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olderthannetfic:
ninswhimsy:
lucastapastatheshamanramen:
theangryuniverse:
three–rings:
There’s always a lingering question that I ask myself, which is why do I, a cis bisexual woman, enjoy romance between two men so much?
There are easy answers, like that it’s just fetishizing. And like, I find men attractive, yes. But I also find women attractive. I don’t have a problem with enjoying het romance, assuming I can find good ones. I enjoy stories with female characters I can relate to.
But there’s something much deeper at play, IMO. A friend of mine who is a gender studies professor was the first person to point this out to me, but 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.
This was recently illustrated to me rather dramatically. 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. Now, there’s no logical reason for that. Sexual harassment is just as wrong when its object is a man. But I know I’ve read fics with a similar premise and never thought about it. 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.
But I can’t when it’s a het relationship. There’s too much baggage there. Too much societal history of abuse. I can’t relax enough with the premise to enjoy that story.
Now some people can. And that’s fine. And some people are never going to be okay with power imbalances like that regardless of gender. That’s also fine. I don’t think having either reaction makes one morally superior. It’s okay to just enjoy light entertainment for what it is without going into deep analysis.
But it’s much more difficult for me, and I think for many women, to relax and enjoy romantic and sexual stories when they involve female characters. We’ve been burned too many times by shitty depictions, by shallow role models, by abuse portrayed as romantic. We have developed a stress response, a trauma response to heterosexual romance. We are hyper-reactive to a wide variety of triggers in regards to it. But removing women from the equation makes stories safer for us. And maybe it shouldn’t? In an ideal world? But for many of us, that’s the truth.
I couldn’t agree more to this.
It is incredibly hard to find a romance story, may it be in a book, film, or tv show, whatever, that doesn’t come with the usual fears of “will the woman be treated well”. I constantly worry about a “Sansa” moment - referring to what they did to Sansa Stark in series 5 of GoT, namely raping her and using her rape as a plot device to make her stronger. With romance stories between two men I hardly worry about anything. It’s just so…. liberating to read this stuff? Just to be able to enjoy the romance, without having to worry about all the things that were mentioned above. God. I love it.
Serious question though,f/f fix almost never has the triggers you’re worried about in them, and if they’re there then they’re tagged, so why is there a dearth of straight women who read m/m fic who are apathetic toward f/f dic at best and vitriolic of it at worst?
This is super interesting to me as someone who at this point in my life identifies overwhelming as a lesbian/wlw and yet is primarily interested in m/m, m/m/f and m/f in fiction and media, both reading and writing.
I’m just fascinated by complex sexual dynamics but why not write them from an f/f perspective? What’s the block?
Is it the way we write and see women in media? Would I feel the same way in original fiction so it’s an artifact of being a fic writer? It is straight up internalized crap?
I feel like this is so worth talking about!
The only “internalized” thing here is the epic quantities of canon het and fanfic m/m we’ve all consumed.
The more we are steeped in fun cliches, the easier it is to reproduce them.
I’ve managed to consume huge amounts of het media that I actually like, even if 99% of het media bugs me. There’s just so much to choose from! Same for m/m, except it’s all fic or original romance novels. M/M/F has some good fic but not much else. It does, however, have some specific common tropes I really like.
It’s pretty easy for me to come up with a fun take on popular tropes for any of that. I’m not a wildly original artist. I tend to be reworking tried-and-true favorites.
For f/f… I’ve looked at the big f/f fandoms, and they’re for media I don’t like. I am not interested in animation, and Hollywood’s taste in women for live action roles makes my vagina shrivel up. I’ve tried to get into f/f romance novels, and I do have some I like moderately well. I have yet to find any I absolutely adore, and most of what I find is contemporary romance, which is my absolute least favorite. Even the crime thrillers are tame and fluffy compared to the hot, problematic messes I read for other gender combos.
Worse, many of the common f/f cliches annoy the shit out of me. I have way higher standards for f/f. Maybe because it hits close to home?
I have a much more personal connection to sex scenes and am much more likely to feel like something isn’t hot because I personally don’t enjoy that act. You’d think this would happen with het, but there’s enough focus on perving on the guy in most of it that there’s still this distance that lets me just enjoy the character enjoying things.
I think that if I had reliable access to more f/f that was kinky dubcon where one of them is an undercover FBI agent and the other one is a dodgy informant who turns out to be a vampire or something, I’d build up an unconscious sense of which cliches I like and be more inspired to write f/f.
olderthannetfic:
ninswhimsy:
lucastapastatheshamanramen:
theangryuniverse:
three–rings:
There’s always a lingering question that I ask myself, which is why do I, a cis bisexual woman, enjoy romance between two men so much?
There are easy answers, like that it’s just fetishizing. And like, I find men attractive, yes. But I also find women attractive. I don’t have a problem with enjoying het romance, assuming I can find good ones. I enjoy stories with female characters I can relate to.
But there’s something much deeper at play, IMO. A friend of mine who is a gender studies professor was the first person to point this out to me, but 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.
This was recently illustrated to me rather dramatically. 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. Now, there’s no logical reason for that. Sexual harassment is just as wrong when its object is a man. But I know I’ve read fics with a similar premise and never thought about it. 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.
But I can’t when it’s a het relationship. There’s too much baggage there. Too much societal history of abuse. I can’t relax enough with the premise to enjoy that story.
Now some people can. And that’s fine. And some people are never going to be okay with power imbalances like that regardless of gender. That’s also fine. I don’t think having either reaction makes one morally superior. It’s okay to just enjoy light entertainment for what it is without going into deep analysis.
But it’s much more difficult for me, and I think for many women, to relax and enjoy romantic and sexual stories when they involve female characters. We’ve been burned too many times by shitty depictions, by shallow role models, by abuse portrayed as romantic. We have developed a stress response, a trauma response to heterosexual romance. We are hyper-reactive to a wide variety of triggers in regards to it. But removing women from the equation makes stories safer for us. And maybe it shouldn’t? In an ideal world? But for many of us, that’s the truth.
I couldn’t agree more to this.
It is incredibly hard to find a romance story, may it be in a book, film, or tv show, whatever, that doesn’t come with the usual fears of “will the woman be treated well”. I constantly worry about a “Sansa” moment - referring to what they did to Sansa Stark in series 5 of GoT, namely raping her and using her rape as a plot device to make her stronger. With romance stories between two men I hardly worry about anything. It’s just so…. liberating to read this stuff? Just to be able to enjoy the romance, without having to worry about all the things that were mentioned above. God. I love it.
Serious question though,f/f fix almost never has the triggers you’re worried about in them, and if they’re there then they’re tagged, so why is there a dearth of straight women who read m/m fic who are apathetic toward f/f dic at best and vitriolic of it at worst?
This is super interesting to me as someone who at this point in my life identifies overwhelming as a lesbian/wlw and yet is primarily interested in m/m, m/m/f and m/f in fiction and media, both reading and writing.
I’m just fascinated by complex sexual dynamics but why not write them from an f/f perspective? What’s the block?
Is it the way we write and see women in media? Would I feel the same way in original fiction so it’s an artifact of being a fic writer? It is straight up internalized crap?
I feel like this is so worth talking about!
The only “internalized” thing here is the epic quantities of canon het and fanfic m/m we’ve all consumed.
The more we are steeped in fun cliches, the easier it is to reproduce them.
I’ve managed to consume huge amounts of het media that I actually like, even if 99% of het media bugs me. There’s just so much to choose from! Same for m/m, except it’s all fic or original romance novels. M/M/F has some good fic but not much else. It does, however, have some specific common tropes I really like.
It’s pretty easy for me to come up with a fun take on popular tropes for any of that. I’m not a wildly original artist. I tend to be reworking tried-and-true favorites.
For f/f… I’ve looked at the big f/f fandoms, and they’re for media I don’t like. I am not interested in animation, and Hollywood’s taste in women for live action roles makes my vagina shrivel up. I’ve tried to get into f/f romance novels, and I do have some I like moderately well. I have yet to find any I absolutely adore, and most of what I find is contemporary romance, which is my absolute least favorite. Even the crime thrillers are tame and fluffy compared to the hot, problematic messes I read for other gender combos.
Worse, many of the common f/f cliches annoy the shit out of me. I have way higher standards for f/f. Maybe because it hits close to home?
I have a much more personal connection to sex scenes and am much more likely to feel like something isn’t hot because I personally don’t enjoy that act. You’d think this would happen with het, but there’s enough focus on perving on the guy in most of it that there’s still this distance that lets me just enjoy the character enjoying things.
I think that if I had reliable access to more f/f that was kinky dubcon where one of them is an undercover FBI agent and the other one is a dodgy informant who turns out to be a vampire or something, I’d build up an unconscious sense of which cliches I like and be more inspired to write f/f.