I kind of think the agency thing is an excuse. People don't write femslash because they don't want to. There may be reasons for that, but I don't think it's a lack of female characters.
Remember Lorne/Parrish and Stackhouse/Markham in SGA? They both got more fic than Teyla/Anyone. Yes, it would be better to have more well developed female characters, but we currently have lots of good ones, and we all know fandom will build a ship out of bugger all if the boys are pretty and it hits a trope they like (example: Arthur/Eames in Inception fandom).
My current fandoms are A-Team (which I'd have to bring a woman in from the TV show to slash with Charissa), Highlander (which has a couple of potential women to slash and one solid pairing, see icon), Hawaii Five-0 (which has one or two potential pairings), and Marvel Comics (which has three or four practically canon pairings). In the first three cases, femslash would take a bit of wrangling, but is totally doable, I've seen fans latch on to less plausible ships, in the last it's begging to be written for Misty/Colleen, Jess D/Carol, Natalia/Bobbi and Carol/Wanda (to name three off the top of my head).
So the question of why I don't write femslash in more then comment fic comes down to my own reasons for not doing so, not to a lack of opportunity or a variety of available pairings.
I find that, personally and I'm not speaking for anyone else, I don't write femslash because it's too close to home. I'm a queer woman. All the women I've dated have been in fandom. Do we have a lot in common with Misty and Colleen? Not really, no. However, it would feel to me like putting something of myself, perhaps something that I wouldn't want to share, and possible something about one of my partners that they don't want to share. Writing about male characters is safe, distanced, because my heart is horrible gender essentialist, and I can never feel like one of the boys is really me.
That is probably also an excuse for internalised misogyny.
no subject
Remember Lorne/Parrish and Stackhouse/Markham in SGA? They both got more fic than Teyla/Anyone. Yes, it would be better to have more well developed female characters, but we currently have lots of good ones, and we all know fandom will build a ship out of bugger all if the boys are pretty and it hits a trope they like (example: Arthur/Eames in Inception fandom).
My current fandoms are A-Team (which I'd have to bring a woman in from the TV show to slash with Charissa), Highlander (which has a couple of potential women to slash and one solid pairing, see icon), Hawaii Five-0 (which has one or two potential pairings), and Marvel Comics (which has three or four practically canon pairings). In the first three cases, femslash would take a bit of wrangling, but is totally doable, I've seen fans latch on to less plausible ships, in the last it's begging to be written for Misty/Colleen, Jess D/Carol, Natalia/Bobbi and Carol/Wanda (to name three off the top of my head).
So the question of why I don't write femslash in more then comment fic comes down to my own reasons for not doing so, not to a lack of opportunity or a variety of available pairings.
I find that, personally and I'm not speaking for anyone else, I don't write femslash because it's too close to home. I'm a queer woman. All the women I've dated have been in fandom. Do we have a lot in common with Misty and Colleen? Not really, no. However, it would feel to me like putting something of myself, perhaps something that I wouldn't want to share, and possible something about one of my partners that they don't want to share. Writing about male characters is safe, distanced, because my heart is horrible gender essentialist, and I can never feel like one of the boys is really me.
That is probably also an excuse for internalised misogyny.