fwiw, "majority straight women" has not been my experience in fandom. i went looking for fandom demographics data and found the Fansplaining Shipping Survey results, sample size ~17,000. on the welcome page they say the survey reached a group of fans who were active on Twitter/Tumblr in April 2019, primarily but not exclusively m/m slash fans. the survey demographics questions are at the very end, and while 73% of respondents described themselves as female (so "majority women" applies; 21% picked nonbinary/genderqueer, and 9% picked male), only 20% identified as straight. 42% of respondents picked bi/pan, 29% picked asexual/ace-spectrum, 23% picked queer, and 14% picked gay/lesbian/homosexual. (note, people could pick multiple options for the gender and sexuality questions, so they don't add up to 100%.) now, one could argue that this survey is not representative of fandom at large (if say, ao3 users as a whole are more straight on average than the fans this survey reached on Twitter/Tumblr.) which is possible! as a primarily tumblr/twitter/discord user myself, 20% straight subjectively feels far more accurate than "majority straight," but that could just mean that's what's more accurate for my own community. (the survey does say that it primarily reached m/m slash fans; presumably if more f/f fans were reached in the survey, there would be more queer respondents rather than less. not sure about m/f.) the reasons that f/f fandom is small are complex, and i don't feel equipped to explain them (though i think the anti problem could easily be a cause in the decline); however, i do think that the percentage of straight women is overblown as a cause. (certainly, as others have already pointed out, it would hardly explain the decline since the demographics likely have not changed significantly.) (personally, i myself became less interested in f/f and more interested in men and m/m as i transitioned and slowly came to realize i was a gay trans man rather than either bi or a woman, but i don't think that's likely to be a large-scale cause.)
Honestly a lot of people dunk on it, but I do think that misogyny and lesbophobia play into matters regarding size. That latter one in particular stands out, because even among sapphics who do have a stated desire to write F/F a lot feel too uncomfortable doing so. With several bringing up things like feeling that their sexuality is inherently predatory, even though they know this is stupid. That and you have things like F/M shippers harassing F/F shippers, with things like the charges of transmisogyny being groundlessly targeted at Randivor Pride Week and the people who comment with shit like "It's just more yuri shit" at F/F Edeleth. The Mass Effect shipping community also apparently has an issue with F/M shippers harassing F/F shippers. Also to this day I'm still finding things like people reacting with "ew wtf" to things like Lain saying she loves Alice or people calling Soifon an annoying lesbian or people calling the people who think Soifon is a lesbian gross or weird. So we've got like active lesbophobia from fandoms in general and we've got internalized lesbophobia. And this really cannot be helping. Also like as much as people like to go "But I'm literally a bi woman" being a bi woman does not and never has made you immune to lesbophobia. This trend is not recent. It's been around as long as I can remember and was around even earlier than that. With yuri fandom it's around partly because S is focused on desexualized and pure relationships and yuri draws very heavily from S. There's also been a long fought battle against cishet men fetishizing lesbians in yuri porn made for men. With western fandom in general, it needs bearing in mind that the general mood on sapphic desire is that it is inherently predatory and inherently gross. You're taught from a very young age that you even thinking about another woman is tantamount to sexual harassment. It's part of why we've ended up with things like "stupid lesbians" and the like. It's not just that girls are taught to be more passive in dating. It's that and the fact that sapphic desire is pegged as somehow a violation in and of itself. We're also dealing with girls and women who are nervous about shit like "Am I fetishizing things?" and taking the blame for lesbian porn on themselves. As though our writing smut fic or whatever is somehow adding to the very real problem that is the fetishization of sapphics by cishet men. The recent anti phenomenon has been adding to this, of course. But I do want to clarify that pure lesbians isn't new. It's rather old and being further exacerbated. I'm not entirely sure why we're being hit with the anti thing so bad in specific. Though I do wonder if the heavy effect of Second Wave radfem logic has left on lesbian culture and lesbian spaces has played into it. Both in terms of the sex negativity and in terms of the framing of relationships between ciswomen as inherently more pure than anything else.
For further clarification, lesbians also aren't free from perpetuating lesbophobia. But I'm more used to hearing bi women in fandom bringing their sexuality up when people suggest that maybe there are lesbophobia issues in fandom.
I wonder if there's a link from many antis being in cartoon fandoms and cartoon fandoms having more f/f pairings, so the antis focus on attacking those for being impure.
I wouldn’t be shocked and honestly it is Suffering. (What’s really weird is that a huge chunk of the latter-day Steven Universe porn (on AO3 at least) seems to focus on Steven himself, which…you do you ig, but given the fandom’s Issues with anti bullshit the fact that there’s been an uptick in Steven smut seems like a bizarre turn of events. Obviously I haven’t made like…graphs or anything, but it seems like there’s been a trend in that direction in recent times and it’s incredibly confusing?? I definitely agree that anti mentality and its prominence in Gay Cartoon Hell fandoms plays a big role in the lack of f/f, but this particular bit of anecdata jumps out to me as the one thing that gives me any real pause there. something something Stevens Universe, who lives in Beach City and adopts 10,000 new moms each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted)
It's purely Anti's for me, as to why I don't make more f/f stuff for my fandoms. The loudest most popular fans of the ships tend to be antis and I want to avoid them like the plague, so I just. Find myself not making any content that would cross their paths at all. I should, honestly, for myself and my own enjoyment. But I don't, half out of spite and half out of fear of attracting wolves to my curated meadow because I sincerely just want to keep my head down and not deal with them and their buddies. Ships I once enjoyed feel poisoned now, and I just have zero interest in reviving them.
This honestly might help explaining things at least as far as cartoon fandoms go, but they're just one media type. F/F is seeing a great deal of representation in other mediums currently, too. Especially in the realm of speculative fiction I'm finding. The book fandoms for F/F that I'm familiar with are tending to be dealing with very anti-unfriendly fandoms like The Masquerade fandom. These book fandoms are rather small with the exception of The Locked Tomb fandom though. The Masquerade, for all the praise it gets, only has 31 fics and one very small fan discord, along with a few dedicated fanartists. These fandoms also end up creating a sort of web of general sapphic sff book fandom. A lot of Masquerade fans got into the series after being recommended it once they finished catching up with TLT as one example. And weirdly while they are connected this way, only TLT is really resulting in great fic and art production. This is despite the fact that the fandoms are often lamenting a lack of fic for their respective series or standalones and despite the fact that a lot of time is spent crafting AUs and fic ideas. I wonder if that lack is related to the fact that these fandoms are like a sort of pan-fandom. People recommend new books and then people go out and read those books and talk about them. And with the amount of material coming out or that has come out, there's a sort of constant reading of new material going on. On top of being less visible than the cartoon fandoms, we also just have a lot more stuff we're constantly shifting through. I spent all of a day resting on Gearbreakers before I went on to reading The Priory of the Orange Tree and talking about it in a book discord. And that seems to be generally just how people go. People go "Oh hey I'm reading this thing" and liveblog their thoughts and then others go "Wow I'm going to read this thing!" and proceed to do the same. In a never-ending liveblogging loop. So our fan behavior seems to be primarily focused around being widely read and talking about the things we're reading before moving on to another thing. And the fancreation most are doing ends up being things like small memes, AU ideas, group collaborated off the cuff fic that isn't ever written formally, etc. Things that are easy to do on your downtime between reading every last piece of sapphic sff in existence. I do really wish the sff book fandoms wrote more. If we did there would be a lot of variety in fic to read. While The Masquerade and Teixcalaan deal with a lot of the same territory, they deal with it in a very different fashion and with very different casts.
The yuri and general weeb fandoms also have just. Gluts of material to be sorting through constantly. And little fic even for things like Otherside Picnic which dodge the complaint that it's just school girls doing nothing. The fandoms for these are producing fanworks, though. Just these fanworks seem to primarily be visual in nature. Either things like fan comics or fan art are more common than the fic. These fandoms also have a sort of more regular staying power? There are years between releases in The Masquerade. Otherside Picnic is a serial novel, though. We're also dealing with the fact that these fandoms are also a mix of people who can speak Japanese and who can't speak Japanese. But other weeb fandoms write more. Notably shonen fuckboy fandoms, which is historically VERY UNFRIENDLY and even hostile to F/F fans. So why aren't the yurifuckers writing as much? I suppose at least part of that is just that we're very niche in comparison to battle shonen. But I do wonder why we just never seem to make as much fic. We interestingly seemed to have made more fic on ff.net during the yuri boom in the 2000's. Mai HiME and Nanoha fandom in particular were very productive. We were still very niche back then, but we were making more. A thing to consider is that it might be due to them not moving off FF.net, honestly. While Otherside Picnic doesn't have a spot on FF.net and the majority of Bakarina fandom is on Ao3, Nanoha fandom is still uploading shit to FF.net. Same with Mai HiME fandom. SAO fandom is in a similar bucket wherein a lot of people just are stuck on FF.net. Including SAO:AGGO fandom, which is a yuri fandom. There is a splitting of archives going on. Some of weeb fandom also only publishes on tumblr I've noticed.
Also a thing that I feel is worth mentioning that didn't have a place in the other posts is that...From what I've seen and heard, the vast bulk of active harassment F/F shippers are getting is coming from F/M shippers. I bring this up mostly because I see slash shippers blamed a lot for this lack of F/F fic almost exclusively which I feel is unfair. And I feel that het shippers, who are actively harassing us, do need to actually be called out for said harassment. People should know about that. Because it does chase people away from writing. This slant to the harassment seems to be consistent with what I remember as a kid too, though there was a period of time in the early 2000's when people were learning about BL, yaoi, and yuri that fujos were very shitty to yuri fans. Like calling you slurs level of shitty. I've not really run into that since with fujos, though.
Being bi and not driven away from yuri by antis, I’m trying to figure out why it has almost always been so much less appealing to me. And honestly, I think a lot of it comes down to the larger presence of cishet men? By and large, I haven’t felt like most of these fans were doing anything wrong, gatekeepy, or even uncomfortable. It just means that there’s a huge roulette issue with whether the material and discussion around it is gonna resonate at all or just feel kinda alien and squicky. What I want from f/f is not what they seem to want, no matter how relaxed and pleasant they might be as people and fans.
I guess maybe it’s sort of the parallel to gay men not vibing with slash written by and for women? Oh, and for the record, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a single fandom group where cishet women were the majority or even close. Women, sure, but not cishet women.
There's spaces for these fandoms that are focused exclusively around lesbians and bi women. So long as you're willing to look for those. One of the longest lasting and the one I originally started out in is Yuricon. They've apparently got a discord now instead of a mailing list? But like Yuricon's whole thing is "Yuri for lesbians, by lesbians", so the space is largely sapphic in nature. Haven't been in contact with anyone from Yuricon for ages though, so I have no idea how active the community is anymore. There was a forum for queer yorusoi fans too and nanofate had similar spaces. Yuri fandom's got pockets for sapphics out there. The sapphic sff book fandoms also seem to largely swing some variety of queer, with a good chunk of said queers being sapphics. I get like issues with cishet men in yuri fandom. As I've run into enough of them that I get very suspicious of cishet men writing the stuff or liking it. There's definitely spaces for sapphics though or at the least queers in general. They just need to be sought out and they tend to be smaller. I guess Yuricon's an option? Or you could like check out sapphic sff books and then go and look into discord servers or subreddits for the series in specific. Other alternative idea is honestly just talking with personal friends you've got who are into the same works and like creating small little webs. This is my general way of interacting with other like minded f/f fans now. Also cishet women dominated fandom spaces I've run into. I've even been stuck in them in the past because that was like my option for irl weeb friend group at a time. Fucking sucked.
The fact that we're often so sequestered I think is part of why we're so small. But part of why we're so sequestered is because we face harassment. Especially in the case of works that are not primarily sapphic. Like the queer yorusoi forum didn't exist just because. It existed because of homophobes and lesbophobes in the broader Bleach fandom.
Next time I cycle back to “But What About… Women?!” I’ll definitely have to give that a look. Thank you! I guess I just tend to lurk so much with fandom things that most people never even noticed I was there. No one would have had reason to think of mentioning anything like that to me, and no one would have been able to vouch for me with communities that have reason to be fairly closed. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but it does help if you have some idea that there’s something you might want to be a part of in the first place. Most of the cishet guys I happened to meet who really liked yuri were honestly chill? That was nice at least. It just felt like there were at least two very different kinds of porn, maybe more, existing under the same label. I don’t mind people doing their own thing on principle. It’s just a problem for me that it’s so difficult to tell what kind of intended audience so many of the things are for.
Of course! I get like it being hard to find places to talk about and share the kinds of stuff you want to. Oh there's definitely two very different kinds of porn in yuri fandom. There's reasons I'm surprised when I hear that things like Goodbye, My Rose Garden are written by men. Because my idea of men writing yuri tends to either be like Yuru Yuri type shit or like. Straight guy yuri porn. Which is hard to explain but like it's like...Sex lacking josei sensibilities and tones, and instead that with seinen sensibilities and tones. Straight guy yuri porn was so common when I was younger that I kind of just gave up on porn with women. It's still very much A Thing and like it's occasionally fine but like a lot of the time I'm very "Yeah no" about it. It's incredibly frustrating. Thankfully I do have better luck with fanfic, but like that does require my fandoms have fic to begin with. And the fic is often few and far between... It's honestly part of why I write as much nsfw fic as I do. There's just not enough of it around. In terms of like non-fan produced stuff...I've been pleasantly surprised with several of the books I've been reading where it concerns sex between women. Like none of it's like E rated fic levels of shit but like it's been very nice to come across the sex scenes in things like The Priory of the Orange Tree or A Desolation Called Peace and be like "Ah, yes. The kind of sex I want to see. Finally." I can provide names and descriptions of various sff books I've read if that would be interesting at all?
This is exactly what happened/still happens to me. Sometimes I'm in just the right mood where I'm like, meh it's still kinda hot, but most of the time it either squicks or bores me, maybe both. And like, yay for those men, glad they're doing their funky thing as long as they aren't harassing anyone in the process, but it would be so fucking nice if there were any reliable way for those of us who don't like it to avoid it. I just mostly gave up because that's so much of what I expect to find. And yeah, less of a problem in fanfic, but there's still so much less wlw fanfic that statistically, there's just not going to be as much stuff that appeals to me specifically. Especially if it's all fucking handholding and shit. And like, sure, handholding can be the sexiest, most devastating act in the world if it's written that way and done well, but it usually isn't. It's usually not even trying. Such a pity. And again, yay for those people who love it, rock on y'all, as long as you're not harassing anyone in the process, but I wish the environment were welcoming enough to invite more variety. And just more in general. I suppose that's why I go so apeshit about men being jerks to women about slash. I get it. I really, sincerely understand how much it sucks when most of the porn written about people like you is obviously not for people like you, and how much actual trouble it is when it makes it hard to find stuff you would like. But fucking hell, don't you dare come in here waving the "evil straight men fetishizing lesbians" banner while insisting that yet another thing ought to revolve around men's preferences actually. Fuck all the way off, good sir.
That's honestly part of why so there are so many lesbians and bi women writing gei-komi, yaoi, etc. in Japan I've heard. Yuri porn tends to be for cishet men and that just isn't a welcoming space for lesbians. So they write other genres instead which don't have women as the core characters. And that just. Sucks? Thankfully more are stubbornly writing yuri and the stuff published in magazines is slowly getting more and more queer. It's still not the majority of yuri but like. Before there wasn't any and for lesbian made comics you had to go to lesbian indie comics with Japanese material. I'm hoping this is also a growing trend in the porn doujin making scenes too for yuri. An increase in sapphics in the creation of it and an increase of queerness actually existing in the works made. Also, sadly, the environment's diversity won't change at all without people actually making that sort of content. Which again is part of why I'm so insistent as I am on making the kind of fic I want to see. I don't want to read slash, even if it is made primarily by bi women for other women. I want to read about sapphics. I'm going to read about them and write about them. So then other sapphics have more things to read about themselves and so they might also start writing too. Really, I should start putting effort into encouraging sapphics to just start writing the kind of fic they want out of f/f. Like how I do with poetry. And like part of why I read so much yuri and part of why I've been reading so much sapphic sff. It's not just for me to enjoy, though it very much is something I enjoy. It's so that when I come across sapphics who are like "I'd like f/f more if the women were better written..." or whatever else I can then proceed to provide them detailed recommendations on sources providing just that. It's so I can write meta and essays and show others that look there is enough stuff with us out there that there are defined trends like "lesbian with a dead person in her head". I read very fast and I'm willing to put up with A Lot for the purposes of study, so I can do this!
I can't say Dumbledore handled kid Riddle well, but haters suggesting he send Riddle to a psychiatrist, seventy or eighty years ago, in the wizarding world? You know that at that time in Muggle psych medicine Spoiler: psychiatric malpractice Riddle would most likely have been lobotomised or undergone non-anaesthetised shock therapy, right?
