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+---- Thread: Is shipping good for separatism? (/showthread.php?tid=1584)
Is shipping good for separatism? - YesYourNigel - Oct 3 2025
Bit of a clickbaity title, but I mean all the erotica, fanfics, fanart, shipping stuff, otome games, AI boyfriends etc. made by and for women, featuring men.
I feel like this has the potential to provide an excellent outlet for straight women to safely scratch their relationship itch without hitching themselves to a man. At the same time, I wonder how much this just fuels further romanticisation of toxic relationships, red flags and, for gay male shipping, heavy androcentrism and phallocentrism or even further normalisation of abusive straight dynamics by projecting them even onto gay men (the infamous seme-uke dynamics, also anything omegaverse.). Is all this just a temporary respite until the woman finds a boyfriend and in reality does nothing to redirect women away from toxic straight norms?
There's a lot of feel-good mushy shipping that doesn't sexualise the worst most abusive excesses of heterosexuality. I feel like the women who ship interesting character dynamics for an endorphin rush fare better than those who consume self-insert x "toxic man with heart of gold" dynamics, because there isn't a 1 to 1 projection from real life patriarchal dynamics that makes you feel like you can eventually engage in it yourself. A lot of those women in the "interesting dynamics" shipper category tend to, in fact, be fairly uninterested in irl dating because of how much it pales in comparison to healthy non-abusive fictional relationships, which I think is great - anything that keeps women safe and far from men is good.
I also think straight women developing sky-high standards for men based on all this media is excellent, but that is predicated on the men in this media not being the romanticised toxic shits like they are in, for example, boddice-ripper novels. I suppose if the goal is the same (women not dating men and as such enjoying the benefits of not having a dehumanising, entitled, self-absorbed burden in their life at best, and a rapist/abuser/murderer at worst) one might argue it doesn't matter, but I would want women to consume media that makes them internalise preferences for male partners who are empathetic, invested in female well-being and have radically feminist leanings, and simply not even consider any man who doesn't fit that category to a T. While the "jerk with a heart of gold" is similarly unrealistic, the romanticised toxicity is far too easy to exploit by real life messaging and pressures. Aggressive, possessive men are not secretly kind and considerate of women, even if they temporarily pretend to be, and women should push themselves to fantasise about actually healthy dynamics instead of what the patriarchy is already trying to feed them.
I guess another downside is the chronically online nature of it. I would be worried about this addiction to easy endorphins keeping women from getting real shit done, but that's more of a general issue with modern online generations and might just be worth being managed in comparison to the alternative of women endangering themselves by dating men.
RE: Is shipping good for separatism? - Elsacat - Oct 3 2025
Interesting question. I don't know if it's good for separatism. Maybe in the sense that it could set up girls and women with unrealistic expectations, they have terrible real-life relationship experiences, and decide they've had enough of men.
I don't have a link handy to post, but I've read articles about women who watch kdramas, think Korean men are actually like the characters in those dramas, go to Korea to find a man, and end up disappointed by how those men actually treat women. Real life ain't a kdrama romance.
RE: Is shipping good for separatism? - YesYourNigel - Oct 3 2025
(Oct 3 2025, 7:39 PM)Elsacat Maybe in the sense that it could set up girls and women with unrealistic expectations, they have terrible real-life relationship experiences, and decide they've had enough of men.
Well, I would want them to have unrealistic expectations in a good way - expectations for a caring, supportive, feminist partner that most real men can't match, and simply feel no attraction to any man who doesn't fit that. I've seen some women in these communities who are like that - they simply have no interest in real life men because of how offputting they are.
RE: Is shipping good for separatism? - Elsacat - Oct 3 2025
Sometimes I wonder if men are more offputting than they were when I was younger, or if men have always been that bad and the women you describe are just smarter about that than those of us who thought "this man isn't like the rest." (he was like that. so was the next one. and the one after that)
RE: Is shipping good for separatism? - YesYourNigel - Oct 4 2025
I always found real life men offputting. They do not take care of their appearance, are piggish, misogynistic and self-absorbed, and even if they weren't as pornsick in the past, were still engaging in constant objectification of women alongside the Madonna-wh*re spectrum, and shitting on feminists as crazy man-haters. And ofc all the hateful boomer men's "jokes" about their wives. At least nowadays women expect a very basic baseline of familiarity and acceptance of feminist tenets from their partners - things like sl*t-shaming are now red flags when in the past they were taken for granted, although porn use and kinks have been pushed into being acceptable. But men were never even slightly acceptable partners to women.
Sure, we now have incels and the manosphere, but I don't think those are some novel concepts, they're just the classic abusive men who are feeling more defensive than usual because of the visibility that feminism has gained among younger generations. And I also think most women nowadays are smart enough to keep away from them, despite the fearmongering over the tradwife trend (which is mainly consumed by men lmao).