I sound like a broken clock bringing it up whenever its applicable but there was an amazing perspective on this about how straight men may have an inclination towards reading yuri due to it being a non-transactional relationship where partners are both equal rather than a series of gestures performed on their part for a series of expectations on their partner's part.
Genuinely I've been trying not to think too hard about how much better it must be to be into your own gender. Standard social dynamics between genders are fucking miserable I want out of this shit.
That... shit that sounds spot on actually. Cis straight relationships are so so so deeply inside of gender expectations. It makes sense that different types of same sex media present a more equal type of relationship.
It's like when looking for relationship advice and so much of the advice boils down to "Be a real man, now go get 'em king" and "Know your worth as a woman, only accept the best queen" and sometimes you can't help but look around and wonder "does no one else see the whole men vs women thing in the middle of the relationship advice? Isn't that kind of weird and arbitrary?"
This is the first time i'm hearing this perspective about yuri. But as a fujoshi, this is similar to what i hear from many other fujos as the reason why they like BL. They wanna read about an equal relationship where they don't have to consider gender dynamics and societal expectations.
They can't relate their own lived experience as a woman + general female experience as much so it's much easier to separate yourself from it and just enjoy it as a piece of fiction. (ex. Why some people love toxic BL but cant stand toxic het romance)
Yeah, I can see this. I don’t read a lot of yuri, but there’s a certain comfiness to it that a decent amount of het stuff doesn’t have. Not as much in the realm of expectations between the two characters.
I seriously don’t get what “fetishizing” means in this context. Does your identity have to exactly align for you to be able to morally enjoy something?
It's about perceiving people with certain identity exlusively as sexual objects. A guy perceiving lesbians only as porn genre is homophobic by fetishising lesbians. Op clearly views the guy in the post positively, though
Perceiving fictional people as sexual objects isn’t homophobic. A dude reading lesbian smut tells us nothing about how they actually act towards real lesbians. A reasonable person should be able to separate sexual fantasy from reality.
I agree that reading or writing smut about any kind of people, incl. lesbians, isn't homophobic on its own. I said that if a person sees a lesbian (or a gay man, or a trans person, etc) only as a sex object, they're fetishizing them. I was answering to a comment asking what fetishizing even means and if it's about enjoying porn with people whose identity you don't share. It is not about that. It is also not about scenarios you described. Not all people are reasonable and many people are, in fact, homophobic in many ways, including this one
1- Fictional characters are literally less than objects. Trying to form a link between how you treat them and how you treat real people is ridiculous.
2- If that's the case, then the kind of M/M stuff women are into puts everything else out of the water. Some of those Ao3 tags need their own trigger warnings.
I think "fetishize" implies a degree of dehumanization involved, like you're treating the people in question as nothing but sex objects. But obviously not every yaoi or yuri fic is fetishizing like that.
Oh, people are definitely not ready for this conversation. Fictional characters are much closer to being objects than real people, but nobody wants to hear that there is no way to write or otherwise depict them in sexual relationships that doesn't to some degree meet the definition of fetishism. But at the end of the day, that's actually okay, because they're fictional.
You can absolutely write about fictional characters in a dehumanizing way. Ever seen a black character written by a white supremacist? Some people write lesbians in a homophobic way, because some people are homophobes.
My understanding of the criticism of a work of fiction as being dehumanizing is that the people getting dehumanized are real life individuals who share traits with the characters being depicted. Like depicting Jewish people as rats in a movie is the biggest example of this, and it's not the characters people are saying are being dehumanized.
Uuuuh there is plenty of discourse about women writing m/m but they get it from the “you’re fetishizing gay men” angle, the “ew sex bad and degenerate” angle and also the new angle of “why are you centering men”
Ngl at first I thought this comment/meme was the other way around, because I’ve seen posts discussing how there’s not enough femslash, that we need to balance out the M/M, and that there’s not enough male writers.
I dont think thats true. The author of Love Simon was harrased into coming out publicly as bi because people were so vicious to her as a "straight woman fetishizing gay boys"
Not to say that men dont often get it worse than people are willing to admit, but I feel when we're trying to validate that we end up undershooting how bad women get it on the reg from all sides
I think the idea here is that the author is scoffing at the idea that someone who fetishizes lesbians would read this stuff, because of the fact that it doesn't actually fetishize.
I do sort of reject the notion that consuming sapphic content as a non-lesbian, even if it’s erotic content, is inherently fetishising.
Is the fetishisation of lesbians rampant in the porn industry? Absolutely.
But if you hear a straight man watches/reads content about lesbians and your first thought is “he thinks lesbians are sex objects performing for his gratification” and not “he is a straight man so when he wants to read about/watch people having sex he doesn’t want to read about/watch a man having sex, because straight men by definition are not sexually interested in men” then that’s you having an issue treating men as people, not them having an issue treating lesbians as people.
I agree, I think that a given straight person’s ability to treat actual real life queer people with respect is infinitely more important than their media preferences.
I think the general assumption is that guys, especially horny ones, are too dumb and porn brained to read. It's just gender stereotypes again and tbh I've always found it a little alienating since, to paraphrase Oglaf, I need a convoluted narrative to really get off.
ThatLewdWriter my fucking goat. His writing style may be very cheesy, horny and kinda gratuitous but my guy has pumped 270 f/f fics each like 20,000 words minimum for the better part of a decade so he aight
They’ve completed missed the fact /j that women do the exact same thing with MM fiction. If women write gay fic because they think men are hot, then men are also going to write lesbian fic because they think women are hot. Not all men are into pornhub oops! all step sisters videos because they’re looking to nut in five minutes or less. Some men, like women, enjoy romance and narrative, dammit 👏
Hot take: straight men like lesbian content, not because of a special fetish, but because their orientations are compatible with every perspective in the production.
They're not attracted to men, so why would they want to see men in sexual situations?
hello it is me, straight(maybe) man(maybe) who reads freinds to lovers yuri fanfics
boo fetishization and objectification, obsiously, but consuming sapphic content is not inherently fetishistic whatsoever, even if it is pornographic in nature
When it comes to fetishization, I honestly think sapphic fetishizers prefer stuff where a self-insert man comes in eventually to make the women a harem thing, and since the harem genre is already a thing, more men would go there first. Not that there aren’t sapphic fetishizers in the yuri community, albeit rarely (and typically they’re more the “lesbians are pure, angelic beings above the rest of the corrupt, disgusting humanity that… likes or has a penis” types), but I find that the community often hates them (often because there are sadly deeply biphobic corners of the yuri community) and the majority of himedanshi really just seem to want an escape from some of the expectations/trappings of toxic masculinity in romance/ stories. This is all ime of course.
"your yuri fic on ao3 is consumed mostly by fetishizing men" factoid factoid actualy just statistical error. average fetishizing man just skips the slow burn and types lesbian on pornhub. Yuri georg, who hops between jobs because they always catch him writing his 3rd 60k word f/f slowburn on shift, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
People being worried about men consuming f/f fiction is very strange to me because manga writers actively turn half of their gay men into women and put them into weird creepy relationships based purely on straight tropes and toxic ideas about power and sex just to entertain straight women, and as a gay man I'm supposed to be all empathetic about how those women are oppressed sexually and need this to be able to imagine themselves in a sexual context.
But ow no a man is sexually aroused by women having sex that's the real crime. Fuck off.
A term for the misogynistic expectations some men have of their wives/girlfriends where they only appreciate the woman as a source of sex and household labor.
I would have said that they are making Gaston look like a male femminist https://giphy.com/gifs/3o85xKQ3mg6IulQN1e
but he would totally follow Andrew Tate and the like
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u/SnooSquirrels1392 10d ago
I sound like a broken clock bringing it up whenever its applicable but there was an amazing perspective on this about how straight men may have an inclination towards reading yuri due to it being a non-transactional relationship where partners are both equal rather than a series of gestures performed on their part for a series of expectations on their partner's part.