On Sexuality, Fiction, and the Opposite Sex

Now I might be alone in this but I can't help but think Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni would make a cute couple here. They look great together. Perhaps not as much as Michelle and Barack do (officially the most lovable couple in politics) but if Michelle and Carla were just two ordinary women walking down a street in Soho together, hand in hand, smiling at one and other, I might pause and think to myself "what a beautiful couple they make".


That's what we slashers (as in people who write slash fiction, not multiple murderers) do. We see two people who we feel would be great together, be they Harley/Poison Ivy, Faith/Buffy, etc, and we pair them off. Some times it works, some times it doesn't. Then some of us do originals. Girls and boys we create ourselves -- let 'um get all loved up (after suitable periods of drama). What you might not realize is that many of the people doing this, myself included, are straight. There are a fair amount of men who compose femslash and there is a vast amount of straight women who write gay romance. You'd be surprised.

So where does the attraction stem from? Why do so many straight men and women seem to find it so enthralling to read and write about the homosexual relationships of the opposite sex? To be honest I don’t know. All I can do is speculate. That’s what this reflective essay is about. I guess a nice starting point would be sex/gender. I’ll start with men. Okay.

Why would we read Tipping the Velvet?

On the surface, I think the most blunt and obvious reason is sexual interest. We can’t deny that. No straight or bisexual man who saw that brief but explosively erotic Jennifer Tilly/Gina Gershon sex scene in Bound (1996) can tell me that they didn’t find that hot. You know, unless you’re religious or something -- although if you were, why would you watch a movie like that?

No, lets not kid ourselves. A very big reason we blokes watch Strawberry Panic, read Oranges Aren’t Only For Fruit, write Xena/Gabrielle fanfiction, is because girl/girl relationships are a turn on. I know we don’t like to admit that. It makes us look like knuckleheads -- but how can we deny it?

Straight relationships, guy/girl, as cute as they can be, have guys in them. I think that a lot of men prefer the lesbian relationship because there is no guy. There’s no absence felt when its two writhing female bodies on our screens and in our books. Unfortunately, in that, I do seem some cause for concern.

Jonathan Clements, a UK anime buff from WAY BACK IN THE DAY (I’m talking early nineties) once made a commentary about the hentai anime Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend on a Channel Four documentary about sex in anime. To paraphrase, he said that these kinds of movies often have an early lesbian scene (in this case one where a daemon posing as a female teacher molests Akemi) because these were less ‘threatening’ to the primarily male viewer. Later on you see Akemi having sex with Nagumo, her male love interest, which I assume means that men take sex more seriously when there’s a penis involved.

Other men don’t speak for me and I certainly don’t speak for other men, but I can’t lie and say I don’t get a ‘sense’ of that amongst us. Perhaps then, by focusing on female/female couples, we’re removing the component we least want to see (the penis) because we either can’t identify with it enough to substitute it for our own or because we still look at our weenies as a symbol of power and, as Machiavellian as we are, we can’t except the power of others without viewing it as a threat to our own.

I think that there’s a palpable kind of voyeurism in play here. I guess in the back of our heads, many of us are still as clueless about female sexuality as we were when we were tykes. Off the top of my head I can think of three sitcoms (Scrubs, What I Like About You, That 70’s Show) where some male character sexualizes girl’s slumber parties. For example;

Gary: Finally in a girl clique! Now I get to see what happens when all the pillow fights stop.
Val: Someone gets asthma and goes home early.
Gary: ...Is she wearing little jammies?

(Gary & Val, What I Like About You)

As pathetic as it is for us to be looking from the outside in, this is what we do. We gaze and we wonder. We marvel. We watch women living their sexual lives without us and wonder what goes on. I’m certain that men admiring lesbian relationships is objectification in some sense. I know that seems like a strong term to level at us when we don’t necessarily have any malicious intent when we read or write Haruka/Michiru fanfics, and obviously there are some women out there who do find that guy/guy pairings turn them on too, but the point still stands and to be fair it's not the same. Like I said, straight male responsiveness toward lesbians has some roots in voyeurism and objectification. Men have a history of doing that to women for the most insidious reasons possible. Women don’t have a history of doing that to men (of course there are some exceptions; like women who still believe in this old stereotype of black men having naturally greater phallic girth, but I think that has its origins amongst racists who wanted to prevent sexual relationships between white women and men of colour rather than out and out sexist objectification).

We can also admire these relationships as though we were part of them, while at the same time avoid all the social struggles that those partnerships routinely engender.

For example, I know there are more than a few other men out there who write femslash just like I do. One thing I’ve noticed (especially from lemon/NC-17/sex stories) is that when it comes to femslash, male writers focus less on homophobia than female writers do. It happens because if the majority of the men writing those stories are straight, then naturally homophobia isn’t so much of a big deal because we aren't the ones experiencing it on a daily basis. Much of the time it's other straight men who're exporting that homophobia. If anything, it’s not even on the radar (other than maybe a plot tool for conflict). This is a shame. It doesn’t just show a lack of respect for the experiences of gay women it also impoverishes us as writers. We need to paint the full picture, not just the bits we consider to be more palatable to ourselves and our audiences.

Now, saying all of this, had I never stumbled across a thing known as yaoi or had I never been exposed to the Nifty archive; I would’ve fooled myself into thinking that a person expressing any interest in the homosexuality of the opposite sex was fundamentally a guy thing -- a straight guy thing. Yet I’m sitting here telling you now that this is NOT specific to men. If you think the amount of men willing to cultivate and fawn over lesbians in fiction is amazing, you’d be ASTOUNDED at the amount of straight girls willing to do the same thing with gay men (albeit with some twists) in fandom.

Yaoi, for me, was one of the more surprising phenomena for me to discover online. I’m 23, and I’ve been using the internet since the good old days, since ‘99, when there was no YouTube and no broadband; when it took a half an hour to download a song and when Yahoo! mailing lists were the place for fandoms to converse -- long before Live Journal and MySpace.

Yaoi (sexual guy/guy fiction) and shounen-ai (guy/guy fiction of a non-sexual/romantic nature) has been around for quite some time. It’s a Japanese form of slash between men, or much more usually, boys. What’s surprising about it though is that it is primarily written by and for women.


Imagine that.

Aside from straight up porno, most lesbian fiction (by that I mean anime, TV shows, films, books, etc) is aimed at women. Men like me who compose femslash only account for a fraction of the writers who do -- the rough majority are women. Yet in yaoi we have romance between men (gay romance) cornered specifically by females. We could argue this is because women inform a larger part of the ‘romance’ community than men do and I accept that even though I probably can’t prove it. For some reason there is a disproportional gap amongst the sexes when it comes to gay fiction, one I struggle to account for. Namely this.

There are more women writing slash than there are men writing femslash.


I’m sure there’s a thriving community of Harry Potter slashers but I guarantee the main couples you find in that community are guy/guy ones. Admittedly this could be because the main character (Harry) is male. Does this apply with female leads? For instance, Original Cindy of Dark Angel was an out and proud lesbian but I’ve never seen a Max/Original Cindy fanfic.



I’d love to know what the ratio is for Edward and Bella in the Twilight fandom (which I assume has a majority of female fans). I don’t know anything about the Twilight fandom so I’m guessing that most fans are hardcore Edward/Bella shippers. But among the slashers in that community, I wonder which of the two gets paired more often with people of the same sex? I think it’s probably Edward -- but like I say, I know shit-all about that particular fandom. I could be wrong. But I say this to reaffirm my previous point, that there are more women writing slash than there are men writing femslash.

Why is this? Now there’s an extra dimension as to why I’m confused by this and it’s in the distance between everyday life and internet fandom. What with conventions, cosplay, Myspace and Facebook, the gap between online and offline life is blurrier than it once was. There was a time when you had friends in one and friends in the other -- now we have friends in both. You can spend your morning with a buddy and then hit him or her up on Yahoo! IM at night. That being said -- there are still marginal differences. We all by now must know that there are fangirls out there in cyberspace who love male slash. That’s not a new thing online. But how often do we meet people like that out on the streets? In our own little neighbourhoods? In my personal experience I’ve never met a fangirl offline (bear that in mind) so I have to say that, whenever I come across the ‘appreciation’ one sex has for the homosexuality of another in my everyday life, it’s usually a man’s appreciation for lesbians. This is what I see. A lot of guys in the quote-unquote real world don‘t hesitate to say they find girl/girl relationships hot, yet, how many women do that in the real world? How many offline women watch a show like Will and Grace because they ‘get off’ on guy/guy pairings? Slim to none, by my experience. The vast majority of ordinary women neither know nor care about yaoi or other female interpretations of gay men -- but we also know that vast majority of men get a charge out of lesbians in any format from porno, to The L Word, to our own errant daydreams.

There’s plenty of reasons for it, I suppose. There's greater social stigma around guy/guy pairings in the ‘real world’ than there is in the online one. That would explain why there are fewer gay kisses on television than lesbian ones. Still, I can’t help but feel that none of this fully explains why there are so few male girl/girl fans in comparison to female guy/guy fans online, while offline it’s vice versa.

But enough on that. I’m digressing. Lets focus on the female interpretation of male/male relationships with regard to yaoi. And I use yaoi because I think it’s a very clear manifestation of female interest in gay relationships.

In seems to me that, if male slashers use lesbians to derive some sexual gratification without the participation of other men, then female slashers use gay men in much more nuanced yet problematic way.

Outside of originals (which more often than not are written by gay/bisexual men) most slash is written by women for a female audience. We've established that. I tend to find yaoi is deliberately more romantic than yuri (girl/girl, sexual relationships between women in anime) even when sex is the big focus. The men in yaoi think more than more than men normally do. Take an anime like No Money!. You see a guy pause on top of his lover and mentally ponder his sexuality before making love to him. Men in these fictions place a significance into sex that most guys in the real world wouldn't, no matter how promiscuous they appear to be. More often than not I've seen men, in these stories, actually making a connect between sex and (get this) love.

Maybe I'm just a cynical youth but I've always read us, men, as a monolith when it comes to sex. To me, most of us don't see sex as an expression of love or intense feelings even when have it with the women we fall in love with. Sex is usually us acting upon urges that can (but doesn't necessary) equate to emotional feelings. I suppose it's refreshing to see men portrayed in a more emotional light. One thing that pisses me off in lesbian fiction is the way men are constantly used as antagonists; I'm sure you've seen this before. Girl A falls in love with girl B (maybe in a high school setting) but unfortunately Girl B is dating Boy, who's a complete bastard. If there was some depth to these portrayals, an explanation for the bastardy, I wouldn't care as much, but there's usually none. He's just a jerk, that's it. I don't think it says much about your couple if you need to daemonize men to make it work. Of course, yaoi is generally about men so you’d expect characters in it to have some redeeming characteristics, but it’s refreshing all the same.

However.

If the male propensity for femslash is a reflection of our personal sexualities; then I think the female propensity for male slash presents a muggier picture.

Let me explain. You see, in yaoi and shounen-ai, there is a well-known template for couples called ‘seme’ and ‘uke’. The seme usually takes a dominant role in the couple. He’s broad, he’s muscled, usually sexually confident, usually initiates sexual exchanges, usually more romantic and more willing to fight for the relationship. Juxtapose him with the uke. The uke is often smaller than the seme, more feminine in appearance, less confident sexually, usually the one being pursued romantically (no matter how childish or indifferent they seem) and unsurprisingly, uke take a more... passive role in the bedroom. You know what I mean.


Not all yaoi operates like this (the anime Gravitation diverges from one or two common seme/uke tropes) but many do. You see what you have here, right? Gender roles. The seme is the ‘guy’ and the uke is the ‘girl’. Honestly, reading or watching yaoi/shounen-ai often feels like walking backwards into the 1950’s. Feminists have spent years fighting the concept of gender roles and yet here we have them, utterly fleshed out. Semes can chew through their spouses, one after the other, and it’s never a big issue -- just a matter of sowing wild oats until ‘finding the right one‘. The behaviour of ukes who express their sexuality in the same way (like Gilbert from Kaze to Ki no Uta) is portrayed as slutty.

If that isn’t odd enough remember, these fictions are made BY women FOR women. So if you have a fangirl who has accepted the seme/uke gender role manifestation, are we looking at some kind of internalization of sexism? I mean it’s not so radical when you think about it, most of us internalize some sense of gender-based social conduct (don’t tell me you wouldn’t flutter an eye if you saw a trucker walking down the street in lingerie) but when it’s this specific and this blunt, you have to wonder, are young women being made fully aware of the misogynistic origin of them?

I don’t know how to interpret this. It’s possible that authors are doing this to explore the concept of gender roles rather than reinforce them, and it’s not like femslash writers of any gender are immune to it, myself included. It’s often just reflexive. But I think it’s weird that these tropes are so effortlessly accepted amongst female slash fans.

I wonder what ordinary gay men would think of yaoi? I can’t imagine it would all be positive. So it makes me ponder, on the flip-side, what ordinary lesbians think of femslash and yuri written by male authors (like myself). There is a drastic difference in audience when it comes to slash and femslash, yaoi and yuri. Almost all yaoi fans are straight women while proportionally fewer men are involved in yuri. That being said, I believe that when you step out of yaoi and read normal Western guy-guy fiction, there’s a larger number of men creating and consuming it.

So what do gay and lesbians really think of romance created in their name by and (at times) for people who could only ever have a superficial understanding of their romantic experiences? Should we be allowed to?

Ultimately that’s not my question to answer.

I’d like to think that quality counts for something, that no matter who’s making it, as long as it’s a good story, that’s all that matters. I’d like to think that no matter who’s indulging in it, as long as they do so respectfully, that’s all that matters.

I can only speak for myself when I say that I don’t write my stories because lesbian love gets me off, but because it was a natural path for me. I’m not crazy about straight romance because, like I’ve said elsewhere; I can get that anywhere. And while I’m quite comfortable reading and watching gay romance and anime, I’m not attracted to men, so there’s no way for me to write it myself. It wouldn’t be authentic if I can’t empathize with the feelings of my main characters. So I’ll keep doing my thing. I wanna get better at it. But I wonder if this is a discussion we should have. Should men be writing femslash? Should women compose gay romance? What’s your opinion?