- Joined
- Jan 5, 2023
Strangely, there is a known phenomenon of actual lesbians (like, real women who date/marry other real women IRL) preferring m/m to f/f as well. Usually the justification for this that I see is that male characters tend to be more interesting in many popular mediums (since it's easy for commercial writers to fall into the trap of "I don't need to give this character more interesting traits since her being a woman is already interesting"), and in addition, when ships get 'teased' in their source material - accidentally or on purpose - m/m ships get teased based on their personal dynamics whereas f/f gets teased based on how sexy they would look together. Lesbians tend to be pretty split on how they feel about the sexualization of female characters, since on one hand we like sexy women too, but on the other hand, women be projecting onto characters and sometimes it feels like we're the ones getting sexualized without asking for it. So m/m ends up being more appealing in general, both for story reasons and it because it leaves sexualization entirely in the fic author's hands. A lot of the f/f fics in the tag may actually be genderbent m/m ships, though genderbending is not nearly as popular as it once was. (It basically started to die as soon as the pooners arrived.)
ETA: A lot of those f/f fics are probably also not the main pairings of the fic, too. It's pretty common for m/m writers to put in an f/f side ship or background ship as a way to "balance out" the m/m. These usually end up being characters who have no basis for the ship besides "the show only has two (2) principle characters who are female, so we'll ship them."
There is also an issue wherein real lesbians reading f/f would be put off by an unrealistic depiction of lesbian relationships, because even if a female author can generally be relied upon to write plausible female characters, said female author is probably straight and doesn't really know how lesbian relationships work. You wouldn't expect gay men (actual gay men, not pooners) to enjoy the majority of m/m fic, after all.
However, even if a disproportionate (compared to the non-fandom human race) amount of yaoi fangirls are lesbians, ime they're still majority straight. It's just that straight girls on the internet nowadays like to identify as gay men or gender specials and/or call themselves lesbians/bi/pan despite never demonstrating any interest towards other females in real life - at best they like male troons or gender specials. And then there's the asexuals who are clearly horny.
But my point is that even if the self-reported amount of bi/lesbian females on AO3 were accurate, it still wouldn't be surprising that m/m dominates.
(Source: lesbian, longtime m/m fan.)
ETA: A lot of those f/f fics are probably also not the main pairings of the fic, too. It's pretty common for m/m writers to put in an f/f side ship or background ship as a way to "balance out" the m/m. These usually end up being characters who have no basis for the ship besides "the show only has two (2) principle characters who are female, so we'll ship them."
There is also an issue wherein real lesbians reading f/f would be put off by an unrealistic depiction of lesbian relationships, because even if a female author can generally be relied upon to write plausible female characters, said female author is probably straight and doesn't really know how lesbian relationships work. You wouldn't expect gay men (actual gay men, not pooners) to enjoy the majority of m/m fic, after all.
However, even if a disproportionate (compared to the non-fandom human race) amount of yaoi fangirls are lesbians, ime they're still majority straight. It's just that straight girls on the internet nowadays like to identify as gay men or gender specials and/or call themselves lesbians/bi/pan despite never demonstrating any interest towards other females in real life - at best they like male troons or gender specials. And then there's the asexuals who are clearly horny.
But my point is that even if the self-reported amount of bi/lesbian females on AO3 were accurate, it still wouldn't be surprising that m/m dominates.
(Source: lesbian, longtime m/m fan.)


































































