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

[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.