My reason here, call it Reason 5 (since so many of my extra reasons can be grouped together), deals with courtship rituals; namely, in nature (and humans are part of nature), men and women perform acts that indicate interest, a desire to mate. They dance. They call. They fight. They display their beautiful sides. They build nests.This often entails competition with members of the same gender for the attention of an individual of the opposite gender. For humans, this competition is mixed with semi-awareness. The wrong attention. The wrong kind of attention. Disrespect. It all hurts. It can even be mean. Animals are more likely to kill each other than call each other names. Humans, however, can definitely think of another person as a jerk, picky, frigid, arrogant, etc. etc. etc.
It's exhausting.At this point, I should make three points:
(1) It is equally exhausting for men and women. Speaking as a heterosexual woman, the advice that I received in my twenties--dress up, look nice, speak to the guy, be really really extroverted, get his attention, show interest--all of it was the intellectual equivalent of telling me to inspect the male gifts, applaud the winner, check and display my ornamentation, vocalize the right responses, and crowd out other women.
Likewise, men have to collect the gifts, make the advances, check out the ornamentation (appearances/signs of being fecund), come up with the right calls and lines, and crowd out other men.
(2) Although the animal world is obsessed with procreation, humans are not. Displays of this kind go on even when procreation isn't on the table, including on gay dates (even if the wiring isn't quite as evolutionarily ruthless).
(3) Many non-competitive people--I know plenty of them--find sexual satisfaction with a companion. We may be biological entities. We are not fated to be only biological entities. (And the truth is, within the animal kingdom, companionship, affection, and even monogamy do exist.)Clever men and clever women make all these rituals work for them. Passionate men and women do too. Sometimes people fall into relationships. Sometimes the best match occurs at the best time for the best reasons (the "one and only" is a true possibility).
I have no argument with men and women who go out there and play the game and play it well. Kudos, guys! Congrats!
But I thoroughly understand the draw of yaoi and M/M. Referring back to the second point, it isn't that gay men (and I'm sure lesbian women--and transgender people, etc. etc.) don't flirt and peacock and form expectations based on internal requirements. But the literature is surprisingly free of it.
Note: I am referring to yaoi and M/M romance specifically, not gay literature. Maurice does involve more efforts at courtship. Both Clive, unconsciously, and Alec, deliberately and consciously, are in competition for Maurice's affection. Maurice has no idea.
Yaoi and M/M romance--despite tropes like jealousy and miscommunication--is blessedly absent the competitive need to either showcase one's right to be loved or applaud the other person's showcasing. In yaoi (occasionally, in M/M), specifically high school-based yaoi, the "mean girls" may pose competition to the less competitive of the males (Yoshida in His Favorite, for example). But since the more competitive of the males isn't in the running (despite what outsiders believe), the "mean girls" are noisy rather than effective.And a huge amount of yaoi and M/M doesn't deal with the issue at all. Competition is off the table (except for the ordinary competition involved in work v. relationship, family v. relationship, etc.).
The characters are friends--which I will discuss in a later post.
Why Yaoi, Reasons 1-4:
Reason 1: Women like romance; yaoi allows women to read romance without instantly suffering the indignity of being told, "You're desperate!" or "That's wish-fulfillment!" (At least not in America, where nobody knows what it is.) I tackle the issue of wish-fulfillment here and here.
Reason 2: Yaoi takes gender roles off the table. It gets tiresome to be told, "This is what you supposed to think as a woman" (something that I hear as much from so-called progressives as I do from so-called conservatives).
Reason 3: Yaoi (specifically) allows single women (specifically) to read about people on the fringes of society who still work and function within society (rather than running off to live on an island and hate everybody).
Reason 4 applies to the writer side of me. Reading yaoi reminds me of when I first started listening to audio books. Hearing a book versus reading a book gives one a fresh perspective. As I listened to mysteries that I'd read dozens of times before, I began to "hear" how the plots were put together--how the various parts fit. Likewise, reading romances without the expected plot cues helps me see how romances work.
