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

[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.