multitudebr:

are used in very fetishized ways

I'm not saying I disagree with you, but what exactly do you mean with 'fetishization'? I often see that term used very vaguely, to just say something or someone is bad without clearly knowing why. It often implies that someone doesn't have the correct identity to be watching queer media. Like, their straightness in itself is the problem.

I super duper agree that it's bad to insist there can only be the masc top/femme bottom dynamic and nothing else. Diversity is good. That should include femme bottoms paired with masc tops, as long as that's not the only thing we see.

Also, objectifying people, treating them as if they don't have feelings or agency, is bad.

Fetishization usually means giving too much meaning or importance to a thing. It's originally a word for items that were religiously worshipped. So for example, being attracted to people specifically because they're trans, rather than just being attracted to a person who happens to be trans, is fetishization, because of the unreasonable amount of meaning and emphasis being given to their transness rather than seeing them as a whole person.

I'm not sure if the point of BL is fetishization tbh. For some people, probably yes. But I think for a lot of women attracted to men it is also about exploring their own experiences with gender in a more distanced way, and subverting aspects of those comphet gender roles while leaving others in place. I think for those people it doesn't necessarily have much to do with actual real life queer people. The way I see it, it's like gender norms are this big board of levers and switches, and they're experimenting with turning some of those levers, and then others, and seeing what happens to gender in the stories.

I think rather than copy-pasting straight gender roles onto queer people, they're sometimes telling straight stories while borrowing some queer elements in order to a little bit of subversion.

I think in the majority of cases that's not fetishization (putting an unreasonable amount of focus on the fact that it's gay), it's writing from experience. I don't think they're objectifying either, most of the time. A lot of effort goes into the characters' emotions and actions affecting the plot. The diversity in the characters' gender expressions is also making a lot of progress, though yeah it used to be pretty monotonous. I also don't think we can blame them for the sexism they experience at the hands of cishet men, given that they are the only demographic that's pretty much absent from any survey about BL viewership demographics. Conservative straight men don't tend to be pleased with women watching BL, and that tells me there must be something subversive about it, even if it's not always as subversive as I'd like it to be.

But sometimes, yes, people sometimes do fetishize and objectify and demand only strict top/bottom dynamics. The whole Teetee and Por thing shocked me too. Like people, get a life and let them live theirs.

This video essay by a straight girl on why a lot of straight women like BL gave me a lot to think about:

multitudebr:

The point I was trying to make was the de-personalization of actors, to the extent of them not being seen behind the ship.

Ah yes, that really is a problem sometimes :(

multitudebr:

The thing is, when I started watching BLs and discovered the public they're mostly aimed at, I kinda felt bad that I might have fallen for the appeal from the "wrong" perspective, like I was just performing an expected behavior "as a woman". In my experience, being trans is an eternal questioning both from the outside and inside, and having to face this situation coming from a place that brought me so much comfort, a sense of belonging even, makes me feel bad (and I'm working on that).

That's relatable. The truth is I do often like idealized BL shows (aimed primarily at women) better than gritty hypermasculine queer shows (aimed primarily at queer men), and yeah that causes dysphoria sometimes, for the reasons you said.

But I think seeing BL as a feminist(ish) attempt at playing with gendered dynamics in romantic relationships helps me deal with that, because overthrowing the hegemonic comphet script for how those dynamics are supposed to play out is an interest I have in common with women. That does not make me a woman, it makes me a person who is negatively affected by society's gender shenanigans.

I've been reading a bunch of gender-y books lately and in one of them (Imagining Transgender), David Valentine essentially argues that a major reason the brand new category of 'transgender' (which at the time included anyone crossing societal gender boundaries, including for example cross-dressers and intersex people) gained so much traction so quickly in the 1990s was because it was useful to gay organizations.('Transsexual' had existed for a couple decades earlier, but was really strict.)This way gay organizations could stuff everything gender-related into a category different from their own, for respectability politics reasons. Before this, trans people were often slotted into the 'gay' category. Or I guess gay people were slotted into 'gender transgression' because if you were a woman who loved women, then that was considered a masculine thing to do, a subtype of gender 'inversion'. So gay organizations made a concerted effort to remove gayness from the list of gender transgressions by distancing themselves from gender. At the time the prevailing opinion among large swathes of gay people was that you shouldn't reinforce stereotypes and make gay people 'look bad' to straight society. This meant that gay guys were not supposed to be 'overt' (=flamboyantly femme), and that butch lesbians were treated as traitors to women and feminism by being 'male-identified'(=internalized misogyny OR being masculine). Only masc gay guys and femmexfemme lesbians were acceptable.

And I think a little bit of that mentality is still around. There is still a bit of lingering animosity that says gayness and gender can't have anything to do with each other, that being gay doesn't make you any less of a 'real' man, don't 'emasculate' gay men with all this soft and fluffy shit, and implying that one of the partners is playing the role of 'the man' in the relationship and the other 'the woman' is cardinal sin, they must be two rough dudely dudes who happen to like dudes. So media aimed at gay men doesn't necessarily want to engage with gender. And I do want to engage with gender. Gender-nonconformity is kinda the whole point for me. So I'm more drawn to the type of media that does want to engage with it (if imperfectly) than the one that doesn't want to.

Haha I hope that made any sense at all :)