Thursday 8 July 2004

Pic of the day: The SYFG assemble. Screenshot from the anime Sensei no Ojikan.

SYFG revisited

For some reason, an unnaturally large number of my online friends are SYFG: Shounen-ai/Yaoi Fangirls, or, as we guys read it, "Scary Yaoi Fangirls." The Japanese words refer to gay romance and gay porn. The question has always been, why would straight girls want to read, much less write, about men being intimate with men?

Until recently, I thought this was an American affectation, limited to a the college girls who attended the same anime conferences and such. But lately, I've seen the same in a couple of anime. In Sensei no Ojikan for instance, when the two boys are practicing for Snow White and the Prince respectively, the corridor is full of red-faced girls staring and moaning. And in Kyou Kara Maou, the servant girls of the castle discuss the various male/male pairings possible in the court. So evidently this is a real thing, not just an American tack-on.

I'm sticking to my theory that it is an attempt to make sexuality less threatening by projecting it on a situation in which you can't participate. This is based on the reasonable assumption that girls are, by default, scared of sex. Of course it is an entirely different motivation when boys watch lesbian porn. After all, every man knows that lesbians can't have real sex. It's just foreplay all the way, since you cannot have sex without the one crucial ingredient, the divine sex-maker, which only we men are blessed with. So yuri (girl on girl action) equals two hot and ready chicks. But girls are so much more modest and nervous about such things, so there is no way they could think like that about guys. Therefore, the only valid explanation is that they like yaoi because guys who are occupied with each other are "safe" and not threatening to them...

Yeah, right.

One of the more fascinating facts, however, is that shounen-ai and yaoi stories are almost exclusively written by girls. Not boys, and not gays. In fact, I have been told that practicing gays don't recognize themselves in these stories at all. The characters are not really gay boys, much less straight boys who just happen to fall in love with one particular boy (as is the most common premise) but girls with penii.

I still think I could write better shounen-ai than the girls, since I actually am a man and know how boys feel. But I guess that would totally miss the point, because the SYFG don't really write about boys, but about their own repressed sexuality. (And if that's repressed, I'd not like to meet them when they let it loose...)