It's thoughts on yaoi time again, ladies and gentlemen!

[seiberwing]

A gay man posts a secret on fandomsecrets about how he hates that yaoi fangirls fetishize his sexuality, and understandably the entire thing starts wanking faster than a submarine engineer who's gotten on the internet for the first time in a year and a half. I get into it here and here for the most part, but pretty much everyone's sharing their thoughts on the matter.

(Warning: Image heavy. For the dialup-gifted, the secret in question is here.)

My thoughts, highly distilled, are that traditional yaoi isn't fetishizing a sexuality so much as a specific ideal and dynamic, and anyone who thinks that real gay men act like that has a few more problems than the doujinshi on her hard drive. Any thoughts from the audience?

Comments

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

I think the difference, as stace_s pointed out earlier, is not that many girls do compared to the number of Western men who think that porn lesbians are like real lesbians. The societal effects are minimal at best, which means it's a lot easier to treat it as 'just fiction' than something that influences large amounts of frat boy culture.

It only fetishizes homosexuality as much as regular erotica fetishizes heterosexuality.

People can blather on all they want about how it's women taking control of their own sexuality and subverting texts and playing with power relationships (and I'll even agree because yeah, that's there too) but homosexuality *is* a part of slash.

The whole overanalysis of slash thing is just idiocy with a nice dollop of academic pretentiousness-- when you get right down to the porn of it, we slash because it's hot. Outside of porn I slash because of interesting character dynamics, the connotations of homosexuality in that setting, and also because my chosen fandoms rarely have female characters that hold my interest long enough for me to write about them.

[dunmurderin.livejournal.com]

I don't see where the number of people doing it matters, particularly since the secret in question was complaining about the objectification of gay men within fandom where the majority of slash writers are women.

What really annoys me the implication that this guy shouldn't object to something that clearly bothers him because according to those doing the offending it doesn't have enough of an impact to be a problem. When exactly is he allowed to be angry about this?

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I would consider slash a far different thing from yaoi. A reasonable portion of slash doesn't fetish homosexuality, it fetishizes those two (three, four, whatever) characters having sex. Look at all the kink memes, for instance; clearly sexuality alone is not sufficient.

He's allowed to be angry any time he pleases; goodness knows I get angry over smaller things in fandom. I just don't think it's a worthy cause until it starts affecting the real world.

[dunmurderin.livejournal.com]

But the attitudes of those fans he's complaining about DO affect the real world because their attitudes don't magically shut off when they're away from the computer and they turn into people who understand that gay men AREN'T like that.

I've run into people who have asked me and my girlfriend which one of us is the man in the relationship -- I'm pretty sure at least once we were TOLD which one of us was the man. And that's by people who thought they were being funny and who reacted to being told they weren't with an attitude not too much dissimilar to the one you're showing, namely that there wasn't any sense making a big deal over something that wasn't important to them.

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Realistically, how many people are encouraged to think that by yaoi? The perception of there needing to be a man and a woman in any relationship regardless of gender comes more from Western heterosexist ideals.

[dunmurderin.livejournal.com]

Probably not a statistically significant amount -- which still doesn't change the fact that this guy doesn't deserve to have his offense dismissed as unimportant because you don't think it's a problem.

Clearly we can go no further with this.

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, although I'm not sure it warrants an unfriending. The problem in this debate is that neither of us are gay men -- in the fandomsecrets post, there were gay men both for and against your position on the subject.