DonnaK2O:
Chiharu:
Not trying to be rude but,
Male GL fans are part of my pet peeves, tbh.
I'm fine w/ Female BL fans, idc about it, tho. I'm just natural to em' but, male girl's love fans??? thats very weird?????/nbr
My apologies for sounding a bit rude, tho 🫠
I think it comes back to why theyre watching (same with female BL fans). A boy/man coming for the purposes of objectification - which women face basically daily from male strangers - and being crude about it… that feels icky. Absolutely.
But there are genuine male romance fans - so why does it matter what genders the romance are between? Theres also queer men (out or not) in the mix who want to support fellow queer stories.
We actually have a few male GL fans in here. And i think the support and participation from them has been great.
I think it comes back to why theyre watching (same with female BL fans). A boy/man coming for the purposes of objectification - which women face basically daily from male strangers - and being crude about it… that feels icky. Absolutely.AthenaTheStorierX:
Agreed. There's a lot of sociological inquiry into why women like BL so much, and at least to me it's absolutely fascinating. What stands out to me is how varied the reasons are, and how deep it goes, into psychology and the effects of societal misogyny. Here's a couple of examples. But I haven't seen any inquiry into why some men like GL, and I'd actually be really interested in hearing more about that.
So if anyone has resources on that, or would like to share their own reasons (beyond double girls = double hot), I'm all ears. Idk I really think that if 'it's hot' was all there was to it, they'd just be watching porn, no? Why would they sit through all the relationship drama, plot, angst and fluff if they're only in it for the kissing? Doesn't add up.
I really get the hesitance and the icky feelings though. That is a reflex I have too.
I think men watching lesbian porn really is kinda icky and does contribute to hypersexualization and dehumanization and whatnot, but maybe we shouldn't equate that with men who watch GL. I'm personally too ace to be able to watch porn so I don't actually know what I'm talking about here, but from what I've heard, porn objectifies, decontextualizes and dehumanizes its actors, while GL does the opposite.
Objectification is erasing someone's agency, their ability to make decisions, turning them into a thing. Dehumanization is erasing someone's capacity to have a full range of human emotions. I don't see how a whole GL drama could even exist without revolving around its main characters' decisions and emotions. Then again I once stumbled into a 'favorite lesbian movies' list by some guy on IMDB and he'd organized them by breast size, which he'd tagged for every movie... barf. So yeah I guess it is possible to somehow ignore all of the plot and focus only on whether the actresses are hot.
Asexual women are vastly overrepresented when it comes to consumption of BL media, and a common reason we hear is that it helps them experience romance/sexuality from a distance, without any danger of accidentally identifying too closely with either protagonist and triggering repulsion/discomfort. I have seen a couple of asexual/aromantic men say the same thing about GL, but I haven't seen it enough to consider it a pattern just yet.
A lot of the reasons women give for watching BL revolve around societal misogyny and the avoidance thereof, so those reasons can't be 1:1 the same for men who watch GL, but idk I'm not a guy so there's probably reasons I'm missing. Would love to hear from others :)
Chiharu:
Not trying to be rude but,
Male GL fans are part of my pet peeves, tbh.
I'm fine w/ Female BL fans, idc about it, tho. I'm just natural to em' but, male girl's love fans??? thats very weird?????/nbr
My apologies for sounding a bit rude, tho 🫠
Just as women enjoy watching BL, men can enjoy watching GL. They might watch it because they fetishize two women, just as women might watch BL because they fetishize two men.
In between, there are men who find romance between two women cute, and women who find romance between two men cute.
I'm the opposite example 😅😂: I'm a cisgender heterosexual woman who likes GL and doesn't like BL. Because GL is exclusively "What women like" both in sex and romance, it's literally: "The ultimate way to please a woman." I identify with that twice as much.
As for BL, I feel strange, precisely because I feel like I'm "objectifying" men, but as I said, I'm an example of the opposite.
Thx for sharing your reasons :)
They are (generally) fluffy, low-angst and easy to watch stories with happy endings.MarkWasHere:
This is also a part of the reason I watch BL and GL dramas (but am not a man). I used to watch a lot of western queer media (like short films), but I got really sick of how often they suddenly ended in tragedy specifically due to the main character's queerness. I just don't need more 'you'll never belong or be happy if you're queer' messaging in my head. With BL/GL you can generally safely expect that there will not be excessive amounts of misery, violence, gore, trauma or explicit sexuality on your screen, while with a lot of western queer media that might unexpectedly happen at any point.
Also I'm disabled and my brain pretty often doesn't work and will barely let me do anything, and one of the first things it allows me to focus on again is the most mellow, predictable and fluffy Thai BLs or GLs in existence. (That's also the reason I tend to finish BL/GL that isn't very good before I finish the good ones haha. I can't watch the good ones unless my brain works, but when my brain works, I need to do useful stuff instead.) Watching fluffy BL/GL makes it feel like I can do at least SOMETHING other than staring at a wall, and the something might even be minimally useful because I get to learn a language for free. I love learning languages :).
Also PS 'cis' isn't an acronym and doesn't need to be capitalized, but maybe that was autocorrect idk.
Please message me with more stuff like that if you have itdora:
For sure, here you go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, roughly in order of relevance. Thomas Baudinette wrote a full academic book on BL as Thai soft power, and the interviews he gives about it are interesting. I started reading his book, but the version I downloaded cut out at some point and I haven't tried to download a different one yet. So far the book is a medium amount of interesting, not bad, but idk I expected more.
I still often prefer BL to GL because I have issues seeing traditionally beautiful women on screen. Some on the analyses of BLs explain that when there are no women in the story it can free us as women from societal pressures.
That's really interesting, so they specifically can't be beautiful, and it's because of an 'I don't want to have to live up to those unrealistic beauty standards' thing? So if the actresses are not traditionally beautiful, then there's no issue? Does gender expression play into it at all?
I wouldn't have thought of that one by myself, so yeah, thanks for sharing, I love seeing all the diverse reasons why people are drawn to one type of queer media over another.
Chiharu:
oh god, i think started the whole controversy... wtf.???????
Controversy? Idk I'm having fun :)
yes, when the women are traditionally beautiful it makes me think about all the ways I was pressured to be thin and beautiful and wear makeup and have long hair, etc. actually i consider myself femme but I’m fat and I don’t dress up often so it just makes me feel more unattractive to see such beautiful women. Not that I can’t ever enjoy their beauty, but it just brings up my own issues.
That makes sense :)
At first I thought maybe I experienced a similar thing, but now I'm thinking maybe it's actually kind of the opposite. Before I got top surgery a couple of years ago, I had trouble watching sapphic media precisely because I did see myself in the actresses, which made me dysphoric. They had anatomy I didn't want to be reminded I had too. They were being idealized/romanticized/sexualized specifically for their femininity, and there's obviously nothing wrong with that, but it reminded me of how dysphoric I felt when that happened to me. Almost like a weird type of second-hand embarrassment 'I hope people don't see me like that', while knowing that despite my best efforts a lot of people had seen me like that.
So yeah, interesting that near opposite reasons can lead to the same avoidance of GL in favor of BL. But for me a large part of the problem is solved now and I can watch all the GL I want :)
When a professional woman wears sexy clothes constantly to work it seems so absurd to me and takes me out of the story.
That's fair enough haha. For me the absurdity and lack of realism in GL is part of the appeal. It's escapism, idealized fantasy.
