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That may well be part of it, but there's also the disconnect between male and female sexuality. Women can feel it as a rejection. I remember an anecdote by Nancy Friday from one of her Secret Garden books about how when she was young and in a relationship with an older man, she felt really hurt when she found him masturbating one day. I'm here, I'm available, he doesn't need to do that! I forget exactly how he explained things to her and got her to go "and now, gals, I'm telling you don't be upset if your guy does this, it isn't a reflection on you". Something along the lines of "sometimes men just want that orgasm without having to think of anyone's pleasure but their own, and without having to put up with another person".
I can't tell you what the equivalent of porn (not erotica, this is not about the written word content) is for women, but I can point you to a hit TV show, or I assume it's a hit, because I see it being raved over on social media by women. A Canadian (and part-funded by the Canadian government via arts grants, which is funny and ironic, because the Netflix gay show failed) show called Heated Rivalry.
It's about gay hockey players, and from what I understand, it is very gay indeed**. But it's not simply two hot guys having explicit (as you can get away with on TV) sex that has the girlies all hot and bothered, it's the relationships. I'm trying to avoid the show, because I'm not interested, but simply by osmosis I understand that the fans are invested in the main couple and their trials and tribulations. Will they become a couple, or will it stay at the level of frenemies to lovers? The emotionally distant father of one guy which has hurt him and stunted him emotionally. The commitment issues of the other guy. And so on - it's the relationship as much as the butt-humping that is the appeal.
Are they masturbating to the butt-humping? I dunno, they could be. But I think the main difference is that for men, they don't care if the 46DD blonde having cum sprayed on those tits is resolving her daddy issues by having sex with the older guy spraying cum on her tits. They care about the size of the tits. Women find that... alienating. How can you not care about the people involved? Uh, because they're not people? What, you don't think women are people??? That's not what I meant, I meant that the big-titted blonde slut taking it in all orifices from six guys is only there for the purposes of getting my dick hard, I'm not supposed to care about her or why she's doing this, I don't want to care about her or why she's doing this.
And then the fight starts đ
** But gay in a way that seems coded to appeal to women, not gay men. I have a feeling a show by gay men for gay men about gay men and gay sexual life would be very different and much more like porn for straight guys.
No, unfortunately Mrs. FiveHour watched it with one of her (horny, sad) friends who loved the books over the holidays, and there unless they were doing the lovey-dovey stuff every time I left the house, it was mostly just butt fucking and occasionally skating. The main characters fucked before they ever said more than five words to each other, and that's mostly all they did in between, saying as little as possible to each other (because they hate each other, they are rivals ya know?) and then meeting up in a hotel room to fuck. The show isn't really built around emotions beyond being gay, it's built around scenes of as much and as explicit of gay sex as can be done without showing an actual erect penis or an actual asshole. Which, honestly, is disappointing: if you're gonna make porn just go whole hog. But it is really focused on ripped abs and men groaning each other's names, the emotions are just kind of assumed to exist afterward.
My criticism of what I saw of the show is that it was clearly written by a woman/gay men, with nobody having any idea how heterosexual men functioned at the relevant times. While I've never played ice hockey, I was a hetero frat boy during most of the years the show is set, and the dynamic just doesn't make any sense, it's like they have the idea that straight men have no friends and no intimacy and don't hang out. The closet cases' strategy for staying closeted is to never, ever be seen together, seen talking to each other, seen being friends. When, frankly, in 2012 the most heterosexual thing you could do was have a best buddy you drank with and joke about being gay together. There's like a half dozen scenes where they have to, secretly, give each other their hotel room numbers and, secretly, sneak into each other's hotel rooms to, secretly, hang out. And it just feels odd, because when me and bunch of other 20 year olds had hotel rooms in the same hotel the most normal thing in the world would be to say to another guy "Hey I'm room 567 grab a case of beer and swing by." Shane is TREMBLING walking to Ilya's hotel room at the thought of anyone catching him, when if he just had a bottle of whiskey his cover is impenetrable. And frankly, if you're in love with a rival hockey star for YEARS, just get your agents on the line and try to get traded to the same team. A-Rod and Jeter it up! The sports media is still dopey enough that they'll publish puff pieces about how it's soooooooo funny that the two stars for Montreal are soooooo close that they have to live right next door to each other.
There's a second gay romance plot (apparently hockey is nothing but closet cases in this universe) where the captain for the Rangers falls in love with a guy who works at a smoothie shop, but their love must remain SECRET, and he can never be seen at his apartment! And once again I'm like, if you're a star player, having a weird smoothie twink living in your house as part of your entourage wouldn't even be all that odd.
A lot of twitter hockey fans complained that the climactic scene of that plot didn't make any sense, when the captain brings the smoothie twink onto the ice for a kiss after winning the stanley cup at MSG and the crowd applauds. I can only assume the complaints came from fans who have never seen their team win a championship. Jalen Hurts could have shown up to the parade in a fur suit last year after smoking Mahomes and the Philly fans would have applauded. Hell, for the most part, if right after the win a player started kissing a man on the field, I wouldn't even process that it was gay, I would just think he was really excited and got his wires crossed.
Sports guys kissing their team mates after a victory is old hat in soccer đ Heck, "heterosexual life partners" is old hat.
I'm glad (I think) that the show was "gay sex all the time for the ladieez" because there was a lot of the relationship discussion stuff online. But your review of it, having seen it, makes sense to me. The plot is dumb, because yeah: what, guys never hang out together? Sure, if they're meant to be hated rivals on teams that hate each other, then hanging out might seem odd. But I think the whole "sneaking around because HOMOPHOBIA" is a large part of the appeal, the "oppressed" and allies sure love stories reassuring them that they are "oppressed" for being gay etc. See the transgender day of remembrance list of trans murder victims where "getting hit by a car = murder" because systemic racism, transphobia, something something.
Not really, low key most of the big players hang out together, and while we love team rivalries, we love chivalry and sportsmanship between players. "Beat the piss out of him, but when the clock hits zero go get a beer" is pretty much the male ideal.
If anything, the one actual homosexual superstar in US sports history responded by being so out-there party-hardy macho that he ultimately killed a bunch of people to prove how tough he was. Which is a shame, because if he had come out instead of shooting those immigrants outside a night club, we'd probably have the Aaron Hernandez Supportive Teammate Award given out every year in the NFL. And it would have been fine because he played with the one white QB in the NFL who worships the devil instead of Jesus Christ.
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funnily enough I heard about this show from the gay couple in my group of board game friends last weekend and they seemed to quite like it.
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[cw: pretty gay]
To be fair, you do get some gay shows (and even gay porn) by men that's about The Relationships. They just look different.
Take this comic by TooMuchDynamite (cw: furry, clean). Sappy lovey-dovey feminine-energy take on self-sacrifice as a (somewhat literal) sin eater, gotta be a chick thing, right? Nah, he's a he, he's gay, really really into bara (cw: furry, guys in relatively subtle underwear); the same comic opens up with a well-formed gay goat demon I'm not gonna link to because the focus character straddles the line between 'that's an unrealistic bulge for a jock strap' to 'that's just a dick'.
To go back to written form erotica, I've recommended both Kyell Gold and Rukis Croax as expert writers of gay furry smut, but one of them is a gay guy with a husband, and one of them isn't (and probably won't turn out to be a trans guy, if I had to guess), and you don't need a massive amount of familiarity with the fandom or the conventions of yaoi to know which is which. Out of Position is pretty much the football equivalent to Heated Rivalry, complete with sports-themed public coming out arc, and a lot of trials and tribulations about the relationships and how people interact and what's motivating them, and the furry conventions are the least of the differences in either the smut or the social framing.
((And there are even some straight-porn-for-straight-guys writings that go into that level of "caring about the people involved" stuff. For furry writers, I'd point to the Tempe O'kun's straight works, or EddieW for a writer who is fully straight, for examples where the relationship tribulations take such center place that the smut often becomes nearly-forgotten.))
Some of that's biology -- you're telling me the sex that's slower to warm up and has a faster recuperation time favors written stories with a longer buildup and more repetition? -- and some of it's mode of attraction, but I'm... skeptical that's the full story. There's mechanical reasons straight women are a lot less likely to be size queens or be fascinating by a guy firing off like a fire hydrant. There's no such convenient physical explanation for the differences between gay and yaoi exhibitionism, and there's some pretty obvious social ones.
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