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bookshop was talking about female characters and male-centricity in fandom and it made me think about my own fanfic reading patterns and I left this comment:
It's hard to be objective about my own sexism, so I may be deluding myself here, but I feel like part of the reason my favorite stories are boyslash and not femslash is not thinking boys are better, but thinking that *women* are better - buying in to the stereotype that women are more emotionally competent, able to talk about their feelings, etc. A lot of what I love in romance stories is pining and angst and because I've internalized the above stereotype about women, it's harder for me to buy women yearning for each other for years but never *saying* anything about it, or fucking each other for months without ever having a conversation to clarify their relationship. I love the emotional release of the declaration finally, finally being made against the vast weight of typically-in-our-culture-masculine emotional repression, and, I dunno, most female characters just seem too *sensible* for that bullshit, like, if you put women into most of my favorite stories, they would just short-circuit because the women would sit down and sort things out in the first quarter without all the drama and inner torment and misunderstandings and the necessity of extreme circumstances to tear those words out of them. I know, rationally, that doesn't make sense, and there are emotionally-constipated real women (and emotionally fluent real men, I married one actually, god knows the kind of thing I enjoy in fiction would be an utter dealbreaker in real life), but in my head this kind of narrative is strongly gendered male.
It sounds from other comments like maybe I should check out _Devil Wears Prada_ fandom - the fashion magazine aspect is a turn-off but maybe people are writing cool sf or fantasy AUs? - so I'll do that, but I'd love other recs for emotionally-incompetent women (and their eventual happy endings).
To expand a little further, I do have het favorite stories as well as slash, but off the top of my head I would say they often feature either a) an emotionally-incompetent male half of the couple or b) a love triangle providing the emotional repression. I can only think of a couple of pairings, offhand, where a woman is usually bringing an equal or majority share of the angst purely on the strength of her own issues - Ranma/Akane, although even then, Akane usually seems to sort her shit out before Ranma does, and Buffy/Spike, which is outstanding for this.
Thoughts? Recs? Condemnation of my appalling sexism? (Hey, identifying it is the first step, right?)
bookshop was talking about female characters and male-centricity in fandom and it made me think about my own fanfic reading patterns and I left this comment:It's hard to be objective about my own sexism, so I may be deluding myself here, but I feel like part of the reason my favorite stories are boyslash and not femslash is not thinking boys are better, but thinking that *women* are better - buying in to the stereotype that women are more emotionally competent, able to talk about their feelings, etc. A lot of what I love in romance stories is pining and angst and because I've internalized the above stereotype about women, it's harder for me to buy women yearning for each other for years but never *saying* anything about it, or fucking each other for months without ever having a conversation to clarify their relationship. I love the emotional release of the declaration finally, finally being made against the vast weight of typically-in-our-culture-masculine emotional repression, and, I dunno, most female characters just seem too *sensible* for that bullshit, like, if you put women into most of my favorite stories, they would just short-circuit because the women would sit down and sort things out in the first quarter without all the drama and inner torment and misunderstandings and the necessity of extreme circumstances to tear those words out of them. I know, rationally, that doesn't make sense, and there are emotionally-constipated real women (and emotionally fluent real men, I married one actually, god knows the kind of thing I enjoy in fiction would be an utter dealbreaker in real life), but in my head this kind of narrative is strongly gendered male.
It sounds from other comments like maybe I should check out _Devil Wears Prada_ fandom - the fashion magazine aspect is a turn-off but maybe people are writing cool sf or fantasy AUs? - so I'll do that, but I'd love other recs for emotionally-incompetent women (and their eventual happy endings).
To expand a little further, I do have het favorite stories as well as slash, but off the top of my head I would say they often feature either a) an emotionally-incompetent male half of the couple or b) a love triangle providing the emotional repression. I can only think of a couple of pairings, offhand, where a woman is usually bringing an equal or majority share of the angst purely on the strength of her own issues - Ranma/Akane, although even then, Akane usually seems to sort her shit out before Ranma does, and Buffy/Spike, which is outstanding for this.
Thoughts? Recs? Condemnation of my appalling sexism? (Hey, identifying it is the first step, right?)
