Meta Rec: Your Vagina is a Bigot; My Vagina is a Saint

[beatrice_otter]

You've probably already read it, but franzeska has some EXCELLENT meta on AO3 about fandom, racism, sexism, shipping, slash/gen/het, fandom history, hypocrisy, and counterproductive activism.  It's long but OH SO GOOD.  With a lot of really important points that get completely missed in most discussions of these issues.  I have a few quibbles and one major problem with the piece, but overall I agree with most of it.

Your Vagina is a Bigot; My Vagina is a Saint

Comments

[anghraine]

Total agreement on the meta! Total agreement with you, that is—some quibbles, at least one where I'm Uh What—but by and large great. I'm not surprised that Tumblr erupted, but tbh I don't think most of the people wanking would know self-awareness if it hit them over the heads with a 2x4, so.

[beatrice_otter]

One problem I had with it is that for me, character/pairing type preferences don't trump genre preferences. Like early on, they were saying "oh, but if you like femslash, just go to the fandoms where there's lots of it because there's lots of female characters!" And I'm like, but I don't like those genres you mention where that's common.

[anghraine]

That's always been a huge problem for me. I mostly like tropey epic fantasy, and women in serious relationships to each other aren't exactly a dime a dozen there. (And I tend to be very interested in protagonists. In SW, for instance, my feelings are strictly concentrated on Skywalkers, and there's not much femslash to get out of that.) But when those do even out those proportions among the main cast, I start getting femslash ships—and so does fandom, as with something like LOK.

I guess it's that ... despite being frequently annoyed at the wall to wall m/m, I can't blame fandom for what it does with casts that are usually upwards of 80% male. Fandom goes where the tropes are. But it's definitely not as easy as just go find a femslash fandom.

[beatrice_otter]

Yeah. Like, I'm a total StarStarStar fan--Star Trek and Star Wars and Stargate were formative. I want starships and aliens and space opera and nothing too dark, and if there are women-heavy and POC-heavy shows/fandoms for that, please point me in that direction because I am DYING for it?