Fandom

Ladies, Is It Feminist To Mostly Write/Read About Men?

Stitch

As always, I’m working on A Longer/More In-Depth Piece About This, but I am, to quote Jungkook in the bridge for Dis-ease, “sick and tired” – I’m awake for 18/24 hours at least for today. So you’ll have to vacuum up the crumbs in the interim, my bad. 

Late last month, the poet Richard Siken posted a tweet asking “So are there any women out there that ever read a Siken poem and imagined that the characters were a girl and a boy?” It is such a comical question because if you’ve read his work, you know that it’s really difficult to do anything other than a specific gay reading of them because of who he is and what his works about. but what I find fascinating is this one response that has gotten a bunch of likes and repost that  somehow makes this about male/male fiction?

The user I’m talking about responds with: 

“Girls love m/m bc we don’t want to imagine ourselves in Scenarios, we want to experience Love w/o inserting our girlhood or pain or true lives. m/m love to a girl is the kind of unattainable that allows us to bask in Love for Love’s sake – we are not Them & we don’t need to be”

First of all, what does that have to do with what Siken asks? It doesn’t answer his question and is ridiculous beyond that. (I could give the poster the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a follow up to them actually answering his question but… I don’t have to so I won’t!)

Second, this vastly misrepresents the landscape of fandom where the form of fiction that is as popular as M/M is the Reader Insert where a female reader is placed into Scenarios with a male character on the way to a deep love (or dicking). There’s an entire fandom and original publishing presence for these works because they do exactly what that poster insists only M/M content does… and it shows the value of romantic Scenarios to a female audience reading fiction.

I simply don’t understand why so many people in fandom have attempted to portray caring primarily about (usually cis) men in fiction – fan and original – as feminist praxis. And to the point where they say that writing women is too traumatizing and inherently misogynistic that they must only give a shit about women in the context of the men that they’re using to work out their vagina trauma on. 

This is of course 2.5 of the ongoing “We don’t write or read femslash or GL as women because men are better reader vessels” conversations – round one was in February, round two was a few weeks ago and made me write this off the cuff piece about the transmisogyny in action –  but it doesn’t get any better than this?

This reminds of the “girl dinner” TikTok trend and the “girl math” trend on X/Twitter: something that’s funny… up until you come across a person, like this person, that’s serious. And seriously wrong on top of that. 

In the end, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to consuming or creating M/M content… but the same people who are trying to make Caring About Fictional Men a form of feminist praxis… don’t seem to remember that. Consuming BL, dudeslash, or whatnot… isn’t inherently feminist. Lots of people are just consuming and creating this content because it’s hot and they like queer men. 

And that’s fine.

What’s not fine is acting like these creators are working on a moral positioning fighting against the “male gaze” and that every single (cis( woman or trans masc in fandom – I am not the one who drew this particular line, let me just gesture wildly at the AFAB Solidarity squad that comes a running to center themselves and just themselves during these convos -consumes what they do out of a lack of “good” female centered content or because of trauma around misogyny or the vagina. All of these conversations defending the interest fandom has in Content About Men and explicitly saying things that show that they’re valued higher than everyone else… keep pretending that this is happening out of a feminist rejection of the male gaze or the way pop culture supposedly buckles people into binaries that supposedly don’t exist in M/M content.

In another part of their comment thread, the OP up there actually wrote that “there’s no gender roles w m/m and f/f” and that’s not even remotely true. The omegaverse is kind of a literal example of “queering heterosexuality” and for the majority of its brief but powerful domination in fandom spaces, we were watching fans layer stereotypical gender roles along a binary on top of cis gay dudes. 

M/M media even more broadly beyond that has layered gender roles and binaries onto these characters. It’s not just incorrect to say that M/M lacks gender roles… but it’s just a weird claim to make if you’ve been in these spaces for years? Even the source media for these queer pieces of media – in the event of canonical queer media worldwide – does layer gender binaries and roles onto the guys in these relationships? Pretending otherwise to excuse Not Caring About Female Characters is just plain dishonest!

This all just feels like a ton of hypocrisy in order to justify something that doesn’t need justification. 

So you like BL? Big whoop! Do you want a cookie for liking one of the most popular forms of media in and out of fandom around the world? Do you think that you have to justify liking M/M in fandom? Really?

And the justification used is paper thin, presenting it as feminist to focus on male characters in order to protect cis female and trans masculine readers from… pussy. I mean… the burden of misogyny that surely isn’t present in the spaces that brought you “omegas are treated the way women have been treated for ages but also it’s worse”.

Another person replying to the OP I’m thinking and talking about said, and it seems to be a serious response, with “M/M is the closest approximation to love without strings (or: the highest level of love that a girl might allow herself to wade in without thinking about the consequences) for a tainted slate.” That hot mess of a faux Fall Out Boy song title is in response to the “we are not them and don’t need to be” tweet about men and like…

Being a guy and having romantic love as a queer dude is attainable. 

Just transition.

Do it. 

Release yourself.

Or if you want “love without strings” and aren’t an egg waiting to be cracked… go get it? Why is it that M/M is the site for that for you? I literally do not understand choosing that.

But also, the romance novel market brings in billions of dollars. There are millions of romance writers out there. There is something for everyone because the romance industry absolutely revolves around happy endings for people. You can find romance novels around your particular flavor of queer or your niche identity. You’ve got this… they exist and they do provide the same fantasies you’re claiming solely exist in M/M. 

It’s just sad to see someone say that love without strings and essentially as themselves, as a woman, is unattainable. 

I guess… ultimately, I don’t understand why these conversations in defense of Caring About Male Characters in media have to make women sound so miserable? All of the excuses involve saying that girlhood and womanhood are traumatizing, disgusting, unfair… They’re all oriented around how much being a woman sucks. And like… why do that? Why frame your existence as so terrible that you need to escape into men in media – which doesn’t even account to media that exists by, about, and for queer women… 

It’s just embarrassing to watch these people constantly make these bad sad arguments that get accepted as valid.

It’s enough to just like dudeslash, BL, or whatever. You don’t need to justify your interest even if someone asks. It’s fine to just like dudes fucking. It’s okay to read and write things that have nothing to do with you. 

You don’t have to try and pretend that liking BL or dudeslash are feminist because… it isn’t. They aren’t. And in the attempt to portray it as such, the arguments used aren’t just miserable… they’re often deeply misogynistic and infantilizing women.

I don’t know how to tell people that it’s not feminist to not give a shit about female characters. 

It’s not feminist to solely or primarily care about male characters. 

It’s not feminist to center male characters as the primary site of queer representation you care about. 

It’s not feminist to use arguments about bodies and trauma that ignore and alienate trans femmes in fandom and pretend that all AFABs are bound together by pussy trauma… and that’s why any aspect of critical thought around M/M is misogyny.