Discussion Main / YaoiFangirl

deserved

I think a lot of the bashing of female characters is a direct result of Die for Our Ship.

The major thrust of this page (pun not intended) seems to be that those horrible sexist males have a double standard towards women who like yaoi.

I would suggest that almost the reverse is true. Men who like porn of any type are often depicted as creepy, drooling, basement-dwellers hunkered over a magazine. Or at least as dirty old men. Women who like yaoi are just depicted as giving Too Much Information—other characters don't want them talking about it, but that's all. Anime and manga are far kinder to women who like yaoi than to men who like yuri.

Anime and manga, maybe (although it depends the anime/manga). Real Life, not so much. Women/girls who like yaoi take a lot of flack from people (mostly men) who are not comfortable with women who like porn, or are not comfortable with women who like porn that is different from guy-porn, or who are not comfortable with Bishōnen men, or just are creeped out by anything remotely "gay".

In my experience, its the girls themselves who propagate this "porn is for men" stereotype, by pretending that they're just in it for the Touching Romance rather than for hormones and masturbation fodder, thus seeming hypocritical and/or abnormal when the Touching Romance veneer is too thin to be believable. Twilight and a sizable amount of Slash Fic are the most obvious examples.

And men who read porn take a lot of flack from feminists who think that any porn for straight guys is exploitation and objectification of women. Women's porn is just erotica.

Doktor von Eurotrash: I don't see a lot of Double Standard among feminists who are against porn. They're usually against all porn, in my experience..

Does the Real Life example of the "fag hag" fit here - the straight woman who prefers to hang out with gays and go to gay clubs because the men are better dressed, more stylish, better behaved, won't hit on her, and they can talk intelligently about clothes and make-up?

While gender parity is far more evident with regard to Yuri fandom, I agree the page should be renamed Yaoi Fan, with Yaoi Fangirl and Yaoi Fanboy as redirects, same as Yuri Fan, if only to prevent the usual festering vitriolic backlash.

Take it to the Trope Repair Shop.

I think so, especially due to the somewhat condescending sounds of the terms "fanboy" and "fangirl."

EDIT: Sorry, wrong place. Is there a way to delete these?

I agree it's completely wrong to use "Yaoi Fangirl" and then "Yuri Fan". There's not a single reliable statistic that proves that Yuri is more gender-equal than Yaoi. First of all, if you consider Bara as a subgenre inside Yaoi, and add to that all the straight men that like Yaoi but are afraid to say so, I bet you would end with the same amount of Yaoi fanboys and Yaoi fangirls, or maybe even more.

Over at the Fetish Fuel Wiki. Same with Girl on Girl Is Hot.

Thank you!

I noticed some of the entries - including mine - didn't make it to the wiki, though. I'm disappointed no one copy/pasted the current stuff before deleting the whole thing. *le sigh* Oh well. I'll re-add mine...someday.

That's a problem with a few pages. We moved stuff that we thought was going to be cut immediately but some went under the radar and were removed later on. Same with the Troper Tales for Perverse Sexual Lust.

I deleted it but it came back. I'd go ahead.

Done.

Yes, but this is not the place, especially when the rest of the article hasn't demeaned yaoi fangirls, to complain about being stereotyped, nor to accuse yuri fanboys of being in on it for the porn. I know plenty who aren't.

Dude, that's not the point. The article is supposed to be about the stereotype; that's why it's a trope, not a Useful Note. And we aren't accusing Yuri Fanboys of "being in on it for the porn"; we're saying that men who like girl-on-girl are not stereotyped or presented negatively, since it's considered normal for guys to be interested in seeing girls make out.

In short, we are here to present the tropes, rather than comment on how fair, justified, or Double Standard-ish they might be. At most, we note once near the bottom of the summary of the lack of resemblance between the trope and reality, but our purpose is to analyze media, not media-reality differences.

@ 67.159.44.103: Again, this page is supposed to reflect how the stereotype works, not what you think real people's attitudes are.

Let's try some examples, from works aimed mainly at non-fangirls. Please note that these are all largely sympathetic portrayals; hostile portrayals are even more unflattering.

Fangirl Ogiue from Genshiken is shy, unstylish, comparatively unattractive, extremely nerdy, and has poor social skills, especially in the beginning of the series. Fellow fangirl Ohno is more comfortable with her weirdness (once she's been outed), but she's still plenty weird. Susan the American fangirl is outright scary in her complete disregard for social norms.

Fangirl Rumi from Fujoshi Rumi is shy, unstylish, extremely nerdy, has terrible social skills, lives in her head and is unable to deal with a real relationship when a guy confesses his interest. Her friend Matsui, a closeted fangirl, is busty and attractive, but she's crushingly insecure and she also can't deal with a real guy who's interested in her, preferring to imagine him in a yaoi relationship with his best friend, as does Rumi. (It's made apparent that Matsui became a fangirl back in junior high, when she was unattractive and unpopular.) One she gives in to her inner fujoshi, Matsui becomes obsessive, delusional, and scarily determined to see her fantasies played out in real life.

Yuiko from the manga version of My Girlfriend's a Geek makes an effort to appear superficially normal, but once she comes out to her clueless boyfriend she is revealed to be another obsessive, delusional fujoshi who tries to force him to play out her glasses and butler fetishes, cajoles him to write slash fanfic of her favorite manga, and not only slashes him with his best friend but makes him listen to her fantasies about it. The novel version of the character is downright terrifying and completely given over to her fantasies when she's in private. (The novel was aimed at the general reading public and emphasizes the weirdness and incomprehensibility of both fujoshi and yaoi; the manga adaptation ran in a fujoshi-friendly magazine and is somewhat toned down.)

All of these characters (except Susan) are reluctant to let people know about their interest in yaoi, because they are afraid of their reactions; they all expect to be treated as abnormal because of it.

And again, these are supposed to be mostly-sympathetic characters.

Yaoi fangirls, outside of yaoi-friendly fiction, are not presented as the equivalent of men who like porn; they are presented as warped nerds, women who can't deal with real life and real men, women who are too weird/unattractive to get a man in the first place, scary perverts, or all of the above. Yuri Fanboys, insofar as they show up in fiction at all, have no specific portrayal, while thinking Girl on Girl Is Hot is portrayed as the default male behavior.

Can we get some examples of said "warped nerds" or perverts? Hell, Fag Hag, a link from there, isn't even negative about this connotation.

I just listed six examples; of them, Susan, Matsui and Yukio are particularly scary and perverse (Matsui at one point encourages a gay guy who has a crush on her would-be boyfriend to rape him. She's probably kidding. Mostly.).

Fag Hag contains the following:

"Fag Hags are stereotypically portrayed as overweight. At best, she's a classy BBW; at worst, she's a neurotic drama queen who is either promiscuous or perpetually single. In many cases, the Hag started hanging out with her gay friend because she was attracted to him, before he turns her down for obvious reasons (wishful thinking will ignore even the most Flamboyant Gay characteristics)."

How is that not negative?

This discussion is attached to the Yaoi Fangirl page, and that page contains lots and lots of examples. Considerably more than six (and considerably more than three works.) Few of them (at least few of the ones I've heard of) are negative in more than a "we'd rather not hear about it" way. And not many of those examples are aimed at fangirls, either, although some are aimed at dual gender audiences.