Portrayals of Masculinity in Fanworks

Portrayals of Masculinity in Fanworks vary, and the issue is commonly a focus of slash fanworks. The discussion is most often an interrogation of the depiction of gay men, and men as depicted by women.
A fan, Thamiris, wrote in 2002: 
==Feminization or Infantilization?==
Women in media and in everyday life are often depicted as oversensitive, overemotional, sentimental, impulsive, naive, needy, demanding, even flaky. They're often shown solving problems through intuition rather than reason and logic, and as calmer and more reasonable after having babies. When a woman doesn't act flighty but is sensible and mature, many people would not use those words to describe her but say she is manly or exhibits masculine traits. That's if they're being polite. A very good case has been made for so-called feminine traits as actually being those we associate with very young childrenCharles R. Huot, "Language as a social reality: The effects of the infantilization of women". University of Northern Iowa, 2013.William E. Snell, Jr., The beliefs about women scale. Department of Psychology, SE Missouri State University, 1997.. So when male characters are portrayed with stereotypically feminine traits as part of a slash narrative, we may really be talking about infantilization.
 
== "Masculine" Women==
"There does seem, however, to be a sense that these "feminized" versions of the (male) characters are somehow OOC. But nobody ever complains about "masculinizing" female characters, do they? Ever wonder why not?" (2007) 
Other fans would disagree, citing female characters that were popular, or unpopular, due to their masculine characteristics. Tasha Yar & Galadriel are characters that are polarizing in this way.
==Aren't "Female" and "Male" Simply Artificial Constructs?==
Hypersensitivity: a fan in 1980 complained that in Forever Autumn Starsky was a little feminized in the story as he ended up making the coffee. S and H #13. Well, somebody has to! 
==Big Guy, Little Guy/Butch and Femme/Seme and Uke/Guys Crying/Weepy Uke Syndrome==
In 2001, fan blogger Tom Hardings and his friend Buki Skylark of Realmangamoon hosted fanwriter Irk's raunchy Mystery Science Theater 3000 parody of a well-known screed by fanwriter Jeanne on the yaoi site aestheticism.netnot to be confused with the other "Top 10 Things I Love About Yaoi", which originally appeared at rec.arts.anime.misc and was written by "Saturn". Using characters from the longrunning franchise Slayers, Irk took Jeanne to task for her enervating preoccupation with making yaoi out of every male friendship or acquaintance in anime, manga and games, and for making one of each pair a girlish uke even if he was not that in canon.
==Genderswitching in Fanworks==
==Tuppertrek and CurtainFic==
==Traditional Gender Roles: Het and Slash==
==Case Studies==
===Ray Doyle===
 
Some fans enjoyed the characterization of Ray Doyle in The Professionals as the more "feminine" of the duo. Others, not so much -- one common complaint is that Doyle is often portrayed as fragile and needy.
One fan in 1987 wrote: "I am becoming increasingly aggravated by the portrayal of Doyle as childlike, female, fragile, too beautiful for his own good. I'm guilty in that I cannot depict him in my writing.as the tough man I see him to be in the series, but I hope I haven't yet turned him into the equivalent of a Barbara Cartland heroine. I certainly don't recognise the waiflike creature who is loaded down with jewellery and weeps every five minutes and who is into organic food/vegetarianism that I keep reading about. I agree ... Bodie is tough, probably tougher than Doyle in terms of physical strength but Doyle is the dominant half of the partnership. When it comes to character, he can run rings round his partner." from The Hatstand Express #14 
From 1997: "It's not necessarily A/U stories that girlify Doyle. There are more than enough CIS-based stories that have Doyle as a fragile flower who weeps down big butch Bodie's shirt front at the slightest opportunity. I don't recognise that view of Doyle at all." from Discovered In A Letterbox #3 
In 1998: "...I cannot understand the feminisation of characters. Why do writers do that? Is it because they identify most strongly with that character and, being female, see him as feminine also? Or maybe they really fancy the other half of the partnership and feel they are wasted on a 'real' man? Maybe they're ashamed of their liking for slash so they .. er .. hetero-ize it? You ask how the individual is chosen. I think the character to be feminised is the smaller of the two - simple as that. Daft, really." from Discovered In A Letterbox #6 
Another view: "[The feminization]... by which I mean writers creating 'nice' versions of Bodie and Doyle, The two men talk, think, and behave in ways that women do, perhaps because the writers (invariably women) are putting their own attitudes into their characters. Such writers seem unable to get beyond this to present the characters in a way that is masculine but will still appeal to a feminine readership." from Discovered In A Letterbox #7 
===Tasha Yar===
Tasha Yar of Star Trek: TNG.
===Blair Sandburg===
"Take a character like Blair from The Sentinel for example, writers feminize him an appalling amount. I mean they have the guy bursting into tears at the drop of a damn hat. He cries over every damn thing they can come up with. It gets to the point where you just go 'Jeez, I'm a chick and I don't break out into water works that much.' Have these writers actually seen the show. I'll admit Blair is a new age hippie, somewhat in touch with his feelings, kind of guy. He doesn't cry on a dime though." Feminizing vs Effeminate 
"I think Blair has a lot of aspects that make him easier to feminize: he's got long curly hair and he's short and he's got a gender-ambiguous name and he wears jewelry and he's, like, *sensitive*, man.
But I also think there's a general trend in slash to feminize one of the characters in a pairing. Why this is, I don't know. I've got theories about Beloved Slash Objects and authorial identification and the reconstruction of social roles and internalized ideas about homosexual culture and behavior, but I don't really *like* any of my theories. So the young guy, the blond guy, the skinny guy, the shorter guy, the pretty guy, the [insert vaguely possibly just barely non-butch characteristic here] guy turns into the girly guy." De-butchify 
Also see: Real Men Don't Act That Way (1999).
===Cecil Gershwin Palmer===
In May 2014, tumblr user honeygirl tried to start a discussion about stereotypical male-female portrayal of gay male couples. Her case in point was Cecil Gershwin Palmer of Welcome to Night Vale. Although canon never describes Cecil, so listeners can imagine his appearance any way they like, much fan art depicts him and his love interest Carlos as a stereotypical Binary OTP -- Cecil as a slender blond man, often delicately built and much smaller than Carlos (who is canonically tall, dark and exceedingly attractive). Cecil's voice actor, Cecil Baldwin, has a notably deep, rich voice that is practically a character in its own right (the "Voice Of Night Vale") and he never sounds womanly or femme. But early episodes had had Cecil initially react to Carlos in a "fangirly, gushy kind of way"Alex Townsend, "Cecil Baldwin on the Origins of Night Vale, Cecil’s Love for Carlos, and Playing Someone Delightfully Imperfect". The Mary Sue, September 9, 2015. and listeners picked up on that. 
Honeygirl did not believe that Cecil's initial Squeeing over Carlos in these early episodes did not explain a tendency she had seen for fan art and writing to portray the pair as a binary OTP, especially showing Cecil as an uke type, femme, "girly" or physically smaller and weaker than Carlos. Feeling that this was an attempt to reinvent the pair as a straight couple, and not having the background vocabulary to explain what she meant, she attempted to distinguish these "Cecil as 'the woman' and Carlos as 'the man' in the relationship" portrayals from gender-switching or other legitimate creative experiments.
She received a fair amount of backlash, along with more reasoned comments that plenty of gay, transgender and even straight men have traits society associates with "female": "But why would you dislike effeminate Cecil’s? I totally understand disliking the stereotype yes, but to imagine him as effeminate is hardly stereotyping. It’s a reasonable conclusion to draw."tumblr user hufflepuffsquee in the same discussion at you're not saying what you think you're saying She attempted to clarify:
She followed this up with these words:
Meanwhile, tumblr user djclawson agreed with her, saying: "No I have seen Cecil Baldwin too many times in person not to agree with you, even though my Cecil headcanon looks different than him." Unpopular opinion alert, post dated May 8, 2014 (8:41 am).
==Is Backlash Against "Feminine Men" a Form of Misogyny?==
"I like my men masculine. The characters I like to read slashed, on the shows are tough, strong, intelligent,and just a little wild. I want to see them just as they are on screen in stories. I don't want them remade in our own feminine images. I want them exactly like they are on the show. I want to see what is there and I want the writers to delve in and find all those mysteries that lie within them. I want to see those hidden aspects brought forth. Not for a minute do I think they are hiding this weepy chick inside them waiting to get out. Sometimes a writer can make them so feminine you think you ought to offer them a sex change operation." Feminizing vs Effeminate 
"Otoh, if "feminizing" mean corrupting the character, then I tend to see it as weak writing - bordering "Mary Sue" in this respect: that it's contorting the character into a form that the writer particularly wants to see." The Ad's Office Interview: The Boys Night Out: Some Members of the Male Slash Fans Mailing List (1998) 
"There have been many times that I have read a story and practically heard Fox Mulder, Fraser from Due South or some other typically masculine character scream "we're not girls, so don't treat us like it!" There seems to be an overwhelming tendency in the slash community to make masculine characters so feminine that you could change one of the names to "Mary" and it wouldn't make a difference.
Maybe it's because it fits the story better. Maybe it's because it's the easiest way for female writers to relate to them. Maybe it goes back to the old anime thing, where women like to read about feminine men because they are venting their pent-up sexual fantasies. But even Vincent Valentine has a gun fetish and even Sailor Moon's boyfriend pees standing up.
I find it a little annoying when I see perfectly masculine men, like the aforementioned Fraser, acting like women. Even if we're writing stories about an alternate universe, it's always more interesting when the dialogue and actions of the character are somewhat true to life. The neat thing about slash is that you get to see characters act out what you don't see onscreen but it loses its appeal when the character is so "feminized" that you can't recognize him." Girly Men (1998) 
"...I cannot understand the feminisation of characters. Why do writers do that? Is it because they identify most strongly with that character and, being female, see him as feminine also? Or maybe they really fancy the other half of the partnership and feel they are wasted on a 'real' man? Maybe they're ashamed of their liking for slash so they .. er .. hetero-ize it? You ask how the individual is chosen. I think the character to be feminised is the smaller of the two - simple as that. Daft, really." Discovered In A Letterbox #6 (1998) For a perfect example of what this writer is talking about, see any Star Trek novel by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. Many fan critics comment that James Kirk is notably feminized in these stories, while Spock is hypermasculinized to the point of giving him an extra Y chromosome in one story.
==Is This a Topic That Has Changed Over Time?==
People who think this is a relatively new phenomenon, or only limited to fanworks, should read the aesthetic romances of the mid-1800s, particularly the novels of OuidaOuida at the Online Books Page. Suggested works: Held in Bondage, Chandos, Strathmore, and Under Two Flags . Her powerful action heroes -- and villains, too -- are often also delicate, poetic guys, explicitly described as having many positive "womanly" traits. They weep crystal tears and have warm, loving hearts, able to feel deeply for animals as well as people.
==Meta/Further Reading==
* Girly Men (1999)
* Feminizing vs Effeminate (2001)
* Feminizing: A Male POV (2001)
* De-butchify (2001)
* a question re: feminisation archive link, discussion at Slash Philosophy (July 2004)
* Eew, He's All Girly: Issues Surrounding Feminized Male Characters (2004)
* Moriquendi: The Gendered Other in Tolkien Fanfiction by adn_heming (2005)
* *head tilt* (I think that *I* want to emasculate them); archive link page 1; archive link page 2, post by Cesperanza (August 7, 2006)
* Help! My slash goggles are stuck!; Archive for page one; page two; Archive for page two, post by melannen (2007)
==References==
Category:Discussion