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What never ceases to amaze me is that there are three completely different types of gay male smut available for all kinds of genders and orientations. There is gay male smut aimed at straight men, otokonoko, which is exactly the same as regular smut aimed at straight men except that the "girl" is a little flat and has a certain extra hidden in "her" underwear (the infamous Boku no Pico is a prime example). Then there is gay male smut aimed at straight women, yaoi, which is exactly the same as regular romance aimed at straight women except that instead of a guy and a girl you have a seme and an uke. And then there is the gay male smut which is actually aimed at gay men, bara, which I know little about because trying to read it triggers my disgust instinct (by contrast, yaoi is just boring, not disgusting, and otokonoko is hot).
There is, unfortunately, not yet a genre of gay male smut aimed at lesbian women. But we can dream.
Take this with a grain of salt, as it’s mainly something I’ve just heard floated around in weeaboo haunts, but apparently, a significant proportion of fujoshi are actually lesbians; supposedly, yaoi gives them a way to explore non-heterosexuality in a less personal setting. If this is true (again, absolutely no reason to think that it is), then yaoi would serve the role of “gay smut for lesbians” as well.
Interestingly, I’ve also heard (again, based on screencaps of Japanese polls posted on imageboards) that a significant number of yuri fans are straight women. This is a priori somewhat surprising, but fits with surveys I’ve seen of Japanese yumejoshi (women who enjoy things like otome games and other genres involving extremely handsome men romancing a female self-insert) highly ranking certain female characters (with masculine/“princely” demeanors) as among their favorite and most attractive characters. (To put this in perspective, this would be like various otokonoko characters (better known in Anglophone circles as “traps”) ranking among the most beloved girls in a poll of male anime fans. From what I understand, this is very much not the case, with traps largely being relegated to “niche interest character” status, although who knows, maybe some of those otokonoko characters who have achieved “meme” levels of status might fit the bill.) The common cause of these two phenomena (that is, straight female interest in yuri and yumejoshi interest in “handsome” female characters) probably is just the usual “women are all bisexual” theory.
In the 90s-00s (western) fujoshi were what was called Fag Hags (mostly sexless women who hang out with gay men for a vicarious thrill), and were the reason I never went to any anime convention. For anyone reading who doesn't have experience with the subculture, google "yaoi paddle" and you'll instantly understand.
Yuri fans in the west have had a strange evolution. The ones into cute slice of life haven't changed much, but every scanlator of yuri porn I ever met has decided he's a lesbian in a man's body sometime in the last 8-10 years.
Interesting thread
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Playing actual gay male (typically though not always softcore) porn at Certain Types of lesbian meetups was a thing for a while, although from my understanding it's fallen out of popularity. This sometimes reflected complex gender stuff -- especially in the 90s, the line between butch lesbian and FTM was a lot blurrier than today -- but just plain lesbian fujoshi is definitely a thing.
The official story is that femmy gay guys in 90s porn were more appealing and nonconfrontational to women than the fake boobs and long fingernails (why!?!) of a typical porn starlett, and in the recent era female/female porn either filmed or (more often) written for female interests has become more widely available. But given fanfic worlds or spaces in the furry fandom (cfe SkylarShibe/RedfeatherStorm for a lesbian's take on f/f as discrete from f/m and m/m), I'd expect that there's other social and political pressures playing a role.
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Fascinating breakdown, thanks, I never really thought about it this way. This actually slightly clears up one of the bigger mysteries I've pondered for years while hanging in degen-adjacent spaces - the memetic insistence of how traps/femboys are totally not gay. It's impossible to take the egregious contradiction on its face (there's not even a fig leaf like with e.g futa - you are literally fucking another man), and I presumed it was mostly cope, but from this point of view it apparently is a valid and intended feature, I'm just too normie to see it.
I now have several more interesting mysteries to ponder, chief of which is what is the overlap with loli mentioned downthread, and whether or not this is basically a, for lack of a better term, culturally evolved substitution where
degensconnoisseurs can openly lust after femboys (which are considered based and mostly retain the uh, required body type) instead of lolis (which are heavily stigmatized even in degen-adjacent spaces). It would explain a lot of things, it can't be just the bi-curiosity in the water supply.Further ramblings from downthread:
Apologies for the Reddit link.
It's actually kind of interesting to me that, from a certain point of view, you go from 100% masc to 0% masc and then back to 100% masc- from "I wanted a woman and got a woman as far as I know" (full masc) through "pretending not to notice the cracks" to "the illusion is obviously broken but we're fine with it anyway" (totally not masc) to "not even bothering to keep up the illusion" to "this isn't meaningfully distinct from being gay but that's what I wanted anyway" (full masc).
Having sex but putting aside it's not the thing you actually wanted/having to put extra effort in to enjoy it is probably the least masculine thing you could do more or less by definition, and the middle position on that graph is the one that symbolizes that the most.
I think our words for how people think about gender are probably still pretty bad here; that's why we can point out that "traps are gay" is incoherent as a concept but not actually be able to explain it any better than that language allows us. Actually, I'm doing the same thing with what "masculinity" is above, too, but this isn't yet the effortpost it needs to be to do this properly.
Futa is honestly really weird and doesn't tend to line up with traps/tomgirls at all; the latter tend to have an intentional de-emphasis on both kinds of secondary sexual characteristics whereas with futa they're both on absolute full blast all the time (proportions range from the large side of normal to wildly exaggerated). Maybe you get a slight hourglass and exaggeration of pecs into breasts with a trap (the meme is "draw a girl, call it a boy" but only the low-effort traps are done like that), but with futa you usually get a wasp waist, massive breasts, and a dick half as long and just as thick as their arms.
I only say this because I've noticed that the portrayal of traps tends to be more immature/loli-adjacent than the characters that surround them- their faces tend to be rounder, their outfits tend to be closer to what a child would wear or slightly out of place in that direction with respect to the rest of the cast (if applicable), and the context and memes around them is more immature and more evocative of a loli than a "proper" grown woman (the "boys are the best girls" thing, as opposed to normal male sexuality... which is more likely to pattern-match to futa anyway).
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I think bara is a fascinating glimpse into what superstimulus for gay men must look like- it's bizarre on a good day, and I've seen some examples that look downright alien.
For that matter, I think the same about yaoi more generally since it focuses on massive hands, very tall and triangular heads, and emphasis on facial features women themselves try to accentuate.
And then we have the otokonoko body types, which are basically just slightly taller lolis (no hourglass figure, small cute face, usually dressed in a manner more suggestive of a girl than a woman but without the outright childish attitude to match) that straight men can use as reasons to be less conflicted about liking that body type.
On that note, I'm not convinced Boku no Pico is otokonoko. I think shotacon creates a corner case for the categories; I'm pretty sure that not only was it yaoi (that cover picture is the exact opposite of otokonoko dress, lmao), but it was yaoi intended for straight men. That paradox is probably half to blame for why it's still a meme (and the other half is that famous reaction video).
Is there a genre of lesbian female smut aimed at gay men? (For that matter, is there a genre of lesbian female smut aimed at lesbians?)
There's a very funny horseshoe(?) effect with shota, isn't there? Where it circles back to being totally the domain of gay men: even the plot of Boku no Pico is a standard gay summer hookup that Milo would reminisce about.
I wish it was still the 00s internet so we could do an Aella-style Hot or Not poll on this stuff without half a dozen groups trying to cancel us.
It's media involving gay men, but meant for ostensibly/otherwise straight men (there's way too much of it for the opposite to be true).
Which means that either "it's gay" is missing something important, "the audience is straight" is missing something important, or both are. (And if that's the case, what's missing, why is it missing, and how come nobody notices?)
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Eh... that's definitely a thing ((and I'd argue that a lot of penetrative gay porn is superstimulus for gay men in a way that straight porn isn't for straights, for simple practical reasons)), and sometimes hot because of the thing, but there's also a tendency to emphasize the extreme variants in what escapes into more public spaces. Bara as a genre can cover everything from your overmuscled aliens to 'probably a little more muscled/chubbier than practical or realistic' to 'JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Extra' to 'this is a twink, with facial hair'.
... there's definitely stuff that fits that category, but it's an absolutely tiny field, and it tends to either be focusing around gay men who are going to turn out to be bisexual transwomen (cfe here for a pre-transition piece if you're logged in, cw: explicit f/f lesbian; will also warn that artist is great at giving very unusual kinks), or a side effect of an artist that mostly works m/m getting commissioned or otherwise roped into stuff outside of their normal focus (eg, Braeburned has 1 f/f piece ever, and if you didn't pay a lot of attention it'd be easy to miss that the top has breasts).
I don't think there's a named genre.
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