Yaoi porn

[WarriorNewAgain]

If you weren't aware of this...

Thread: https://twitter.com/neetfem/status/1521828666027745284?s=21&t=q2aHFiTQ__41XOwpssjb3g

It’s a Japanese manga genre about homoerotic and homosexual relationships between gay men that caters to women. Japanese men call women who read this manga “fujoshi” (which means “rotten women). The genre rapidly popularized in the west and many fujoshi seem to identify as trans.
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https://twitter.com/onagohari/status/1521855115799506944?s=21&t=q2aHFiTQ__41XOwpssjb3gg

This seems to be a common theme that some detransed women have recently been describing, besides some of the other misogynistic pressures or confusion around being gay and gender non conforming.

Something I'm personally aware of is that in my send setting we often seem to get young girls with autism (occasionally boys but more common in girls) who draw comic characters constantly repeatedly, and then seem to quickly move on to (innocent) manga genres. (We have far fewer girls than boys generally in send schools as more boys than girls tend to also have learning difficulties.)

This is what my dd's friend group were obsessed with.

There's an episode of gender: a wider lens that talks about the shipping that a lot of teen girls do about boys, imagining them in gay relationships but it's boys from the imaginations of girls who then think that they are also boys and want to be in gay relationships. But they're doing the types of things that actual boys wouldn't do and wanting to be something that boys typically aren't.

I think it's this one

gender-a-wider-lens.captivate.fm/episode/45-helena-part-1-social-justice-fandoms-ftm-gay-boys

Sorry to hear that Wanda.

Yes I've heard Helena describe that but wasn't aware of the specific form of manga.

I was first aware of it in some of the Harry Potter and Twilight fanfics but it had been going on for longer than that.

Yes it’s been going on in fanfic for years (sometimes written by middle-aged women who should tbh probably know better 🤣); but as a pp says, now it’s very anime influenced, and it’s often girls imagining themselves as boys having a romantic first gay relationship, but they don’t actually have the first clue about men generally/gay men/gay male relationships. So the “gay boys” are imagined as essentially with the romantic sensibilities and interests of young preteen/teenage girls. The girls then imagine they want to “be” boys; but the version of imagined “masculinity” they create is highly confected and unreal - a sort of sanitised K-pop idea of what boys/men are like. It’s a version of that old trope about girls liking sanitised young male pop singers because they are “safe” and not as threatening as grown men - but sort of turned back on itself and heavily (self-)eroticised, if you will.

The flipside of this is the phenomenon of the “transgirl” who stereotypically imagines “girlhood” as like a cross between an all-American slumber party/Ariana Grande video; and the anime cat ears/kawaii/gym-skirt-and-white-cotton-panties
aesthetic of Japanese/Korean pop/manga/porn.

This is really interesting. I was thinking a little while ago about starting a thread about slash fanfic, which is overwhelmingly female-authored and female-read (I think). On the one hand, it has the sort of effect on its readers that's identified here - reinforcing the default men-are-the-human-ones approach, together with a hefty dose of eroticism and fantasy. On the other, it seems a place for straight women to imagine relationships which are free of gendered assumptions about who does what, and where there's a kind of equality - which in the real world is always skewed by the participants' sex. That seems a legitimate desire, which isn't necessarily driven by internalised misogyny.

Obviously I'm not talking about porn (and I'm definitely NOT googling yaoi porn 🤣).

It's well known that men watch 'lesbian' pornography (which bears little resemblance to real lesbian sex as it's designed simply to be titillating to an observer). Why is it seen as strange for women to watch pornography based on gay men, that is designed on similar principles, i.e. titillation, not accuracy.

I didn't know this had a name but this is the sort of thing my dd is immersed in. Anime/fanfiction. I think she first started with warrior cats around 12/13 when I had more control of her Internet use. She's 17 now and much more secretive about her drawings etc. She has no other social life apart from this online fantasy stuff. I was hoping it was an interest that would fade. The people in her group seem to be similar, gender questioning, young, some trans, non binary etc.

Yeah exactly this - and it's different to the usual fantasising in that there's really strong impressions that these kids are obsessing about that are making them want to trans out as the fantasy.

This is very interesting and I think the kind of slash fiction that used to be the case (eg often slightly older women writing two male characters together in fan fiction) probably does have an event of imagining a relationship at least partly free from gender roles.

But the difference with the current mode of female teenagers doing it is that they are largely completely steeped in a pervasive youth culture of designating everyone as a “bottom” or “top” and each character as taking on either dominant or submissive roles that do - even if they are not fully aware of it - mimic the “traditional” gender roles, only this time viewed through a lens of quasi-BDSM and some rather mistaken yet completely codified ideas about how all same sex relationships (in fact how all relationships) have to necessarily operate along some kind of dom/sub/bottom/top axis.

This is a relatively new thing but something that really is pervasive in young people’s ideas of sexual culture, even if they haven’t had sex and have no real romantic experience with the opposite or same sex! Just as the gender culture has proliferated all these gender labels, so sexual behaviour has been proliferated too and gained all these labels as well - so you have twelve or thirteen year old girls declaring themselves a “Demi-boy trans masc sub bottom” or whatever, and imagining their favourite boy characters in similar terms.

And all these “roles” are imagined as separate to gender/sex, but inevitably they carry along with them a lot of buried assumptions that are connected to gender stereotypes, so the roles of “top” and “bottom” get imagined as masculinised or feminised even in imaginary same sex pairings - so these are no longer imagined as places where ideals of equal relationships can be explored, but rather the reverse - as place where some of those “roles” actually get acted out in what ends up being quite a reductive and reactionary way. For example, girls imagining two boy characters in a same sex relationship - but one is the “top” and one the “bottom”, and the bottom enjoys receiving sex and being feminised/choked/submissive and being dominated by the “top” - and right there, suddenly there are some not very equal roles back in play, except it’s all supposed to be terribly “queer” and progressive because the roles are separate from sex/gender (only — they aren’t really; it‘s just really like a revival of the old stereotype of “who’s the man and who’s the woman?” that many people used to have about same sex relationships).

Sorry, long post! But I think it’s crucial in understanding these new forms of imagined pairings that girls are “identifying” with not to think of them as necessarily liberating, in the way that writing same sex slash perhaps was for adult women - but seeing them instead as part of this new culture of having to define and label every aspect of sexuality and gender as something “innate”.

You can’t just be a young person exploring sexual fantasies any more -- they always have to be terribly rigidly bound by all these definitions of “I’m an aro-ace demi switch pan femme” or whatever; and woe betide you don’t say the “right” things for the “right” role, or someone will start arguing with you that you aren’t doing things “properly”.

In vain you will try to explain to a teenager that most people, including in gay male relationships, do not see themselves as innately a “bottom/top/dom/sub/switch” or whatever, and instead enjoy a variety of sexual interests and roles in bed without this being an essential part of their gender, identity or personality. They do not like this idea 🤣 Possibly because if you get rid of these ”roles” as somehow innate, it also threatens all the whole ideology of gender identity along with it.

Great post, moon - lots to think about there!

(Sorry to add another post — but the other effect of this, too, is to divorce bdsm-type relationships from a wider culture of male-sexed violence, and instead to see it as just an individual choice/innate predisposition among a menu of sexual behaviours/“kink”. (So it isn’t any longer a feminist issue, because anyone of any gender or sexuality can like being dominated! It’s an innate predisposition so that’s just how I am, I like being choked! Anyone can like it!— and so on).

Whereas second wave/radical feminism would see this as a form of eroticising female subordination, the new sexual culture sees it as just a facet of identity - and therefore it’s politically verboten to object to it, or to “notice” that funnily enough, it tends to be skewed by sex/gender and the whole “queer” discourse around bdsm/kink/bottom/top just mirrors the treatment of women in conventional porn.

As if you can say — “but look, imaginary anime boys also have these identities, so it’s bigoted to claim that kink is a feminist issue.”

"They do not like this idea 🤣"

Possibly because the rules are comforting? The world is all over the shop at the moment. Everything is up for grabs. We've moved from a repressive world where everyone did what their parent did, to one where no one knows what's what.

You can't look at mum or dad's life and tweak it to better match your preferences. You have to start from scratch. There is nothing on the table that's reliable and certain, no temp,ate to amend, just a basket of colours and scraps to try and build an identity from.

@picklemewalnuts I think that’s true - I teach university students, and for a long time they were absolutely delighted to leave the school system behind and get into studying things without all the continuous assessment, marking and grading of the school curriculum.

They used to tell me how freeing it was to not be subject to constant assessment any more, and to be able to choose their own interests and direction. This has really changed in the last five or so years - all of a sudden they are asking for more continuous assessment, asking for grading, asking to be hovered over all the time, like they can’t be without it.

It’s like we’ve now got a generation defined by that bit in The Simpsons where they get an unexpected day off school, and Lisa can’t cope with it and ends up shouting “grade me! Validate me!” — only this time it’s not meant to be a funny joke.

Interesting thread, and a subject I wish had been dealt with more in Helen Joyce's book. I noticed trans-identification popping up a lot in fandoms and fanfiction a few years ago and it was the sheer numbers that first made me realise something odd was going on.

There's an interesting take in an Ovarit thread, the Fandom to Trans Pipeline, suggesting that girls identifying as gay boys may have been for some a way to sidestep accusations of homosexual 'cultural appropriation' in their fanfiction.

Also worth noting that these top/bottom/bdsm Korean boy band transing fantasies are getting embedded in before any of these withdrawn, pale, introvert kids are even snogging anyone!

Yes, I find it interesting, but also a bit terrifying to see bits of the current youth culture appearing in fandoms. I have occasionally written for a couple of niche OG het and wlw pairings, and have really noticed the content of the explicit works changing recently. I used to actually enjoy fanfiction erotica precisely because it seemed to offer a much more authentically equal and female-centred portrayal of sex and sexual desire, one that countered the misogyny of mainstream erotica and pornography. But all of a sudden, every second explicit fic in these pairings involves “breath play”, joking, slapping, bdsm, “size kink”, “look at Daddy’s little girl taking my huge cock” or whatnot — and for characters who in canon would never at all be into that kind of thing 🤣

But the problem is that the girls who write this kind of stuff - normally in their late teens and early twenties - just see it as a normal thing to be turned on by as they have been used to reading it all over the place and seeing it in filmed porn.

Whereas I find it a massive, anti-feminist turn off, and something that it’s hugely worrying that girls seem to have been taught to enjoy - eroticising their own domination and objectification. It’s not like there hasn’t always been a little bit of bdsm in these fandoms, but it used to be more of a niche interest. Now it’s everywhere, and far from looking like sexual liberation, it just seems to me to be mirroring similar misogynist trends in online porn more generally.

*choking not joking. Would that it were joking 🤣

But importantly though, I don’t think the fact that girls are writing boy/boy pairings is an escape from the whole kink culture necessarily - because it’s replicated there too. Or maybe in boy pairings they can at least occasion imagine what it would be like to be the dominating partner? Hmm.

Japanese anime clearly plays a major role in how many men become trans-identified. The profile pictures of little Japanese cartoon girls or boys with giant teary eyes are almost always picked by either middle-aged male transitioners or teen female transitioners. I really believe that it is those cartoon girls many of the transwomen identify as, much more than real women.

I have written male male fanfic for twenty five years, and I don't see that it has changed very much.

There are more fanfic readers who call themselves queer or trans now, but no more than any other group of people who spend a great deal of time online.

There's also no reason why fanfic writers should be writing realistic gay male relationships. They write what women like, not what men actually are. It is fantasy, not ethnography.

choking not joking

Neneh Cherry considers rewrite.

@hangonsnoopy you really don’t see any change in the style or content of the way it’s being written? What fandom is it? I notice big changes in the ones I read - suddenly lots of kink and sexual roles, and especially “breath play”. The worst of the choking / slapping stuff is definitely in the heterosexual (and increasingly in f/f) pieces though.

Nightwaking, I've never read het or f/f so I can't comment on those. Do people write het in a way that is supposed to be realistic? If that is the case, I would expect there to be lots of slapping and strangulation, because that is what young women have been saying they are experiencing now in sex.

My experience of male male is that there has always been romantic, equal fics and there have always been fics with very strict gender roles, now coded into alpha/beta/omega and there has always been some really depraved stuff.

The longer time goes on and the more ingrained the different tropes have become, the less anyone seems to care that male/male is complete fantasy and has no relationship to reality.

I’d estimate that in the main het erotica pairing I read, about 1/3 of it now incorporates some currently fashionable kink or other - which used to be very much not the case (these are longstanding characters who are canonically very much not the kind of people who would be into kink 😂). For the most part this het pairing has always been very female-focused and feminist.

The kink-focused writers are all very young, but I know from their profiles, and from interacting with them (eg on Tumblr/Discord), that most of them are generally pretty virginal or inexperienced overall, so it doesn’t seem to be stuff they’ve personally experienced, more like stuff they seem to have taught themselves to be aroused by or think they should be aroused by because it’s everywhere in both mainstream porn and in the fanfiction culture. (They almost all watch porn of some kind.)

Interestingly kink play stuff is also appearing in the f/f pairings I read too - and again largely written by very inexperienced young women.

(I should say that when I say the writers are very sexually inexperienced, I know this because they frequently post/discuss/complain about this in forums/servers, so I’m not just inferring it!)

Re the unreality — I’ve also been quite intrigued and also amazed that it seems to have become quite accepted that writers will include assumptions from porn about sex that don’t really happen in real life (or are anatomically impossible or unlikely) and no-one bats an eyelid. It wasn’t always like that in this particular fandom; as I said, it used to be very female-focused and realistic. But now as well as kink tropes there are often moments when the inexperienced writers give away that it’s entirely fantasised, often with plain anatomical impossibilities.

Obviously fanfiction has tropes of its own that writers deploy even if they aren’t strictly realist. But yes, I think there’s a sense that there’s much less attention paid these days to whether the sex is realistic, which wasn’t previously the case.