anitabuchan

I find it an interesting point that most of the women who spoke in terms of power and control, who found it appealing to "make" two canonically straight characters "act gay," were older -- early 40s and beyond -- whereas the younger women I interviewed rarely touched on it beyond the shock value of two guys being romantically involved. Granted, the interviews were at slash and yaoi conventions, so the sample was self-selective, but the responses were systemically disparate enough to make me pause. From a personal view, I took the two perspectives to be a product of age -- Second wave feminism vs. the new generation of "I'm not a feminist, but..." because all the women I interviewed were very aware of feminist issues and gender politics. So I think having them speak so enthusiastically on women's issues and then act so callous/purposefully oppressing toward the issues of gay men just -- saddened me. A lot. I had planned to turn my thesis into a book or an article and do so much more with it, but by the end I was very disillusioned and that was only three years ago.

Author responsibility -- Yes, exactly. Like, there's a difference between exploring an issue to see what it says about society and exploiting an issue gratuitously for personal gain. It's up to the author first to draw that line, not a publisher or the reader. It's not just author responsibility, it's personal responsibility.