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

[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. :)