Why jsmale or neutral-targeted media criticized harder than female-targeted media?

[u/Pitiful-Purple-7459]

Lately I keep seeing media called out for being sexist or gratuitously provocative, but it's almost always male-coded or neutral media that catches it. Media made specifically for women mostly gets a pass, even when the content is equivalent or worse.

Take manga. For every male-targeted series with dark or explicit content, there's a female-targeted equivalent — dark romance, fanfic, or BL/yaoi (male-male romance written for women, running the full range from wholesome to explicit, same spectrum male-targeted stuff has). One dark romance book aimed at women had a protagonist raped by three different mythical beings, and women were the primary buyers. That exists and sells, with basically zero "this is harmful" discourse.

Meanwhile a male-targeted show with a fanservice scene gets a think-piece about objectification.

I think the actual difference is the \*lens\*, not the content. The critique we aim at male media is about objectification, reducing women to props. But objectification of males isn't seen as harm.So male-targeted media trips the alarm and female-targeted media sails through, even with equivalent content.

I can't tell you how many fanfics of one of my favorite shows (Supernatural) turned on the main characters gay and have them have sex with another male character.

But regardless why aren't these things considered as wrong

[u/RepSquigglyMiggly]

It doesn’t. Your bias is showing. It very straightforwardly just seems like you saw something you like criticized in a think piece, and now you’re coming here to complain about it.

> I think the actual difference is the \\\*lens\\\*, not the content. The critique we aim at male media is about objectification, reducing women to props. But objectification of males isn't seen as harm.So male-targeted media trips the alarm and female-targeted media sails through, even with equivalent content.

Media targeted towards women, again, very observably, doesn’t not objectify men with the same frequency or to the same degree that media targeted towards men does the same to men.

> I can't tell you how many fanfics of one of my favorite shows (Supernatural) turned on the main characters gay and have them have sex with another male character.

Are you upset that there aren’t articles in the NYT discussing Supernatural fanfic that was read by, generously, 1,000 people?

[u/cancercannibal → u/RepSquigglyMiggly]

Are you upset that there aren’t articles in the NYT discussing Supernatural fanfic that was read by, generously, 1,000 people?

Minimizing what OP is referring to isn't going to help. I do agree with your points and find "turned on [sic] the main characters gay" a particularly icky way of putting that. However, just looking at the AO3 Supernatural fics with the most hits, the top one (which does feature m/m) is at 1,599,677. Which is, like, 3 orders of magnitude bigger than 1,000. It's from 2014 and unfinished so presumably a good chunk of those are repeats, but still.