quick question for those of you familiar

[kaigou]

...with yaoi-girls and/or (female) m/m fans. Of those you've known/met in the subculture who prefer the m/m and avoid the m/f, have any of them ever explained the reasoning behind their preference? Beyond just the younger version of "well, m/f is icky" or the lazier version of "I just don't like m/f". Anything more in-depth, more honest, more insightful?

Because the only explanations I've ever gotten amount to variations on those two, and that's not much substance when it comes to deconstructing what, exactly, is going on for readers with the preference.

Comments

[sharibet]

Coincidentally, I was just having a discussion about this with one of my best friends in RL. He's a recently-out gay man (we were actually dating for a while before he came out), and he was wondering about this as well.

He postulated that there was a strong vein of misogyny running through female fandom, which I couldn't entire deny. But specifically in relation to Japanese anime/manga, my feeling had to do with cultural stereotypes and portrayal of gender roles.

Basically, to North Americans, Australians, and Europeans (hereafter referred to as "us"), the stereotypical portrayals of male characters in Japanese pop culture are easier to understand and more sympathetic, since they track more closely to our ideals of masculinity and "heroic" male characters.

Many of the female characters in Japanese pop culture are more difficult for us to empathize with, since they're either conforming to the ideals of traditional Japanese womanhood--soft-spoken, deferential to men, self-sacrifing, and ever-cheerful, (ever notice that "good girls" immediately fall into the roles of serving food or tea to the male characters, even if the girls themselves are guests in the home of a male character?) or rebelling against the gender stereotype of the "good girl."

The rebel-female stereotypes most commonly-portrayed in anime/manga are:

1. The big-breasted, hard-drinking mature virago/cop/soldier (often, this character is supposed to be an American woman)
2. The loud, physically-violent hot-tempered adolescent girl
3. The sexy whore

(As a side-note, one of the reasons I love Seirei no Moribito so much is because Balsa's characterization is so refreshingly free of the usual offensive stereotypes applied to strong, capable women characters in a lot of anime & manga.)

As a reader, I'm willing to read almost any plot and any pairing, as long as it's well-done. I'm reading more m/m fanfiction right now because that's where the best writers in the fandom gravitate, it seems.

Anyhow, just my two cents' worth, based on what I've read and viewed. Your mileage may vary.

[ajnabi]

I don't know much/anything about it, so I can't really say -- but I am surprised to hear that one of the responses is that m/f is icky! because it seems like a lot of people find m/m to be the ickier thing. and i've gone through my own homophobic/internalized homophobia stages about this, too, and continue to in some ways (with my naivete, structured prejudice, and generally complicated feelings/reactions to and about sex).

[casey_valhalla]

Oh dear. You had to ask. I hope you don't mind that it's in first person, although I've had this conversation with fangirl friends who agreed that this was an underlying reason for their preference for m/m.

It stems from a rejection of heteronormativity by straight women who are not heteronormative. Basically, I dig guys, but I'm not interested in getting married and having babies. In a m/f romance, it's given that love leads to marriage leads to family, and that females naturally want this, and that 'suitable' males want it, too. If a woman doesn't, she's a slut; if a man doesn't, he's a hopeless bachelor case who only wants sex that the female will summarily reject. If you're a real-life female and you don't hold the love-->marriage-->family value set, it's really hard to identify with the women in these stories, or even the men.

In a m/m romance, however, there is no pressure from family, peers or society in general to get married and have children--partially because doing so is logistically and/or legally impossible, and partially because the societal norms and expectations of a m/m couple are vastly different and in some cases the complete reverse. Which isn't a good thing, but it serves to prove my point. In reading m/m romance, I can read my own romantic fantasy of having a healthy, loving, sexual relationship, in which both partners are equals, without the pressure or obligation of it being any more than that.

Of course this raises a lot of questions about why there can't be m/f pairings that accomplish the same thing; but as far as the mainstream media goes, the value set I outlined above is so deeply indoctrinated in books and movies and advertising that even in a story that attempted a non-heteronormative m/f pairing would be dismissed as the characters being in denial, and/or the heteronormative overtones would still be present even if only in my own mind, reading it. It's a sad thing, really, when the only way for a woman to escape the expectations of her gender is to remove it entirely from her romantic fantasies.

This is why I have a problem with 1) Mpreg, 2) any fics in which the m/m pairing gets married or otherwise goes domestic, and 3) ukes that are way too effeminate in looks and/or behavior.

The whole argument comes across as unfortunately self-misogynistic; but honestly, when I'm sitting here being bombarded with the materialistic twit females on reality shows and commercials where the girl talks about how she doesn't know when she's supposed to change the oil in her car--you can't really blame me for running full-tilt in the opposite direction.

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

Because when it's a m/m pairing, I don't have to be on guard.

M/m and f/f pairings don't come with the history of power imbalance that m/f pairings always have, for me. While I don't particularly enjoy reading incarnations where one of the m/m pairing has been 'feminized' into adopting a traditionally female role in a m/f partnership, even if that's the case, it's still not really a woman and thus I'm not invested in their gender treatment.

[branchandroot]

*wry* All of the above. I've tracked this informally myself, for a while. When I find thoughtful answers they tend to cluster around "the male characters are better/more fun/more intresting" (which has it's problems as a generalization preconditioned by institutional misogyny, but is certainly statistically accurate and once that expectation is set even running into, let us say, Lisa and Lust won't change it; but consider the Roy/Ed v RoiAi, in FMA--when a strong and interesting woman does show up she does often get action); "distanced/less threatening/easier to experiment" (to be honest, this is a big element for me personally); and "less power imbalance" (which also has a lot of problems considering how the m/m pairs are actually written, which is often direly heteronormative and role-bound, but it's also true that having two characters who are culturally granted the power-positive charge to start with is part of what attracts readers and writers in the first place).

The less thoughtful responses do usually stop at "m/f is icky", which you will also very often see unthinkingly paired with "real gay people are icky" in the exact same fangirl, and sometimes even the same breath. I do suspect this is a sterling example of inculturation at work, wherein girls are not supposed to like/want sex and also gay people are bad.

[ivoryandhorn]

In addition to all the reasons everyone else has been giving, I would argue that part of why so many people prefer m/m is because the relationships between male characters get so much more development and screentime. Even in fandoms with many female characters, they often exist in vacuums and are only important insofar as they relate to the men around them. Whereas the relationships between male characters are both much more common and also a lot more textured and have greater variety. I mean, look at Naruto and Sasuke -- he pledges to do anything in the world to save Sasuke from himself. There's just no real m/f equivalent to that, I think. Even though Sakura professes the same aim we expect that of her because pre-timeskip her most outstanding bit of characterization was that she had a crush on Sasuke. Naruto's motivation we know are his desire for family, desire to prove himself as Hokage, etc. The canon usually offers a lot more raw material to play with for m/m relationships than it does for m/f and definitely more than f/f.

[dogemperor]

The only thing I ever got resembling an explanation was, essentially, "Het is icky". That, or they didn't like the particular *female* who was being paired as much as the male (usually under grounds that the female was essentially too much of a pushover, or the female was "too annoying").

As an aside, this is something I've never quite understood. Especially in the GWing fandom, everyone gets paired with just about everyone else (yes, I've even seen 6xOtto and the rare 6xWalker; I tend to like the more unusual pairings) and I've never quite gotten the hatedom around the female characters in general. (I actually LIKED Noin, Relena did mature in time, and Sally was good folk. The only ones who gave me creeps were Une and Dorothy, and that was less because of their femininity and more over the fact they were bugfuck nuts in their own way.)

Then again, out of the three fandoms I really follow that are heavy on pairings, the primary m/m pairing tends to be selfcest (Mo No No Ke with Kusuriuri x Hyper, Breath of Fire IV with Ryu x Fou-lu), at least the BOF IV fandom doesn't get into holy wars over it (there, it really IS a matter of "het is icky" versus "yaoi is icky" versus "I don't like Mami because *I'D* rather be sleeping with Fou-lu, damnit"), and the three women that tend to be in the main het pairings have tended to be strong women (Noin, Mami, and Kayo respectively--and yes, Kayo does count, especially if you consider the strictures women in Edo-era Japan lived under who weren't nobles).

And for the record, I also tend to like both the het *and* yaoi pairings. I'm more of a fan of whom the person fits with, gender be damned :D (Probably why I tend to like selfcestuous ones too.)

[mongrelheart]

Well, I'm hardly a member of the subculture; I can only speak about my own experience with being briefly fascinated by reading m/m stories. I think it had to do with the fact that, in my own life, I had personal knowledge and experience of what m/f and f/f interactions were like, whereas m/m was something exotic and mysterious and unknowable, and would always remain that way, me being an f.

As for females writing m/m, I think it's a way of escaping the limitations of the second-fiddle, always-centered-around-a-man roles that female characters are corralled into in so many stories. I think this leads to female authors who instead of remaking the female role so that she can be at the center, disavow femaleness, and make themselves over as male in their own stories. Which, the more I think about it, is actually very sad.

Sorry if this is a bit incoherent. I'm only recently figuring out what it is I think about all this.

[white_aster]

I second a few of the reasons given above: guy characters being more interesting/complex in anime/manga settings, some of the young girl hangups about sex and distancing one's self while one experiments, lack of cultural gender role baggage allowing the characters more freedom, etc.

Also, as someone who likes the m/m and reads more of that than m/f, I find it kind of amusing that no one suggested what I consider the simplest answer: "because they find it hot(ter than the m/f)". Oh, it can be fed in by elements of mystery, the forbidden, safe space to explore sexuality, etc, but not always. Sometimes, on a physiological level, folks just find reading about m/m sex hotter than reading about m/f sex. Why? Hell if I know. Why do guys like lesbian porn? We've been trying to figure out what makes something sexually stimulating for millenia. :shrug:

[nnayram.livejournal.com]

This whole thread was awesome to read. ^^ Thanks!

I became a yaoi fangirl in college, because I had a crush on a girl who wrote GW slash. *laugh* That aside, I like yuri/hentai/ecchi work as well. (May I recommend Claudine by Ikeda Riyoko? Different from the rest of the yuri out there and worth a re-read as well.)

So, to the point, on the reasoning behind the m/m stuff: 1)it was something out of the ordinary at the time, 2)there is a LOT of it available, so one never runs out of reading material, 3)it became amusing to see the lengths to which yaoi could get (have you seen the Micky Mouse/Tom doujinshi? anything by Sakurai Shushushu is a good laugh, too), 4)I happen to have a thing for long-haired males making love. Either with a female with a boys-cut or another male, or heck, several people, I don't really care. ^^ 5)The only decent SM work I have read happens to be m/m.

If that was more details than you were looking for or off-tangent, my apologies. *bows*

[(Anonymous)]

Any idea why I can't post to your journal? It just keeps telling me bad unicode.

[maire]

I've certainly very much enjoyed a reasonable amount of m/f and f/f writing, but I do tend to read a lot more m/m.

I've always vaguely assumed it goes along with my standard discomfort with being female -- one that a lot of women have.

I don't actually want to be a man (and I don't think I am a man) but I also don't feel entirely comfortable with being a woman, because so many of the stereotypes about that don't work for me or hurt me.

I know a lot less about the downsides of male stereotypes, because they don't hurt me personally, so if a piece of fiction doesn't include a woman, I don't have to confront my issues when I'm trying to relax.