Let's discuss MM Romance and the women who write it—who are the
vast majority of writers within the genre, followed by queer people outside the
mainstream binary (that is, they identify as genderfluid, genderqueer,
nonbinary, and so forth) and of course transgender people.
First, my credentials, since that is important. My name is
Megan Derr, if that wasn't already apparent. I am 36 years old. I've been
involved in MM since high school, though back then it was almost entirely slash
and yaoi, not the formalized MM Romance (MMR) genre that exists now. But we'll get to
that. I am asexual and biromantic, have a wife, two queer sisters, and
countless queer friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and peers. I have two BAs –
one in History, with a focus on Meiji Japan (I had initially planned to be an
academic/professor, a career I noped out of pursuing later). The other,
actually relevant, is a BA in East Asian Studies, with a focus on yaoi (more
specifically, yaoi and women's sexuality/feminism). I've been writing MMR since
2002, publishing since 2007, and a publisher (at Less Than Three Press) since
2009. TL;DR I do know what I'm talking about.
This is going to be a long post. There's a lot of ground to
cover, and I don't want to rush anything. But the primary question we are addressing
today is the one at the heart of all the latest posts, comments, blogs, and so
forth written by gay men about feeling as though they have no voice in the
community and women are just using them for money and masturbation.
So in sum: Are women (and other queer people) appropriating cis
gay men/romance/sexuality for their own selfish ends?
The short answer is twofold:
- No, nothing is being appropriated
- Women are allowed to enjoy things sexually, and only
sexually, just as much as men
For the longer answer, we'll have to cover a few things:
- Women and Sexuality
- Appropriation, MM Romance, and Gay Fiction.
- Entitlement and Sexism
PART ONE: WOMEN AND SEXUALITY
I'm not interested in playing Oppression Olympics, let's
make that clear. I have fibromyalgia, which means I'm in some degree of pain
every single day of my life. That doesn't mean that when my wife complains
about her feet hurting that I tell her to suck it up because I have it worse.
But it does mean that there are differences to our pain, and
those differences have to be take into consideration when we do things. I can't
really help her with a lot of yard work and stuff. I definitely can't mow the
lawn (not that I did it more than like twice a year anyway, I hate mowing
lawns).
What does this have to do with women?
Gay men have certainly had a horrible time of it,
historically speaking. The AIDS epidemic struck that community harder than any
other. We have awful words like 'faggot' because of the horrific attitudes
toward gay men. At the end of the Holocaust, everyone was set free except the
gay men, who were simply moved to new prisons. I could go on for pages simply
listing the wrongs that gay men have endured for centuries. It's important that
not be dismissed or trivialized. Those hurts and wrongs are very real and
deserve to be remembered and respected.
But in all these
rants by people like Hans M. Hirschi, SM Collins, and F.E. Feeley Jr. not a
single one acknowledges they understand the bigger picture of MMR. That women have a
dark and ugly history regarding their sexuality too. And that history has a
huge bearing on the path that culminates in MMR.
Name some famous gay men, past and present, as many as you
can in say, three minutes.
Bet you can come up with a pretty long list.
Now do the same with famous lesbian women.
That list was probably a lot shorter.
What about for bisexual men? Asexual women? Transgender men?
Genderfluid people?
The further you get from cis gay men (important to note: also white, we won't even start on
POC and the maltreatment thereof, we'd be here for the rest of the year), the
fewer names you know. The Greeks, the Romans, the Samurai, cowboys, and all
sorts of artists and writers throughout history—all of these have acknowledged
gay cultures/sub-cultures. They're not hard to find. History is FILLED with
accounts of men fucking other men, even in times when such was taboo and came
with a death sentence.
Where are all the accounts of queer women in those same
times? Outside of Sappho, most people probably can't rattle off queer Greek
women. What about Romans? Know any queer women in feudal Japan? What about the
wild west? Or early America at all (like Boston Marriages). What
about Renaissance Italy? Everybody knows of Leonardo and Michelangelo, but what
lesbians can you name from that time? You probably thoughts of Oscar Wilde,
maybe Byron. But what female contemporaries who were queer can you name?
If you could name several, awesome. That means things are
improving. But I think it's a safe bet to say that most people could not rattle
off a list of queer women as easily as they could gay (and sometimes bisexual)
men. And yes, the phrasing is intentional: between the broader 'queer women'
and the narrower 'gay men' still the narrower category wins out.
Why is that?
Because historically women's sexuality is considered a
nonentity and/or a moral failing.
Gay men are punished for having gay sex. Women are punished
for having sex, period. Throughout history, men could leave their house and
have all the sex they wanted, married or not, and nobody saw a problem with
that. But a woman who has sex without being married, or who has an affair?
Condemned. Trollops. Sluts. Ungodly. Ruined. Women who sold sexual services?
Trash. You see the same attitudes today: strippers, prostitutes, etc. are
constantly looked down on because they provide a service that men want. Nobody
ever condemns the man who goes to the strip club; they condemn the woman on stage.
Gay men are condemned for having the wrong kind of sex.
Women are condemned for even acknowledging an interest in sex, or for catering
to the sexual demands of the men around them.
And when we're not being punished for having a sex drive,
we're simply erased—mostly for being women, but also for being women who dared
to have sex and be loud and proud about it. Or do you think it's coincidence
that H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are considered the fathers of science fiction,
even though Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
predates them by almost 100 years? Margaret Cavendish published The Blazing World in 1666, but you
almost never hear mention of her. That's just one example of women being erased
and ignored, and they were both straight to my knowledge. When queer women do
anything, they're often rewritten as straight if they're acknowledged at all.
If you don't believe me, look at the way some sports stars
were treated by the news in the past couple of years. When Collin Martin took
to the field to play a few days after coming out as gay, he was given a
standing ovation. After winning an incredible victory and rushing over to kiss
her wife, Abby Wambach was first written in reports as celebrating with a friend. It was only later, after outrage, that that mainstream media acknowledged she was queer and kissing her wife. Gay man shows up to
work, gets a standing ovation; queer woman wins an incredible victory, gets
called straight.
Throughout history, women have been consistently punished
and thrown out simply for existing, for simply wanting to enjoy sex the way men
have. This has led to a lot of sexism, overt and internalized, in men and women
(much like racism is deeply impeded in cultures, to the point we don't even
realize some of what we say and do is racist as hell).
But women make do, and have found various outlets throughout
the years to express and enjoy their sexuality as best they can. One of the
ways they do this currently is via yaoi, slash, and MM.
Yaoi has taken a lot of hits over the years, mostly
rightfully, for a lot of its problematic elements (one of those being rape, yaoi is filled with alarming amounts of rape).
But it's important to note that yaoi is a Japanese thing that made
its way overseas, and eventually overlapped with slash, but slash developed
wholly on its own here in the States. Most consider the start of slash to be
Star Trek, with the classic Kirk/Spock pairing (the name slash in fact comes
from that slash, which differentiated gay pairings from straight pairings).
Long before the internet, women typed up and printed and photocopied volumes of
stories—what came to be called fanzines, or zines, and mailed them to each
other, traded at conventions, and so forth (an interesting parallel to
doujinshi culture, which for the sake of brevity, are basically the Japanese comic equivalent of
fanfiction).
This is the first argument against women coopting gay
culture. It was developed 100% separate from it, by women who saw a compelling
couple (or couples, or threesomes, or whatever) and wanted to explore
it—romantically, sexually, however. For many women, MM is a way to explore and
enjoy their sexuality without all the baggage that comes with being a woman.
That is a vitally important point. When you spend your entire life ingesting things like:
He acts like a girl
I'm not like other
girls
She dresses like a
slut
I'm saving myself for
marriage
Sit like a lady
A lady doesn't talk
like that
Men don't like it when
you do that
Your boyfriend won't
like it if you cut your hair
She was asking for it
If you dress like that
you're going to get raped
I heard she's slept
with lots of guys
You're such a bitch
Don't be such a girl about it
Stop being a drama queen
He's acting like a princess
And much more, what you want most is a way to be free of all
that shit. This is not a problem that men have ever faced and would ever
understand. Men have never been punished for being sexual, only for having the
wrong kind of sex (sex that, basically, makes them "too womanly," as
is best demonstrated in the fact that "non-masculine" men like
twinks, flamers, etc. are looked down on, as well as those who prefer to bottom
or like to wear panties and so forth. And the way cis gay men treat trans men, GQ, and non-binary people is often even more horrific).
Some women enjoy reading romance novels with het
relationships, but others prefer to read MMR because for them het MF simply
comes with too much baggage.
It's also important to remind everyone here that more than
cis women inhabit MMR. Genderfluid people, transgender people, and so forth all
have their own reasons for preferring MMR to het MF. The latest wave of anger
was in fact started because a genderfluid author wrote about why mpreg was so
important to them.
Again, I am not belittling or dismissing the pain that gay
men have endured. But a common theme amongst all the angry posts written by
them is that women are appropriating their culture, their lives, without
considering all the pain and horror they've endured.
But not once have any of those men seemed to consider the
painful history that women, as a whole, have endured, and why that might affect
what they read, write, and enjoy (in any medium). Men turn to FF only to get off. Women turn to MM to enjoy romance, enjoy stories, and sometimes, yes, to get
off without the painful baggage that
reading MF and FF often brings.
At no point in history have cis men, as a whole, had to turn
to FF to be able to enjoy themselves and their own sexuality because enjoying MF was too difficult or painful.
Which leads to the next point.
PART TWO: APPROPRIATION, MM ROMANCE, AND GAY FICTION
I'm not going to linger long here, mostly because I'm not
fit to. I'm a cis white women, and we occupy that awful space of being both
oppressed and oppressor, something
too many of us like to pretend isn't the case. White women have a long, ugly
history of demanding equality for themselves while stomping all over POC,
especially WOC, while taking from them those things we like and claiming all
the credit, which is some breathtaking hypocrisy.
But the main argument lobbed around this week is that we are
appropriating gay men/culture for own our pleasure and money.
I've already covered in the previous point how that's
entirely true, but let's flesh it out.
One of the mistakes people make is that MMR is a part of gay
fiction. This isn't true. Gay fiction is its own entity, populated and enjoyed
predominantly by gay men, and coming primarily from literary fiction., which includes love stories.
MM Romance sprang from slash, yaoi, and evolved as a
subgenre of romance, which means it began life with all the tropes, styles,
trends, etc of romance (and of genre fiction in general).
These are very
different categories. The expectations of literature have next to nothing in
common with those of genre fiction. And nothing makes that more apparent than
the difference between 'love stories' and 'romance.'
I'll stick with some het examples for this one.
Most people are pretty familiar with at least two love story
authors: Jojo Moyes of Me Before You
fame, and Nicholas Sparks of The Notebook
(and several other books) fame. These are love stories. One of their key traits
is that they seldom end happily; most are bittersweet at best. Love stories are closer in style and goal to literature than they are to genre fiction.
Literary fiction is hard to give a precise definition to,
and most of the ones you can find can basically be summed up as "better
than genre fiction." One particularly contentious definition is 'having
literary merit' (seriously?) and another prize one is 'has value or merit in
the social world.' Yet another is 'emphasizes meaning over entertainment.'
I think the general takeaway here is that literature is
regarded by and large as social commentary first, and everything
else second. Genre fiction definitely offers social commentary, but isn't
obligated to, and also acknowledges people want to have fun with what they read
most of the time.
Probably still not a great definition. My point is that
literature plays by very different rules, and love stories are closer to
literary fiction than to romance.
Literature is also predominantly by men, as most categories
and genres are.
Romance (along with YA and chick lit) is dominated by women.
This is important.
Romance, or more specifically genre romance, is defined as
(by the RWA):
Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story
and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.
A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around individuals falling in
love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many
subplots as he/she wants as long as the love story is the main focus of the
novel.
An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic
Ending: In a romance, the lovers who
risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with
emotional justice and unconditional love.
Romance novels may have any tone or style, be
set in any place or time, and have varying levels of sensuality—ranging from
sweet to extremely hot. These settings and distinctions of plot create specific subgenres within romance fiction.
Love stories have to obey none of that, save there is a
couple involved. And MMR, which was largely sprung from fanfiction, follows all
of the conventions of genre romance.
Gay romance, as in those stories primarily written by and
for gay men? Come from the literary end of the spectrum. Part of this is
because for a long time queer books couldn't really be published unless they
were miserable (the infamous
Bury Your Gays trope that still exists in most
mediums) and essentially "punished" for being not straight.
But the other reason is that it was written that way because
they're men, who wanted nothing to do with the garbage romance drivel enjoyed
by airheaded women. Romance keeps publishing in money – it draws the most money
of any genre by far, at 1.44 billion.
The next genre down? Crime/mystery at 728.2 million.
Literature? Not even in the top five.
And yet it's romance that is constantly derided. Sneered at.
Dismissed. Called garbage. Romance authors often get asked "why don't you
write real books?" and other awful, demeaning questions. Men who write het
romance tend to do so under female pennames and don't advertise they do so.
So gay fiction, including gay romance, is heavily influenced
by male-dominated literary and general fiction, and MMR is heavily influenced
by genre romance. The only place those two converge, sort of but not really, is in love
stories, where, you guessed it, a man is the most famous writer
(Nicholas Sparks).
This not a past trend. It continues strong to this day. Men do not want
to be lumped in with women. At a convention I once attended, a cis gay author
was asked why he wrote romance, and he replied "I don't write romance, I
write love stories" even though it was a romance convention, populated by
romance authors and readers, and all his books follow the hallmarks of romance
books and are published by romance publishers. Men do not want to
be associated with women, even as they show up to profit and otherwise benefit
from a genre we built.
Because make no mistake, MMR as it looks today was built and
shaped by women. From the earliest days of slash and yaoi, when it was labeled slash,
m/m, m/m romance, and yaoi on various sites like ff.net and others long
vanished, until the founding of Torquere Press in 2003 made it an official
genre, where it was written, published, and marketed as part of the romance
genre. When Dreamspinner Press opened in 2006, it followed all the same
conventions. Before all else, MMR is romance
and romance has always been woman-centric. Gay men, like most men, had little
to nothing to do with romance until very recent history, with the rise of MMR.
Straight men certainly have next to nothing to do with it.
So to say that women appropriated or coopted MMR from gay
men is grossly inaccurate. It was inevitable that MMR and gay fiction/love
stories would cross paths, but they've been two different entities
from their inception.
Gay fiction is predominantly by and for gay men. It was
developed from literature, and the trends and conventions therein. It's also
influenced by literary requirements/trends that stories about queer people must
be punished for being so, and molded by the awful history and present that gay
men suffer for daring to not be straight. It focuses on being gay, the gay
community, and so forth. These books are gay-centric first, and everything else
second.
MMR is predominantly by and for women and queer people, some who simply enjoy reading about two men having sex, but also a great many people who
aren't always comfortable expressing and enjoying their own sexuality via MF
and FF focused books. It follows the conventions and expectations of the
romance genre it's part of, meaning an emphasis on romantic relationships and
an emotionally positive and satisfying ending. While they are certainly about queer people, and sometimes the
difficulties of being queer, they are romances first.
And this brings us to the final section of this post.
PART THREE: ENTITLEMENT AND SEXISM
Let's tackle the simplest point
first: the complaint that women only write MM to get off.
Why exactly is that a problem?
Don't gay men use MM to get off? Don't straight men use FF to get off? Don't women
and other people use MF and MM and MF and whatever else to get off? So why is
it a problem that women and queer people not cis gay men use MM to get off?
Why is it only when women are sexually enjoying themselves that men start to
get angry? It's not a matter of staying in your lane, because then gay men
would be equally angry that straight men use anything other than MF to get off,
and lesbians use anything but FF to get off, and they complain about neither.
Only about women using MM to get off.
As usual, it's only when women
are owning and enjoying their sexuality the way they want instead of the way men tell them to, that men get angry.
So this point is frankly
hypocritical and ridiculous. Sexuality is diverse and complicated, and nobody
has any right to get angry about what others use to get off (unless it's bring
real harm to real people, such as pedophilia).
Which brings us to the next
point.
White cis men comprise the most
privileged group on earth, and being gay does not absolve them of that
privilege, any more than being a queer woman strips me of the privilege that
comes from being white.
I'm not denying the problems that
exist in MMR. There have been plenty of instances of fetishizing, of women who
are homophobic in life enjoying the "dirty" thrill of writing/reading
MMR. Of sexual harassment of cover models and porn stars at conventions. The
problematic elements of the 'gay for you' trope, the way so many books contain
things like forced blowjobs but don't treat them like the rape they are. These
are only a few examples, and they need to be better addressed than they have been thus
far.
But to say an entire genre is a
problem because of bad elements is to basically condemn everything under the
sun as wrong because nothing on earth is without problematic elements. Not your
favorite person, book, or movie. Even my cats aren't perfect, although Kerberus
comes really close.
This latest round started with
someone who wanted to talk about why writing mpreg (one of the most contentious
elements of MMR) meant so much to them. The comments that have come from gay men
(some of them, I want to stress that other gay men have been nothing but
supportive and don't deserve the misery brought on by the few) have been
distressing, but unsurprising.
I've
already responded to SA Collins, so I'm not going to rehash him.
We're going to focus on three others, and why what they say is so troubling,
and what it has to do with the larger matter. We'll start with Liam 'rape
comment' Livings:
Think about that. A person makes
a heartfelt personal post about what
mpreg means to them and a gay man,
instead of just chiming in with reasons why he doesn't like it, but can
understand why other people might (something many other commenters said) comments
with 'I'll just write about women raping each other, first vaginally and then
anally and how romantic it is.'
Which was not remotely related to
what OP said. A genderfluid person says 'this thing mean a lot to me' and a gay
man replies with 'how about if I write about women getting raped, then you'll
see how it feels when people write about this thing nobody is making me read.'
And that's not an uncommon
reaction with men. A frequent comment that comes up with discussions of
equality is 'so if women are equal now does that mean it's okay to hit them?'
and when women rant or rave or otherwise dare to talk without bothering to be
polite and demure, a depressingly common reply is 'I'm going to come to your
house and rape you.'
I once received a DM from a complete
stranger who said, 'I'm going to come to your house, tie you up, and throw you
in the trunk of my car.' I reported it to FB, who said it wasn't a violation of
their policies. A man threatens
to kidnap me and he's allowed to carry on without even being banned from FB for a few days.
Somebody who is not a cis man
simply says, 'this is why I like X' and a cis man replies with 'well I'm going
to write about women getting raped.' He never retracted those words, either. he
just doubled down and refused to listen when people tried to correct his
misunderstandings regarding the genre and point out why what he'd said was
ignorant/harming.
What did all this result in for
Liam "rape comment" Livings? Pretty much nothing. He just deleted his
comments, walked away, and a couple of days later got around to making a shitty
non-apology (exactly like SA Collins did) wherein he says bringing the raping
of women into the discussion
was a
"knee-jerk" reaction, which is frankly so distressing that
I hope I'm never in a position I have to trust him with my safety.
Frankly, his entire post is awful, and filled with ignorance about the romance genre as a whole,
not to mention conventions and other components of the business (why never
bakers, etc. on the covers of books? Because bakers make their living baking,
not being cover models. Same with porn stars – they star in porn, and often do
other such work, so they'd be familiar with at least some of the elements of
romance/erotica and wouldn't look down on what is essentially paying
customers, unlike tax accountants and so forth).
But there are a couple of parts I
want to focus on. First, this one:
If anyone
were to actually read this, I’d be accused of hating romance, and they might
not be entirely wrong. I’ve really begun to dislike the genre as a whole, but
not because I dislike love stories, it’s because of the many rules regarding
sex in romance and particularly the appropriation of gay men in M/M
Do you notice the qualification?
Love stories, not romance. As I mentioned in the previous section, people who
don't want to be lumped in with romance writers (but still like the money they
think all romance writer make) love to qualify they write 'love stories' and
not romance. Even though fairly often their books are, in fact, romance.
Because of the many rules regarding sex in romance
That would be
the genre rules, though I've read so many books (MM, FF, MF, MMF, FFM, and
more) – that I can honestly say the only hard and fast rule for sex is that it
must be consensual to some degree (this is where you get into dubious consent,
a staple largely of yaoi but which also has popularity in slash and MM circles)
unless the book is heavily focused on
consent issues (slave fic being the primary type of story in this category) and
related topics.
The next part I want to discuss:
So where
do stories about real men go? Those of us (regardless of gender) who write
outside the M/M sea label them "gay fiction", but now even that is
contested because some of the M/M authors claim that if “M/M is about fiction
primarily for women, then I’m not an M/M author. I write gay fiction!” Thank
you very much. Now you've just taken our last refuge. I feel like the
proverbial Indian being evicted from his reservation! No offense to my native
American friends, but you get the point. These people don’t care about us, they
care about their balance sheet, and gay men are the pen(ises) to balance their
checkbook. #CulturalAppropriation
For the record, there is a lot of
confusion and frustration within MMR because so many (men, women, cis, trans,
etc) do write books they feel don't belong under the MMR heading – and
rightfully so. But MMR is really the only place they can go and be seen, so
that's where they go, and both they and readers are left frustrated. This is
not a problem unique to gay men, though certainly I can understand the
frustration stated here.
I'm not even touching on his "real men" comment, suffice to say it's one more element of the sexism I'm discussing.
I'm mostly focused on the
grossly offensive, impressively hypocritical appropriation comments. Worse,
it’s not unique to Hirschi, but is in fact an attitude frequently found amongst
gay men. Livings even had something to say on the matter:
His experience "may" be wrong. He's cis, he's
male, he's white. Being gay doesn't erase that, and being gay and feeling
appropriated doesn't mean it's all right to compare how you think fictional gay
men are treated to how very real Native Americans were slaughtered and herded
until white people were finally content to leave the few that were left
alone(ish). It doesn't mean it's okay to threaten women and genderfluid people with rape, even fictional, hypothetical rape.
On to my last exhibit, F.E. Feeley Jr., who thinks MMR is
just
'homophobia
without the bible verses' which… plenty of homophobia exists without
bible verses, but I'll let that one go.
Once you parse through the badly
written …whatever that is, you can somewhat ascertain that a man walks into a
bathroom where an “Omega” (the one supposed to get pregnant by his alpha) is so
“in heat” that he has to bang himself with a vibrator. It’s pretty gross this idea of dehumanizing
someone. The concept of alpha male/ omega male is nothing more than the literary
way of walking into a redneck bar with your boyfriend and a well-meaning but
slightly inebriated associate asks, “Which one’s the guy and which one’s the
girl?” And I think I’m being nice.
He's not being nice. At all. Again, this is an example of a
man who ignores all the nuance and history behind a genre, especially since he
says that MMR has only been around for ten years.
It's interesting, the vitriol, the violence, that has come
from these men regarding mpreg – because all them, to the letter, have spouted
horrific things about and to the people who enjoy mpreg. Why is that?
Because sexism. Because pregnancy is generally regarded as a
viscerally cis female thing, and the absolute worst thing you can call a man is
a woman (slut, bimbo, girly, whore,
you're such a girl, stop acting like a woman, bitch beer, girly drinks; the
way men have to be male nurses, mannys, wear manbuns and manties, so they're
masculine and very much separate from their womanly roots).
What is mpreg? This post is 5000 words long as of this sentence,
and I could write at least that much on mpreg alone.
The most basic elements of mpreg is
simply that a cis male or cis male equivalent (if the pregnant character is an
alien where human definitions and constraints may not apply) gets pregnant,
often through highly unconventional means (conventional for this sake means
'doesn't have a uterus or equivalent'). But there is a lot of nuance and
variety to the sub-genre.
The most prolific type of this story is called ABO, where people
are divided into Alpha, Betas, and Omegas, with Omegas being the cis males who
can get pregnant. An almost-universal element of these stories is that the Omegas
(and sometimes the others, but always the Omegas) go into heat and the only
relief comes from fucking (be it another person, a toy, whatever). Some verses
include birth control type drugs, some don't.
Livings' rape comment possibly sprung, at least in some
small part, from the fact most of these ABO books deal heavily with consent.
It's not uncommon for an Omega to have a horrific past filled with rape and
abuse (they're often regarded as 'less'), to live with worries of being too
ugly, too used up, too old, etc. to ever find true love, a happy home, loving
family, etc. For them to constantly struggle to be seen and treated as equals,
instead of always as less, and often not even as human.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Does anybody reading
this see what these stories could possibly parallel? Sometimes it's
intentional, sometimes not (and sometimes people just want to write a kinky
story about a dude crazed with the need for sex that only another hot man can
fix. I've watched porn. I know 'sex-crazed' is not a premise unique to women writing/reading
ABO MM fic).
I'm barely touching the surface of mpreg and ABO fiction.
It's a category that doesn't get the credit it deserves, probably because it's
A) mostly written by women and queer people who are not cis gay men; and B) it
puts men in a "womanly" position, which men have a long and sordid
history of finding repulsive (or are we going to ignore how often gay men
describe vaginas and breasts as 'gross' and call themselves gold-star gays if
they've never interacted with a vagina? And don't worry, I think gold-star
lesbians are equally awful).
What do all these screenshots and quotes demonstrate?
That cis gay men, broadly speaking, think they are entitled
to MMR and that women should not be encroaching on it unless they write what
and how cis gay men tell them to. Even though MMR as a genre was built by and
for women and queer people, and originated with slash and yaoi, whereas gay
fiction has always been the domain of cis gay men and originates with literary
fiction.
That cis gay men, broadly speaking, are privileged, are sexist,
and both of these things show through in the hostility they display when
speaking to and about women in MMR. Nothing demonstrates this more than the
vitriol that rose up from cis gay men when a single person simply posted
briefly about how much a small category in MMR meant to them, a post that hurt
no one and simply demonstrated all the nuance that MMR can and does contain.
Instead of appreciating that and having a discussion about viewpoints, the
goods and bads of various tropes/premises/etc. they made it all about them, the
cis gay men, and ignored everything
that was said regarding genderfluidity and exploring one's self, and how
much such things mean to people who do not identify as straight or cis.
In summary, no single part of literature (in its broadest
sense of 'books') belongs to any one person or group. Care should always be
taken when an author writes outside their own bounds (like a white person
writing about POC, or an abled person writing disabled characters), but we all
come to the stories we write by different paths, for different reasons.
Women have, throughout the course of history, been punished
simply for existing. Even cis gay men have a long history of treating us like
objects, from marrying a woman for convenience before popping off to spend time
with a lover, uncaring at how neglected and hurt their wives felt, to the
disgusting history of 'fag hags' and threatening things like rape, real or
fictional, the moment their temper is up.
Since so much of that treatment was internalized, many of us
turned, ironically enough, to men to enjoy those things we were punished for
enjoying as simply ourselves. Because we can explore safely, and with far less
censure, those things we couldn't explore with spouses, lovers, friends, or
even by enjoying het romances.
To the cis gay men who say that we've stolen their house and
should obey or move out of their way, I say:
No. We built this house. It's our safe space to simply be. All are welcome, the more the
merrier, and gay men definitely should not be entirely ignored and dismissed.
But it was men who drove us to build this house, and we'll
be damned if they turn around and take it from us like they have so much else.
If you can't respect us, all the work we've done, and all
the reasons we built this house to begin with?
You move.
SOURCES
This comprises a very small number of relevant resources. I
no longer possess many of my old books, some sources simply aren't available
anywhere I can find, and I've already spent a lot of hours I didn't have on
this and there is work I really really
need to be getting done. If there is someone willing to contribute further
resources in the comments, I'd be eternally grateful. ~M
