ugly and ignored, be drawn to spilling 10 000-words’ worth of sympathy for her? Writing about the sex life of a pretty, confident woman can also be uncomfortable if the writer’s insecure about her body or sexual inexperience, or feels that she’s gross for having sexual desires in the first place.
Fair enough! However, the article loses me couple sentences later: “fanfiction that avoids women all together allows authors and readers to identify with either character.”
Like, they’re right that people use this excuse, but oh man, I hate it. I hate it!
It’s textbook patriarchy that men (especially White men) are the default, unmarked. You can’t not relate to a man because “man” doesn’t mean anything, but “woman”? The character might as well have three heads and come from Mars, she’s so abnormal and unrelatable. Little girls are expected to see themselves in Harry Potter, but boys can’t see themselves in Harriet the Spy. And I guess bisexual women in their twenties can see themselves in…Wei Wuxian?
For those of us who do identify as queer (not het) women in fandom, are our lived experiences as women less easy to overcome in our imaginations than our lived experiences as queer (not het) people?
Folded into this reasoning are two other prongs of misogyny:
We judge women for the same qualities we admire (or forgive) in men.
In short, fandom forgives men for all their itty-bitty mistakes—in fact, those mistakes might be a good reason to love him—but hold human, contradictory, and frankly, interesting bad behaviour over female characters’ heads.
Plus, if she’s such a bitch, why would you want to relate to her?
Women see other women as competition.
Sometimes this manifests in painfully obvious ways, such as female fans bullying a love interests’ actress or their favourite musician’s girlfriend. The actress was hired for a role, someone else wrote her lines, but she’s the one encroaching on the male character and his devoted fandom.
Of course you don’t want to ship him with a woman. What woman would be good enough?
These fans aren’t shipping themselves with the character/actor (…well, most of the time), but they feel ownership and protectiveness over him. It’s like any old-school yaoi manga: a woman’s intentions are always suspect. She must be on the prowl to take our male lead, while the male love interest joins him.
↬A matter of objectification
Lemme back up to the charts. For the 2024 Top 100, we have RPF (Real Person Fiction) in 14 spots. For the 2024 Top Poly, RPF is in 19 spots.
RPF takes real people with real lives and transforms them into little dolls to play with (it’s irrelevant right now if this is good/bad/neutral). The dolls become friends, fight, make up, make out, and have sex (with one, two, or even six fellow dolls at once).
Now imagine doing that with real life women.
The shippers of 2024 sure couldn’t.
To feel morally squeaky-clean about RPF, you do have to accept that it’s fine to claim someone’s body and personality and transform them to your whims. For RPF shipping, it’s fine to claim their most intimate, most private lives too.
The spectre of sexual crimes that happen to female celebrities—revenge porn, upskirting, selling sex tapes, stalking, and AI pornography (digital rape)—hangs over female ficcers. We’re a generation raised on the illegal leaks of underage starlets’ nudes. Therefore, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that RPF with female “characters” has never, ever taken off like RPF with men.
Similarly, there’s a resistance to turning a completely fictional women into a sexual object to leer at, even for just 3 000 words. It feels like participation in a culture that’s—well, that’s misogynistic.
If you’ve ever dared to like a female character, from Poison Ivy to a My Little Pony, you’ve likely stumbled into male-drawn, exaggerated cartoon porn that gleefully depicts rape (I mean, one of the “hilarious memes” in the Brony fandom is the Rainbow Dash Jar, which is a horrific display of the socially-inept, immature rape culture that emboldened these pathetic men to take over and destroy a fandom meant for little girls). Maybe it’s just me, but that’s a little less appealing than a fic showing a consensual, enthusiastic, slightly factually inaccurate first time between two male characters.
My brain pumps the brakes on writing explicit F/F because of this bizarre sense that my female faves deserve more respect. Weird-ass behaviour on my part—I have a very light touch when it comes to sexual content, prioritizing character dynamics and realism over fandom’s trendy fetish of the week—but that’s how this feels. It’s like I’m being rude.
If I Google, say, Yae Miko fanart, I’m more likely to get ugly art where her boobs are shiny, plasticy beach balls the size of her head than anything related to her importance in the plot. The Chinese fandom apparently hates her for being unkind to the male MC, unlike the other fawning females. It was hard to enjoy the recent hot spring-themed event where she had a precious new hairstyle because of all the male gooners acting like dumbfucks on the official posts. I’m not like them, Miko! I love you like a normal lesbian! I’m happy big and sexually normal!!
↬↬Female sexuality is icky
Welcome to Feminism 101.
He’s a stud, she’s a slut. He’s au natural, she’s got to be waxed, plucked, perfumed, and trim, or she’s trashy. Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson were styled as underage sexpots, but we put them in the stocks once they actually had sex. Countless fictional men are introduced on our screens via screwing a faceless woman, and this is supposed to be Cool and Charming and Fun, while female characters preserve their innocence for their (on-screen) first times.
Yawn. Unicorns only show themselves to virgin maidens and all that. You might’ve memoryholed this because now it’s the realm of glam drag queens, but “cunt” and “fishy” are, you know, sexually-charged insults towards women about their genitalia. Ickyyyyyy!!
It’s not easy to tease these two motivations apart, as when it comes to fanfic or fanart, they look the exact same—lesbians (or women in general) are cottagecore-soft, while gay men’s overt sexuality is fun and profound. I guess we all just gotta look inside ourselves and ask if we’re afraid of witches.
↬A matter of gender dynamics & distance
I read a recommendation for a het romance. And it sounded cute, and came highly recommended. The tropes at play were fun. Until I read a snippet and realized this was a romance between a woman and her boss. I had a visceral negative reaction.
Instantly I’m thinking of sexual harassment stories I’ve read and heard from other women. I’m thinking of how uncomfortable it would be to have your boss develop feelings for you. How icky the power dynamics would be, etc.
And then I realized…this wouldn’t bother me if it were two men. […] Because when it’s two men I can accept this is just a light romance, a fantasy, meant to be fun and sexy and not to represent the real world.
And:
Some women dislike reading about women in fanfic because they find themselves identifying too closely with the situations described. If a fic includes issues which are uncomfortable or triggering to some readers, then a male protagonist can sometimes provide a buffer that allows the reader to examine the topic more objectively.
A light example is illustrated in that first quote—a boss x employee romance. An extreme example is how the trope no-no(-stop-please-stop)-yes is totally boilerplate in yaoi manga, but if it was in a hetero romance novel, your skin would crawl and you’d make a Booktok video warning about how gross it is.
While we discussed before that there was preference for writing men because writers “couldn’t relate to her,” now we’re talking about writers “not wanting to relate to her.” Out of discomfort, past trauma, or a nasty little awareness that you’re too much of a Good Feminist to put a woman in this kind of situation.
[A] lot of women enjoy m/m romance and gay porn because of the lack of women. It removes a source of pressure and sexism. Without any women present, you don’t have to constantly evaluate the sexism of their portrayal, or be reminded of negative experiences in your own life. It allows women to experience romance and especially sexuality without all the baggage that comes with it in our patriarchal society.
Fixing this isn’t as simple as taking an iffy romance dynamic and making them both the same gender—making a boss and employee both female does alleviate some of the ick factor, but in my opinion, it’s more about the fact that women are present at all.
Fanfic loves to play in the realm of taboo—violence, incest, rape (they even have cute names for it: noncon and dubcon), misogynistic/transphobic/homophobic kink, and anything dead dove. In many cases, the distance is a safeguarding method, to keep the rehearsal of scary emotions a few steps away from your mortal body that can actually be damaged if you’re as unlucky as many of your sisters (as unlucky as 1 in 6 of them, in fact).
This is fiction’s strength. But too many of us grew up with media that sure didn’t seem to just be “rehearsing” or “hypothetically” hating women, so even fake depictions of it don’t feel good to consume.
In a way, fandom objectifies men to avoid objectifying women: they are creatures to hold at arm’s length, to conduct experiments on. News feeds about men don’t remind us that when women encounter “misogyny kink,” it’s usually not in the safe framework of an Overwatch fanfic written by a 17-year-old.
Besides, it’s not like bi men are even around to read that biphobic M/M fanfic, right? Who’s the predatory gay rape fic gonna hurt if gays aren’t reading it?
[Q]ueer […] identities are not neutral in regards to real-world oppression or oppressive narratives, either. And given the large numbers of queer(/not het)-identifying folks in fandom, the reasoning of ‘being unable to imagine stories - or, perhaps, also unwilling to seek out fan-created narratives - free from the kind of oppression that echoes our lived experience’ kind of seems off to me? […]
[T]here’s individual escapism, which I get, and then there’s collective devaluation of all narratives except (white) dudeslash, which is more to the point.
saathi1014 (emphasis mine)
I’ve been keeping my focus narrowly on “triggering” fics, where I find the instinct to hide in a man’s shadow to be completely understandable, almost reflexive.
But where does M/M fluff fit in, which accounts for much more of the archive than dead dove? What about multi-chapter M/M epics that redefine the source material? Coffee shop AUs? Broken-heart angst? First kisses? Is heterosexuality (and femaleness) so scary to our cohort that imagining a first date between a man and a woman is, in aggregate, across all fandoms and over 10 years, so difficult?
Of course not. All we’ve found is yet another piece of this huge puzzle.
Queering the Norm
This reasoning can be summed up as “There is (little to) no representation for our communities in mainstream media. Therefore, fandom represents itself through fanworks.”
Who Gets Shipped and Why? discusses how much of the huge juggernaut fandoms are media by men, for men, about men (I mean, the 2024 Top 100 includes Call of Duty and the Minecraft streamer boys’ club). But once they get into the hands of “women, nonbinary, and queer authors,” the stories and characters are essentially changed by their new handlers and new audience, “[allowing] them to flip the script from the heteronormative, straight, mainstream perspective.”
[F]anfiction is an inherently transformative work which, by its very nature, strives to address or change some flaw that exists in canon, even if that flaw is “why isn’t there more of this thing?!” Fanfiction has addressed the lack of gay men by making straight characters gay; it’s addressed countless cultural misappropriations with wildly varying AUs; it’s addressed canon plot holes and timeline issues with fix-it fics and crossovers. Fanfic is the show your show could be like, if only you dared to dream.
Alright…we know this reasoning is deployed when it’s oh-so-convenient because of one fun fact: out of the 2024 Top 100, there are 3 Black characters. And when you look at the Top 100 of All Time, that number drops to [drumroll…] ZERO! Oh yeah, real good job queering the norm there, ya jerks!
It feels like I’m moving the goalposts since, when this topic is brought up in regards to slash, it’s obviously referring to making men bisexual, gay, and sometimes ace or trans—it’s not about race at all.
And to that I ask, okay, why? If changing the landscape of media to reflect the people who consume it is fandom’s beating heart, why is that energy only put towards making White men gay?
I’ll give fandom their flowers because they got Hermione to be listed by any Tumblr-aware stats-cruncher as being of “Ambiguous” race, but why is there no energy behind uplifting racially-diverse characters?
You can queer-norm your way into an avalanche of scenarios that Straight White Man Media wouldn’t dare let their Straight White Man Characters touch, but you can’t queer-norm your way into making fandom the one place where women outnumber men? Many fans freely blame poor female representation on Straight White Man Media, and yet they don’t queer-norm that convenient problem away.
Several people have also spoken to me about the desire to go against the norm, to seek out the queer relationships which are rare in the mainstream media, and subvert common romantic narratives which are heterosexist and unconsciously power-imbalanced. Fandom is often seen as the only place which makes it possible to do this, and if the source canon doesn’t contain interesting F/F potential, M/M is the obvious choice to latch onto.
However, this does not hold true in all cases. There are many source canons in which a diverse and interesting cast of female characters, with their own relationships and goals, is still largely ignored by fandom in favour of M/M relationships.
Why M/M? (emphasis mine)
Conclusion
[T]he societal emphasis on the male gaze seems to have affected fanficcers’ creativity to such an extent that even in our own fantasies, we cannot give women a fair shake. […] The bias against female characters and female pleasure is an ingrained, institutionalized problem which won’t go away on its own.
Oof. I think that’s everything.
To recap, there’s a lot going on here. While I feel like I punched holes in almost every reasoning that was brought to me, I don’t think I completely debunked any of them (well, maybe that last one). Some excuses are more, uh, whiny and bad than others, but I don’t think any are wholly untrue, especially since this essay was written after decades of fandom fighting let the best arguments rise to the top (I lament the really, really bad excuses that fell through the cracks over the years. Those would’ve been fun to dismantle).
So, it seems like the big M/M issue happened because of a ton of different forces that interlock in different ways for each person.
A ton of small biases, unconscious or otherwise, validated and enforced by a culture until they became part of that culture’s very fabric. Bit by bit, degree by degree, fans as an aggregate have been angling away from women and towards men. They all have unique reasons, but regardless, the end result is a disinterest in women, and an overblown, forgiving, fawning fixation on men.
Well, that’s not so bad an idea to wrap up with. Certainly makes it easy for me.
Because we already have a word for that phenomenon.
Performative Culture of Rage
On what grounds do you disapprove of people writing what they want to write? Are you calling someone a sexist because they don’t want to write what you want to read? Is that actually justified or are you so caught up in a performative culture of rage that the only way you can legitimise your ire is by using buzzwords. Is it not good enough anymore to say I don’t like this pairing, instead you have to generate shame amongst those who do ship it, and attempt to make them ‘repent’ and
ship what I want them to ship‘be a better person.’
A Tumblr user from 2013, who I’m not gonna cite because of this outdated dickishness
Fandom goes fucking nuts about this topic.
I noticed that the vast, vast majority of the time when I found Tumblr discussions on this topic, the writer had decided their particular horse in this race and was blaming it and only it. That’s part of why this thing is so damn comprehensive—people who laid out multiple reasonings and sparred with them on their own terms were rare. Therefore, firing back was easy: respondents just picked their own favourite argument and got to typing.
Not to mention that people always got a sense that pointing out the issue meant the OP wanted them alone to solve it.
Most users were quite nice in response. They’d talk down the angry respondent, saying that no, I don’t blame you, and it’s not about individuals making individual choices. It’s fine if you shop around for the next White man to ship, but I’m just observing a huge, obvious, culture-wide problem. You should ship whatever you want, but if you’re getting so defensive, perhaps you’re seeing yourself in This Picture.
I don’t want to be so nice. I am, actually, telling you to solve the problem. It’s 2025. Look at those line charts again. Nothing has changed in a decade.
Why do we talk about the danger of fetishization when straight women are writing about male/male pairings, and never think about the fact that slash is often being written by young women who have been socialized to be so ashamed of their sexuality that their own fantasies never include people of their own gender?
Why are we placing the burden for destroying problematic tropes about sexuality and romance exclusively on this tiny, relatively powerless subculture made up of relatively powerless people who are creating media exclusively for their own enjoyment, and not on the gigantic megacorporations that are profiting off the romanticization of abusive, unhealthy, destructive relationships, an attitude fans are only repeating?
centrumlumina replies to this with a phrase that broke my mind wide open: “Because my audience are fans. Fandom is the realm in which I have influence, and the only place I have any real hope of change happening.”
Maybe this rings more true to me—and I should’a thought of it myself, damn it!—because I write original fiction and am surrounded by people who create original fiction, so we know we are, in our tiny ways, contributing to the landscape of media. The M/M fandom avalanche isn’t just a thing that happened to us—we made it. We built the culture. I am currently building the culture, one dumbass fanfic with video game losers kissing at a time. An online, dorky, perverted, silly, self-indulgent, beautifully female culture, but a culture all the same.
If I make more F/F, then the culture has more F/F. If I persuade you to write more women, then the culture has more women. If I made you think about the topic with this essay, then yay! The culture thought about the topic!
After scrolling through a decade of Tumblr arguments, I don’t understand how fans can acknowledge that the culture of fandom is a misogynistic mess and throw up their hands, like, “Well, fuck you! I’m just responding to a media culture that hates women by hating women!” (And I do want to emphasize that back in the day, the answer really was to hate women. None of this cowardly “braincell” shit.)
I don’t even think media these days is that bad for female characters. Genuinely, I don’t. But these women certainly do! Like in the quote above, those who pushed back the most viciously against being asked to write anything but White men were also the ones who were the most insistent that the media they love is hateful, reductive, abusive to women—and they were like, “I’m gonna repeat their mistakes over, and over, and over, and over, and swear that it’s actually my feelings and my unique and special way of expressing myself.”
Slash tells me I am not worthy of love. It tells me I do not deserve to have the same wide, varied, pleasurable palette of sexual expression and desire as male characters. Male characters get everything; women get nothing.
They deserve nothing. They are nothing.
That’s what I feel when I look at the male character obsessed behavior of fandom.
What Do You Want Me to do About it?
Unfortunately, if you got this far, I have some proactive ideas for you.
In the rough version of this essay, I thought of ending with a recommendation list of media with cool female characters. But the thing is, once again, it’s 2025. I don’t think we’re actually unaware of the “right” media. Do I really need to say “How about Life is Strange? Yellowjackets? Ever played Infinity Nikki or Stardew Valley?—those are a sapphic cottagecore dream come true!”
I think we all know what’s out there and how to find it. I think we all know how many of us watched The Arcane and came out a Jayce/Viktor shipper because CaitVi is too #problematic.
So here is my revised list of ideas:
Support your local F/F loyalists. Look for the fics/art and comment. There’s great stuff out there, and unfortunately, the reality is that in many fandoms, to find the F/F, you have to go looking. Even if you don’t come out a shipper, you’ll have supported someone, and that’s real nice.
Participate in prompt trading. If you’re in an exchange, write or draw someone’s F/F ship instead of defaulting to the M/M ships you also share. Post prompts in F/F prompt-collecting groups on AO3 or LiveJournal so other people can get ideas from you and write them.
Check yourself if you’re starting to Marauder-out. Are you getting pulled into an unrecognizable fanon about a dude? Are you getting seduced by what is essentially a separate fandom about a dude? Are you Onceler-ing? Generally, I think there’s something hilariously innocent and fun about the way non-canon fandoms can spawn into existence (I said I was once a Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons girlie, right?), but facts are facts: fanon flies out the window with the most gusto when it’s in service of a bunch of fangirls crushing on some dudes. This is fandom misogyny at its most indulgent, its most unapologetic, and I don’t think the Tumblr Sexyman Brigade really knows it.
Unfortunately, you’re gonna have to write F/F. This makes people so freakin’ mad. Blah blah, I don’t wanna make things I don’t care about, blah blah, can’t make inspiration where there is none, blah blah blah. Too bad. Pick a ship and get to work! Spin a wheel! Join a trade! I don’t care!
Oh, good lord. I’m bad enough at ending monthly update newsletters, much less whatever monster this is. Why’d I blow my line about “we already have a word for that phenomenon” so early?!
I guess…thank you for reading. This was a labour of love and fixation on a sprawling topic so I could forget about my fiction deadlines. Thank you to the article writers before me, as well as the people on Tumblr who gave me reasoning suggestions when my own mental well had dried up. Of course, thank you to the data compilers and centrumlumina. I don’t want to talk about this topic ever again.
Now, chin up, guys. Let’s go write some fic.
