agentmoppet:

So a scathing article on the fetishization of gay men by white women stumbled into my feed and I got pissed.

Rather than argue that there is no fetishization, I’m simply going to list a few of the reasons why I ship gay ships. Which – shock, horror – are nothing like what you’re suggesting, and paint a far richer picture than your eagerness to jump on your high horse and ‘burn the hypocrite’ would suggest.

I ship gay ships because I’m sick of reading heterosexual romance with all its sexist stereotypes. Not including the het traits prevalent in yaoi, slash fiction focuses on the relationship between two personalities rather than the reinforcement of two gender roles or, even worse, the attempt at being edgy and feminist by doing nothing more than reversing those gender roles. Slash and Femmeslash – yes, believe it or not we can read both –  as they exist today have been molded by significantly different tropes and practices, and are therefore refreshingly free of those stereotypes that quite simply make me gag.

I ship gay ships because I don’t give a fuck about their gender. I don’t go out in search of a new ship by scrolling to find which two men I can fetishize next. I latch onto chemistry that often happens to be in the form of a bromance. Why is it always a bromance instead of a female friendship? Because female friendships of depth are still underrepresented in pop culture. Maybe you should write an article about that.

This brings me to my next point. Extending a bromance into a romance, to me, is the figurative equivalent of shoving a sword through the “no-homo” attitude that I see far too often. Just like my first point, this is a way of using slash fiction to counter sexism: male sexism. No homo? Full fucking homo. Get over it. I want to see more of it, not because it gets me off, but because it normalizes the natural extension of a male friendship into a gay romance, rather than reinforcing the concept that men should act as homo as they like but then get weirded out when love is brought into the mix.

Finally, slash fiction removes the vicarious appeal, and I like that. This is not the sort of romance that I’m meant to mentally slot myself into and then spend the rest of my life searching for, only to feel hideously incomplete if it doesn’t show. This is a romance experienced by two people who are not me. There is no ‘relateable female protagonist’ who I’m meant to model myself off, which means I am free to appreciate their happiness for them. Do you understand what I’m saying here? Because this is the most powerful point and the one that is most difficult to articulate. Slash fiction teaches me to appreciate the happiness of others, without then hinging my own happiness upon it. It teaches me that there can be just as much joy in playing the role of the Pansy or the Hermione who set up the two dorks, as there is in being the romantic heroine. It teaches me to appreciate the love that other people share without experiencing jealousy or aggression, which teaches me to be relaxed and happy in my own skin, and to value myself by qualities far removed from whether I’m single or taken.

Since you’ve stuck with me to the end, I actually am going to argue against the concept that the fetishization of lesbian porn by men is the same as the love of gay ships by women. It’s not. Women support gay romance in fiction to the same extent that they support it in real life. The issue that can arise with men supporting lesbian porn is that they often don’t also support those relationships as they exist in the real world.

Women read gay romance because it’s liberating. It squashes stereotypes and sexism, and allows us to read a romance that for once in our fucking lives does not require us to be either the damsel or the femme fatale.

We read it because gender and gender roles shouldn’t matter when it comes to romance, and if the only way we can get that is through unpublished, amateur fiction, then maybe you could throw us a goddamn bone and think twice before devaluing the richness that is slash fiction by reducing gay romance to a fetish.