Hi! I see lots of people talking about that fangirls are fetishing mlm relationships, I see this like a problem too but I feel like lots of people think that it means that everyone who ships queer couple is fetishing it and forgets that there are also queer people who ship characters because they need representation. Where is difference between shiping and fetishing? Is every cishet girl who ships mlm ship fetishing them? (I was using word “queer” because I’m trans gay who ships Holmes/Watson)

vivahate1988:

For one thing, all of the talk around fetishisation in fandom really annoys me because I think it’s largely misguided. For example:

• straight women are in a minority when it comes to the production and consumption of m/m fanfiction
• m/m ships are statistically more likely based on the characters that make up your average piece of media
• as one person put it, “it wasn’t that friendship needed to be sexualized, it was that erotica needed to be … friendship-ized” – this is the internet, anyone has access to porn in 0.2 seconds if that’s what they’re here for, but people are choosing to read stories built around friendship instead
• taking Johnlock as an example, there are currently 79639 fics on AO3, and of those, 11985 (around 15%) are rated Mature and 13488 (around 17%) are rated Explicit – that’s 32% in total, meaning that over two thirds of the total amount of fic isn’t sexually explicit in any way

In addition to that, I identified as straight when I first started reading fanfiction, and it was reading Johnlock fanfic, in part, which allowed me to come to terms with my sexuality (I now identify as bisexual with a strong preference for women). As well as normalising queerness for me, it allowed me to explore it at a distance (f/f fanfic seemed threatening to me at the time, no doubt because of my issues with internalised homophobia). It also introduced me to a community in which queerness was celebrated, which was exactly what I needed at that time, having no access to that in my real life (although I’m fortunate enough not to have been exposed to violent homophobia, either). 

Also, I think it’s incredibly disingenuous to treat young teenage girls reading fanfic as being remotely on the same level as straight adult men masturbating to lesbian porn (produced by an industry which profits from the exploitation of women) and meanwhile often voting to deny real LGBT people equal rights. I also think it’s worth bearing in mind that girls are taught from a very young age to be ashamed of their bodies, and a lot of sexual imagery (in books, in films, in tv, in advertising, in music, everywhere) revolving around women’s bodies is incredibly violent, so it makes perfect sense to me that cishet girls would feel uncomfortable reading anything which implicates bodies like their own in a sexual context, regardless of their sexuality.

Of course festishisation happens, and I’m the first to criticise people for using real life LGBT victories to talk about their ships, for example, but I think that this issue is way more complex than people tend to make out.