Slashy Meta: Two for One
Feb. 4th, 2010 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tsukinofaeriiPlease don't eat me.
There's two types of fail-meta wandering around fandom that I quietly determined not to poke into—misogyny in slash and homophobia in slash. On both I am all too likely to be RAGE FLAIL ANGRY YELLS OF DENIAL, and no matter how mildly I word my post/comments I can't be certain that I won't come out with all sorts of wrong. Slash is near and dear to my heart, and I've gotten very used to the "you write what, omg that's sick and wrong" reaction. So I bristle.
This is me avoiding bristling, and not avoiding poking the issue with a stick, because I have a long history with sticks and getting bitten on the ass.
(Note to self: tackle slash-shaming as relates to misogyny, homophobia and knee-jerk reactions to outsider accusations in another post. I do believe it's tangentially relevant to this post, but only tangentially. It seems to me that there's a correlation between slash outsiders [gay men who don't read/write fanfic, for example] talking about reasonable concerns in regards to slash, and the instantaneous VROOSH-ASPLODEY response from some slashers that is more emotional than reasonable.)
I feel like fandom, and slash particularly, have been instrumental in helping me grow as a person, as a bisexual person and as a writer. When I see posts that can be summarized as "slash is inherently anti-gay" or "female erasure in slash shows it's misogynist", it feels like my last ten years are being sneered at, and I want to defend all the good slash can do, and has done. I'm addressing both of these issues in one post because I feel like one leads naturally into the other, and I can't easily separate them.
I believe that the misogyny inherent in Western culture not only leads to misogyny in fanfic, but also directly into slash fanfic. Misogyny and homophobia are linked, and both are embedded into culture on an inherent and pervasive level, both of which end up reflecting in a genre that (unexamined) seems designed to avoid and discredit both. In short, it's a domino effect of fail. I do not think that the presence of problematic tropes discredits the entire genre.
I also feel that the majority of this discussion is about this discussion, which is repetitive at the best circle-wank at the worst. What started out reasonably (LAMBDA Fail) has become about how slashers react to criticism of slash and is then being applied to the genre itself with no differentiation. Yes, writers can be terrible about responding to criticism; this does not devalue what they write. I'm dealing with slash, for the record, not with the issue of slasher reaction to criticism.
Here's what I'm going to do. This is divided into two pieces. The first are My Thoughts, and is hopefully not exactly the sort of flaily defensive thing I've been trying to avoid. I can only use my own perspective, so that's what I've done. The second (much more painful lol) will be posted later, in the form of a ten-year review/meme of my time writing fanfic, from where I started to where I am now, pulling one fic a year from my files and looking at it to see if I have grown like I feel I have, or if I'm just in an echo chamber making myself feel better.
Between these two, I reached almost 5000 words of what is hopefully not BS. Yeah, it's like that. Oi.
First off, it seems to be the done thing to identify one's self and establish some sort of cred. I'm cisgendered female, ambisexual (or pan/bisexual, whatever the kids are calling it these days). I have no queer cred. No, really. I don't. For all that I'm not heterosexual, I'm still not a part of the LGBTQAI community. There's a lot of reasons for that: I'm not welcome there, it's not where I found my support when I came out, I don't have friends there, etc and so forth. I support various political goals, but that doesn't mean anything. What it comes down to is that I do not identify as part of that group. If I'm going to align myself with any community, I'd call myself a slasher or a fan (except those aren't valid demographics outside the internet). Fandom is where my friends are, as well as people I consider family, it's where I find emotional support and where I spend my free time. Let's just call that a community, for the sake of argument. I'm probably weird in this, but it wouldn't be the first time.
A lot of the complaints about misogyny circle around two problems. 1) Women simply don't get as much fanfiction written about them as men and 2) fan antipathy towards female characters.
When I first got into fandom, I failed. HARD. My first fandom was Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon. Cultural appropriation, misogyny, heterosexism... Hooboy, I think I lit up the bingo cards like a Christmas tree. That was... Gods, ten years ago. I was young, and dumb, and not a writer. I wrote, but it tended to be of the "and this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, the end" sort of work. In other words, I really had no clue. I definitely didn't identify myself as a writer, and I didn't think about what I was writing. Safe to say, this was back when I thought a hymen was about two inches in and was worried that I didn't ever remember having one. Since I left Sailormoon fandom, I haven't been in a female-centric fandom, but I remember my starting point very well, and I know why I've gone this way.
Sailormoon had characters who were female. They were not perfect. Usagi is the role model for problematic female characterization in a lot of ways, but I loved her and still do! She had awesome friends! She did things! It was great, and I could relate to them! Okay, so she was awash with pink, which I OD'd on as a kid and tend to not like. Didn't matter. Awesome was awesome.
Very, very few of my fandoms since then have had that sort of set up. Strong characters do not always mean relatable characters, especially in terms of female characters. Even if I have relatable female characters, what are the odds that they're going to have a relationship that I can ship? And what I write is mostly shipper fic, so relationships matter to me. Will their Designated Love Interest be one I can buy into? Probably not, because 99% of what media gives me looks nothing like what I want from a relationship, which is essentially BFF + attraction. With other women? HA. HA HA HA. If that were the case, shows wouldn't fail the Bechdel Test so hard. With non-romantically intended men? Noooo, because if a Female Character has Male Friends, then it gets in the way of the Romance, and that Is Not Allowed. (I have Bad Opinions of people who think women & men can't be friends platonically, which is sadly not yet a discredited trope.) What about minor characters? I admit, I'm lazy; I don't want to spend energy crafting a character that may as well be an OC when I can just use an OC. I want intense, driven relationships, and my shipping history shows it.
What this comes down to is... I don't write women in my fanfiction because I don't see women in my media. I see caricatures, I see female-shaped McGuffins, and I see cardboard cut-outs with breasts. When I am (rarely) given a woman, chances are I'm not given anything to do with her. Notable exceptions (Xena & Buffy) sadly happened before I learned of fandom. When I do find female characters that I love, I go ballistic with joy, and almost never ship them with their intended love interests. (My Fruits Basket Tohru-ship is Tohru/Arisa/Saki, for the record, and I am grateful that I got out of that series when I did. I do not like the way it went.)
Looking at this, I can't say that I don't have any antipathy towards female characters. I do—I resent them. Where I should be seeing someone relatable, I'm seeing a thousand versions of wrong, and I hate it. Relena (orbits Heero), Kairi (McGuffin), ChiChi (wife/mother period), Hermione ("the girl" of the trio)... All perfectly good female characters, but not anything I can buy into. I used to bash characters with the worst of them, and I'm working on doing better, but the fact is, most media doesn't give me what I want. It's become habit, actually, to look to the male characters for the strong relationships and relatable characterizations that I love, which means even now that I'm poking in fandoms with a plethora of female characters, I still don't write them.
It's a problem, and I admit it. But I don't think it's me projecting onto the characters. It's that I can't in most cases, and I'm not going to beat myself over the head for it. I can look for ones I'll fall in love with (I'm looking at you, Ms Potts ♥), but I'm not going to try and make myself identify with someone that I really don't. I can look for fandoms with relatable women, but I almost never fall into a fandom because I went looking for it. I fall into a fandom because a friend is in it, or I saw a good fic, or because I literally tripped over it. For me, fandom tends to come before canon. It's a community thing. Without the community, I doubt I'd even be a fan.
So when this comes together, I—as a shipper with a dearth of women to ship? I end up in slash. It gives me the sort of intense striking character interactions I want to see, whether it's brothers (Supernatural), friends (Marvel, Sherlock Holmes, Kingdom Hearts) or enemies (Harry Potter, Dragonball Z). And then that brings up the problem of feminine erasure.
Some common myths about slash fandom that I feel the need to debunk, at least in regards to myself.
All of that being said, slash is not sunshine and roses. Female characters do get badly treated and unfairly ignored. There's a lot of reasons for that. I've already outlined my own reasons when I fail. The only solution I can think of is to make a conscious effort to include female characters, and to monitor ourselves and each other.
Problematic tropes of any sort need to be called out, period and a paragraph.
But the fail of one is not the fail of all, and condemning an entire community for the failure of a few. Trying to cover all of slash in a blanket of misogynistic fail because a percentage of slashers do fail will only cause knee-jerk reactions and argument-ending flounces. It's like saying, "This rice is brown, therefore all rice is brown." It's a classic logical fallacy. This goes both ways. That one slasher doesn't fail does not mean no slashers fail.
In that vein, I'll bring up the recent discussion about the appropriative nature of slash, and how it harms gay men. First, let me reiterate something. I'm not referring to m/m profic. I have no experience with it, I'm not involved and I would be out of line to take a stance. Slash and m/m are two different subjects from where I stand, in the same way that het fic is different from Harlequin.
There's been some posts saying that slash, by default and inevitably harms gay men. (The post I can think of off the top of my head is locked, and so I won't link it.) And while I can see some of the reasoning behind that, I can't agree. There are problematic tropes, and those do harm. There are careless writers, and those do harm. I am not ever going to say that slash is by default activism, because it's not. But what I can't see is how those bad points negate the good writers, and the valuable stories, and their positive effects. Some of these stories touch lives, expand awareness, and provide a touchstone for people who don't find it elsewhere.
I said upward that I put a piece of myself into everything I write. Clearly, I'm not a gay man. I can research and ask questions, but I'll never have that personal experience. And that's not a bad thing. That's what writing is. It's extrapolating and creative and deeply personal. It touches people, reader and writer both. Is it appropriative, in that I use gay male characters to write these stories? I've commented elsewhere saying that it is, but after thinking I'm going to reverse that, because I don't see gay male culture in my stories, nor do I try to reflect it, because in most cases I am not writing about gay male men in gay male culture.
(I've just been blindsided by the following.) I am writing about characters in the same limbo I'm in, where I'm not straight but I'm not of the LGBTQAI community. Most of the fic I read (which is self-selecting) does the same thing. Is this harmful, that I'm using male characters in a way that reflects my own experience? Especially seeing as (looking over my past fic), I frequently write them as bisexual, which blurs the lines even more? And in the end, I'm still not writing my own experience in the actuality of it all, so does it even matter? (Tangentially, why is it that bisexual characters are being counted as gay in this debate? That's bugging me now.)
This lack of gay male culture in fic is also one of the reasons slash fic is being said to hurt gay men, because I don't write their culture into my stories. (This references the locked post that I'm not linking to.) If I were to do so, that would be appropriation, and I don't think it would be wrong to tell those stories as they are, provided I do the research and handle it respectfully. Between these two arguments I see absolutely no resolution, and so feel no compunction about stepping away from it until my fic is critiqued and I can apply it specifically to myself.
This post which is worth considering, points out that the abundance of female slash writers are, inevitably due to demographics and numbers, drowning out the voices of gay male slash writers.In profic, this is absolutely and 100% a problem, IMO.* In slash fic, I'm torn on this because, in my experience, gay men tend to have little interest in writing/reading slash fanfic. Obviously some do (the writer of that post self-identifies as a gay man), but fanfiction in general seems to be something women are interested in more than men, and that holds true in slash as well. Can a majority voice (female) drown out a minority (gay male) voice when the minority has shown little interest in the venue in question? I'm not sure the answer is "no", but I'm not sure it's "yes" either. If it is "yes", does the harm of this outweigh the good enough that it should be stopped?
Yes, I did just say "slash does good", which is not the same as "slash is activism". One thing I think that slash does by simply existing (that it really doesn't get credit for) is increasing visibility and making people aware of issues. It's done a lot of work towards bringing the idea of gay characters forward. Heteronormativity means that unstated sexuality is mistaken for heterosexuality. Slash refutes that, twists it, plays with it and overall rejects it. Even the people who are complaining that the slash is taking over their fandom at some point have to acknowledge that there is indeed such a thing as homosexuality, which opens doors. It's all taking place in their own head, so it's quiet and unobtrusive, but I think I would rather have that than scores of people who never acknowledge it, never think about it, and never even glance away from that heterosexual assumption so many have. I think that's valuable.
All in all... You know, fandom isn't perfect. We have problems, there's absolutely no question. But where is all this hatred coming from? I don't recognize any of the claims being thrown out here as absolutes. Fandom, and the world as a whole, needs to be more self-policing and aware. That's the only way we're going to end some ugly cycles, and ultimately make things better for all of us. We're already somewhat self-policing, and getting better, but a conscious awareness and implementation of it would be the next step, and I think that needs to be taken on an individual basis. (Trying to get all slashers to agree to anything is harder than herding cats.)
TL;DR, problems are problems, but making blanket claims solves nothing. Fandom is reactive, not proactive—we can only work with what we're given, but we've developed a pretty solid ability to take straw and make it into gold. We're already doing that, and we need to do it more. We just need to keep an eye out for people turning straw into crap.
Even donkeys can do that, after all.
* ETA:logophilos was patient enough to explain what's happening in profic publishing in the comments here. Consider the strike-out text retracted.
There's two types of fail-meta wandering around fandom that I quietly determined not to poke into—misogyny in slash and homophobia in slash. On both I am all too likely to be RAGE FLAIL ANGRY YELLS OF DENIAL, and no matter how mildly I word my post/comments I can't be certain that I won't come out with all sorts of wrong. Slash is near and dear to my heart, and I've gotten very used to the "you write what, omg that's sick and wrong" reaction. So I bristle.
This is me avoiding bristling, and not avoiding poking the issue with a stick, because I have a long history with sticks and getting bitten on the ass.
(Note to self: tackle slash-shaming as relates to misogyny, homophobia and knee-jerk reactions to outsider accusations in another post. I do believe it's tangentially relevant to this post, but only tangentially. It seems to me that there's a correlation between slash outsiders [gay men who don't read/write fanfic, for example] talking about reasonable concerns in regards to slash, and the instantaneous VROOSH-ASPLODEY response from some slashers that is more emotional than reasonable.)
I feel like fandom, and slash particularly, have been instrumental in helping me grow as a person, as a bisexual person and as a writer. When I see posts that can be summarized as "slash is inherently anti-gay" or "female erasure in slash shows it's misogynist", it feels like my last ten years are being sneered at, and I want to defend all the good slash can do, and has done. I'm addressing both of these issues in one post because I feel like one leads naturally into the other, and I can't easily separate them.
I believe that the misogyny inherent in Western culture not only leads to misogyny in fanfic, but also directly into slash fanfic. Misogyny and homophobia are linked, and both are embedded into culture on an inherent and pervasive level, both of which end up reflecting in a genre that (unexamined) seems designed to avoid and discredit both. In short, it's a domino effect of fail. I do not think that the presence of problematic tropes discredits the entire genre.
I also feel that the majority of this discussion is about this discussion, which is repetitive at the best circle-wank at the worst. What started out reasonably (LAMBDA Fail) has become about how slashers react to criticism of slash and is then being applied to the genre itself with no differentiation. Yes, writers can be terrible about responding to criticism; this does not devalue what they write. I'm dealing with slash, for the record, not with the issue of slasher reaction to criticism.
Here's what I'm going to do. This is divided into two pieces. The first are My Thoughts, and is hopefully not exactly the sort of flaily defensive thing I've been trying to avoid. I can only use my own perspective, so that's what I've done. The second (much more painful lol) will be posted later, in the form of a ten-year review/meme of my time writing fanfic, from where I started to where I am now, pulling one fic a year from my files and looking at it to see if I have grown like I feel I have, or if I'm just in an echo chamber making myself feel better.
Between these two, I reached almost 5000 words of what is hopefully not BS. Yeah, it's like that. Oi.
First off, it seems to be the done thing to identify one's self and establish some sort of cred. I'm cisgendered female, ambisexual (or pan/bisexual, whatever the kids are calling it these days). I have no queer cred. No, really. I don't. For all that I'm not heterosexual, I'm still not a part of the LGBTQAI community. There's a lot of reasons for that: I'm not welcome there, it's not where I found my support when I came out, I don't have friends there, etc and so forth. I support various political goals, but that doesn't mean anything. What it comes down to is that I do not identify as part of that group. If I'm going to align myself with any community, I'd call myself a slasher or a fan (except those aren't valid demographics outside the internet). Fandom is where my friends are, as well as people I consider family, it's where I find emotional support and where I spend my free time. Let's just call that a community, for the sake of argument. I'm probably weird in this, but it wouldn't be the first time.
A lot of the complaints about misogyny circle around two problems. 1) Women simply don't get as much fanfiction written about them as men and 2) fan antipathy towards female characters.
When I first got into fandom, I failed. HARD. My first fandom was Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon. Cultural appropriation, misogyny, heterosexism... Hooboy, I think I lit up the bingo cards like a Christmas tree. That was... Gods, ten years ago. I was young, and dumb, and not a writer. I wrote, but it tended to be of the "and this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, the end" sort of work. In other words, I really had no clue. I definitely didn't identify myself as a writer, and I didn't think about what I was writing. Safe to say, this was back when I thought a hymen was about two inches in and was worried that I didn't ever remember having one. Since I left Sailormoon fandom, I haven't been in a female-centric fandom, but I remember my starting point very well, and I know why I've gone this way.
Sailormoon had characters who were female. They were not perfect. Usagi is the role model for problematic female characterization in a lot of ways, but I loved her and still do! She had awesome friends! She did things! It was great, and I could relate to them! Okay, so she was awash with pink, which I OD'd on as a kid and tend to not like. Didn't matter. Awesome was awesome.
Very, very few of my fandoms since then have had that sort of set up. Strong characters do not always mean relatable characters, especially in terms of female characters. Even if I have relatable female characters, what are the odds that they're going to have a relationship that I can ship? And what I write is mostly shipper fic, so relationships matter to me. Will their Designated Love Interest be one I can buy into? Probably not, because 99% of what media gives me looks nothing like what I want from a relationship, which is essentially BFF + attraction. With other women? HA. HA HA HA. If that were the case, shows wouldn't fail the Bechdel Test so hard. With non-romantically intended men? Noooo, because if a Female Character has Male Friends, then it gets in the way of the Romance, and that Is Not Allowed. (I have Bad Opinions of people who think women & men can't be friends platonically, which is sadly not yet a discredited trope.) What about minor characters? I admit, I'm lazy; I don't want to spend energy crafting a character that may as well be an OC when I can just use an OC. I want intense, driven relationships, and my shipping history shows it.
What this comes down to is... I don't write women in my fanfiction because I don't see women in my media. I see caricatures, I see female-shaped McGuffins, and I see cardboard cut-outs with breasts. When I am (rarely) given a woman, chances are I'm not given anything to do with her. Notable exceptions (Xena & Buffy) sadly happened before I learned of fandom. When I do find female characters that I love, I go ballistic with joy, and almost never ship them with their intended love interests. (My Fruits Basket Tohru-ship is Tohru/Arisa/Saki, for the record, and I am grateful that I got out of that series when I did. I do not like the way it went.)
Looking at this, I can't say that I don't have any antipathy towards female characters. I do—I resent them. Where I should be seeing someone relatable, I'm seeing a thousand versions of wrong, and I hate it. Relena (orbits Heero), Kairi (McGuffin), ChiChi (wife/mother period), Hermione ("the girl" of the trio)... All perfectly good female characters, but not anything I can buy into. I used to bash characters with the worst of them, and I'm working on doing better, but the fact is, most media doesn't give me what I want. It's become habit, actually, to look to the male characters for the strong relationships and relatable characterizations that I love, which means even now that I'm poking in fandoms with a plethora of female characters, I still don't write them.
It's a problem, and I admit it. But I don't think it's me projecting onto the characters. It's that I can't in most cases, and I'm not going to beat myself over the head for it. I can look for ones I'll fall in love with (I'm looking at you, Ms Potts ♥), but I'm not going to try and make myself identify with someone that I really don't. I can look for fandoms with relatable women, but I almost never fall into a fandom because I went looking for it. I fall into a fandom because a friend is in it, or I saw a good fic, or because I literally tripped over it. For me, fandom tends to come before canon. It's a community thing. Without the community, I doubt I'd even be a fan.
So when this comes together, I—as a shipper with a dearth of women to ship? I end up in slash. It gives me the sort of intense striking character interactions I want to see, whether it's brothers (Supernatural), friends (Marvel, Sherlock Holmes, Kingdom Hearts) or enemies (Harry Potter, Dragonball Z). And then that brings up the problem of feminine erasure.
Some common myths about slash fandom that I feel the need to debunk, at least in regards to myself.
- It's straight women using men as proxies.
Surprise! I don't buy this, and recent pokings into it seem to agree with me. Most of my flist is made of slash fans, and I'm always faintly surprised when someone turns up straight. I know I have some heterosexual people on my list (HI, PEOPLE! I SEE YOU!), but my experience has always been that slash tends to be filled with people like me, who aren't straight, but don't fit into the LGBTQAI culture for whatever reason. We have male writers, female, transsexual, intersexed, lesbian gay, asexual, bisexual... The whole human spectrum! For another thing, if I wanted to use male bodies as a proxy, why would I even be a fan at all? No, really. I could use any sexually attractive male body as a proxy. I love these characters, so I write about them. It's all very simple. As a side note, I don't believe the gender or identification of the writer has anything to do with whether or not the writing is doing harm. Women can write misogynistic trash as well as men, for example.
- It's all about sex.
The piles and piles and piles of non-explicit slash says otherwise. Some of the best fics never show the sex. (Everyone who knows Marvel on my flist will know of
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai & elspethdixon, but I feel like I should point them out as a pair of non-porny slash authors doin' it very right.) Yes, sex comes up, but (for me) that's related only tangentially. I like reading about these characters that are intensely connected. I like reading about sex between two characters who are intensely connected. The logic seems faultless. Two penii do not necessarily make anything better. - Women write slash so they don't have to deal with women.
I write, therefore I am. I'm not saying, on any level, that women don't frequently get the short end of the stick in slash. We call that bad writing and fridging. But I think that any woman who is trying to write herself out of the picture is trying something pretty much impossible. As the writer, it's impossible to disassociate myself entirely with what I write. Everything I put down in text is a thought I'd had, a feeling I know, a memory... On some level, there will always be some of myself in there, no matter what I write, and I write for my own enjoyment. So this is all about me, in a lot of ways. This, naturally, is the source of a lot of issues, because I am not a nice person 100% of the time, and my issues will and do bleed through.
All of that being said, slash is not sunshine and roses. Female characters do get badly treated and unfairly ignored. There's a lot of reasons for that. I've already outlined my own reasons when I fail. The only solution I can think of is to make a conscious effort to include female characters, and to monitor ourselves and each other.
Problematic tropes of any sort need to be called out, period and a paragraph.
But the fail of one is not the fail of all, and condemning an entire community for the failure of a few. Trying to cover all of slash in a blanket of misogynistic fail because a percentage of slashers do fail will only cause knee-jerk reactions and argument-ending flounces. It's like saying, "This rice is brown, therefore all rice is brown." It's a classic logical fallacy. This goes both ways. That one slasher doesn't fail does not mean no slashers fail.
In that vein, I'll bring up the recent discussion about the appropriative nature of slash, and how it harms gay men. First, let me reiterate something. I'm not referring to m/m profic. I have no experience with it, I'm not involved and I would be out of line to take a stance. Slash and m/m are two different subjects from where I stand, in the same way that het fic is different from Harlequin.
There's been some posts saying that slash, by default and inevitably harms gay men. (The post I can think of off the top of my head is locked, and so I won't link it.) And while I can see some of the reasoning behind that, I can't agree. There are problematic tropes, and those do harm. There are careless writers, and those do harm. I am not ever going to say that slash is by default activism, because it's not. But what I can't see is how those bad points negate the good writers, and the valuable stories, and their positive effects. Some of these stories touch lives, expand awareness, and provide a touchstone for people who don't find it elsewhere.
I said upward that I put a piece of myself into everything I write. Clearly, I'm not a gay man. I can research and ask questions, but I'll never have that personal experience. And that's not a bad thing. That's what writing is. It's extrapolating and creative and deeply personal. It touches people, reader and writer both. Is it appropriative, in that I use gay male characters to write these stories? I've commented elsewhere saying that it is, but after thinking I'm going to reverse that, because I don't see gay male culture in my stories, nor do I try to reflect it, because in most cases I am not writing about gay male men in gay male culture.
(I've just been blindsided by the following.) I am writing about characters in the same limbo I'm in, where I'm not straight but I'm not of the LGBTQAI community. Most of the fic I read (which is self-selecting) does the same thing. Is this harmful, that I'm using male characters in a way that reflects my own experience? Especially seeing as (looking over my past fic), I frequently write them as bisexual, which blurs the lines even more? And in the end, I'm still not writing my own experience in the actuality of it all, so does it even matter? (Tangentially, why is it that bisexual characters are being counted as gay in this debate? That's bugging me now.)
This lack of gay male culture in fic is also one of the reasons slash fic is being said to hurt gay men, because I don't write their culture into my stories. (This references the locked post that I'm not linking to.) If I were to do so, that would be appropriation, and I don't think it would be wrong to tell those stories as they are, provided I do the research and handle it respectfully. Between these two arguments I see absolutely no resolution, and so feel no compunction about stepping away from it until my fic is critiqued and I can apply it specifically to myself.
This post which is worth considering, points out that the abundance of female slash writers are, inevitably due to demographics and numbers, drowning out the voices of gay male slash writers.
Yes, I did just say "slash does good", which is not the same as "slash is activism". One thing I think that slash does by simply existing (that it really doesn't get credit for) is increasing visibility and making people aware of issues. It's done a lot of work towards bringing the idea of gay characters forward. Heteronormativity means that unstated sexuality is mistaken for heterosexuality. Slash refutes that, twists it, plays with it and overall rejects it. Even the people who are complaining that the slash is taking over their fandom at some point have to acknowledge that there is indeed such a thing as homosexuality, which opens doors. It's all taking place in their own head, so it's quiet and unobtrusive, but I think I would rather have that than scores of people who never acknowledge it, never think about it, and never even glance away from that heterosexual assumption so many have. I think that's valuable.
All in all... You know, fandom isn't perfect. We have problems, there's absolutely no question. But where is all this hatred coming from? I don't recognize any of the claims being thrown out here as absolutes. Fandom, and the world as a whole, needs to be more self-policing and aware. That's the only way we're going to end some ugly cycles, and ultimately make things better for all of us. We're already somewhat self-policing, and getting better, but a conscious awareness and implementation of it would be the next step, and I think that needs to be taken on an individual basis. (Trying to get all slashers to agree to anything is harder than herding cats.)
TL;DR, problems are problems, but making blanket claims solves nothing. Fandom is reactive, not proactive—we can only work with what we're given, but we've developed a pretty solid ability to take straw and make it into gold. We're already doing that, and we need to do it more. We just need to keep an eye out for people turning straw into crap.
Even donkeys can do that, after all.
* ETA:
logophilos was patient enough to explain what's happening in profic publishing in the comments here. Consider the strike-out text retracted.