I happened to stumble across this mini-essay regarding why femslash remains to be so unpopular in fandoms, and among fandom writers, and it hasn’t left my mind ever since I read it. I’ve been turning it over in my mind, ruminating over why so many of the arguments seemed repetitive.
I realised it’s because I’ve heard it all before.
What’s striking about the aforementioned essay is how the language and fandoms referenced date it to a certain period of pop culture history—and yet the arguments, the excuses, the defensiveness… that’s timeless.
So much of this rhetoric still permeates fandom discussions when it comes to the evergreen discourse of “why no women?” Whether it be fandom or original fiction, hobbyist writers or famous, well-acclaimed authors:
Female writers seem to have an entrenched resistance to interrogating why they gravitate towards male characters at their own counterpart’s expense. One can say:
“Well, it’s a free world and people can write what they want.”
And certainly, I am not arguing against that!
Nor am I expecting this “rebuttal” of sorts to alter any minds—I am far too jaded for such idealistic fancies. It’s more that I wanted to put down my thoughts on why these arguments hold very little ground with me, and I wanted to share my dissections with the few people who consider my opinions to hold any worth.
So without further delay, let’s get into it.
Reason 1: I just relate to men more
I had my reasons. Some are purely personal and subjective, such as that most of the fictional characters with whom I strongly identify have been male. This says more about the quality of female characters in professional fiction than it does about me. Another is that identifying with a character who is different from me in an important way, such as that of gender, gives me a certain detachment. I tend to prefer movies and novels set somewhere otherworldly, whether it's outer space or a fantasy universe or some historical period. I prefer for fiction to be a good metaphor for my own experience, not a faithful mirror of my own experience. Writing and reading about men helps keep that distance between me and the characters.
The main reasons why I end up drawn into these discussions is because I can relate to some degree. It’s difficult to be a young girl consuming media who feels at odds with the expectations of womanhood. Who does not hold any affinity for the supposed virtues of “soft power”, who cannot “manipulate men with wiles and youthful beauty”, who have personalities that are more like blunt hammers than elegant daggers to wield. In that regard, it can be easier to relate to men. To identify with men. Their arrogance, their foolhardiness, their unpalatable flaws and appearances. Their intrinsic humanity.
And yet, even when I have identified with male characters in the past—I lacked this reverence for them. And it’s mainly because I saw the way people treated female characters who were akin to what I’m talking about above. The difficult, prickly women who flirted with moral ambiguity were always unfairly villainised by fandom. Especially female fandom.
Over the years, I have watched as my favourite female characters were denigrated, erased, insulted, and tarnished in fandom spaces. Their actresses dogpiled and bullied off social media for the mere crime of being disagreeable. Their male counterparts remained lauded, unscathed by this vitriolic mob. It became a stark reminder to me that the standards we uphold men and women to are not the same. If I were to hypothesise, I would lay the cause with what the essayist herself insinuates in the final few lines—seeing these female characters were too close for comfort. It held up an ugly mirror to reflect the shortcomings they themselves had fallen prey to. And in seeing that source of shame projected onscreen… they couldn’t respond with anything but revulsion.
I shall come back to this point at a later time, so please keep it in your thoughts.
Reason 2: Not enough “interesting” women
I don't watch TV at home, but when I visited a friend last year, I consented to sit through The X-Files with him. I hadn't seen it in a few years, so I was blown away by Scully: beautiful, smart, capable, assertive. I immediately thought, "I gotta slash her!"
But with whom? She doesn't have an attractive sidekick or an archvillainess in canon. An original character would be suspected of being a Mary Sue, and probably with some justice, because I do want Scully for myself. (No, Spooky can't have her. She's mine.) I stewed for a long time, and finally ended up writing crossovers, slashing her with Emma J. Russell from the movie The Saint and with Detective Diana Bennett from Beauty and the Beast, the latter despite the attendant difficulties of pairing a redhead named Dana with a redhead named Diana.
So that's the big problem: finding a fandom that has not only one, but two interesting, complex female characters. In most fandoms, we're lucky to get just one.
This one is very ironic to me considering we have a well-known fandom phenomenon such as Slash Migratory Fandom. For those who aren’t aware: it describes a cyclical occurrence where shippers of a juggernaut M/M ship will “migrate” to a new form of media, locating two male characters to project a certain dynamic/personality type onto. They'll jam 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.
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.
Many a fandom war has been started over the behaviours of SMFers and their relentless crusade to cram characters into their dominant/submissive, twink/bear, top/bottom complementary dichotomy. Which they use as a template to write reams and reams of fanfiction.
There is an even more peculiar type of fan behaviour which I like to dub “male character parasitism”: a minor male character of three or so lines becomes so inexplicably beloved that they inflate his importance to ludicrous proportions—flooding the tags with meta, headcanons, and other fanon content until a random onlooker would think he had a prominent role!
Should we take it a step further? I could even walk you down the lane of “crackshipping”: two white men who have never so much as exchanged a single line (hell, they might not even share a canon), nonetheless become insanely beloved and monopolise the tags of their respective fandoms through the sheer thoughtpower of dedicated shippers alone.
Fandom has always been a transformative space that has never let the binds of canon prevent them from imagining all possibilities—so long as it was involving a male character. Why, then, does this well run dry when it comes to the topic of women? Why are there no female minor characters of three or so lines that were skyrocketed to fame on the flimsy basis of constructed fanon characterisation?
Reason 3: Well, fandom is dominated by straight/bisexual women!
The male characters of Utena, however, are a sorry lot by comparison. The series' three hunks, Touga, Saionji, and Akio, do very little in canon besides lounge around looking edible. (Which I'll grant they do very well.) What little personality they have beyond their overdeveloped sexuality is frankly repulsive; they're immature, self-centered, use their sexuality to manipulate others, their motivations are infantile, etc. In short, they're male bimbos. (Bimbas?) Yet there is a huge volume of Touga/Saionji, as well as an awful lot of fics derived from the Touga/Akio hints in canon. Utena/Anthy exists, and one or two stories try to set Juri up, but the f/f is dwarfed by the m/m, despite the rampant femslash potential.
In a way this makes sense. The majority of slashers are straight women. (I've been scolded more than once for saying this, but I stand by my statement. There are a tiny handful of gay men in slash. There seems to be a sizeable minority of Lesbians and women who identify as bisexual; there's no telling how many are in slash, but I personally know several of both. The fact remains: straight girls outnumber us, and I get the impression that they do so by a hefty margin. This has an impact on the genre.)
This is where things get a bit contentious—and where the essay dates itself most. There has been a lot of discussion on the demographics of fic writers and what percentage of them belong under the “queer” umbrella (mainly bisexual women), and how many of them are heterosexual women. In either case, I consider the sexuality of the writer irrelevant. As a bisexual woman myself, I can’t stress enough how alienating I find the concept that I have more affinity towards the experiences of gay and bisexual men than I would my own gender demographic.
We share same sex attraction, but that’s the extent of it. Walking in the body of a bisexual man would impact my life so many ways—to make it distinct to that of being in the shoes of a bisexual woman. The life experiences, stereotypes, dangers, etc. are inherently filtered through the basis of gender. However, I know not every bisexual feels the same in that regard.
That being said, whether or not I am attracted to men should hold no basis on whether or not I write 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. I say this because being attracted to women has never prevented men from being able to ignore female characters and largely erase them from narratives. It’s why we have the current landscape we do to begin with!
Therefore, there must be some other factor influencing why women, even women attracted to other women, cannot bring ourselves to be emotionally invested and attached to female characters the way men are in reverse.
Reason 4: It’s just plain old misogyny
To Scarlett O'Hara, "all women, including her two sisters, were natural enemies in pursuit of the same prey – man." Another classic bodice-ripper, Forever Amber, has one male character remarking, "If women could learn to tolerate each other, they might get an advantage over us we'd never put down."
I've seen some very nasty remarks from female fen about interesting, complex female characters. These fen are willing to forgive male characters for all sorts of things, including murder, but female characters are another matter. I've seen so many stories that turned the female characters into travesties of their canonical selves that I was moved to send some very extravagant praise to a Mulder/Krycek slasher who allowed Scully to be the competent, intelligent, assertive, unique woman she is in canon.
A somewhat more uplifting perspective is that the male characters tend to have more serious flaws in canon to balance their good points. Female characters, on the other hand, tend to be a little too perfect. Scully's beautiful, well dressed, highly intelligent, and working in a male-dominated profession. How many of us can really identify with a paragon like that? Maybe these powerful female characters are TPTB's attempts to give us the positive role models we've been demanding, and they've made them a little too perfect in their eagerness to fill this demand.
Here is where the views of this essay and myself converge—cherish it while it lasts. She mirrors a lot of the arguments I was making in the first point, wherein female characters are held to different standards. Impossible standards, I would assert. You see it in the way Scully is regarded as some unobtainable ideal. Surely, no woman could be expected to live up to being beautiful, intelligent, and well-regarded in her male-dominated field?!
It fascinates me, because it runs counter to the specific male fantasy we see in media, over and over, where the extraordinary exploits of an action protagonist cannot hope to be fulfilled by the average couch potato. Yet we do not see men despair over their inadequacies to the same extent we do for women. And it makes me curious: why? Why do we feel the need to chase this unattainable goal for ourselves to the point we lash out in frustration against characters who do? Why is “identification” and “relatability” upheld as the bar a female character is forced to clear before we deem her worthy of enjoyment? And why is that same bar so lowered for men? After all, you don’t see women encountering the same emotional barrier when identifying with the likes of Dean Winchester—who is far and away from a run-of-the-mill bloke you could run into at your local pub.
I agree with the author in that it’s a disconcerting concept to reckon with, and one I’d prefer not to consider. Alas, I am not of the mind that inconvenient truths ought to be avoided because you’d prefer not to confront them. And this argument, of them all, stands out to me as the most compelling and sound.
Reason 5: The feminism issue
But I think I've figured out the main reason that femslash is in the minority. One of the leading theories in the never-ending debate about Why Women Like Slash is that it's a chance to vicariously claim traditional male prerogatives; we can dream about having adventures and vanquishing bad guys and having the independence men have always taken for granted but that we've had to fight for very hard. But a few people have asked, couldn't we do that just as well, perhaps even better, by writing about powerful female characters? Cagney and Lacey? Scully? Captain Janeway? Why not more taking power by doing so via female characters? I understand wanting to do it through male characters, since I do it too, but why not more of the other way?
This is the final response I have, and the driving force of why I decided to write this article. Because I agree with her: why can’t we do it more the other way? What is it about writing women that inhibits imaginations from considering that we could ever be as formidable, as accomplished, as magnificent as men? Especially since—when we are offered such paragons—the fandom wants to tear them down as setting up unrealistic standards for real women. Is this argument not ultimately circular and thought-terminating?
One must consider that there is a secondary, subconscious barrier you must overcome… and I think I found it as this tangent continues.
Well, when I finally wrote some femslash, as well as a genfic (The Ancient Ones Endure) with a strong, independent heroine, I started to see the answer. I didn't plan to bring feminist issues into any of these stories, and yet they cropped up every time. Diana Bennett is a homicide detective. I only did a small amount of research for my stories about her, but I did find out that female homicide detectives are very, very rare. Agent Scully is in two male-dominated fields, medicine and the FBI. Without planning it, I found myself mentioning in passing the ways in which they had had to surpass their male colleagues to get anywhere in their careers, and how the struggle had toughened them, and the coping strategies they developed. In my two Scullyslash stories, I found myself, again without planning it, poking some playful fun at the clueless men who made advances to Scully, Diana and Emma, who were far more interested in each other.
Ah, and there is it.
In order to write women to their maximum potential, one must be willing to grapple with why we are being hindered. And the answer is misogyny. A topic that’s grossly unpopular among women in fandom (and is increasingly becoming so in the feminist backlash we’re experiencing to date). I believe a lot of this is to do with the fact that women still internalise blame for misogyny, rather than externalise it. They think the reason for their oppression is rooted in some inherent fault and inadequacy in themselves, rather than the fact that men (and women) largely work together to sabotage us and keep us in line. To enforce gender roles on us. To indoctrinate us into naturalising these beliefs about ourselves until we consider them indisputable truths of the world.
It can take immense mental work to free yourself and open your eyes to it. And it’s difficult, tiresome work that can lead to negative mental strain. I understand why a lot of women avoid it, and why they seek refuge in the depiction of men to counter it. But I cannot encourage it when it only leads to more misogyny festering in writing spaces. When the outcome is either less room for female characters to exist, or be boxed in by the demands of the more traditionally feminine voices dictating how they believe women ought to act, feel, and desire.
But I don't really want to write about feminist issues. And I don't think many other contemporary women do either. I think we're ready for the equality of the sexes to be taken for granted. We're tired of having to argue about it. We want to bypass the whole issue. Writing m/m – identifying with male characters and depicting relationships between only men – allows us to do just that. Once the head of a feminist organization said that the greatest honor they could have was to become obsolete. M/M slash announces that we're ready for that day.
Feminism is not the enemy here, and never has been. But if you truly don’t want to write about feminism, then there are options that you did not discuss. Why not consider… writing men as unrealistically accepting, benevolent, and egalitarian? Why not write no men and have reams of stories with nary a male character in sight? Worlds populated with nothing but lesbians and bisexual women loving and fucking each other? Why is it that the expectation is never placed on men to alter themselves or to disappear, whether it be in fiction or reality? Why is the only way you can imagine liberation from misogyny in fiction is to eliminate its victim, rather than its perpetrator?
I really think that’s a question worth sitting with.
We have to be the change we want to see here. We have to be willing to fight for ourselves to be portrayed as strong, flawed, vengeful, power-hungry, weak, pathetic, stupid and brilliant—because if we don’t then how can we expect anyone else to pick up arms?
If you're interested in fantasy that loves exploring women as both central and supporting characters you will definitely be interested in thriving cast of The Essence of the Equinox
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