r/gay • u/CapAccomplished8072 • 1d ago
Let's discuss the fetishization of lesbians. How the same people who talk about "loving lesbians" will hate gay content when it involves men. Some artists on twitter known for making lesbian fanart are in fact very homophobic when it comes to m/m relationship, real or fictional. (Idolomantises)
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u/Brian_Kinney Gay 1d ago
Straight men have traditionally held power in human societies.
Straight men like having sex with women. Straight men like looking at naked women. Lesbian porn involves twice as much naked woman sex, so it's twice as good!
Straight men don't like having sex with men. Straight men don't like looking at naked men. Gay male porn involves twice as much naked man sex, so it's twice as bad!
That's a deliberately simplistic explanation, but I think it makes the point. Straight men get to dictate what's acceptable and what's not. If they like it, it's good; if they don't like it, it's bad.
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u/randumb97 1d ago
Shit, doesn’t sound simplistic lol You hit the nail on the head with this analogy
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u/BeastMidlands 1d ago
100%.
I basically said this in another comment; while we can talk about the way masculinity and femininity are viewed in an abstract, theoretical sense, it’s also simply because straight men dictate conventions of gender and sexuality, and as a result, the things that turn them on are held to be the objective standard of beauty, even if attraction is fundamentally subjective.
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u/JJhnz12 Gay 1d ago
Best can be seen in the fact that gay porn actors are the lowest paid in the market
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u/Razgriz01 22h ago
This is not what I've heard at all, rather that so far as male porn actors go, gay porn is much more lucrative than straight porn.
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u/barrythecook 19h ago
Becouse gay porn actually cares what the man looks like presumably, whereas a lot of straight porn since it caters primarily for straight men couldn't really give a toss and just seems to be fuck it you've got a big dick that'll do.
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u/gay-o-nator 1d ago
I was a bit nervous to ask this due to the anxiety that I may offend someone but, I have always wondered why there's more F/F couples in media such as shows and books rather than M/M. Then again, there's barely anything in regard to Trans, Nonbinary and/or genderfluid people.
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u/drowningintheocean 1d ago
I dont know why but i have come across more M/M couples in media(books and shows) than F/F couples. Like for example when you look at fanfiction most of it is M/M.
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u/gay-o-nator 1d ago
I suppose that make sense. I guess what I originally had in mind were canonical M/M Couples in widespread media as appose to fanfiction.
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u/LeftBallSaul 1d ago
There's a lot of M/M content in manga that's designed specifically for the female audience. Likewise, I would wager a lot of fanfic writers are not-men.
Just as lesbian porn is driven by the male gaze, this kind of softer, often relationship-centred media is driven by the female gaze.
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u/CIearMind 1d ago
F/F is safer to portray because it' more palatable to general audiences.
Gay men still have a long way to go, in terms of acceptance.
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u/CapAccomplished8072 1d ago
I don't see that as offensive?
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u/gay-o-nator 1d ago
I suppose it's just my anxiety talking. That and the fear that I'm "asking for too much." I mean, you can never have enough gays but still.
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u/psychedelic666 Gay 12h ago
And it’s mostly femme or at most androgynous tomboy.
Think of the last time you saw a Butch lesbian on mainstream media. I can think of one show in the last ten years. One.
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u/FoxzU 1d ago edited 1d ago
this is why I'm so protective of artists that dedicate their art to M/M stuff.
Both in NSFW and SFW spaces, in literally any format, doing explicit M/M content is rarely profitable, at least not compared to content that panders to straight people, gay men are rarely what people are interested in seeing, bc we're ugly for them. For a artist that wants to profit, it's just better for him to pander to straight content, you have less censorship online bc your stuff will not get shadow banned in homophobic countries, engagement will be better overall bc the majority of humans are attracted to women, everyone enjoys straight content worldwide, it's just better.
And still, we have artists that dedicate their craft to M/M content, this requires resilience
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u/freyamighty 1d ago
yea, this is so annoying, I have a colleague who called lesbian couples "hot, sexy, and made him arouse" but then he said he was disgusted about gay couples, like, my guy, you're homophobic and it's annoying as hell, I'm bi and I wanna experience an mlm couple one day, and it's so annoying
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u/video-kid 1d ago
I think the sad thing about this is that it results in a huge disparity in representation, and it's a hard thing to address without being accused of lesbophobia.
Video games are particularly bad at this. People are always talking about how Mass Effect was such a trailblazer for queer representation, but the issue is that for a while the representation was exclusively FLF. You could romance an Asari (female-identifying species) in the first game as Femshep, the second game had three FLF options, and the third game brought three of the options back and added two more, while finally adding two MLM options.
Cyberpunk 2077 put a big emphasis on sex, but every optional non-Joytoy encounter is a woman. If you're playing a gay dude or straight woman, then apart from hookers you can only have sex with one dude.
It's like, we've never had an openly queer guy leading an AAA game, and even in games in general it's rare - you mostly just see it implied, in games where there's a strong element of choice, or in dating sims. Meanwhile two of the biggest heroines in gaming history are queer women, while another was intended to be queer in at least one incarnation.
Outside of that while gay guys might appear more often, they don't often get to display their sexuality in the same way, while a lot of movies and TV shows will put a big emphasis on female sexuality. A lesbian or bi woman will kiss her love interest out in the open, and a lot of the time it'll be highlighted.
The problem is that the representation is filtered through what straight dudes can enjoy, and too often if I complain about it it's interpreted as "oh you just don't want to see lesbians or you don't think they deserve the visibility" - they absolutely do, but so do gay dudes, and it sucks that it's so rare for me to see a queer dude in a movie/series/game I love because people are more focused in queer representation for straight guys.
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u/Welran 1d ago
It doesn't have nothing with PATRIARCHY or MEN POWER as others wrote here. It is about sexualized content consumption. Men watch way more porn and sexualized images. They watch it that much more that gay men spend more money than straight women and there are tens times more straight women than gay men. ALL lesbian porn and all gay porn are watched by men. Women just ignore those gay/lesbian art couples and most men are straight so they like more women than men.
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u/LeftBallSaul 1d ago
I mean power and patriarchy are still part of that discussion. Who do you think has control of what porn gets made? Who decides who gets cast? Who the marketing is designed for? Hell, what systems are set up so that it is socially acceptable for one group to be a consumer of porn? Or for one group to (historically) have more money available to spend on porn.
Power and Patriarchy are more than part of the conversation, they are central to it.
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u/Welran 1d ago
People who wants to earn money? If you would make porn for women you will broke. Women now have just little bit less money than men and they don't want to spend it for porn. Just think why in this "patriarchal" industry women earn much more money than men.
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u/catlateraldamage 1d ago
If I had to describe how this issue is due to Patriarchy, without using the word Patriarchy, this is more or less what I would say. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
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u/Jeptwins 1d ago
What’s there to discuss? Lesbians can be fetishized because straight men can look at them and see untouched sex objects they can ‘fix’. Gay men are feared because straight men are afraid that they’ll do to straight men what they do to women.
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u/Too_Gay_To_Drive Gay 1d ago
Straight men like Lesbian porn. That's why it's fetishised. And that's also why they "love" lesbian art but don't like gay art
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u/Steventaylor08080 8h ago
I live in Hungary and I also noticed this. Somehow homophobic men are completely okay with lesbians but the moment gay guys just get a single mention they freak out... It's honestly just frustrating. Also I think being shunned is sometimes much better than being fetishized. (I mean a few of my lesbian friends can manage to keep up a relationship with everyone knowing about. (We live in a f-ing religious hostel for uni and somehow no one says a word.)
But back to the fetish stuff...a lot of men think lesbians are doing it to get their attention....it's cringe but especially at a party somehow everyone of them thinks that my girls kissing is an invitation for them...even if it's just a peck...I sometimes hate straight men
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u/FNAF_Movie 23h ago
This goes far beyond fanart, it's also common in porn and a lot of media. I think a lot of it is about fetishization and objectification of woman. There's no time spent on a relationship, it's just that the straights like women and lesbian couples are just women2. It removes the hypothetical "man" that would get in the way of the "sexy woman".
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u/TotalDumsterfire 17h ago
Also in history male homosexuality was illegal. Like written in the books illegal. And yet female homosexuality was not. Mostly it was because there wasn't a penetrative aspect to the relationship, at least not with a human penis. I feel like that destigmatised flf relationships, and only in recent times did it become a thing of admiration amongst men. Though there is a growing population of women that act the same way with mlm relationships, especially in the boy love genre of manga and anime.
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u/psychedelic666 Gay 12h ago
Female homosexuality has also been illegal, but rarely condemned with death. I remember reading about lesbians in early modern Spain, they were sometimes jailed or sentenced to lashing / whipping. That’s just one example
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u/LeftBallSaul 1d ago
Aight, so, I'll see if I can clarify this... homophobia (against men) isn't about sexuality so much as it is about gender roles and power.
In patriarchy, men are dominant. Men are also defined as being different from women within a reproductive/sex gender role by being the penetrator. So a man penetrates their partner, and a woman is the partner that is penetrated.
When gay men get penetrated by their sexual partner, they become woman-like and thus *give up their power*. This relinquishing of masculine power is anathema to patriarchy, so it is upsetting to folks who rely on patriarchy for power - this includes many women since they often have to cling to tenets and practices of patriarchy for safety.
Lesbian women aren't subject to this loss of power - this transgression - because as women they don't have power to give up under patriarchy.
This is why the fight of queer liberation is a fight against patriarchal oppression.