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Fandom Stats and Other Interesting Things

On Fanlore, there is an article on transformative fandom which sets the tone for this post:

PoliticsFirst, it's political. I find many mainstream texts problematically essentialist (that is, they are chock full of sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, etc). Transformative works, as the name implies, can engage with texts in a way which allows me to transform those aspects, and actively speak back about the things I love, and the issues I find offensive and ethically dubious...
... I think it's very feminist that so many women take part in this form of art practice, and that they can use it as a forum for talking about issues which are often silenced or stereotyped in the mainstream, like positive sexuality, polyamory, rape, misogyny, sexual harassment, domesticity, etc.
It's because of my interest in the political side of transformative works and their communities of practice (and remix cultures more broadly) that I volunteered to help build the Organization for Transformative works. Fanworks = activism for me.
In regards to romantic relationships:

Second, it's about love...I mean transformative love from friendship to lovers or vice-versa. I mean love that isn't clearly defined in our culture, like frenemies or polyamory or asexuality.
Love is treated with such suspicion in mainstream literature; it's hard to find works which take it seriously without devolving into "isms". I'm deeply unsatisfied by most (but not all) mainstream books and films about love, with their relentless focus on heterosexual romances. They are often ghettoised as "women's literature," and chock full of misogyny and stereotypes... 
This point will be addressed later, especially since the authors creating these transformative works violate the rules they set out.

By announcing that transformative works are indeed political and have a political motive, it then involves poking into the political orientation of the author writing these works. For example, the statement that love is 'not well defined' in our culture suggests that love is not promoted or is denigrated. If the argument made was in regards to pornography and its mass promotion and consumption, that is an argument anti-porn feminists, Christians, and those on the Left and Right can be in agreement on. But that is not the argument made.

First, we must discuss why there is a 'lack of love', and why so many stories devolve into 'isms'. I assume the largest 'ism' is misogyny, which is oddly amusing considering how many writers of transformative fandom are women themselves.

Second, the OP is complaining about 'heteronormative' romance. There is indeed a market for same-sex romance and there are publishing houses dedicated to M/M and F/F content. You are free to pursue them and create your own stories; break the wheel, so to speak. Yet you do not. Heterosexual romances, like it or not, are the bane of our society because it is how humans reproduce. Since women are overwhelmingly the authors and creators of romance stories and have been since human history has been recorded, this is a self-defeating point.

For a more interesting perspective, I found the following blogs. They are not from 'straight white males', and what they produced is quite valuable.

Here is a post on data on AO3's users. Of note:

Demographics
  • Age - The average age of respondents was 25 years.
  • Gender - More respondents selected Genderqueer than Male.
  • Sexuality - Only 38% of respondents selected Heterosexual.
  • GSRM - 54% of respondents identified as a gender, sexual or romantic minority.
  • Ethnicity - 78% selected White as their sole response.

 The data itself is from 2013-2015, so it would be interesting to see the changing face of fandom as the years progress. However, one thing is clear: the 16-year-olds of FFnet's yesteryear had siblings who grew up on Twitter and now identify as 'non binary'. This gender categorization was once limited to Tumblr, and is not in the public lexicon with legislation being passed to make government documents like birth certificates gender neutral. This generation, plump from social justice activism and keen to find a new identity, are now projecting their identity through the written word, and by extension, fandom.

By the by, it is well known that white women, in the under-18 and 20-24 age range dominate fanfiction. This, too, also has a political motivation:

Fanfic is, by and large, written by women. It’s a creative voice that fills a void left in Hollywood as well as in publishing houses. Only 9% of spec scripts (for movies) sold between 2010 and 2012 were written by women. In 2010, 84% of the reviewers for the New York Review of Books were men and 83% of the books they reviewed were also by men. Female writers make up only 29% of TV staff jobs, a drop of 1.5% from last season, with things looking even bleaker for minorities, who hold only 13.7 percent of TV staff writer jobs. All of these facts add up to one thing - these days, writing is utterly dominated by middle aged, white men. They floods our televisions, our bookshelves, and our movie screens and sometimes we fall in love with the characters but maybe we don’t see the story we wanted told. So we write fic. 

I can assure you that romance publishers are overwhelmingly dominated by women, and so are other sectors if you care to look. And I should also mention that in Hollywood, it's not dominated by white men. Fanfic is a way for these disenfranchised women to fight the patriarchy - but don't you dare use the white man's methods of criticism or deconstruction. That's for them, silly.

This is only one aspect of it. According to the AO3 post, a majority of these young women consume M/M fics - despite being 'non binary' or a sexuality other than heterosexual. Is there a draw to these stories?

According to...this individual, there might be:

Lately, the idea that slash shippers are straight girls ruining series with their homosexual fetishization has been going around a lot. That’s bullshit. The more I think about it, the more bullshit it is...After all, fanfiction is a reactionary medium. It exists as a dialogue with the series that it is about, and with our culture at large. The reason for the popularity of slash fiction lies there. Let me explain.
I would argue that fetishization of homosexuality, in this context, refers to disrespectfully reducing the dimensions of a character down to their (often non-canon) homosexuality. I do not think that is what slash writers do. There is a huge focus in fic-writing communities on being accurate to the character. The majority of fic writers put a great deal of effort into making their interpretations as close to the original text and as human as possible. And not only that, but it seems to me that a lot of writers who fail to do that (and are accused of fetishization) are quite new to writing, and it’s more that they don’t have the skills to render characters dimensionally than that they don’t have the intention. The abundance of people who apologize for being out of character speaks to that immensely, in my opinion. 

If we are talking about being 'accurate' to the characters here, that is a huge vat of bullshit. It's not even about keeping characters in character - it's about being reactionary. And why are they written that way? Simple:

And then, of course, because the majority of characters in these series are male, the majority of the screen time goes to men. The majority of the interactions are between men. The majority of the well-developed relationships, generally friendly, are between men. A great deal of the time, if the male lead gets into a straight relationship, his friendship with the other male characters is still more developed  than his relationship with her. Those friends nearly always get more screen time and character development than she does.
I think another main contributing factor is (internalized) sexism. People are told all the time, overtly or subtly, that stories about women are not worth telling. A lot of the time it’s phrased as “they don’t sell well.” So female characters are often reduced to supporting characters for men, or even plot-irrelevant tokens and hastily done romantic sub-plots. Even in real life, women’s stories and women’s lives get less attention than men’s. Society tells us that a woman’s time is worth less, that her body is more important than her brain, that women are shallow and petty. Society tells us that femininity in itself is a character flaw. In the world of media, a man can be anything. But while there is a decent range of female characters, all too often, they’re written as women first and people second.
We are taught to be uninterested in female stories. We are taught that female stories are uninteresting. And because of that enforced sexism, even the few well-developed female characters we do get are often interpreted as having stepped out of line by refusing to be passive and petty, and reduced to stereotypes or omitted in fan-works.
The last reason that I think slash is so over-represented in fanfiction is that female desire is still seen as taboo, unsightly, or even ridiculous. People don’t feel comfortable writing about female pleasure because we’re taught that female pleasure shouldn’t exist.  

Take a moment to digest that. M/M fanfiction, written by biological women, is done as a reactionary movement towards bigoted, sexist men. Women cannot feel pleasure or desire, so they seek it by writing about male characters who dominate the screens. But did we not just read how women are underrepresented in the media? How does it serve your argument by saying misogyny is to blame; how women are denied their pleasure, yet completely exclude them from relationships all because of their biology?

M/M fics, by this argument, is inherently misogynistic. Women are not people, but men can do anything. The women writing these fics feel they are getting back at society and, in turn, transforming the male characters they love into little more than sexual objects who exist for their pleasure alone.

Tell me: who is the real sexist? How is promoting gay-centric stories and the stories of gay men (and lesbian women and their stories/pairings hardly get any attention from anyone) supposed to help women? Isn't that...misogynistic?

To someone with a brain, the answer would be yes. If you complain that women are being denied their voice, their pleasure, and their very existence, yet do not write them on an even playing ground with the men, you are sexist. By admitting men have better stories; that their relationships are better and their sex is better, you are arguing that women's existence comes second to men, and gay men most of all.

 Here's another explanation:

Several people have also spoken to me about the desire to go against the norm, to seek out the queer relationships which are rare in the mainstream media, and subvert common romantic narratives which are heterosexist and unconsciously power-imbalanced. Fandom is often seen as the only place which makes it possible to do this, and if the source canon doesn’t contain interesting F/F potential, M/M is the obvious choice to latch onto.

...Some women dislike reading about women in fanfic because they find themselves identifying too closely with the situations described. If a fic includes issues which are uncomfortable or triggering to some readers, then a male protagonist can sometimes provide a buffer that allows the reader to examine the topic more objectively.
...Stories about men are less likely to include the everyday gender-based upsets that women are most familiar with. While there can be any number of problematic tropes about men which are rooted in sexism, these are less likely to register with female readers - as are inaccuracies or poor writing, especially when it comes to smut.
 Even though fandom is a female space, it is not free of misogyny. From disproprtionate amounts of hate towards female characters, to tired heterosexist love cliches, fanfic authors can often draw on and unconsciously perpetuate the misogyny of mainstream culture.

In order to fight the Patriarchy, you are going to exclude women because of 'heterosexist' norms and argue implicitly they come second to gay men. Wow! How progressive! Stunning and brave, like how American feminists were 'beaten into submission' by transgender women!

Here's a perspective from a self-professed asexual...who writes a lot of gay porn:

  • At this point, very early on in my story telling career, all women who are written exist only to further the more important story lines of the men who are semi-interested in their existence.  Wives exist only to exalt their husband’s virtures and/or compliment their strengths.  Daughters exist only to highlight how gloriously good at everything their fathers are and/or how much better the sons are.  Sisters exist only to make their brothers lives simpler by dealing with anything that requires domestic effort.  Mothers largely do not exist but if they do, they are patient and angelic and often dead.
  • Women are often portrayed as ‘harpies’ or ‘bitches’ or ‘illogical’.  They have ridiculous desires and expectations that try to to impose limits on the whims of the men they are attached to.  Their only personality at this point is to try to domesticate/capture their men and therefore ruin the man’s infinite potential.
  • Women are, more often than not, murdered, abused or dead
  • Nobody notices or cares the horrors the women of the story live through, and when any woman tries to point out these abuses, they are ignored or condescended to.  The Men have Survived Worse 

And how is this remedied, after public school is done with? The author doesn't write about women. She, an asexual, writes about gay men having lots of sex. 

How about a perspective from this post-modernist bingo lingo?

The centrality of romantic recognition to genderfuck slash stories frames their questions of identity and gender, asking how much of desire is generated by a person and how much by their physical attributes and cultural attributions. Male/ male slash explores sexual dynamics via crossgender identification, placing two often highly masculine men in romantic relations to portray love that eludes the hierarchies often inscribed in heterosexual relationships. Lamb and Veith (1986), in fact, suggest that slash’s love between male protagonists explores relationships with a gender equality impossible in heterosexual pairings. Classic slash narratives are closely aligned with the feminine genre of romance...
(...) The romance plot has often been criticized as a patriarchal structure (Modleski 1980); when slash fans take it up, it can be difficult to see where texts criticize patriarchal structures and where they reinscribe them.

 You hear that, bigots? It's about equality. We're fighting the patriarchy by excluding women, demeaning them in fandom, and putting gay men and straight men who are turned gay by non binary women first. I'm sure you'll fight those Alabama abortion laws now, fam!

Now, wait a minute. Maybe it has nothing to do with internalized misogyny...but it's entirely the fault of our racist, homophobic patriarchy:

 I don’t think fans prefer M/M slash because they’ve internalized misogyny. We write and read slash to turn ourselves on, and a majority of slash fandom is turned on by men.Note that I am only talking about sexwriting here; there is far, far more to fandom, but this is where my intellectual and personal investment is. To be totally clear: I agree that the overall lack of minority representation in fandom reflects and may further the same problem in the wider culture by shutting down minority voices. The lack of POC characters reflects racism. There’s sexism and homophobia behind many fans’ insults to female characters, and expressions of distaste about female sexuality. But I disagree with the explanations too often given about why there’s so much M/M slash. Problem is, these debates lump together race, gender representation in general, and gender representation in slash as if they are all explained by culturally-imposed prejudices, and I think that’s a mistake. A person’s desire is not culturally imposed the way prejudice is. Its expression may be, but I think erotic object choice is inborn.
My problem is that people have used unconvincing stats about authorship to categorically dismiss the idea that women’s sexual desire for men drives the predominance of M/M fics. This implies that a majority of slash is about men for some other reason than desire, for a cultural and political reason: because (at least some of) the women who write and read it have internalized misogyny and are thus complicit in patriarchy. We write sex about men because we don’t like women. Some bloggers are careful to say that no one person is automatically guilty of this, but saying that the fandom is collectively culpable indicts the desires and pleasures of everyone who enjoys M/M slash."
Read the first line, and then read the last. First, you don't think fans prefer slash because they hate women. To conclude your argument, the women read and write slash because they don't like women. Therefore, you have some degree of hatred towards your sex, so, in order to fight the patriarchy, you write about overwhelmingly white men fucking each other. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Some comments of note:

 I write sex in the way I find sexy. I find men incredibly sexy. Cocks, man, what do.
(...)he Mary Sue argument doesn’t happen with slashwriting. I can write two men acting on their desires in a way that insulates me, personally, and I can explore characters without that little ugly MS lurking on my shoulder.
Really goes into the whole, "I write slash because I find these men incredibly sexy, but if these men approached me in real life I would cry rape or accuse them of being members of the patriarchy."

Because that's what you people do in real life. Your fantasies, though, say otherwise.

Another comment of note:

Her description of the experience of reading and writing embodied women–“the intimate, the shaky, angry, violently frustrated feeling that so often accompanies the incredible relief at realizing that other people feel this way too. That other people experience the world — the misogynistic, patriarchal, racist, homophobic world — in the same or similar ways to you, and have all sorts of embodied experiences within it, glorious and painful and loving and happy and dull’–that’s a big part of why I crave writing about women, too, and particularly sex writing about women, whose sexualities have so long been denied and/or co-opted by the patriarchy.
(...) I also just find stories about women super super hot. And I DO use fic as a masturbatory aid, among many other things, but my personal pattern goes something like:
  • Scenario 1: I am in my analytical-brain, not particularly looking to get off. Now I prefer to read and write well-crafted prose about compelling characters, many of whom, for me, are women.
  • Scenario 2: I have had a good day, maybe even fooled around with a real-life lady recently. I got turned on, and she didn’t act like I was weird or gross! That makes me feel good about myself and about her! Now I am alone and looking to get off. I prefer to read gritty, realistic sex writing involving embodied women.
  • Scenario 3: I have had kind of a rough day, though nothing for the record books. Now I’m looking to have a satisfying reading experience, and also get off. I prefer to read well-crafted, character-driven, non-heteronormative sex writing involving either men or women. Its levels of representation and realism, at this point, come secondary to whether it convinces me of the world it’s creating and the relationships within that world, and whether the sex is written in a fresh or compelling way.
  • Scenario 4: I spent the day having interactions that required me to directly confront my personal baggage around sexuality, much of which involves being told, by men, that my preferred modes of sexual expression are weird or wrong. I feel triggered, unattractive, and uncomfortable in my own body. I prefer to read the most fantastical, divorced-from-reality m/m smut I can possibly lay my hands on.
That’s what I men when I say m/m is sometimes easier for me to read, for reasons relating to misogyny and patriarchy.
Quelle surprise. Women who complain about sexism in the real world find they cannot empathize with women in fiction, despite demanding that there be more women in fiction to fight sexism. You don't even take your own advice, do you ladies? Your own sex triggers you, upsets you, and disgusts you. Men, predominately white men, the same ones you hate, despise and wish to destroy, happen to have pretty nice cocks you like to fantasize going into another white man's anus. You love them being attractive, charismatic, three dimensional...but the minute these men appear to you in real life, out comes the Crayola hair dye and the false rape accusations, replete with the 'Stop Kavanaugh' signs.

You don't like female characters? Fine. But don't go around telling me it isn't about misogyny - true misogyny - when you openly admit you hate female characters on the basis of their sex. They get in the way of that gay love; they are uninteresting and one-dimensional, because the 'white men' who create TV shows put all the emphasis on straight white males (that you write as being gay anyways). Gay men are far more interesting, and you all are in it for the porn, aren't you? You love, love love that gay sex so much, characterizations can be thrust upside down like those thrusting cocks you love to fantasize pumping inside of you but won't dare touch IRL.

It's not about characterizations. It's about the porn, and satisfying women who overwhelmingly hate female characters and despise M/F pairings because they are 'fundamentally' unequal. By saying this, you are giving the go ahead to gay men being the uppermost echelon of our caste system; a Natural Aristocrat if you will. If women are uninteresting and cannot command the screen the same as men, you have zero right to demand more of them, because you don't even care for the content you are demanding or creating.

In short: hot, sexy white men among different swathes of fandom set these women's libidos into overdrive but they do not want men like them in real life giving them a romp in the sheets. They'd rather have their porn and dildos; their recycled, rehashed plots they say is better than those cliched het stories all because two cocks are involved.

Take it from someone like me: the minute you actually start being analytical, you start seeing fissures and cracks and realize the porn is the only selling point to these shallow, sex starved women who love the white men they so despise. And it's all out of the mouths of babes.

For a long time I've wondered what the draw towards slashfic is, and these are some pretty 'academic' reasons if I've ever seen them. The politicization of fanfic is to be expected; with the rise of social media and Millennials graduating from college and entering the 'real world' Conservative Inc thought would cure them, they present new problems in a kulturkampf.

The women and 'women' - non binary individuals are overwhelmingly young women, many of whom choose to take testosterone to fight the binary - writing these stories keep insisting it's about taking back a realm denied to them. They want to fight 'white' Hollywood writers and innate societal sexism. They want an end to queerbaiting, queer bashing, and the poo-pahing of sexual minorities. Since AO3 is split between heterosexual college women and non-binary college women, one thing is for sure: for all their want to defeat male sexism and misogyny, they only prove their detractors right with every M/M fic published.

It is not, and never has been, about respecting canon characters. The admission that because there are more male characters on screen and they 'identify' with them more means you like those men and their attributes, but don't like men having them in the real world. Overwhelmingly, the largest slash pairings on AO3: Dean/Castiel, John/Sherlock, Steve/Bucky, Tony/Steve, and countless more, involve white men. There is seldom any gay interracial pairings (with the exception of Shadowhunters, which has an official gay pairing). What does that say about these tolerant people who want to smash the patriarchy?

They want women to have a voice, yet these white women have such a craving for masculine, brooding, mysterious men. In the case of fanfic lesbians, we again have a dilemma: women who say they are not interesting in penis absolutely love reading, producing, and consuming M/M content with hunky, attractive white men.

Is it projection? A denial of their carnal desires? I do not know. I can tell you from mere observation that these 'non binary' and sexual minority women is that their sexuality fluctuates based on whatever fic they read. They'll cuddle their girlfriends while seeing two hunks go at it; to see them treat each other in ways they would see as abusive in real life. They write sex scenes where the semen flies free - and in some cases it's like a fire hydrant - and where consent isn't always on the table.

Of all these M/M stories, there is no consensus on whether they are 'fetishizing' the gay community or not. If anything, they subconsciously project their carnal desires of what they want in a (white) man, yet are too afraid or detest white men in real life. They look to the screen and see the traits they want in a man, but do not want men to show them the same respects.

They normalize sexual abuse; in the gay community, abuse is thrown under the rug. It's a dirty secret, and those who bother to discuss it are called homophobic - even if they are/were gay men themselves like Robert Oscar Lopez. These same people who, on their tumblr, reblog the importance of consent and how disgusting it is we live in a rape culture, consume and enjoy literature that involves male characters being sodomized and humiliated in the worst ways.

These same scenarios would be condemned if they happened to females. But as we've read, these individuals - overwhelmingly female - don't really care for their own sex. The accusation of 'internalized misogyny' is absolutely valid here, because you do not show anyone you're serious by placing females in last place with your emphasis on male/male stories. By arguing, 'Because we see men more, we empathize with men more, and so we like to see them have sex more,' you're not showing those heterosexists what's what. In fact, you're sympathizing with the men you claim to hate; the men you say are responsible for all the ills in the world.

AO3 is a mere reflection of the politicized state of fandom and fanfiction in general. It's not about creating good stories anymore - it's about checking off all the diversity boxes. Except that doesn't really happen; Marvel, currently the largest fandom on the website, has scores of M/M pairings...nearly all involving white men. Fight the white male patriarchy by making them screw each other. That'll fix the gender wars!

And what happens when you say no? What happens when you point out that these fair women and non binary warriors that their work isn't serving their interests, or any interests at all? That their stories are copycats, with terrible storylines and characters getting sodomized to the moon?

Why, your comment gets removed. They don't want your criticism; they want their consent for it. They don't want to hear the truth. They, like the Marburg virus, invade a space, inject their RNA into a fandom, and out it comes in a bleeding, haemorrhagic mess. If fandom is political, and the woke points get you views, then it says something about the future of fandom and fanfiction in general.

Despite being written by women, it's women who don't like their sex. It's women who view their sex as weak; who put them aside for the stories of white men they adore but don't want making love to them in real life. They do not want standards. They do not want to actually fight the cultural rot and make things better between the sexes. They, like it or not, are complacent in this cultural rot.

Fanfiction is meant to be reactionary. What are you reacting to? Will you get Silicon Valley to crash with your slashfic? Or are you writing it to get the US to open the borders?

It's activism, alright. But it's not activism for your future. You serve no one's interests but your own, and if you want to be political, someone is going to be your Tucker Carlson.
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