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fangasmagorical · 6 years

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When women aren’t attractive to men, we call them disgusting: a primer on fujoshi discourse.

This is a very long post. Can I get a summary?

🏳️‍🌈 "Fujoshi" means "a woman that straight men don't find appealing because she is involved in fandom in a way straight men can’t exploit." That is all it means.

🏳️‍🌈 The use of fujoshi as a synonym for homophobe is a result of misogyny.

🏳️‍🌈 Fujoshi are actually less likely to be homophobic than their non-fandom peers.

🏳️‍🌈 Fujoshi are mostly (70% or more) queer women, not straight women.

🏳️‍🌈 While attacking your oppressors can be cathartic or empowering, queer women are generally not the oppressors you intend to attack when you say "fujoshi are all evil." Nonetheless, queer women are the people you are attacking.

🏳️‍🌈 If M/M content made by women is uncomfortable for you to see, for any reason, then you don't have to see it. Many tools for blacklisting content exist specifically to ensure your comfort and safety.

🏳️‍🌈 Using those tools is more effective than trying to silence women in fandom because those tools are more customizable, and because queer media can and should be available to all people who want it.

🏳️‍🌈 Criticism and hatred are not synonymous.

🏳️‍🌈 Women are capable of creating and consuming art just as well as their male peers.

🏳️‍🌈 Queer men are not a unanimous front, and do not universally feel that M/M content written by women should be banned.

🏳️‍🌈 Women's sexuality is reviled throughout western society. Some women choose to reclaim the vocabulary used to harm them.

🏳️‍🌈 Women make plenty of non-M/M fan content, which should not and cannot be ignored when discussing women's contributions to fandom and art.

🏳️‍🌈 You're not obligated to like these things, but you shouldn't use your dislike as an excuse to be hateful.

🏳️‍🌈 If you have more questions, you can ask me them, but I will not be kind to people who do not respect me when asking me things.

What is a fujoshi?

A woman whose engagement with fandom makes her unattractive to straight men. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Just a woman whose enjoyment of media makes straight men react negatively to her.

A “fake gamer girl,” of sorts, though the "fujoshi” applies primarily to animation fandoms.

Many women self-describe as fujoshi as a point of pride, because women don’t exist for male consumption anyway.

Why do people keep saying fujoshi are bad/evil/homophobic/etc?

Because hating women is a fundamental tenet of many modern societies, and the use of a non-English term allows misogynists to obfuscate their hatred of women, so that they can engage in misogyny while still looking openly progressive.

In particular, queer people who have been harmed by cisheteronormative society see women in fandom as an ideal target for harassment, because they have relatively little social power to fight back, but can be easily painted as violent and oppressive.

But I heard fujoshi exploit and sexually abuse real life gay men?

Those people are called “sexual harassers” and “homophobes,” and while they exist within fujoshi groups, they also exist everywhere else, and usually at a higher rate.

However, “fujoshi” doesn’t mean “sexual harasser.” It means “woman who is unappealing to straight men because of her fandom.”

Well, aren’t fujoshi all cis and straight? So, looking at queer stuff is inherently exploitative.

There’s two issues with that belief. First, queer media is not media that should be restricted.

By saying queer media should only be engaged with by people who are queer in the exact same was as depicted, you deny questioning people access to information, and deny actual cis/straight people important empathy building opportunities.

Because fictional characters aren’t real, and thus cannot be hurt by straight people, they make especially helpful teaching tools. If a straight person gets confused or upset and says something harmful about a fictional character, there is no direct, real world victim. This gives straight people to opportunity to learn and better themselves before interacting with real queer people.

Queer fiction keeps queer people safer by offering an introductory course in “how to not be a bigot” to straight people. And, as much as we might prefer that straight people just stop being bigots, that’s not going to happen without information, experience, and exposure.

Making queer media inaccessibly has always been a primary tool of open queerphobes, because it makes queer people feel inhuman to ourselves and others. Making queer media inaccessible means making sure that even cis/straight people who would otherwise ally with queer people don’t understand our needs, or even our existence at all, and those inadvertently support our oppression.

Second, most fujoshi are queer, whether by orientation or by gender. And by most, I mean roughly 3/4 fujoshi are queer in some way.

But I enjoy making fun of fujoshi! It makes me feel better about myself as a queer person who has been persecuted before!

You can simply replace “fujoshi” with “homophobes” in your posts and discussions, and it will be more accurate while still giving you the power trip of lashing out against an abusive system.

When you say fujoshi are responsible for hurting you, you’re actually saying “queer female artists are the reason I am oppressed.” It’s simply untrue, and it also discourages coalition building, which prevents queer people from building truly safe spaces and fighting effectively against cisheteronormativity. It is, in effect, the “divide” part of “divide and conquer.”

Also, you should also consider, where possible, seeking professional help in processing your feelings of powerlessness, as lashing out in this way is often a sign of trauma, and you deserve to be mentally healthy.

Obviously this isn’t possible for everyone, and as queer people, we are especially unlikely to have access to mental health resources. But, attacking other queer people is not an especially great way to assert our power over the social systems that have abused us.

But the stories and art that fujoshi make are uncomfortable for me to read! I don’t like seeing them!

I have an exercise for you. It will help you to exert power over your surroundings, reduce your stress levels, and ultimately allow you to lead a healthier and happier life.

Ignoring things you find uncomfortable is hard. It is often impossible, particularly if you are, as so many queer people are, dealing with trauma.

But avoiding them is very simple in most cases. Utilize blacklist functions on sites such as tumblr, and search removal functions on sites such as AO3.

For information on how to blacklist, go here.

For information on search result removal, go here.

Why should I have to do that? Shouldn’t fujoshi stop doing things that make me uncomfortable, instead?

If we buy into the idea that everyone should stop making any content that makes another person uncomfortable, there would be literally nothing made, ever again. Someone is always uncomfortable. I, personally, have a PTSD trigger related to a common household appliance that was used to physically abuse me: the oven.

If we banned all use of ovens in all media, almost nothing other than a small amount of news shows would exist, and only until there’s an oven manufacturing recall.

More importantly, racists, homophobes, transphobes, etc are made uncomfortable by the simple existence of queer people and people of color and other marginalized groups. The argument that all art and all content should be comfortable for all people means that anything which shows the existence of, say, a brown trans person such as myself cannot exist.

In contrast, if we make the individual responsible for their own comfort, that means the proliferation of tools such as blacklists that are infinitely customizable, leaving people such as myself able to block out all mention of ovens without needing to worry about disabled people who rely on baking their meals because they lack the muscle control to fry things on a stovetop being denied access to important information.

Isn’t being critical of media you engage with important though? For progessivism and leftism and stuff?

Being critical is important. Be aware of the flaws in media, understand its implications.

But being outright censorious is counterproductive.

Being “critical” should not mean “being hateful towards.” That is a misuse of criticism that is propagated by abusers to make their abuse of others seem acceptable.

In the same way that “gender critical” tends to mean “hateful of trans people” rather than “rightfully suspicious of the white, western gender binary and the ways it oppresses people,” “media critical” is often used as an excuse to engage in blatant hatred while pretending to be thoughtful.

Even if you personally don’t mean “critical” as a disguise for abuse, the vast majority of the media-critical people who pass on this hatred of women in fandom do mean it as a disguise for abuse.

Being critical is important, but being critical and being hateful are not the same.

But since fujoshi are women, they can never understand what it’s like to be MLM ,and I don’t want them to ruin the concept!

This assumes that women are incapable of understanding the experiences of men. Remember, most fujoshi are queer, so “queerness” and even “same gender attraction” are already things they experience personally.

The only salient difference between a bi woman who writes about the main couple in Yuuri on Ice and a bi man who writes about the main couple in Yuuri on Ice is that the woman is a woman.

It also assumes that all genderqueer people have completely static genders, and no experiences that they could ever consider belonging to another gender.

As many trans people who realized they were trans later in life will tell you, this is fundamentally untrue. Some trans women are drawn to M/M content because they once considered themselves men, even after they recognize their womanhood. Some trans men are drawn to M/M content even before they realize they are men, because there is an appeal to relationships that don’t involve women, as they are not women. Some genderqueer people enjoy M/M content because they have dysphoria relating to female sexuality. Some nonbinary people enjoy MLM content because they prefer to see bodies like their own represented in erotic fiction.

To assume that fujoshi are incapable of understanding or engaging with M/M fiction is to assume that women are incapable of the emotional and intellectual abilities of men, and that trans people simply don’t exist.

Well, okay, but what about all the MLM who say fujoshi are bad?

What about all the MLM who say fujoshi are good?

The fact that there are queer men on both sides of this discussion suggests that other things need to be taken into consideration when making your decision on women in fandom.

But, sometimes fujoshi say things like, “being gay is a sin,” and that’s really horrible!

Actually, these women are saying that their own sexuality is considered a sin, which is an accurate statement. The prevailing powers in our societies hate female sexual expression with an immense passion. Female sexuality is opposed by many major religious groups, functionally all conservative governments, and anyone who has ever called a woman a slut/whore/prude/frigid bitch/etc because of the way she engages with her sexuality.

In playfully describing themselves as being sinful, these women are robbing bigots of the ability to hurt them by making the same claim genuinely.

Even if it were the case that these women are claiming being queer is a sin, as most of them are queer anyway, it would still be a reference to themselves, and thus an act of reclamation.

You may have heard people respond to being told to “go to hell” that if hell exists, it’ll be better than a heaven full of homophobic douchebags, or with phrases like “there’s a throne waiting for me,” or even simply saying “thank you.”

An extremely similar rhetorical mechanism is at play, where people reclaim the words that are being used to oppress them, and turn them into self empowerment.

In the comparatively rare cases when women in fandom are genuinely homophobic towards real men, other women in fandom tend to react negatively to that and re-educate those homophobes. This is because, again, fujoshi are primarily queer.

If fujoshi are all queer women or whatever, why don’t they make F/F content instead?

There’s a few answers to that.

The first is that they do actually make F/F content. Quite a lot of it. The majority of fic writers and fanartists in all major fandoms are (queer) women. This includes fandoms where the bulk of content is not M/M like My Little Pony, Sailor Moon, Madoka Magica, Steven Universe, and so on.

(Edit note: as absurd as this is about to sound, I forgot fimfiction exists. When factoring for specialized archives like it and eqd, the majority of mlp creators are indeed men)

The second is that, mathematically, there are simply more male characters with more canon content to draw off of as a basis for fan exploration than there are women. More characters and more screentime means more detailed characterization, and thus, more fan content.

The third is that many women, particularly those with dysphoria and those with sexual trauma, have difficulty engaging with female characters as sexual and romantic objects. While it can be beneficial to re-integrate one’s sexuality with one’s own body, everyone who would benefit from that kind of thing needs to approach it on their own time in on their own terms: being able to control the situation is what prevents self-harm. Trying to force these women to explore female sexuality can be anywhere from uncomfortable to lethal, depending on the severity of the trauma.

Well I don’t like it!

That’s alright. You don’t have to like it. You simply have to respect that women exist, and are allowed to enjoy fiction the same way men are allowed to do so.

If you don’t want to see it, then there are tools that will enable you to avoid it. Everyone has their likes, dislikes, and hardline rejections.

I have other questions you didn’t even start to address here!!!!!!!!

Well, alright, I’m willing to talk about this subject in more detail, as long as you’re willing to be polite about it.

My ask box is open to you.

However, if you are simply going to come and claim yell that I’m a homophobe who hates gay men and/or myself, then I’m just going to make fun of you, so please try to be nice.

#shipping #fujoshi #fandom #misogyny #transphobia #reclamation #self empowerment #discourse #long post

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