Shippers gonna ship

whatisa:

soophelia:

Excerpt:

Studio executives aren’t necessarily homophobic, but the film business is in a financial slump and averse to risks even in the best times. Though gay marriage is now more accepted across the United States, the industry is driven by tickets sold to straight men. That’s why lesbian sex gets a pass: when Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis spend a steamy night together in Black Swan, it helps sell tickets. There’s no similar financial bump attached to gay male intercourse.

what’s so astounding about it to me is that there are barely any women in films these days. most movies are about two very attractive, charismatic men having adventures together. if movies are made to please men, then apparently what pleases men are other men, not women. in fact, almost all popular media is about men, and if it’s all for men, then men must be utterly obsessed with men.

i think that’s why it’s so hard to show anything fully, explicitly gay. because it’s too honest about men loving men. in a normal movie of men with men for men, you can flash five seconds of olivia wilde in skimpy clothes as a security blanket, like, “don’t worry boys, you’re still totally het!” then go back to it being men men men. that’s usually the only role women get in films, the little pointless romantic (sexual) subplot that is shoehorned into the main story, which is usually a sex-free romance between two men (now called a “bromance”.) the only thing separating straight men from the reality of how homoromantic their interests have become, the only thing separating it from being fully homosexual, is the lack of gay sex and the inclusion of heterosexual sex (or the promise of or allusion to it.)

gay sex is the last barrier, the last defense, the final frontier. once it stops being taboo, once it becomes a normal thing for a film to have, just another option of an ending, then all of these films become what they are. if gay sex were as normal as straight sex, there would never be a need to cram in a heterosexual romantic subplot because a gay romantic plot between leads would make more sense and be equally acceptable to audiences. and then almost every film would be about gay men (mind you, they already are, they’re just pretending they aren’t by omitting the sex.)

and then writers would perhaps have to learn how to write female characters as human beings rather than love interests/sexual objects for the leading men. and they would have to write all relationships, male or female, in ways that make sense and flesh characters out as people, rather than just shoving an attractive male and an attractive female at each other and pretending that it’s inevitable that they have sex, when those characters always have stronger feelings for other characters than each other.