ibelieveinthelittletreetopper:
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3
Possible F/M ships: 27
Possible M/M ships: 36TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
I’ve seen the screen-time/representation argument before, and I’m still not sure I buy it. Yes, @destinationtoast is absolutely correct that more female characters equals more het and more femslash. My other big fandom is Battlestar Gallactica, which features a pretty gender-balanced cast and one canonical lesbian ship, and the result is both more het and more femslash. I’m getting into Mad Max fandom as well, and again, more het, and more femslash. So yes, absolutely, some of the blame falls on the (usually male) canon creators for not creating enough well-round female characters with screen time in the first place.
But when I look at say, Sherlock fandom, the glaring example that always jumps out at me is Mormor. I have nothing against Mormor or people who ship it, but it’s pretty astounding to me the amount of effort that fans have invested in a male fanon character who isn’t even on the show. And, to @observethewalrus’ point, there is no corresponding fandom interest in say, Violet Hunter, or any of the ACD female characters who are mentioned in passing but aren’t on the BBC Sherlock show who could be fleshed out, and I doubt there ever will be, because fans tend to call OFCs “Mary Sue.”
So I do think there is some validity to the internalized misogyny critique, especially when we consider that it’s not just that there isn’t much representation of female characters, but that when we do see female characters in fic, they are often vilified or otherwise reduced to one-dimensional cartoons that don’t encourage reader empathy.
I understand what people are saying about it being easier to blame the fans than the creators. We have closer ties with fellow fans and it’s easier to call out someone we think might actually listen. But for me, this isn’t about assigning blame as much as it is about being the change I want to see in my fandom, to use the old cliche. I write as much het as I do slash, and I’ve started writing femslash as well, though that was harder for me because of the math, as people have pointed out, there are fewer possible femslash pairing and I didn’t really find one that spoke to me until Morkins and obviously both those female characters were introduced in S3.
And I defend people who ship Warstan, Sherlolly, Molliarty, Adlock at every opportunity from people who insist these ships are homophobic. Because I know my friends who ship het pairings are interested in further development of the female characters, and have nothing against IRL gay people (many of us are queer ourselves). Fandom seems to me overwhelmingly about making space in the canon for people and relationships who are not otherwise represented, and women are still underrepresented in mainstream media in major ways.
So, that’s my $.02.
Thanks, @anarfea, for the very thoughtful response. The more time I spend in fandom, the more I think there’s a lot to what you say, and also that it’s really, really complicated.
There was a really good article I reblogged on this within the past couple days called The Femslash Gap that tries to brainstorm & analyze a number of these factors and more – and my response, FWIW. I really like the non-reductionistic approach there.
When I first entered fandom and started seeing arguments about why there’s so much slash and so little femslash, the arguments bothered me because most of the ones I saw were really reductionist and non-mathy. People often assumed there was one reason (usually a bad assumption), and they threw around terms like misogyny on the one side and homophobia on the other (and at the time I hadn’t yet realized how subtle or broad the application of these terms has grown, either), often without paying much attention to the possible combinations afforded by the underlying media. And that seemed absurd to me, as a fan, a Johnlock shipper, and a fandom statistician.
To break that down a bit, because I think many fans – maybe especially noob fans – are in a similar boat on the first couple points:
Oh, and let me make clear– because I think I left it implicit above – I find the “homophobia” accusations hurled by some M/M fans against some het shippers (or non-fans of a given M/M pairing) to be ludicrous and terrible. Who you ship is not who you support rights for IRL. And very many of us in fandom are various stripes of queer, as @anarfea points out and @centrumlumina’s AO3 census data supports: http://centrumlumina.tumblr.com/post/62840006596/sexuality I find that argument so ridiculous I don’t bother to engage with it, but that may be a mistake on my part (not to mention johnlock/ot3 shipper privilege). And I certainly didn’t want to skip over that excellent discussion by @anarfea and appear to dismiss it.
THIS: “ So I do think there is some validity to the internalized misogyny critique, especially when we consider that it’s not just that there isn’t much representation of female characters, but that when we do see female characters in fic, they are often vilified or otherwise reduced to one-dimensional cartoons that don’t encourage reader empathy.”
I keep wanting to discuss this more– how we write women in slash fic. I’m thinking about how many times a female character– no matter who she is– is portrayed as vapid, shallow, timid, a straight up bitch– a doddering old lady who say’s “dear” every five seconds– or a murderous vixen, etc, etc, …
Okay. In Sherlock, part of the problem is that the women we are given to work with are caricatures to begin with. Ella, the “motherly” Black woman. Mostly invisible. Sally Donovan, the Angry Black woman and a slut, besides. Mrs. Hudson– see doddering, motherly granny stereotype. Janine? Ho’. Mary? Assassin who just wants life in the suburbs. “I’m not really bad, I’m just drawn that way.” Molly, the girl-woman desperately in love. Or, as they used to say– “Fish”. (ugh)
And what do we do? Our women “chirp” and “giggle”, or they are cartoon villains. Or they are window dressing. They have no real purpose. We seem to want them gone. Or– they must stay in their tropeish roles.
I think that’s how much we have been influenced by media.
But because we are independent of popular media– in other words, we are in it, but not of it– and we can pick and choose what we want to do, how we want to show these characters– we have the power to change how women– who are reflections of ourselves– appear in our own wing of underground media.
It’s a shame that oftentimes, we can be more chauvinistic in our writing where women are concerned than the men writing the original series…
Sorry for blathering, but y’all made me think! :-D
Crawling back up under the couch…
i just had an academiagasm.
(via amusewithaview)
