Why Do Women Love Boys’ Love?
Why Do Women Love Boys’ Love?
By women, I mean me... and it seems I'm not the only one.
Hi, I’m Jeannette, and this is the 23rd issue of The Sex Beat, a newsletter documenting my research on sex. If you’re a new subscriber, thank you for joining me on my journey! I’d love to hear your thoughts – send a reply. Or if this newsletter isn’t what you thought it would be, feel free to unsubscribe here.
Last Friday, the community manager in one of the Slack groups I’m in posted the following question in the #general channel: “What’s the one hobby that keeps you sane?”
Amidst the answers about spotting typos, yoga and playing guitar – it’s a group for journalists and media practitioners – someone mentioned binging on Chinese Boys’ Love (BL), also known as danmei.
I’ve come across the term more than once in my research, of course, and as a lurker on AO3 and other web novel sites, I’m no stranger to slash fiction. So of course I had to go down this rabbithole – and there’s a lot to discover. But first…
What is danmei?
Danmei (耽美) is the Chinese term for yaoi, a genre of Japanese fictional media featuring erotic relationships between male-presenting characters.
After its emergence in Japanese girls’ comics in the 1970s, it made its way to China and increased in popularity during the early 1990s (Yang and Xu, 2016).Surveys may not be totally comprehensive, but a recent study of almost 1500 participants by Madill and Zhao (2021) show that a majority of danmei readers identify as women (~88%) and heterosexual (~67%).
So despite the male-male sexual relationships, it’s not surprising that most of these stories (which are typically also written by heterosexual women) have a heteronormative frame (Madill and Zhao, 2018).
During a series of interviews with BL fans, Madill and Zhao identified the following themes:
social and family approval
a “good” romantic relationship is one that has public acceptance, hence the occasional occurrence of male pregnancies in BL
everlasting romantic relationship
heteronormative couple
a maintenance of gender stereotypes in appearance, personality, and social role even though both partners are male
dislike reversible relationship
the top should always top and vice versa
gay relationships in reality
BL fans are generally more accepting of homosexuality, but this acceptance tends to go in the direction of heteronormativity eg. supporting marriage etc.
The question of why straight women love BL never really crossed my mind before. I mean, we don’t really question why straight men like f/f pornography. But some researchers argue that there are additional reasons as to why women like m/m depictions of sex.
It has a lot to do with “gaze”
I found a whole journal article analysing yaoi through a psychoanalytic lens, but that sort of analysis tends to be a bit esoteric – with mentions of scopophilia, the phallus, and the Freudian framework of “a child is being beaten by the father” (Nagaike, 2003).
Basically, and in over-simplified terms, there are societal and cultural expectations of women – including the (false) idea that they are non-sexual, but loving and long-suffering.
Nagaike (2003) writes that “X-rated videos, erotic comics, nude magazines, and other erotic materials were originally masculine inventions”.
These were generally only accessible to men, which meant that “women’s sexual identities have been alienated from any possibility of entering into the representation of the erotic” (p. 83).
Thus, BL allows women to project onto male characters and find an expression of their sexuality in that way – a less complex, less controversial kind of pleasure.
This evokes the notion of the gaze. In a study exploring the motivations of women who watch m/m pornography, Neville (2015) writes that respondents typically spoke about what they disliked in heterosexual pornography.
Some of these dislikes included:
… the way they perceived women as being treated and/or exploited in heterosexual porn, the invisibility of female pleasure, the fact that identifying with the female actress made them less able to enjoy the eroticism of looking, and the fact that most heterosexual porn invited them to view the sex acts occurring from a “male” perspective – noting the way that the camera tended to linger on female anatomy and that men in heterosexual porn were “ugly and out of focus at best, and just a disembodied cock at worst” (Neville, 2015, p. 199).
When it comes to m/m pornography that’s made for gay men, it may be possible that women are borrowing the (gay) male gaze (Marks, 1996).
But what’s going on in boys’ love – where women are writing for women?
References:
Madill, A., & Zhao, Y. (2021). Engagement with female-oriented male-male erotica in Mainland China and Hong Kong: Fandom intensity, social outlook, and region. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 18(1), 111–131.
Marks, L.U. (1996). Straight Women, Gay Porn and the Scene of Erotic Looking. Jump Cut, 40, 127–135.
Nagaike, K. (2003). Perverse Sexualities, Perversive Desires: Representations of Female Fantasies and ‘Yaoi Manga’ as Pornography Directed at Women. U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, 25, 76–103.
Neville, L. (2015). Male gays in the female gaze: Women who watch m/m pornography. Porn Studies, 2(2–3), 192–207.
Yang, L., & Xu, Y. (2016). Danmei , Xianqing, and the making of a queer online public sphere in China. Communication and the Public, 1(2), 251–256.
Zhao, Y., & Madill, A. (2018). The heteronormative frame in Chinese Yaoi: Integrating female Chinese fan interviews with Sinophone and Anglophone survey data. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 9(5), 435–457.
I say “male-presenting” because in some of the stories I’ve read, the characters may have fluid genders but still present with physical features that we might associate with masculinity – broad shoulders, abs, the works.