Why Do Women Love BL? Discuss Your Reasons

@jpny01 

I've known 2 people before that had tearing after anal sex, not to the point of having to go to the hospital for it, but it was definitely painful for them for about a week.

Yeah the temperature may be rather steady, but add a hard cold rain to the mix with high temp/humidity and that's what talking about. Personally I have no heat tolerance and even with living in New York State there's been times where it'll be hot out, I'll get caught in the rain and the rapid change in temp shocks my system and it'll knock me out for the rest of the day, etc. Like I said before it's very much like heat sickness, and I have known others that have better tolerance to heat than I do and still get effected like that.

Trần Vũ Đức Duy https://www.instagram.com/sam.0985/ and Ba Vinh are both hot as hell, not to mention those two are hilarious together. Yes there are a couple of other Vietnamese BL production companies out there, but those two really are trying to do everything they can for representation in Vietnam and their series are usually really good, although I can't speak for Vian, I haven't watched it because of the tik tok formula they're filming it in.

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@Maggi64 

Yeah I don't know what's going on with Taiwan BL series lately, they seem to be going backwards a bit this year, especially with having such strong series last year.

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One other thing I've noticed lately is the make up of the fan base for some of the actors is shifting as well. While the fan base is still primarily female, some of the actors like Ohm Pawat as a perfect example also has quite a few male fans as well. I'm not sure if that's because Ohm has always been very obviously treating his male fans the same so they feel comfortable going to his events, being vocal about being his fans, etc., but I've noticed that with some of the other actors as well.

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PS: For context for your discussion incase you're keeping track of it, I'm a 42 year old gay male living in the USA.

Cursed Existence, yay, another middle aged gay male!  It looks like we've got more than I realized in our little group.  Glad to have you here.  I like getting gay male voices, but especially like hearing from older people because I feel like such an old lady in BL land (the demographic is 18-30 yr old females).  

Oh, and I love your name: Cursed Existence.  That's so funny.  Another guy here is named Solipsism and I love that one too. 

In childhood, nobody is more merciless socially than girls. While female writers might not deal with horrible women on a day-to-day level in their current lives, I think it's possible they have childhood trauma. But if they have an office job, they may also feel it if they're operating in a pre-feminist society. I'm old enough that when I first started working, the US was still like that and women were terrible to each other in the workplace. Now there's not much difrerence between men and women.

As for the formula masculinity = physically stronger = always better, I definitely don't agree with that - the first two elements, yes, but that's kind of our biology. Men are also often looked at as emotionally and practically stupid. Watch commercials - they are mostly aimed at women, and all the men in them are very uke in their inability to do anything. A huge proportion of BL relies very heavily on the Implausible Misunderstanding, which requires the characters to be so totally clueless that you wonder if they have a developmental disorder.

I've thought about your overall theory, and it makes sense to me, but there is something that doesn't jive with it, and that's that BL is increasingly popular as patriarchal structures weaken. Maybe that's just coincidental with the development of new media, but I'm not entirely sure all this is about patriarchy. 

i still think we're over-thinking it.  Not everything is about identity politics. Straight men get off on watching two women have sex, and female erotica, which tends to be more romanticized and verbal, gives us the female equivalent of lesbian fantasies, which is two men romancing each other.  If our societies were matriarchal, would men not want to watch lesbian porn? (Well, if we were matriarchy women would ban men from watching any porn, but imagine if they didn't.) I don't think it would make any difference, and I don't think it would make BL die off - it might even be mainstream. Maybe wives would require their husbands to have boyfriends so they could squee over it.

I feel like we're making assumptions that women have to identify with the uke, who is the receptor, which I don't think is necessarily true.  Does everyone here do that, or do you just enjoy attractive boys getting it on with each other, either romantically, sexually, or both? 

I don't identify with either, although the "classic" uke annoys me with his uselessness and passivity - but then passive or evil female characters annoy me too. I generally like best the BLs where there is no uke and seme, or the dynamic is weak like in My School President, or when the usual arrangement is reversed, like in 360 degree where the 20-year old more effeminate character was the seme and the 45-year old more masculine character the uke - that's kind of hot. 

Jpny, you nailed it with the following statement: "In childhood, nobody is more merciless socially than girls. "

There is even a famous sociology book called Queen Bees and Wannabes, that formed the basis of the movie Mean Girls.   The book discussed how boys show aggression by simply punching you.  Girls, however, practice something called "relational aggression" wherein they will destroy your relationship with others via gossip, rumors, lowering your status, etc.  This is also a prolonged form of aggression compared to physical aggression. So yes, being the victim of such aggression will scar a female for life and, thus, the negative images of other women will manifest in the negative portrayals of women we see in so many BL's.   

 Maggi64:

Cursed Existence, yay, another middle aged gay male!  It looks like we've got more than I realized in our little group.  Glad to have you here.  I like getting gay male voices, but especially like hearing from older people because I feel like such an old lady in BL land (the demographic is 18-30 yr old females).  

Oh, and I love your name: Cursed Existence.  That's so funny.  Another guy here is named Solipsism and I love that one too. 

In a way I'm surprised there aren't more gay male BL fans on here, especially with the lack of quality representation in USA media, but then again BL is still something you tend to fall into learning about.

Thanks, I started off with EndlessXistence back when I was 16 and then changed it to CursedXistence quite a while back now and have stuck with it ever since.  

The obvious answers would be that women are tired of seeing the girl in het ships getting abused and treated like trash without agency whatsoever, or that they have a gay fetish. However not all BL fans are like that since there are so many lesbians in the BL fandom as well. 

Aside from the fact that many BL fans are gay, bi or lesbian, there are other psychological factors that result in a large portion of the BL fandom appearing to be almost just "girls".  As speculated by Yaoi Author Sakakibara Shihomi, many of those Fujoshi (also referred to as Girlf4g in some communities) may actually be genderqueer and may not fully understand their own gender identity and orientation or are in the closet and see writing or watching BL as the only way to express their feelings safely. In a large pool of fans that seem to present as "cis straight female" you never know what they identify as or what their reason for their BL obsession is. As a genderqueer bis3xual I see myself represented somewhat in mlm stories and I relate to them a lot of times, more than wlw even though for the longest time I identified as a woman. Relatability is only one of the reasons to be drawn to BL but whatever it is, as long as you don't fetishize or disrespect real people I don't see any harm in enjoying queer content even as a straight girl.

So I'd like to ask a question please!

I am wondering about fujoshis and the whole concept of bl fandom and the acceptance thereof by friends and family in Asian countries.

As far as I understand a fujoshi is a young woman 18-30 years old and a fervent fan of bl manga. A japanese movie and a series came to my mind Fujoshi,Ukkari Gei ni Kokuru in which being fujoshi is put on the same level as being gay. I found the idea shocking! The girl, fujoshi, outs herself in front of the school to show her gay friend how supportive she is of him. And as much as I liked both the movie ad the drama, that final scene left me dazed. Did I understand it correctly? Is being fujoshi such so terrible in japanese society? And in our western countries? Do you tell your friends and coworkers that you watch asian dramas and are a fan of bls?

People around me are not aware of existence of asian dramas. I only discovered them because i was fed up with western shows during pandemic confinement. When I mention them to my friends they look at me mildly amused and not interested at all. So talking about different drama genres like BL is impossible! I'd love to find someone IRL to talk to about dramas. In France dramas are a niche audience thing and the fans outside asian communities are rare. So I cannot compare Europe with Asia: the entertainment industry and cultural development seem to be different. And for all OUR talk about inclusivity and equal rights, LGBT shows in the west are few and far between and usually very sad and tragic. For every Queer as Folk there seem to be tens of Brokeback Mountains. BL as a genre seems to be poking it's head shyly here (Heartstopper, Love Victor.) but nowhere near asian countries.

 jpny01:

why, in most (but not all) BLs, is the uke essentially a boy dropped into the (19th c) female role - he's fragile, needs protection and guidance, and has very little agency. 

Could it be that the original yaoi manga authors, those women mangaka in the seventies, just could not sell their straight romances(too many of them on the market maybe or not good enough?) so they changed the female lead (small fragile incompetent brainless pretty) into uke, a tiny boy, fragile, pretty and weak? Sometimes that is the only difference between a straight romance and a yaoi! 

BL series just follow the original manga material. 

The height difference is often the first thing noteworthy when watching BLs based on a manga/manhua. This is the trope I hate the most because it actually proves that BLs are just a copy of straight manga stories up to the main characters' traits (even in real life most women are shorter than majority of men!) which makes them lose credibility and originality in my eyes. Clichés and tropes are abundant in the world of romance and I really appreciate it when the authors and producers go that extra mile in order to break the codes and shake up the genre! That makes for exciting series. But they are hard to find! I can see that Koreans and Japanese tend to stick very faithfully to the original material. Thais mostly avoid this trope but uke in thai series is often prettier, thinner, weaker, softer and not much shorter than seme which is underlined with wardrobe (softer colours, ampler clothes, accessories like purses and tote bags you never see a seme carrying).

The uke is usually shorter in Thai BL, with a couple of exceptions like Love By Chance - but it's uncommon, and if the uke is taller, he's skinnier. In cases where the uke is more athetic than the seme, like Surprise Pittikorn in Secret Crush on You or War Wanarat in Love Mechanics, they usually hide it under clothes, although War's character was a swimmer and we got to see his hot body several times. But he was much shorter than the seme.

The height difference brings up an interesting point about the authors. I think for many BL writers the uke is a self-insertion into the story - women tend to value tallness in men, and that's why someties the uke doesn't have much agency or a fully realized personality - he doesn't need one because the author already knows who she is and so her self-insert is a way to fantasize about her ideal man. What are common characteristics in BL of semes? Tall, rich, masculine, athletic, rich, stoic, white knight syndrome, rich, and rich.  The uke usually isn't much of a fantasy figure except for gay men who like twinks. A woman might want to take care of an uke or pick him up and put him in her purse, but not so much as a sex object.

I don't know if any of the female audience approaches it that way too, but I tend to feel that current thinking about representation is off-base. I don't think you need a character to have similar physical characteristis to identify with him/her. I'm a man and I rarely identify with any BL characters, so I'm not sure why a woman would be more likely to.

The seme is dominant in every aspect of life in the drama - which is odd because even the most patriarchal cultures are not like that. In Japan or the Gulf states, men dominate public life, but in both cases, women control private life. Likewise, there's a huge difference between being domineering in bed vs. at any other time.