People hold a general distaste for fandom these days. Fandom is responsible for the pickle we've found ourselves in now, after all. A deep, dark pit that self hating women have dug for ourselves, because the deeper the hole, the safer we are from outside scrutiny and judgment. Women that hunt you down from the other side of the earth will claim that they aren't trying to hurt you, that they're not doing this act of harm upon you for hateful or spiteful reasons. They're trying to help you!
I know how you feel! they sputter, their voice cracking with the recognition of the monster they once were. I know you can't help but be turned on by father/son incest porn! But if THEY find out who knows what THEY'LL do to you! so you have to get rid of it, please, I'm begging you...God is always watching...nam-myoho-renge-kyo....
But you see...fandom and yaoi shipping was quite literally one of the strongest bastions of feminist praxis for many decades and people probably didn't even realize it, considering most of the golden days were when were in our teens.
Men are everywhere on the internet. You quite literally can't go anywhere without men. They're on forums, youtube comments, competitive game voice chats, social media, a mysteriously high number all jonesing to show you a picture of their penis or fall in love with you because you're a girl that also likes to play Quake 3.
But men...did not, nor really now, care about fandom. They simply had no interest in colonizing it. Fandom was one of the few places on the internet you could go, and find a majority collective of women. There were evil women, predatory women, backstabbing women, moronic women of course. But post a story or a thought about whatever series you were particularly attached to, and there was a high chance the other people that you were going to interact with or shared your world view were women.
Fandom is looked down upon by men. I see several tweets every month along the lines of "the idea of being multi-fandom is so ridiculous! just say you like things" or "people in that fandom are so horrible, it's better to just do stuff with a small group of friends". And both these level of comment ignore the material reality of why these small communities worked so well in the first place. Because they acted as a safe space for women to have conversations, analyze text, form artistic and literary skills, and most important of all, sexually express themselves in a way that didn't immediately get you sexually harassed.
People sometimes get a little carried away with their holier-than-thou impression of the whole thing, sure. One cannot subsist only on smexy yaoi rape fanfics or telenovela plots; but I do feel the mocking of blorbo squeeing, increasingly intricate mechanisms of making men pregnant, and hot-topic level poetry fanfiction is all rooted in misogyny.
"This is written like a fanfiction" and the 2000s trend of associating saying 'like' a lot and valley girl accents noting low intelligence are based in misogyny (If teenage girls do it, it's embarrassing.), and dare I say...White Supremacy. The idea of there being a proper way to talk. A proper way to carry yourself. Showing too much emotion, caring about low-brow concepts that even a child could interface with. And if you fail to meet this bar of conduct you're admitting to the world you're hedonistic philistine!!!
But I disagree. Women were creating culture, and bettering themselves, and cultivating safe spaces to better survive a world that thought them less than pond scum.
There is very little for women to turn these days. Women that can't get along with other women through some abstracted failure to blend in with the environment will be teased by their male friend groups for their "eccentric" taste. Feminists that exist in a post-OnlyFans world that want to have a deeper conversation about the commodification of our bodies are anti-porn in a way that attempts to cut to the heart of the manner, male domination being baked into every aspect of our everyday lives that it becomes like air that you breathe, but always in my opinion Ouroboros' itself into this idealized fantasy that there is One Type of erotica that one is allowed to indulge in without infecting your brain with the woman-hating brainworm. (Which kind of just feels like Christianity 2 to me.) Saying to abstain from any pornography that does not prioritize your pleasure and empowerment sounds good on paper, but there always seems to be a dissonance on the conversation of fantasy and sexual liberation. Being a whore is woke, but being a slut isn't. Wanting to dominate a woman is sexual liberation, but if you're straight, well, tough luck. Even dominating a man can sometimes slip into the realm of submission if he ends up feeling too good, so it's better to just stop thinking about that stuff.
No one is more loathed than the fujoshi. Men hate you, of course, because you're a woman expressing a sexuality that does not involve them. Gay men aren't really interested in what you're creating because most yaoi works are a direct reflection of the female experience. Tumblr-based radfems want you to die because you are primarily interested in a body of work that centers men. And then most of modern fandom has been capitalizing on what is the strongest force of female subjugation for decades and decades of male domination, shame.
How dare you sexualize GAY men. They're gay, they're not attracted to you. This is too reminiscent of the harm straight men inflict upon lesbians every day. Using these blurry colors and pale shadows as vessels for sexual exploration...you should be ashamed of yourself. I mean, that character might as well be a woman anyways. Why aren't you jacking off to women? If you jacked off to women, you would be making the world a better place! It'd make me feel better to imagine such a thing, anyway.
And if you're not even a fujoshi, it's, well...tacky. To be attracted to men, I mean.
Yaoi is a joke, a punchline. No climax, no point, no meaning. It's embarrassing to want something you can't have. What impossible standards of beauty. How shameful it is, to want to be loved as an equal. How embarrassing to admit to wanting to be loved.
But it's fine if you're into that kind of thing! It's fine, I just want you to know, I'm better than you. Because I jack off to women. You should really get with the program by now. It's an act of resistance I last heard, because the more photos that are churned and spit out from the meat grinder of perfect capitalistic fantasy- hair removal, 13-step korean skin care routines, baby fat, eyelash extenders, lip fillers, veinless, blemishless bodies; dressed up in a bunny suit or micro bikini. I'm the one making a better world. It's an act of resistance to indulge in all this, because this world just hates sex so much. Because clearly that executive in the pin-striped suit sitting over there despise nothing more than for half of the world to become wildly obsessed with this iconography and what it represents. Darn!
I've lost the thread here. Depending on who you ask someone could say the world is either too sex crazed or too Christian. But it all has to do with women. It always and forever will have to do with making women shut the hell up about what they want, and how society and men and the institutions they have created have failed them at every turn. There has never been a point in history where straight men weren't allowed to freely talk in open forum, vlog, stream or social media format about what they jack off to and who they want to have sex with. Pornhub is never getting banned by the US Government. There is a reason they are using a poorly implemented ID tracking system to "ban porn" instead of actually putting in any effort to regulate sex trafficking. Sexy anime women drawings are never getting banned by the US Government. It will forever and always be places like tumblr, livejournal, itch.io, dlsite, gumroad and kofi. Any avenue women and gay people have created to express sexual expression that goes against the status quo will easily be choked to death in it's sleep. Partially because they hate your candy-ass, partially because nothing is more upsetting to a man than a woman that is sexually liberated in a way that does not benefit them.
Being a fujoshi is lonely business nowadays. If you got lucky and managed to snag a group of like-minded women from the livejournal days you're set, you can live on locked twitter forever. But maybe it's all in my head, but it feels impossible to form those style of communities now more than ever. The centralization of the internet most definitely plays a huge part. Vtubers post daily about their 'yaoi addictions' and their 'blorbos', but in the public and male dominated field of Vtuber fans, especially in the muddy wasteland as resistant to traction like twitter, all you can hope to receive is a fellow vtuber saying "oh my god!!! i want to non-con him too!!" or a moron commenting "soooo like, do you only want to peg men, or...?"
A collection of questions I would love to ask the UN
on nationally broadcasted live television:
Would there exist a world where men would go out of their way to make two seperate tags that denote "rape" and "rape but it's not as scary as real rape"?
Is a woman that gets off to being dominated by a fictional man participating in her own oppression or taking control of it? Is it the same if they place a layer of abstraction with a fictional male character? Is it feminist if a woman wants to see a male character taken advantage of as a form of catharsis? Does it immediately stop being feminist if she wishes she was a man in either scenario because she is acknowleding the entire scenario would change completely if either party is female?
What does femdom mean? Is it simply an effort in the change of facial expression?
Why do only women get called cuckolds for jacking off to gay sex? Why not men when they jack off to lesbians?
Why are men made so uncomfortable when I draw a man with a vagina? Are they experiencing for the first time an act of unrealized sexualization? An unexpected empathetic response due to the roles we as a society have imposed on genitalia?
Why did women invent omegaverse, wish babies, hanahaki disease, soulmate barcode AUs, code, novels, language, slang and prose?