controversial opinion but maybe… maybe gay, bisexual and queer men dont exist for the consumption of straight women????
like i feel like i shouldnt really take up a lot of space in this convo as a perpetually confusing essentially bigender person but like, there is basically no mlm media created for the consumption of mlm, almost all of it is geared towards appealing to a straight female audience and thats… a little fucked up??
like contrary to the bad 2014 tumblr discourse, homophobia still exists? so if youre a straight person you should probably be real fuckin critical of how and why you consume queer media, and if youre creating media with queer characters you should probably be real fuckin critical of whether youre doing it to give representation to actual queer people or just boost your straight viewership with gay fetishization.
!!! Tacking onto this as a gay man – LOTS of straight cis girls in fandom spaces were raised on yaoi, a manga/anime culture where rape is seen as romance and two men have to fill dramatically stereotyped gender roles.
This is not what gay guys are. We are not your ship fodder, we are not toys to be played with, we aren’t your objects of consumption.
The hypersexualization of gay men by cishet women continues to this day and our voices aren’t heard because Apparently Homophobia Is Over (rolling my eyes) for gay men.
A ton of the comments to this post are women telling queer men that slash fiction isn’t for them, “proving” (either via a queer man that doesn’t mind the tropes in slash fiction that this post is calling out or one of those statistics post that doesn’t have a universal reach in the first place) that this post is wrong for how it talks about fandom, and that they don’t have a right to critique how fandom comodifies and misrepresents their sexuality.
Newsflash ladies: if you’re more focused on getting your rocks off to dudeslash than listening to the words of queer men who straight up have problems with how slash portrays love and sex between men on stereotypical and offensive avenues, you’re once again proving that it’s not about representation mattering.
Because it doesn’t, not to you. What matters is what gets you off and apparently no one can critique desire.
(I’ll reblog it if I can find it again, but a gay black man wrote an essay about M/M fiction and depictions of sex in the romance genre being unrealistic and unrepresentative of actual queer male experiences on ANY scale and immediately was bombarded by women of all sexualities telling him how misogynistic he was and how M/M fiction was NOT FOR GAY MEN even though it ostensibly was about them.
It’s all about womanhood and femininity and women using portrayals of (marginalized) men and masculinity to explore their sexuality and actual queer men are forced to keep silent when these women write their sexuality poorly and then refuse critique because critiquing slash and m/m fiction is now misogynistic…)
I think I remember the post you’re talking about… shit, what was his name? I hope you find it. Silencing gay men who say anything critical about slash has been happening for a long time.
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