a “fetish” is arousal caused by non sexual objects, actions or body parts. sex is not a fetish. sex CAN’T be a fetish. you’re not fetishizing anyone by being turned on by two people having sex. that’s normal, healthy human sexual behavior.
you don’t have to be something in real life to write about it. if that were true, fiction as we know it wouldn’t exist
This is so simple I’m not really sure what YOU aren’t understanding. if anyone needs to explain themselves, it’s you. do you even know what “fetishizing” means? like can you actually define that word for me?
another thing to think about: lots of yaoi fans aren’t straight women, but let’s examine a hypothetical straight woman. rather, first examine a hypothetical gay man. when he watches porn, would you expect him to like straight porn? if no, why not? maybe because there’s a woman in it, and he’s not into women, and wants porn with only men in it?
surely you see where this is going. can you maybe understand why a woman who’s attracted to men exclusively might want porn with only men in it?
you need to explain to me what’s inherently wrong with that. if the content itself is fine with you and you only take issue with the gender of the person consuming it, really, really ask yourself why. ask who’s actually being hurt by it. (spoiler alert: no one.)
This, although I would like to point out that IN REAL LIFE, women who expect gay men to behave sexually for their own pleasure and harass said gay men, THAT’S what fetishization is about because you are treating real life people as objects that have to behave a certain way for your sexual gratification only (although, this could be said for any kind of couple, really) But here we’re talking fiction, so the argument shouldn’t even exist in this context.
^ this exactly. and women who behave like this are pretty damn rare. (women who want a token gay best friend to go shopping with, that’s also gross and considerably more common, but not really fetishization.) if you encounter them you should tell them to knock it the fuck off and stop being creepy. I’m gonna keep saying this until I’m blue in the face:
call out specific people for specific behaviors.
that means “yaoi fangirls are fetishizing gay men” is a massive sweeping generalization and not a true statement. “fujoshi are homophobic”, same deal. call out the individual, not a group of people whose only crime is liking BL comics and fanfiction.
hey so im a bi guy with a preference for men and i just want to add my thoughts to this if thats okay!!! this is in no way meant to be rude and i agree with what youve said! women liking mlm ships is fine, its just not fine when they use it as an excuse to be offensive and rude to actual mlm. when people stop treating you as a human being and defend it with their love of yaoi/gay porn, then theyre dicks. this has nothing to do with people that are not doing this, ofc. enjoying those things is not inherently homophobic, its how you treat actual lgbt people. its hurtful when someone starts treating human beings like sex objects, which i have sadly seen happen.
thank you, this is exactly what I’ve been saying all along. what matters is how we treat real people, not how we treat fiction that we consume and the characters in it.
the problem is that it’s become fashionable now on tumblr to hate every single BL fangirl/fujoshi regardless of if she’s done anything offensive or harmful, they’re all just guilty by association. we should strive to be better than that, and recognize that it’s not okay to police women’s sexualities or their taste in erotica. especially if we’re just gonna completely ignore it when men consume f/f content. it’s hypocritical and yes, misogynistic.
I’ve met plenty of female yaoi fans. I’ve seen a few of them cross the line, trust me – but it’s possible to correct them and tell them what they did was offensive, rather than throw her and everyone remotely like her under the bus.
Honestly it’s mostly about controlling women’s sexuality. And it never considers that a lot of the people they’re talking about are not Straight, or not cis. There are more categories of non-men than “women,” and the antis are either forgetting or deliberately omitting this. True fact: I got into slash because I was dysphoric about my body. I didn’t want to be in a position to be thinking about what genitals I had, during sex. That issue has lessened somewhat, but meanwhile I’m still bi af. Maybe some days I wanna see dudes, in particular. Maybe some days I wanna imagine I am the dude.
But according to the Youth Log Cabin Republicans, I’m just fetishizing gay men or something. Regardless of how I treat real people, or if I give the characters I write personalities, or whatever.
^ yeah, I came here to say something about this…
I’ve been in fandom for nearly twenty years, since I was a smol and got fanfic on Usenet and hadn’t even heard that there were ways to be a different gender than male or female. (Although I met a few binary trans women in my teens, I wouldn’t learn that there were other options and nonbinary genders until the mid 2000s when I was 20.)
Do you have any idea how many people I’ve met over the years who figured out they weren’t their birth-assigned gender through their interaction with gay stories?
The answer is LOTS. I have known both female-assigned and male-assigned trans people for whom this was an important part of their process of coming out or understanding themselves. The liminal space of fiction. The gradual understanding, “… I’m relating to this character as a stand-in for me, and experiencing their gender as my own, and maybe I want to let myself experience more of that.”
It was a part of it for me, too.
And the idea that people shouldn’t read/write/experience things outside what they currently perceive as their gender and sexuality niche is in practice VERY harmful to trans people, because *not everyone starts off knowing what they are.*
All true. Slash fiction communities are full of queer people, especially trans people, AND full of teenage straight girls and guess what? both need space to enjoy ad explore their sexuality outside the constant scrutiny of society. A factor I am still missing from this conversation is that a lot of straight women choose to read and write fiction with only men in it not because of an interest in gay men but because writing fiction with no women makes it far easier to lose the straight male gaze.
The cultural focus of straight sex* is all about women as sexy objects and in any depiction of straight sex the focus is on her. Is she pretty enough? Is she skinny? What are her breasts like? Along with a lot of far more degrading stuff. Mainstream porn is 99% focussed on women because they’re presented as products for straight male consumption.
The result? Young women exposed to these depictions of sex find it hard to imagine straight sex as anything but a performance expected of them. It’s always about a woman who is supposed to be hot. The male gaze is everywhere and they feel like they need to put a hot super model in their straight porn to make it hot, because their own bodies couldn’t possibly be sexy enough. Even feminist porn often focusses on (slightly larger, slightly less stereotypically feminine, etc) female bodies, reconfirming that a hot female body is the essense of what makes straight sex sexy.
One solution? Just take the women out of the
equation and keep only the people you are attracted to: men. Writing porn without women can be one way to put straight women back in control of their own sexuality and out of the constant pressure to be sexy. You don’t need to be sexy if you’re not in the story.
From there, slash fiction often becomes a personal experiment in sexuality outside what is pushed as desirable by mainstream society. Slash fiction explores fat sexy bodies, transgender characters, unmasculine men that are no less sexy for it, slash fiction explores clumsy sex as a good fun thing and most predominantly slash fiction explores deep friendships as the foundation for a good sex life. Slash fiction also often explores personal topics that are difficult to deal with in a first person perspectives, like rape fantasies, eating disorders, body dysphoria, depression, etc.
There are definitely problems in slash communities. Racism and a dubious understanding of consent being the most predominant ones in the slash communities that I’ve interacted closely with, but I strongly believe these can only be fixed by the community. Outsiders who have no love of slash and all the good things it can do can not create the room for learning and growth needed to overcome these issues.
—
*In this piece I use the term ‘straight sex’ instead of ‘different gender sex’. This is not because I think sex between people of different genders is inherently straight, it’s not. Two bisexual people of different genders can have sex and there will be nothing straight about it. However, in this context I am using ‘straight sex’ to mean ‘the depiction in porn of sex between a cis man and a cis woman under heteronormativity, which always assumes and enforces straightness’.
QueerAnarchism 