While a positive response from this fan base may have been well-anticipated, what was even more surprising to some was the show’s other core demographic: women, especially straight women. from cosmopolitan to NPR Many media outlets have questioned why the show’s male-on-male sex scenes turn women on so much. But in reality, this is not surprising at all. Given the long history of women engaging with this kind of material, if not on screen then on the page.
history of the phenomenon
Indeed, it is well established that male-on-male romance and erotica stories have provided fantasy fuel for female audiences since the 1960s. One notable example of this is when female fans of a then-new science fiction series star trek I started to imagine that something was going on between Captain Kirk and Spock. They wrote their own complex stories in which the two characters were lovers, creating a particular type of fan fiction that combined same-sex characters, also known as “slash” fiction.
In a pre-internet world, it’s hard to imagine how this very special group of female fans with their outlandish fantasies came together, but they found a way, explains Lucy Neville, author of Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica, published in 2018. “I interviewed a lot of women who were into fan fiction in the ’60s,” she says. “And it was all about the zine they copied. They took it to fan events and tried to sniff out other ‘slashers.’ They then formed small subgroups, all exchanging their zines and reading each other’s stories. So it was very grassroots and organic. ” But the advent of the internet in the ’90s provided fans with a richer space to create parallel romantic and sexual stories around their TV characters.
The world of publishing and literature also has a long history of women creating and enjoying male-on-male romance stories. In Japan in the 1970s, a community of female artists known as the Year 24 Group began producing so-called girls’ manga. Shōjo manga are Japanese manga aimed at young girls, which sometimes focus on relationships with men of the same sex. In the 1980s and 1990s, this evolved into the yaoi or boy’s love scene. It focuses exclusively on stories of male-male sexual relationships, usually written by women.
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
