Compare and contrast.

[randomness]

Thought for the late night, partly inspired by a face-to-face comment by rmd about gay regency romances mostly being written by and read by women, and partly from a post by digitalemur called Fun with YAOI, or things I come across at work:

Is there any similarity in this kind of man-to-man fiction mostly created and read by women to the girl-on-girl photosets mostly being photographed by and viewed by men?

Note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi has a useful overview of the yaoi phenomenon.

Comments

Just assume massive disclaimers, please

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

I've had that theory for a long time. I think that the common factor between the yaoi and the "girl-on-girl" stuff is that they involve members of one sex acting in a way that appeals to heterosexual members of the other sex. Put in simplified average-case non-spectrum-sensitive terms, yaoi is two men that straight women like, and girl-on-girl is two women that straight men like. So the men in yaoi are handsome, brooding, and emotionally involved, while the women in girl-on-girl are reasonably attractive and like to have sex all the time. In neither case does this correspond to what the average gay or lesbian would seek out, or how they behave.

In my non-expert opinion, anyway...

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

So, I have a bewildering variety of theories about the popularity of slash/yaoi.

1. "Well, duh, it's the girl version of lesbian porn. Girls like porn too, ergo..." (ie, what you said.) I think this is totally *true* and is the most basic reason why girls like and write slash. The reason I'm not fully satisfied by this explanation, though, is that if it were just a "slash is like lesbian porn, and porn is fun" thing, I would expect there to be a higher percentage of het porn. Therefore I have other theories:
2. It's not just porn, it's socially permissible porn because it has this flavor of being a blow for civil rights, which means writers and readers feel virtuous about it in a way you can't about het porn.
3. Women care about character development in porn and male characters tend to be better written, better developed, and have a broader, more interesting range of issues and challenges in canon. Therefore girls gravitate toward writing stories that focus exclusively on an all-male cast.
4. Women who write slash tend to be fairly liberated, meaning they want to write characters behaving in traditionally "male" ways, and it is more difficult to write two characters behaving in traditionally "male" ways when one is picturing one half of a duo as a female. Thus girls gravitate toward focusing on male characters because there is less cognitive dissonance (conscious or unconscious) in writing males behaving the way they want to write their characters.
5. Similarly, on the flip side, being a woman can kind of suck. Women in relation to men suffer from all kinds of power and aggression issues, as well as conscious and unconscious constrainign role expectations. Women are drawn to writing slash because it quickly and easily divorces them from all that; it's freeing.
6. Slash gets you around a big problem for contemporary romance-writing. To whit: romance novels suck. They inevitably follow the same formula: Boy and Girl fall in lust... uh, I mean, love. They are both consenting unmarried adults, and they both totally want to have sex. However, for some typically unbelievably poorly contrived reason, they don't. There's a lot of UST, increasing degrees of fooling around, a narrative and physical climax, and then they get married. This worked fine in the 50s when consenting adult women weren't supposed to want to have sex, but it sucks nowadays. UST is fun to read but it's really hard to find a narratively satisfying (to geeks) reason why a consenting adult male and female who really want to have sex and aren't in a situation that really SHOULD preclude sex, should hold off on doing so for 200 pages. Two guys, on the other hand - lots of narratively satisfying reasons! He's in the closet! He's in the military! He can't bear to disappoint his parents! He wants children! He's bi and he doesn't want the issues of being openly gay! He lives in rural Utah and prefers to stay alive! So long, UST-filled romances with two men are easier to write in a plausible way than long, UST-filled romances with a man and woman.

I generally feel that all of these are true to one extent or another, and it's the confluence of all of them that accounts for the preponderance of interest in slash.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I rather wonder how many romance novels you've read and in what timeframe. While they are very formulaic--like most heavily genred fiction--that formula has changed a great deal over time and depending on what category one is reading. I read them extensively in the late 80s/early 90s and have read one or two a year since then and been very interested at the changes in women's attitudes towards sex and in the societal roles in which the women are portrayed.

I'm not saying they're great, mind you, but some of your generalizations seem rather dated to me, or based on a fairly small sample size.

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

Actually, my reading history is similar to yours, except that my highest volume reading period was in the mid- to late 90s when I was a teen. I don't know that I would say I read "extensively" at any point, but... put it this way, I read enough that the reason I only rarely pick up a romance nowadays is that I ran into exactly the problem I described above over and over again until I mostly gave up. While there are certainly exceptions (it's certainly *possible* to come up with a good het UST plot that isn't narratively ridiculous) I would say the problem is hard enough to avoid that most romance writers aren't good enough to do it. The formula may change (and I agree that there are meaningful ways the genre has modernized) but the centrality of a long period of UST hasn't, I think, and I do think that's getting harder and harder to do plausibly for modern het romances. (It should in theory be easier for period pieces, but in those cases the characters usually act so anachronistically that it seems silly, to me at least, when the one area they aren't liberated and modern in is sex.)

All that said, I certainly can't call myself a comprehensive expert in the modern romance genre, so you're free to disagree. :)

[nezumiko.livejournal.com]

I've never read any gay regency romances, but I've read plenty of yaoi manga and fanfic, and written it, too. I think the gay porn yaoi where it really is very sexually explicit and stimulating has some interesting analogies to girl-on-girl porn, in that it is expressly sexually titillating, and aimed largely at a heterosexual audience. But a lot of yaoi is more about the emotional connection, and there it becomes murkier. I've seen the argument presented that romance writing is emotional porn, aimed at women. I've certainly never seen any emotionally stimulating porn aimed at men.

Also, I think there's a better understanding of what excites men, just in terms of there being a porn industry that caters to them. There is a lot of porn aimed at het men and a lot for gay men, and a lot of women both gay and straight consume this porn because there isn't much really made for them. I mean, try to find some porn for gay women? It's just about impossible.

I will say this for me, at least, as a reader and writer of yaoi and slash, I like it and want to read and write it because I identify with the male characters. I want them to be men, acting like men, so what I prefer to read and write, is the less romancy sort of stuff. Ultimately, I write and read it because I want to be one of those men.

[allyphoe.livejournal.com]

You seriously have a hard time finding lesbian-oriented (as opposed to girl-on-girl) porn? IME, it's much harder to find non-sexually-explicit lesbian-oriented stuff. Check out the lesbian section at a big chain bookstore sometime. The ones close to me have two categories of books - "Best Lesbian Erotica / How to Have Hot Lesbian Sex" and "Coming Out." Good Vibrations (which is pretty mainstream) has lesbian-oriented video porn.

[nezumiko.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I actually checked out the Best Lesbian Erotica series, and the writing was really variable. There were one or two good stories in there, but most of it was almost painful. I read it and decided it was really aimed more at men than women, like the girl-on-girl video. But maybe I'm being too picky.

I've never tried any of GoodVibe's videos, but I'll have to investigate. I think it is starting to be available, it's just that there isn't as much of a history of erotica aimed at lesbians.

[allyphoe.livejournal.com]

I think it's more that good porn is hard to find in general. Straight porn IME tends to be laughably bad, boring, or both.

[shiruru.livejournal.com]

At the risk of sounding silly, I put in my two cents.

I always thought it was because women are so strongly critical of other women. They may not speak those thoughts out loud under normal circumstances, but it comes out loud and clear over works of fiction. Take for instance, Fushigi Yuugi. Female fans loved the male characters and hated the female protagonists so vehemently because they argued that they, under the same cirumstances, would have acted totally differently or done things better than the female leads, that they themselves would have made a way better partner for the character they liked than the canon female did.

I think in many series like that you observe the females who desire the males in the series, hating the women who get said males. During the time of Rurouni Kenshin I remember a lot of jealousy-fueled criticism or every little thing Kaoru did or said. You can easily see this in Inuyasha fandom, too (which is why I steer clear of it). There are a lot of people who just rant about how much they hate Kagome or Kikyou, because they themselves want the male charas. With Naruto, it is Sakura.

I think these females imagine themselves to have less faults in a certain place than the canon female who gets the guy's attention, and imagine that they would love whoever it is so much better, and so they hate that female lead. They usually tend to go root for some unknown underdog character whom they imagine has the same aptitude as them in some place, a character who is not developed at all so that it is easy for them to graft their own personality onto that person.

I always figured that yaoi helps females to step around that vicious self-criticism. If looking at another woman there is competition, and the female's tendency (I think) is to be harshly critical of that competition (in order to eliminate it or feel superior). If looking at two guys, then that problem can be completely avoided. Note that in yaoi somehow even the crappiest or sappiest of things to do or say evoke comments of "Aw how cute Iruka blushed at Kakashi! OMG111!" whereas if it was a female in the same role there would be harsh criticism of the female's actions. Yaoi helps heterosexual women (especially some who tend to be of a type who are very insecure and thus very judgemental of their peers) step around their competitive urges against other women and get right to enjoying guys, and two guys is 200% of the enjoyment.

I also think that maybe yaoi could be just a symptom of women's longing for guys who are more like them. Note that in yaoi guys almost never act like they do in real life. I have yet to see in yaoi Chara A sit on the couch and scratch and drink beer and watch football like my brothers, or Chara B think about absolutely nothing (which my husband, though I adore him, seriously does do!) or Chara C work on his car and tinker in the garage for a whole day.

Yaoi men seem to have a heavy probability of being the following: poetic, sensual, interesting, very interested in sex but almost always starting with words to begin the foreplay, an androgynous or pretty sort of appearance (boyish hips, slim body). Most of all, thoughtful, even neurotic, very aware of their appearance and body and grooming and dress, overly observant of their environment and the closeness of bodies, gestures, expressions and What It All Means!-- which is how I think women tend to be, and are frustrated or disappointed when they find their male partners are not.

Or at least that's what I think from observation. Correct me if I'm totally off.

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

I cannot resist pointing out that the female characters you list are arguably *actually* annoying, and the reaction against them may not be female criticalness of other females, but annoyance at yet another pathetic anime girl. The way Kaoru's abilities and strength are underused by Watsuki is a betrayal of her early established character, and you must expect a negative reaction on that front. Miaka is pretty dull. I tend to think most of the characters in Fushigi Yuugi are pretty dull too... but she's one of the worst offenders.

A couple counterexamples: look at, say, Ouran High School Host Club-- hardly cut and dry on gender, but a great female protagonist. This is a fandom rife with slash (and het)-- of course, again, hardly cut and dry as it invites it. You list Naruto's Sakura, I assume as versus the tendency to slash Naruto/Sasuke; what about another big Shonen Jump series, One Piece? There's a lot of slash in that fandom too, but women also tend to like like the women crewmembers, particularly Robin.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

My best friend and I discussed this not long ago and he said that when he first heard of the whole slash phenomenon, he checked it out and found that it all sucked. I think this is an over-generalization and continue to mean to dig up some of the pieces I've enjoyed and see if he has that reaction to things I think are well-written, but since everything I've read in slash is within particular fandoms I like that don't interest him, it's a bit challenging.

[dpolicar]

Well, to be fair, to roughly a second approximation all fanfic sucks... more generally, all "self-published" writing sucks.

[marith.livejournal.com]

To a second approximation *everything* sucks. Sturgeon's Law applies to published and non-published writing alike.

Published writing has more filters on it, so the truly dreadful stuff is more likely to get rejected, it's true. But the 10% of fanfic that actively doesn't suck can be as good as a good published short story - it's just harder to find.

[dpolicar]

So, in thinking about your question as stated I find myself struggling with the difference between "man-on-man" smut and "boy-on-boy" smut; between "girl-on-girl" smut and "woman-on-woman" smut.

And no, I'm not just trying to be PC about language here.

A rapid sampling of the Internet leads me to the unchallengably scientifically supported (grins) belief that much more of this stuff is written about (and, I assume, by) teenagers than about adults... which may itself be a artifact of the fact that I started looking around while reading livejournal, which apparently has an average user age of 3.4 months, and not a real phenomenon at all.

I'm not entirely sure what conclusion to draw from this, even if it's a real phenomenon, except that it seems to me that one is probably doing something different when writing/reading about teenagers (with all of the first-time, sexual-exploration, yadda yadda themes that imples) and adults. I'd be willing to bet that the former has a kind of safety-valve effect that I have trouble articulating clearly... and I don't think lesbian porn has that property for straight men, though I'm not entirely sure about that either.

[twilight-tea.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's much similarity, besides the outward appearance. Why do you ask to compare fiction with photosets?

I think one argument is that gay fic is read/written by women who aren't in relationships, or perhaps shy away from things sexual. A lot of women have a problem with watching or reading het porn because they find themselves mentally placing themselves in the female role. With gay fic or porn, they don't have that problem (unless they want to be a guy!). In other words, it's an escapism that they don't necessarily have to project themselves into.

Well that's one theory, among many. I personally don't believe in it, but it kind of makes sense for a lot of women. Another thing I've noticed is that women who have gender issues write gay fic. One of my favorite authors, Poppy Z. Brite, admits to feeling as if she's a gay man stuck in a women's body, and all of her books involve gay men and few women.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

stolen_tea pointed me here... I think in part because I occasionally write bits and pieces of a regency lesbian romance. Never really gotten into slash fic. Didn't know their were gay (male, I assume) regency romances... (Not entirely sure I wanted to, but... information is always good, I guess.)

I'm bi. I like lesbian smut... well, actually, mostly I don't, but I wish there were more lesbian smut that I liked*. The conventions of the regency novel are kind of entertaining (mind you, I've read Georgette Heyer... and Austin, mostly). The capacity for taboo is interesting, but also the capacity for misdirection and characters getting in over their heads without realizing it.

* er... though come to think of it I haven't spent a lot of time looking, either. Okay, lameness, all around.

[wereterrier.livejournal.com]

Where I'm coming from: I both read and write slash, femmeslash, het, and gen (not primarily sexual or romantic) fanfic, and prior to that, wrote some original smut and original fiction (including pieces with romantic subplots), none of it published. Visual smut does nothing for me. I don't believe I have ever read an actual romance novel, so I'm going to look at this mainly from the smut angle.

In general, I find the fanfic smut better than professionally published stuff, but there's a lot of crap out there too, so perhaps I just have a better handle on how to FIND the good pieces. There are a few writers who do both.

Before I was actually in this community, I ascribed to the "no threat & twice as much of what you want" theory of why a substantial number of men like f/f and a substantial number of women like m/m, but since then, I have met lesbians (including a lesbian couple!) who write m/m smut. This leaves various supplemental theories:

• Women like text smut, and there is a better range of words for male bits. There are erotically significant sections of the female genitalia that have no words beyond the medical. (Honestly, those of us who sometimes write sex involving women can get into long threads griping about this.)
  
  
• In the area of fanfic, most established bodies of fiction have more interesting male characters than female characters, and male characters often outnumber female characters by an order of magnitude. If you actually want plot or psychological complications, it's usual much easier to pick a m/m pair who come pre-equipped with a really horrendous mess or two.
  
  
• Two male characters can be aggressive or competitive or even downright violent towards each other, and most readers won't get too upset.
  
  
• Similarly, more readers won't find BDSM unnerving. (It was actually a gay friend whom I first heard postulate that BDSM was more socially acceptable in same-sex pairs, because it couldn't be sexist. He thought that het BDSM was socially irresponsible unless the woman topped. Hey, we were in college and he was an idealistic kid....)
  
  
• Another friend of mine has theorized that a lot of smutty fanfic is a way to arrange sex as conflict resolution between characters who display a disruptive level of hostility towards each other -- the "peacemaking bonobo female" theory. Quite a few stories use the device of turning hostility to UST or obsession and then to open lust or love, so this actually makes sense for those stories.
  
  
• Smut without romance is more acceptable for a m/m pair.

Incidentally, I'd argue that the "one character is feminized" situation, while common, is not a genre characteristic. Yes, there are particular writers who always do that, and particular communities in which it is pervasive, but probably less than half of the stories I run across fall into that class. Of course, there is some filtering involved in what stories I actually open and read, but I just read most of a Christmas gift exchange (124 stories and pieces of art, submissions originally anon, so writers not selected by me, although I knew I liked the writing of many of the participants), and it certainly wasn't the rule there.