Reblogging for edit about how I tried to exclude background ships.

This may not make a lot of intuitive sense if you're not familiar with fandom, but if you are, it's completely in line with what people want to see from their fic dynamics. Part of the escapist fantasy of femslash is for two women to have a relationship that's not defined by patriarchal norms of motherhood and parenting. But in any fic where men are involved, the escapist fantasy is often more about imagining a space where men aren't beholden to toxic masculinity, which includes not reacting to pregnancy the way so many men do IRL — with disgust or fear of commitment or feelings of jealousy or insecurity or even anger towards the pregnant partner.

That's one reason why mpreg really fascinates me. In addition to allowing a fictional male character to become an evolved progressive partner, it also allows women to write a man having to go through the same dramatic physical and hormonal changes that women do during pregnancy, and to imagine a space where a man adapts and adjusts to that. And mpreg is also, of course, a hugely fertile space for trans and other non-cis writers to imagine bodily transformations and blurring of gender definitions and roles all within the safety of a fanfic romance trope.

Submarine: Quite a few people ship it, but nobody wants to admit to shipping it. Will randomly appear and throw the other ships into confusion.

Pontoon: that random crossover ship with that one black dress character/trope/fandom everyone will ship with everything else. Has the potential to turn into a massive party until someone gets sick and everyone goes home.

Pedalo: That iconic bizarre crackship whose proponents claim they’re only into it ironically, but secretly they’re all dead serious.

Paging @amythe3lder for the pool noodle definition.

Barge: Not quite seaworthy, but buoyant in both the literal and figurative senses. Someone is always merrily drunktweeting about it at 11pm on Saturday night and then wistfully sobertweeting about it 4 hours later from their kitchen floor. The kind of ship that generates more playlists than fic. Artfully covered in trash and dirty laundry.

Raft: There’s two-to-four people who Ship It Hard and a few others who grab onto the side for safety when there’s drama on their usual flagship.

Barrel: There’s orphaned fic of it. There’s unsigned art of it. There’s headcanon asks on anon. Someone must ship it, but no one knows why or who they are. Your friend got a glimpse once before they ducked back down.

Pool Noodle: It’s just you, kicking your feet. You named the ship and wrote it on your noodle with a big sharpie. You tell people about it and are met with confused blinking. Most of the fics in the tag were either written by you or for you. You are caught between wanting to shout about how lovely life is on this floating scrap of whimsy and fearing that your noodle can’t bear much weight. Or worse, that someone will come over and dunk you, take your noodle and fwhap you on the head with it. 

Scuba: Like a submarine, but it’s just you all by your lonesome, exploring the depths, possibly encountering more tentacles than anticipated.

Kayak: you invented this ship and are the only person who cares about it. There are, at absolute max, maybe three fics for it and you wrote them all.

conceivablyanyone said in tags: #I think about this all the time  #it’s like guyliner or bromance  #why is masculinity so fragile that simply being associated with something that girls like is a huge threat to it  

I have an answer to this:

While English isn’t a gendered language in the sense of having a gendered grammar, like Spanish or German, we nonetheless have many words that possess both masculine and feminine forms, like actor and actress, author and authoress. Often in these instances, the masculine form of a word is synonymous with its neutral, default or original form, in keeping with the fact that feminine variants were later linguistic additions; often made, it must be said, not just because women had started doing a thing they’d previously been prevented from doing, but because men at the time wanted to establish that female efforts at the same pursuits were different (and likely inferior) to their own. 

Thus: women aren’t actors, they’re actresses; women aren’t authors, they’re authoresses, and while some of these feminine variants have more linguistic traction than others - we still say actress, but authoress sounds quaint and sexist - it’s noteworthy that there’s no commensurate tradition for making masculine variants of female forms. Nursing, for instance, is assumed to be a traditionally feminine career, but while we sometimes specify ‘male nurse’ as distinct from just ‘nurse’ - this being a rare professional default with a feminine implication - we’ve never gone so far as to make a whole new word for it.

Which is, I suspect, because there are so few historical instances of men moving into female spheres, rather than vice versa, until very, very recently. But now that it’s started to happen, what do we see? A discomfort with the idea of feminine terminology doubling as neutral. Rather than accepting that words like ‘romance’ and ‘eyeliner’ can be applied equally to men, we’re creating masculine variants whose express purpose is to prevent the traditionally feminine terms from becoming universal. Slowly, surely, we’ve been shedding those early feminine -ess words from the language, dropping them as we’ve come to see the lack of utility (and the surfeit of sexism) in unnecessarily distinguishing gender in such instances, thereby reverting to using the traditionally masculine forms as universal. But now that we have the opportunity to do the same with feminine forms, we’re baulking.

What’s most interesting about this, though, is that in both instances, it’s seemingly men creating and sustaining all the separate, unnecessarily gendered terms: first to deny women full membership of historically male professions and groups, and now to prevent themselves, however ineffectually, from being associated with traditionally feminine concepts.

Because language cooties.

… that is a fantastic goddamn analysis, Foz.

This is a classic example of what I call subtractive masculinity, in which “masculine” is not defined by anything men *do*, but only as “what women *don’t* do”.

So if males (who want to be considered masculine) get interested in *anything* women are known to like, they have to either a) change the thing to repulse women, or b) re-name it so as to claim that *their* thing is a completely different thing than that girly thing.

People brought up in this culture will do this automatically, but IMHO a large reason the culture is still clinging to fragile subtractive masculinity is that it is a *gold mine* for marketing. “Remind males that masculinity is fragile, offer to bolster their gender anxiety — lather rinse repeat, straight to the bank.”

-ess is the worst. I would rather have to politely correct a thousand people incorrectly assuming my gender based on sexist associations with my writing style than ever go by an career-related -ess again.

“It’s not a doll, it’s an action figure!” Gendered fandom marketing starts young.