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So, after the incredible video essays of both Harris Bomberguy and Todd in the Shadows on James Somerton, I have some Thoughts. Please watch their videos first, and please consider kicking some money over to the writers that Somerton stole from, if you have some to spare. At the end of the day, Somerton's most egregious crimes are the rewriting of queer history and stealing the hard work of queer creators, many of whom died during the AIDS crisis. I think my thoughts (as a queer trans man) matter, but ultimately, these are the people who were hurt, so I feel the need to mention them before anything else.
But I do think I should speak about his misogyny, because the tropes he invokes are ones that are specifically hurtful to me personally.
Many of James' "original" observations (read: ones he didn't steal from the people who did the actual work) are these weird jabs about this... cabal of straight women who simultaneous love slash and dehumanise queer men (usually for the purposes of fetishisation), but also angrily tweet in droves when they see two men having sex on screen. (To be clear: I know the antisemetic connotations of the word "cabal" and I am using it intentionally to stress my point. A "cabal" is often a made-up boogeyman invoked by people who want the world to be less complex than it is. I'm also Jewish.)
This is a narrative that I've seen over and over again in fandom spaces. I generally associate it with the Livejournal era (I think because I wasn't there and everything seems so mythic and foundational these days?), but....
Has anyone ever actually met someone like this?
I've been in fandom for a long-ass time (my first fan fic was published in 2011), and I can safely say that I've met a lot of people over the years. Almost all of them have been queer. I think the last time I talked to a "straight" woman in fandom spaces was 2014, and she's now living with her queer platonic partner who is a woman. I don't know how she identifies, but that's not straight woman behaviour. And you'd think that the fandom spaces I'm a part of (usually shipping 2 men together) would attract these people like crazy. And yet, the majority of straight women that I see in fandom spaces either ship hetero ships or ship their self-inserts with male characters. I've known a few cis women with husbands and boyfriends in my m/m ship servers, but I can't say that I've ever gotten the vibe that these women were just here for teh hawt yaoiz or whatever. I don't even know if they were straight, since their sexuality is Not My Fucking Business unless they decide to make it so. When these women wrote fan fiction, they wanted to keep these characters in character and explore themes and emotions. When they did write pwp, it seemed like they thought that sex was part of the character's relationship and wanted to explore that too.
I think there is a tendency to write different ships similarly, especially when different fandoms are written by the same author. We are not a particularly large community, all things considered, and I think we all have our characterisation comfort zones. (I did realise a couple years ago that I write USUK from Hetalia and Kylux from Star Wars with an eerily similar dynamic. Oops). However, I feel as thought that's more easy to attribute to fandom writers influencing themselves and each other, and amateur writers generally staying in their comfort zone. It's the same reason most of my fics take place in the USA. It's second nature for me to write them that way and when I'm not planning and drafting over and over again, there's not a lot of opportunity for the story to develop and change. Is this based in homophobia or a desire to put m/m relationships in a specific box? Probably. Society has a lot of Opinions about how gay relationships ought to be and I think we're not immune to swallowing the water we're swimming in.
That being said, it only feels icky to me (as a queer transmasc) when it's clearly out of character and goes out of its way to impose heterosexual dynamics onto queer characters. The bottom is physically smaller, submissive, emotionally needier, and less sexually experienced than the top, who is physically larger, dominant, emotionally stoic, and more sexually experienced. However, I see these tropes most often not in fan fiction, but in mainstream gay porn, which is targeted at queer men, not this mysterious Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal. Like a lot of porn, it is (to borrow from Ian Danskin's Semiotics of "Cuck" video) a reflection of what a minority wants and what the majority will tolerate. It's a popular fantasy, but not an earnest reflection of most m/m relationships. (It's also popular in yaoi manga, but I haven't read anything from the genre since 2011, so I'm not inclined to opine further.) Unrelated side note but something that's always bothered me: I dislike how much top/bottom discourse is dedicated to forcing characters into this dynamic. But... 90% of the time the people I see participating it are, like, fourteen, so that will probably be the only thing I say publicly about it. I'm not interested in dunking on high schoolers on the internet.
Anyway. When I hear people complaining about things on the internet, I have one question on my mind: Who is actually being harmed here? Who actually gives a shit that James Somerton is (to borrow from Todd in the Shadows) making up a bunch of women to get mad at?
First of all, I'm not convinced that I (a transmasc who is deeply closeted in his daily life) wouldn't not count as a woman to Mr. Somerton. Bomberguy points out that during one of his rare digressions from plagiarism, he claims that "queer women get to tell their stories on TV" with images from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Steven Universe. Presumably, he is referring to showrunners ND Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar respectively. While Stevenson and Sugar were not open about their gender identities until after their shows were at peak popularity, both Stevenson and Sugar have their pronouns in their twitter bios. (Stevenson came out as nonbinary in 2020 and then as transmasculine in 2021 and this article from 2018 mentions Sugar's nonbinary identity). The fact that both Stevenson and Sugar are transgender is also on their wikipedia pages. I know this because that's where I grabbed Stevenson's tweets. (In Somerton's defense, Sugar has called themself a "nonbinary woman," but I still feel like not mentioning their nonbinary identity is lying by omission.)
Unrelated: It's not exactly a mystery why Stevenson and Sugar were more likely to be able to tell their stories than queer men working in children's television. They were perceived as women at the time and we have a very gender essentialist idea of who gets to write for children. Like, of course these women are writing for children! They're supposed to be wives and mothers and be all nurturing and shit. Men who work with children are often side-eyed as being potential predators, which is doubly true for queer men. After all, men aren't mothers, they don't nurture, so why should they care about children's television? That's a useful hypothesis for you, Jim. It took me 10 seconds and 2 braincells.
And when he's not erasing the identities of nonbinary creators, he's erasing queer authors who wrote books he doesn't like. Becky Albertalli is the author of Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, a book about a gay teenager who enters an anonymous romance with someone in his high school. I read the book and found it to be heartfelt and moving and very true to life. Albertalli also mentions in her author's note that she got the idea for it while working with queer kids. She had never said whether or not she was queer herself (and it is None Of My Fucking Business), but it's clear that she loved the queer community and put a lot of effort into making queer kids feel seen. I was a year out of high school when I read it and it made me cry. When it was adapted into the film Love, Simon, the project had a gay director in Greg Berlanti (too lazy to grab a source, you can check his wikipedia if you don't believe me).
Problem is, some people didn't get the memo about other people's sexuality being None of Their Fucking Business and decided to start attacking Albertalli for being a straight woman who wrote about gay men (presumably a member of the Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal). This essentially forced her to come out as bisexual before she was ready in this heartbreaking Medium post (which I read when it dropped and pulled the link from her wikipedia page). Years after this dropped and made a relatively large splash in gay online spaces, Somerton claimed in a video that Albertalli was straight. She would later comment on that video expaining her story and asking him to make a correction. There's honestly no excuse for this error, and Albertalli handled it with far more grace than I ever could.
So, Somerton is either too lazy to double check information about the people he writes (read: plagiarises) about or chooses to ignore their very-publically-available coming out posts when writing his videos. Hbomb points out a weird subtext to a lot of his videos that seem to imply that anyone he perceives as a woman has it easier than gay men do. I'd love to hear how my DFAB friends of colour feel about this white cis gay man's opinion on their issues, but my eye is twitching. I've seen kind of an uptick of #discourse invoking the Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal since the rise of Twitter and Tik Tok. I thought I was just getting old and using tumblr less, but I'm starting to think that this extremely successful YouTuber whose videos get millions of views might be poisoning the well a bit here. To be honest, I remember some of the #discourse about Fetishising Hetero Women from about 2013 on tumblr, but I think we grew up and realised that we weren't straight or weren't women (or in my case, both!). I think the Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal is cathartis for folks like Somerton because it allows him to be really misogynistic while still feeling like he's punching up to some extent. Like, sure, I don't think these women are capable of liking m/m relationship for any reason other than teh hawt yaoiz, and they're also responsible for every writing decision I don't like. They're also homophobic and infantalising of gay men, so actually I'm doing a good thing by beating up this strawman. And then I will point to any woman whose work I didn't enjoy, claim she's heterosexual, and watch my fans tear her down. It's not misogynistic if the woman I'm quietly allowing my audience to harrass is profiting off of our community!
And it's weird that he never does this with male writers, right? My beloved Neil Gaiman and Rick Riordan are both straight men (as far as I know) who write mlm and wlw characters, and yet I never see anyone accusing them of fetishising lesbians or only being in it for teh hawt yuriz. Funny how there's no corresponding Fetishing Hetero Man Cabal when most mainstream lesbian porn is intended for cis men. Why does this powerful group of Weird Women on the Internet have so much power over the type of queer stories that get told but the actual powerful and well-paid men who write about queer women get a free pass? I'm not accusing either of these men of fetishising queer women (I find all their queer character to be pretty well-written); I think Somerton needs to unpack his misogyny.
Finally (and you can tell I've been procrastinating about this section), I have a personal bone to pick with the Fetishising Woman Cabal trope. It has infected me with so much brainrot that I'm terrified to be myself. I've known I wasn't a woman since I was a freshman in high school. I'm 25 years old and I'm only out to my closest friends in real life. I'm... not completely comfortable talking about it here either, but if it makes one person feel better or less alone, it's worth doing.
I am a transgender man who likes men. Most of the stories that I read are about men falling in love with (and fucking) other men. Most of my writing is about men falling in love with each other and/or having sex. This has been (and hopefully always will be) a safe way for me to explore my identity as a transgender man who likes other men.
And yet. Despite knowing this to be true without a shadow of a doubt, I am petrified of being part of the Fetishising Woman Cabal. I am afraid that I am, unbeknownst to myself, a woman who fetishised gay men so hard I have deluded myself into becoming one. That the TERFs are right and I hate women so much that I reject being one. I am afraid to mention to my gay male coworker that I mostly write and read stories about gay men because I am afraid he will think this of me. I'm afraid to come out at work because I don't think anyone will take me seriously. And I work in one of the most progressive metro areas in the country.
The biggest punchline to all this is, even if I am not a man, I am still certainly not a cishet woman. I am aromatic and I also date women! I'm about as queer as you can get! If I have these hangups, I can't imagine how allo trans men who only like men must feel.
When we point fingers at the Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal, we don't just hurt cishet women who like stories about queer men (which, by the way, is not a problem unless you're REALLY weird about it). We're also hurting anyone who has experienced being a cishet woman and anyone we choose to paint with that brush.
I'm happy Somerton has been revealed as a fraud and that his platform has been removed. Now let's get to work getting rid of the brain worms he helped infect us all with.
(Note: this is a blog post and not intended as a well-sourced essay. If there are any factual inaccuracies, please let me know so I can edit them!)
But I do think I should speak about his misogyny, because the tropes he invokes are ones that are specifically hurtful to me personally.
Many of James' "original" observations (read: ones he didn't steal from the people who did the actual work) are these weird jabs about this... cabal of straight women who simultaneous love slash and dehumanise queer men (usually for the purposes of fetishisation), but also angrily tweet in droves when they see two men having sex on screen. (To be clear: I know the antisemetic connotations of the word "cabal" and I am using it intentionally to stress my point. A "cabal" is often a made-up boogeyman invoked by people who want the world to be less complex than it is. I'm also Jewish.)
This is a narrative that I've seen over and over again in fandom spaces. I generally associate it with the Livejournal era (I think because I wasn't there and everything seems so mythic and foundational these days?), but....
Has anyone ever actually met someone like this?
I've been in fandom for a long-ass time (my first fan fic was published in 2011), and I can safely say that I've met a lot of people over the years. Almost all of them have been queer. I think the last time I talked to a "straight" woman in fandom spaces was 2014, and she's now living with her queer platonic partner who is a woman. I don't know how she identifies, but that's not straight woman behaviour. And you'd think that the fandom spaces I'm a part of (usually shipping 2 men together) would attract these people like crazy. And yet, the majority of straight women that I see in fandom spaces either ship hetero ships or ship their self-inserts with male characters. I've known a few cis women with husbands and boyfriends in my m/m ship servers, but I can't say that I've ever gotten the vibe that these women were just here for teh hawt yaoiz or whatever. I don't even know if they were straight, since their sexuality is Not My Fucking Business unless they decide to make it so. When these women wrote fan fiction, they wanted to keep these characters in character and explore themes and emotions. When they did write pwp, it seemed like they thought that sex was part of the character's relationship and wanted to explore that too.
I think there is a tendency to write different ships similarly, especially when different fandoms are written by the same author. We are not a particularly large community, all things considered, and I think we all have our characterisation comfort zones. (I did realise a couple years ago that I write USUK from Hetalia and Kylux from Star Wars with an eerily similar dynamic. Oops). However, I feel as thought that's more easy to attribute to fandom writers influencing themselves and each other, and amateur writers generally staying in their comfort zone. It's the same reason most of my fics take place in the USA. It's second nature for me to write them that way and when I'm not planning and drafting over and over again, there's not a lot of opportunity for the story to develop and change. Is this based in homophobia or a desire to put m/m relationships in a specific box? Probably. Society has a lot of Opinions about how gay relationships ought to be and I think we're not immune to swallowing the water we're swimming in.
That being said, it only feels icky to me (as a queer transmasc) when it's clearly out of character and goes out of its way to impose heterosexual dynamics onto queer characters. The bottom is physically smaller, submissive, emotionally needier, and less sexually experienced than the top, who is physically larger, dominant, emotionally stoic, and more sexually experienced. However, I see these tropes most often not in fan fiction, but in mainstream gay porn, which is targeted at queer men, not this mysterious Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal. Like a lot of porn, it is (to borrow from Ian Danskin's Semiotics of "Cuck" video) a reflection of what a minority wants and what the majority will tolerate. It's a popular fantasy, but not an earnest reflection of most m/m relationships. (It's also popular in yaoi manga, but I haven't read anything from the genre since 2011, so I'm not inclined to opine further.) Unrelated side note but something that's always bothered me: I dislike how much top/bottom discourse is dedicated to forcing characters into this dynamic. But... 90% of the time the people I see participating it are, like, fourteen, so that will probably be the only thing I say publicly about it. I'm not interested in dunking on high schoolers on the internet.
Anyway. When I hear people complaining about things on the internet, I have one question on my mind: Who is actually being harmed here? Who actually gives a shit that James Somerton is (to borrow from Todd in the Shadows) making up a bunch of women to get mad at?
First of all, I'm not convinced that I (a transmasc who is deeply closeted in his daily life) wouldn't not count as a woman to Mr. Somerton. Bomberguy points out that during one of his rare digressions from plagiarism, he claims that "queer women get to tell their stories on TV" with images from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Steven Universe. Presumably, he is referring to showrunners ND Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar respectively. While Stevenson and Sugar were not open about their gender identities until after their shows were at peak popularity, both Stevenson and Sugar have their pronouns in their twitter bios. (Stevenson came out as nonbinary in 2020 and then as transmasculine in 2021 and this article from 2018 mentions Sugar's nonbinary identity). The fact that both Stevenson and Sugar are transgender is also on their wikipedia pages. I know this because that's where I grabbed Stevenson's tweets. (In Somerton's defense, Sugar has called themself a "nonbinary woman," but I still feel like not mentioning their nonbinary identity is lying by omission.)
Unrelated: It's not exactly a mystery why Stevenson and Sugar were more likely to be able to tell their stories than queer men working in children's television. They were perceived as women at the time and we have a very gender essentialist idea of who gets to write for children. Like, of course these women are writing for children! They're supposed to be wives and mothers and be all nurturing and shit. Men who work with children are often side-eyed as being potential predators, which is doubly true for queer men. After all, men aren't mothers, they don't nurture, so why should they care about children's television? That's a useful hypothesis for you, Jim. It took me 10 seconds and 2 braincells.
And when he's not erasing the identities of nonbinary creators, he's erasing queer authors who wrote books he doesn't like. Becky Albertalli is the author of Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, a book about a gay teenager who enters an anonymous romance with someone in his high school. I read the book and found it to be heartfelt and moving and very true to life. Albertalli also mentions in her author's note that she got the idea for it while working with queer kids. She had never said whether or not she was queer herself (and it is None Of My Fucking Business), but it's clear that she loved the queer community and put a lot of effort into making queer kids feel seen. I was a year out of high school when I read it and it made me cry. When it was adapted into the film Love, Simon, the project had a gay director in Greg Berlanti (too lazy to grab a source, you can check his wikipedia if you don't believe me).
Problem is, some people didn't get the memo about other people's sexuality being None of Their Fucking Business and decided to start attacking Albertalli for being a straight woman who wrote about gay men (presumably a member of the Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal). This essentially forced her to come out as bisexual before she was ready in this heartbreaking Medium post (which I read when it dropped and pulled the link from her wikipedia page). Years after this dropped and made a relatively large splash in gay online spaces, Somerton claimed in a video that Albertalli was straight. She would later comment on that video expaining her story and asking him to make a correction. There's honestly no excuse for this error, and Albertalli handled it with far more grace than I ever could.
So, Somerton is either too lazy to double check information about the people he writes (read: plagiarises) about or chooses to ignore their very-publically-available coming out posts when writing his videos. Hbomb points out a weird subtext to a lot of his videos that seem to imply that anyone he perceives as a woman has it easier than gay men do. I'd love to hear how my DFAB friends of colour feel about this white cis gay man's opinion on their issues, but my eye is twitching. I've seen kind of an uptick of #discourse invoking the Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal since the rise of Twitter and Tik Tok. I thought I was just getting old and using tumblr less, but I'm starting to think that this extremely successful YouTuber whose videos get millions of views might be poisoning the well a bit here. To be honest, I remember some of the #discourse about Fetishising Hetero Women from about 2013 on tumblr, but I think we grew up and realised that we weren't straight or weren't women (or in my case, both!). I think the Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal is cathartis for folks like Somerton because it allows him to be really misogynistic while still feeling like he's punching up to some extent. Like, sure, I don't think these women are capable of liking m/m relationship for any reason other than teh hawt yaoiz, and they're also responsible for every writing decision I don't like. They're also homophobic and infantalising of gay men, so actually I'm doing a good thing by beating up this strawman. And then I will point to any woman whose work I didn't enjoy, claim she's heterosexual, and watch my fans tear her down. It's not misogynistic if the woman I'm quietly allowing my audience to harrass is profiting off of our community!
And it's weird that he never does this with male writers, right? My beloved Neil Gaiman and Rick Riordan are both straight men (as far as I know) who write mlm and wlw characters, and yet I never see anyone accusing them of fetishising lesbians or only being in it for teh hawt yuriz. Funny how there's no corresponding Fetishing Hetero Man Cabal when most mainstream lesbian porn is intended for cis men. Why does this powerful group of Weird Women on the Internet have so much power over the type of queer stories that get told but the actual powerful and well-paid men who write about queer women get a free pass? I'm not accusing either of these men of fetishising queer women (I find all their queer character to be pretty well-written); I think Somerton needs to unpack his misogyny.
Finally (and you can tell I've been procrastinating about this section), I have a personal bone to pick with the Fetishising Woman Cabal trope. It has infected me with so much brainrot that I'm terrified to be myself. I've known I wasn't a woman since I was a freshman in high school. I'm 25 years old and I'm only out to my closest friends in real life. I'm... not completely comfortable talking about it here either, but if it makes one person feel better or less alone, it's worth doing.
I am a transgender man who likes men. Most of the stories that I read are about men falling in love with (and fucking) other men. Most of my writing is about men falling in love with each other and/or having sex. This has been (and hopefully always will be) a safe way for me to explore my identity as a transgender man who likes other men.
And yet. Despite knowing this to be true without a shadow of a doubt, I am petrified of being part of the Fetishising Woman Cabal. I am afraid that I am, unbeknownst to myself, a woman who fetishised gay men so hard I have deluded myself into becoming one. That the TERFs are right and I hate women so much that I reject being one. I am afraid to mention to my gay male coworker that I mostly write and read stories about gay men because I am afraid he will think this of me. I'm afraid to come out at work because I don't think anyone will take me seriously. And I work in one of the most progressive metro areas in the country.
The biggest punchline to all this is, even if I am not a man, I am still certainly not a cishet woman. I am aromatic and I also date women! I'm about as queer as you can get! If I have these hangups, I can't imagine how allo trans men who only like men must feel.
When we point fingers at the Fetishising Hetero Woman Cabal, we don't just hurt cishet women who like stories about queer men (which, by the way, is not a problem unless you're REALLY weird about it). We're also hurting anyone who has experienced being a cishet woman and anyone we choose to paint with that brush.
I'm happy Somerton has been revealed as a fraud and that his platform has been removed. Now let's get to work getting rid of the brain worms he helped infect us all with.
(Note: this is a blog post and not intended as a well-sourced essay. If there are any factual inaccuracies, please let me know so I can edit them!)
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