This is a fun exercise, and it's made me sit down and think about my own preferences in a more systematic way. My conclusion? People's reasons for reading het are just as varied and incapable of being boiled down to a single "answer" as are the reasons people read slash.
You identified a few factors that apply to you. If you forgive the simplistic paraphrasing, they are (more or less): (1) you prefer that female characters be included in your reading material; (2) m/m slash doesn't hold much erotic interest for you; and (3) your favorite theme in fan fiction centers on the ways in which men and women navigate their relationships with each other – a theme which is at the heart of all het fic.
I read your essay and found myself nodding in recognition at points #1 and #2. But when I got to #3, I found myself thinking, "Oh, that's interesting, but it doesn't apply to me." Which in turn made me ask myself what *my* theme of preference is. Having given it some thought, I think it involves more of an internal conflict than external. I like reading about the struggle between human strength and weakness, or to use religious terminology, "virtue" versus "sin." Accordingly, I tend to like characters whose lives are, in essence, a battlefield between those two tendencies. In practice, this tends to mean supporting characters – not most fandom heroes/heroines, whose virtues outweigh their flaws too much for my taste, and not completely "evil" villains, either, who have the opposite problem. Rather, I like characters whom one might best describe as "morally challenged" as opposed to outright evil, and I like stories which explore the boundaries of that internal conflict.
However, I realize that there is absolutely nothing inherent about this theme that would prevent it from being explored just as well in m/m slash as in het or f/f. Or gen. So, I think my reading preference with respect to m/m really boils down to the first two reasons you mentioned, with the heaviest emphasis on #1 (primarily liking to read about women).
Coming back for more
You identified a few factors that apply to you. If you forgive the simplistic paraphrasing, they are (more or less): (1) you prefer that female characters be included in your reading material; (2) m/m slash doesn't hold much erotic interest for you; and (3) your favorite theme in fan fiction centers on the ways in which men and women navigate their relationships with each other – a theme which is at the heart of all het fic.
I read your essay and found myself nodding in recognition at points #1 and #2. But when I got to #3, I found myself thinking, "Oh, that's interesting, but it doesn't apply to me." Which in turn made me ask myself what *my* theme of preference is. Having given it some thought, I think it involves more of an internal conflict than external. I like reading about the struggle between human strength and weakness, or to use religious terminology, "virtue" versus "sin." Accordingly, I tend to like characters whose lives are, in essence, a battlefield between those two tendencies. In practice, this tends to mean supporting characters – not most fandom heroes/heroines, whose virtues outweigh their flaws too much for my taste, and not completely "evil" villains, either, who have the opposite problem. Rather, I like characters whom one might best describe as "morally challenged" as opposed to outright evil, and I like stories which explore the boundaries of that internal conflict.
However, I realize that there is absolutely nothing inherent about this theme that would prevent it from being explored just as well in m/m slash as in het or f/f. Or gen. So, I think my reading preference with respect to m/m really boils down to the first two reasons you mentioned, with the heaviest emphasis on #1 (primarily liking to read about women).