Desire, dissent, and the female gaze: Why women write so much fanfiction

Indian Express

a day ago

When I was 11, I found the 'cool kids' in my bus discussing their favourite theories on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the way back from school. Desperate to join their conversation, I borrowed the first Harry Potter book from the library — unaware that it would change the course of my life.
Over the next few years, I would read the series again and again and again. I would become what they call 'a fangirl', and I would wear the badge with pride.
At the time, I was going through puberty in an all-girls school, and I knew I must pick a fictional man to fall in love with soon. I picked Ron Weasley (I was 'not like other girls', clearly). And I got to work, scouring the internet so I could learn everything about this Great Love Of My Life™. Inevitably, one day, I wound up on fanfiction.net, and read a fanfic where Ron and Hermione do more than kiss— gasp! (The kids would call this 'a canon event'.)
Naturally, my brain exploded.
I had discovered something rather magical. A sprawling, underground library full of stories where anything could happen. My favourite characters could slip off their narrative leashes and be free. They could fall in love with someone else, rewrite their endings or just have really graphic sex in the restricted section of the library, and no one would bat an eye.
But the real kicker: not only could I read these stories… I could write them. I could take these characters, so beloved and so familiar, and use them as puppets — my puppets. (When it comes to teenage girls, give them the chance to play God and trust me, they will run with it.)
At 22, I found myself studying 'Fandom Studies' as part of my college degree (yes, that's a real area of study — God bless English Lit). Reading what the scholars have to say on the subject compelled me to revisit my own childhood in an attempt to understand why fanfiction meant so much to me. Was it just because it ushered in my sexual awakening? Or did it also lay the foundation for me to become a writer? My boyfriend at the time had never read fanfiction and didn't get its appeal. This got me thinking — was there something specific about being a woman that made fanfiction so compelling to me?
Turns out, the answer is a resounding yes.
From the female lens
Women drastically dominate fanfiction. More than 80% of people who read and write fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), the most popular fanfiction site, are women. In fact, more of its users identified as genderqueer (6%) than as male (4%). Why is that? For one, some scholars speculate that women are more inclined to write for free.
Since fanfiction violates copyright by reimagining others' intellectual property, hosting platforms prevent writers from receiving any monetary compensation. Most AO3 authors are okay with that and take pride in being a part of the platform's anti-capitalist 'gift economy' based on exchange and collaboration. Men, however, are not likely to write for free, suggests American author Camille Bacon-Smith. Women, on the other hand, already engage in several acts of unpaid labour and can perhaps see the value of such writing.
Historically, 'anonymous' has always been a woman. Even literary icons like Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelly published their early novels anonymously or under the mere title of 'lady'. While things changed for the better over time, books written by women are still priced lower than those written by men, a 2018 study found. It also noted, 'the more female a genre, the cheaper the books.' In this context, one can fairly assume that the genre with the least monetary value (fanfiction) should come to be the most female-dominated of them all.
A place to rewrite rules
Women may also take to fanfiction because it's inherently transgressive.
Popular media is often from the male perspective — written, directed or produced by men. The transformative nature of fanfiction provides a means to subvert dominant cultural narratives as well as patriarchal or heteronormative ideas within media. Captain America and Bucky can be #couplegoals, Hermione Granger can be black, and your favourite member of One Direction can be in a wheelchair.
Despite being a straight cis-het woman myself, I have found myself reading lots of slash fanfiction (stories of romance/sex featuring two characters of the same gender, typically straight, typically male). This baffled me till I read what Mel Stanfill, one of the researchers behind the 2022 AO3 survey, told Refinery29: 'Slash allows women to explore sexuality without the baggage of identification and the gender norms they are subjected to in real life'.
The act of reimagining familiar stories invites alteration of not just gender roles, but also those of race, power and reality itself. For women and other marginalised groups, the freedom to craft a story on their own terms, without commercial barriers and away from scrutiny and judgement, is a kind of escapism they would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.
Owning desire
Another popular idea is that fanfiction is just 'porn' for women. To be fair, while not all fanfiction contains romance or erotica, a lot of it does. The same things have been said (usually by a man, accompanied by a scoff and a smirk) about the modern BookTok romance novel. However, the idea of some kind of 'porn for women' is not just brilliant, but also important. And it's been around for ages (think — Mills & Boon).
In a world where female desire has been routinely either erased or presented as 'forbidden' (even in its most straight-cis-vanilla-hetero-'normal'-form), fanfiction is where these desires (however kinky) can go to breathe. This is perhaps why some of the most successful fanfictions on the internet are not just based on romance but on sex. Psychologist Leon F Seltzer has written how men are hard-wired to receive visual cues as sexual impulses, but most women are not. Women require stimulation in the mind to become aroused. 'If there's such a thing as porn for women, it's the romance novel,' he wrote in a 2012 article.
Dr Helen Wyatt, a sex therapist, notes how, for women, getting into a state of arousal means first feeling safe. Mainstream porn, which centres heavily around the male gaze, can be jarring or even disturbing to watch. In contrast, the gradual lead-up to sex in most erotic fiction, combined with the personal investment readers have in characters, helps them feel safe and therefore uninhibited.
In fanfiction, the world, the backstory and most importantly, the characters are already achingly familiar. And it is therefore one of the safest places to explore desire.
Women read and write fanfiction for a variety of different reasons. Many, like me, found themselves entrenched in a fandom, hungry for more material. Many others have used it as a space for escapism, dissent, power, sexual release or a combination of all these things. It can be collaborative or it can be anonymous — you get to choose. It is vast and nebulous and uncensored. There's no one to watch, judge, or police you. But the magic of it boils down to that feeling I had when I was 13, reading my first bit of Romione (that's Ron + Hermione, for the uninitiated) smut — the feeling of entering a text, deconstructing it and making it my own, dabbling in a world of infinite narrative possibility. A world with no rules, except the ones you decide should exist.