Why the Guys? or, Navel-gazing on a Sunny Afternoon
'Why do we like to watch/ think about/ fantasize two
guys having sex?' It's a question that gets asked a lot by both slash and yaoi fans. I'll
be up front about my personal gut response, which is, 'Why not?' A liking for m/m is a
sexual taste ('kink' where I come from) like any other, and there are only two possible
responses to a kink: 'Yowza!' and 'Hunh?' If someone shares your kink, you don't have to
tell them why it's hot. If they don't, all the explaining in the world won't enlighten
them.
This laissez-faire attitude doesn't quite meet some people's needs, I'm aware.
Most of the slash fans I know are academics who analyze their hobbies the same way other
people play video games, as a pleasant way to pass the time. For them, half the fun of a
thing is talking about why it's fun. The yaoi fans I know are different. Don't ask me why,
but it's the yaoi fans who seem to want an assurance that a liking for m/m is normal, or
at any rate not proof of a hopelessly depraved nature. OK- let's get that one out of the
way to start with. A liking for m/m sex is about as normal as writing with your left hand.
Most people don't, but an awful lot of people do, and it's an innate bias. For the
southpaws of the world there are now left-hand shops. For the m/m fans there are now slash
and yaoi. Life is wonderful.
Don't ask why we like m/m. Ask what's the fun of m/m. This turns the
discussion from a defense of yaoi into a list of all your favorite reasons for reading
this stuff. Works much better. The slash fen I knew used to argue the question of what's
good about slash endlessly, and some of the reasons I'm about to give owe a lot to those
thick-paged discussions in the APA (amateur press association) Strange Bedfellows back in
the mid-90's. In no special order, then, we have
the following. Note that most of these reasons slop over into each other:
1) The Role Thing. (Freedom from roles) In m/f you're always working
within set ideas of What Men Do and What Women Do. The expectations are always there, and
they get in the way of what the characters can do. Two guys alone remove those
expectations. The characters can then just be themselves. The strong silent one will be
the guy who's naturally strong and silent, like Kei. The loving supportive one will be the
guy who's naturally loving and supportive, like Ranmaru. In m/f the bitchy weepy
vindictive hysterically possessive character is a woman (see: Fatal Attraction). In yaoi
it's Kouji Nanjo.
Since the roles in m/m can be fluid and changeable, why do so many
people (and it's not just the Japanese) give one partner the role and characteristics of
the female all the time? Why all the weeping ukes and wimpy Mulders? For one answer to
that, see under Gender Fuck. I think the other answer is that some people don't know any
better and possibly, don't care. The m/f model is the one they see all around them, the
one that seems right to them as a model of human interaction. Certainly it's easier to do
a story that runs on familiar dichotomies (strong/weak, active/passive, cold/loving) than
one where two characters have the same characteristics but in different degrees.
2) The Power Thing. (Who's got the gun?) OK: we all know most fiction isn't realistic?
It's not like real life, where power and roles are a constantly shifting thing. Fiction
runs off a number of assumptions, one of which is that men have power by definition and
women don't, unless they're given special magic powers like the Sailor Senshi or conquer
through the purity of their hearts like Basara's Tatara. In fictional m/f, the
relationship is unequal by definition. He's got the gun and she doesn't. In m/m, it's a
level playing field. Both have it, and the question becomes whether one partner will give
up his gun or whether both will hold on to theirs and negotiate. Westerners, with their
democratic bias, are suckers for the story where emotional and sexual roles are
negotiated, sometimes under very unlikely circumstances, like when both guys have fallen
into bed with raging hard-ons. Under those circumstances, the last thing real-life men do
is talk. Classic slash likes to celebrate the mutual empowerment of both partners:
a paradise of equality existing between two fully equal and empowered people. As a
contrast to most m/f, it does make a nice break, I'll admit.
I still prefer the scenarios where one (fully equal and empowered)
person tacitly agrees to relinquish power without requiring a signed contract from the
other guy. The uke gives up his gun and walks naked (literally) into the sexual badlands.
I prefer ukes because they have the guts to be vulnerable, and I don't think I'm the only
woman in the world who finds vulnerable men a turn-on. It's probably why I've always liked
visual representations of m/m. There's a guy bending over for another.
(Classic submission posture in apes. Obviously a taste inherited from our primate
ancestors.) As Jenn has put it, 'A man ain't more vulnerable than when he's got a dick up
his ass.' And hey! these guys are vulnerable for love! Who could ask for more?
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Cuts from Hommes Lapis (Samurai Troopers), You Higuri (Seimaden)
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