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

[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.