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badgalsasuke · 3 months ago

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Fujoshis fetishize gay men?

So this is more of an opinion essay/think piece on the never ending discourse regarding whether fujoshis fetishize gay men or not.

TW: discussions of rape and other forms of sexual assault. Crude language too.

First things first, let's define what is a fujoshi. The word fujoshi, which literally means ‘rotten’ and connotes the presumed, perversions of women who fantasize about male-male eroticism (Pagliassotti, 2013) are also widely considered to be heterosexual women who seek erotic content of homosexual men to fulfill their own sexual fantasies through a different lense, one that by removing the female character found in heterosexual romances, allows women to indulge in "perverted" writing without feeling the urge to condemn the text that'd otherwise happen if it was a fictional woman going through these scenarios.

Think of the amount of BL works depicting rape, kidnapping, sexual acts with dubious consent, physical assault such as choking or slapping and other forms of violence. In BL works these acts tend to be presented as desirable. The bottom, who is usually the one subjected to this violence, will say no to these acts but the top will ignore the pleads because he knows deep down the bottom desires what is happening to him. There lies the fantasy.

Under patriarchy women have a deeply complicated relationship with sex. As a woman you can exist as either the whore or the madonna. Women who enjoy sex proudly and loudly are quickly labelled as whores and thus degraded by both men and other women, becoming outcasts of society; for women sexuality is shameful and must be hidden at all costs but this of course, doesn't stop women from having sexual desires and urges. This creates a very interesting phenomenon; you want to mantain your respectability as a woman because you're not like one of those sluts that actively seek to be degraded through sex and penetration (all sex is degrading when you're penetrated, that is the patriarchal view of sex), but you still desire to be touched and feel physical pleasure so women end up developing "taboo" sexual fantasies, acts that normally you would be disgusted at, except in the privacy of your mind.

Naturally, the erotic content aimed at women consists for the the most part of a woman forced or coerced into sexual acts that she deep downs know she enjoys and actually wants. You cannot be a slut this way, you did not open your legs for a man he did it! her forced you! you didn't want to do the things he made you do because you're so pure you could have not thought about them in the first place! but he still made you reach an orgasm, didn't he? Women become passive agents during sex to avoid the stigmatization of slutshaming.

This of course is a reproduction of rape culture in media and is the reason why so many women became detractors of heterosexual erotica. That's where BL comes into question; take the female character out of the equation and instead insert a male character with a preference for penetration and have him go through the same stuff, bonus points if he's very feminine looking. The character is still being assaulted and violated but by making him a man instead of a woman you distance him from the female audience thus minimazing the guilt and shame women'd get from reading such stories.

It's no surprise that these stories have become so popular among women, they have the erotic taboo elements so many fantasize about while making sure women don't see themselves directly in the abuse.

This is the issue that gay men in real life have with fujoshis and BL as a whole. And I get it.

It's understandable why gay men find unappealing the idea of being used as self-inserts put through grueling scenarios to fulfill somebody else's sexual fantasies and that somebody else being someone that will never have to go through the struggles of a gay person will, similar to lesbians not liking being objectified in porn by straight men for the pleasure of other straight men.

There's other cases of marginalized communities being used as some type of doll for sexual scenarios, for example black men who are often fetishized over their penises by white people to the point there's a whole porn category for it: "my wife tries a BBC in front of me", "Twink destroyed by a BBC", "Sucking a BBC for the first time", and many more titles likes that in every porn site you can find. Asian women are also fetishized by westerners, they're attributed naivety and innocence traits and are portrayed as naturally submissive to fulfill a borderline pedophilic fantasy. Latinos deal with fetishization too, as a Mexican myself I can attest that latinas and latinos have been painted as oversexual beings that always want to have sex and are always down to have sex with anyone available.

All this fetishization leads to dehumanization of the group you're protraying in your erotic works or media so of course it will have its detractors.

So yes, I can acknowledge the feelings of gay men regarding certain BL stories. Those certain stories definitely dominate the BL market but here's where I have to say those are not the only type of stories you can find in BL and that's not fully what the term fujoshi encompasses.

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that fujoshis are considered to be mostly straight women. I think that is an unfair generalization to make, there's also queer women and trans people, both men and women, that proclaim themselves as fujoshis who have found a safe space in BL fan communities to explore sexuality hand in hand with GL content and communities. After all BL is still queer content that can be and is enjoyed by queer people.

Aditionally, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with straight women enjoying queer content. In the same way queer people can enjoy media depicting heterosexual romance I believe straight people can also enjoy queer media. There's a difference between a someone who's fetishizing a group of people and someone who's engaging with gay media like they would for any other type of media. I do find it to be a dangerous path to act like it's wrong for heterosexual people to enjoy queer media and push them away from it, queer media should be consumed as much as straight media.

This aversion to straight women who enjoy mlm stories has led to shippers of mlm pairings from media that's not sold as BL (Naruto, JJK, etc.) to frantically trying to prove they're not a straight girl. Again, it defitnitely needs to be told that not everyone who ships mlm is a straight girl, these are still queer spaces occupied by queer people, however there's still nothing wrong if you're a straight girl that ships mlm because anyone can (or should be able to) notice queer subtext, which leads to my next point.

When it comes to online discourse surrounding fujoshis it's always presumed that mlm ships from non-bl works came to be because a silly horny straight girl saw two boys breathe next to each other and decided they would look hot together regardless of how they're actually written in their respective canon works, I'm sure there's definitely some mlm ships out there that abide by these standards but not all of them do. I've noticed that when it comes to mlm ships that aren't endgame but have actual homoromantic writing in their canon work homophobes tend to weaponize the term fujoshi against its shippers, hence the frantic need in so many mlm shippers to prove that they're not the stereotypical fujoshi.

I believe that is the harmful fujoshi stereotype here, not that straight girls like to ship boys with other boys but that the shipping is shallow. There is this assumption that no one takes homoromantic and homoerotic writing seriously and everybody is just here for the shits and giggles, which I find quite frankly offensive. It's anti-intellectualism to pretend there's no place for interpretations through queer lenses of any type of media.

As a SNS shipper I can guarantee everybody that's not in the Naruto fandom that shippers in this community take queer analyses and readings of the manga seriously here. Sure, some people joined because they thought both Naruto and Sasuke looked cute together or because they accidentally kissed and presumed that moment to be fujoshi fanservice but once they're in they start seeing all the queer writing in the actual manga. SNS isn't the only ship where this occurs.

SNS shippers care about the writing of the manga and its characters perhaps more than any other subfandom in the fandom, to the point several shippers were able to predict what was gonna happen in the manga years before it actually happened.

On top of all that we have endless metas, masterposts, essays and manifestos that show SNS shippers having such deep understading of Kishimoto's writing and the characters he's created. SNS fanworks have dialogues that are exactly what the characters would actually say, in the case of By My Side even the panels are the same, you can read the full doujinshi here. For more examples of other doujinshi predicting manga chapters click here.

Fetishizers can't predict the writing of a piece of work because they wouldn't care about the writing in the first place, they're just here to see two guys suck each other off.

So when the term fujoshi is weaponized by het!shippers towards mlm shippers (not just SNS shippers) I find what they're actually trying to do is shut down any and every queer reading of media and to paint all shippers as shallow & mindlessly horny morons in an attempt to delegitimize us and our arguments. You know how it goes "why does everything have to be gay? why can't they just be friends? y'all always turn everything gay". In some cases they take it a step further and start accusing mlm shippers of supporting incest to the point they've even created the term "pseudo-incest" that supposedly represents two men with no blood relation but have such a close relationship they could be brothers (so basically, not incest). What is funny is that this term is exclusively reserved for mlm ships, you'll never hear anyone use it for a f/m ship where both characters have refered to each other as siblings even if they don't have blood relation. Textbook homophobia.

Queer and straight people can spot queer subtext (that sometimes isn't subtext but actual text), this does not make them fetishizers, to imply such to silence their analyses is homophobic.

So, if you're a straight girl who noticed the queer subtext of any media then don't be ashamed or scared of it because you liked it, don't let the homophobes corner you, *you* are the one who understood the text. And if you're a queer person then defend your stance even more proudly, don't be one of those pick-me gays that go "well, I'm gay/bi and I don't see it as gay" just because they want acceptance from the homophobes. Inquire, question the status quo, look deeper into the meaning of things, I promise you once you spot the first sign of gayness you will find more layers to it.

Finally, regarding the explicit sexual content in gay media:

Y'all have very weird opinions on bottoming. I already posted about it here. But basically y'all need to stop seeing the bottom as the girl of the relationship and need to stop seeing being penetrated as an act of humilliation. I know some people like when the traditional top/bottom dynamic is subverted (I do too!) y'know when they make the top shorter than the bottom, or the top is the feminine one or stuff like that but you gotta keep in mind that no matter how they look, they're still both men so it's still a gay ship, the bottom being a feminine man doesn't make him a girl, that's still a man.

Likewise, there's nothing wrong with explicit sexual content. Over the past couple years people have taken this weird almost puritanical stance on sex scenes not just of gay media but all media where they just want them to not be included at all and it's just bizarre, there's nothing wrong with sex (and no, you're not being oppressed or traumatized by a movie because it has sex scenes my god).

Personally, I will always defend sex scenes in gay media. Give me more The Handmaiden idgaf. Gay sex has been taboo, criminalized and hidden for decades, it should now be CELEBRATED and SHOWCASED as the act of love it is as much as straight sex. Furthermore, you don't have to choose one or the other when it comes to gay media that's sexual and the one that keeps its rating PG-13. You can have both, you should fight and demand to have both, you can have your Heartstopper and your Interview With The Vampire. I really don't like when some people go "finally a show where the gays aren't always f*cking" I sense sinister vibes...

This might be perhaps a hot take but I also don't think we should shy away from queer stories that depict sexual abuse either. I understand that they can be triggering for some people but this should not lead to censorship which can be quite arbitrary and cause the persecution of creatives that wish to explore sexulity beyond the confines of what's "proper" or "adequate".

Oh also, maybe we shouldn’t generalize the entire BL industry as an industry that only produces “problematic” stories, there’s a lot of variety out there and it’s actually really easy to find. But the problematic stories should still exist, again I'm not calling for censorship but rather a different aproach to our engagement with these stories.

In conclusion, some fujoshis definitely have weird behaviours towards actual gay men and the way they choose to depict them in their works but also the term fujoshi has been weaponized to silence queer readings of media and art by homophobes, the two can co-exist.

Reference:

Pagliassotti Dru., Boys’ Love manga special section, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2013)

#Re-upload with a few touches that I had forgotten to add #I meant to add these new segments in a reblog but my dumbass deleted the og post

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