roachpatrol:

orestian:

you know what BL gives women, regardless of their sexuality, regardless of anything else about them as women? an entire genre of work in which misogny is the bizarre statistical outlier instead of the norm. like do some straight women fetishize gay men in ways that are awful and nasty? yes. but the existence of an entire culture of creative work in which it’s basically impossible to encounter a disgusting or alienating portrayal of yourself, in which men are the objects to be displayed for the pleasure of the viewer, in which being gay is normal and heterosexuality is for side characters with no real backstory or plot relevance, in which men are the Other for once… it’s quite the phenomenon. it’s also really interesting to watch the “okama” trope/caricatures of queer trans culture get dissected and reinvented, etc, because yaoi from the 80s is often also casually transmisogynistic, or like relies on having a drag queen character around for humor, but in the 2010s it’s been really rare for me to encounter BL that shits on trans people. IT’S INTERESTING!!

i have never seen any acknowledgement of this from the gay boys who think women shouldn’t consume or produce m/m media for their own enjoyment and until i do i’m not inclined to take their arguments about ‘male objectification’ all that seriously, much less consider them persuasive.

because women can and sometimes do objectify gay men, and that’s not okay when it happens. people do treat each other as things and that is always damaging. but the vast majority of women’s consumption and production of m/m media is about escaping objectification, as well as (overt) misogyny, not replicating it. it’s about enjoying scenarios where every character is an emotionally realized and legitimate person. 

there is i think this idea people always have that when a disenfranchised population seizes power, they’ll enact the abuses that were done on them to their former oppressors. that’s why you get straights freaking out about the Gay Agenda, whites obsessed with Reverse Racism, and, i think, men who don’t question the assumption that the pornography women create of men will be just as disrespectful and exploitative as the portrayals men create of women. 

but it’s not like that. women’s creation and consumption of m/m stories isn’t dehumanizing. it’s not misandry, it’s not a desire to reduce, exploit, or degrade men. it’s pretty much just a longing for a world where all participants in a romance are fully recognized as people: a world a hell of a lot of women will never get to see outside of these fantasies.