With whom are women readers identifying?

When heterosexual women watch regular porn or read the usual smut, they have a choice: identify with the man and be complicit in the actions or identify with the woman and feel mistreated. Paradoxically, removing women from the equation redeems straight female desire: we can look at men—the objects we find erotic—without worrying about the woman’s exploitation or our politics. While some theorists continue to insist women don’t want to look at men and that “the pleasure for female spectators is in seeing men treated like women, rather than the pleasure of seeing nudity itself” (Finch qtd in Moore, 55), others respond that “on the contrary homo-erotic representation, far from excluding the female gaze, may actively invite it”(Moore, 55). Watching gay porn is one direction for the female straight gaze, and while a theorist such as Dworkin sees “gay male porn as simply a reworking or feminization of men through the visual stylizations of female submission” (Smith 151), I would argue that much gay porn is a celebration of male sexuality, and many women enjoy watching it.  Nonetheless the “realness” of the men involved and the rawness of some of the material may not be what some women are seeking.  Yaoi and m/m, in contrast, are often a more romanticized, less raw take on male sexuality.  (Not always -- some yaoi is violent and non-consensual, but it is usually still a non-realistic take on male sexuality.)  The blend of image and text in yaoi add counter evidence to the "women are not turned on visually" argument—the beauty of the boys is a major factor and the pictures are extremely explicit.  These Japanese comic books are written for a female audience, by female writers (or at least writers with female personae), and feature gay romances ranging from sweet hand-holding angst to violent non-consensual bondage. The milder ones are available in the USA and the UK in translation, and thriving on-line communities exist to scan in original versions of racier others accompanied by do-it-yourself translations. These scanlations have avid followings—for example http://community.livejournal.com/yaoi_daily—and are accompanied by excited discussion about smex and pr0n. Japan’s obscenity laws make for fun: manga artists can show what they want except for erect penises, but they simply pose their characters as they wish and leave a blank space where the offending erect organ would be leaving plenty of scope for imagination. Since they are about gay men, even though made for women, they don’t shy away from penetrative sex. So women see explicit gay sex—even if they have to still be protected from the phallus. Since they are drawings, women can also view extreme acts without the same ethical anxieties as when live models are used.

Yaoi is an oddly conservative genre in some ways—there are rigid sex roles. One male is always the seme (dominant partner) and the other the uke (submissive partner) and their out of bed behaviors tend to parallel these roles. Criticisms of yaoi include that it plays to a female anti-gay streak—that the real pleasure comes from watching gay men suffer as women do—as well as perpetuating stereotyped gay behaviors. Yaoi may be the instance of homoeroticism where the idea that women are reading themselves into the role has the most weight. One partner is always very feminine, and the ‘obvious’ choice for a female reader to identify with, but equally likely, and equally unappealing, is the idea that readers are experiencing schadenfreude as they
watch the men suffer. Perhaps we do read/view to identify with characters, or gleefully watch them suffer, but we also read (and watch) for many other reasons including aesthetic enjoyment, empathy (as opposed to identifying), to explore others' lives, or to be aroused. The male gaze possesses and enjoys without becoming the object, so why cannot the female gaze?

In a collection of essays responding to Laura Mulvey’s ideas about the male gaze, Moore talks about how looking at homoerotic situations allows for “fluid relations of activity and passivity across multiple identifications” and argues that “this more mobile concept of desire” (55) ties to the ideas about how fantasy is endlessly creative within limited options. She draws on Jacqueline Rose’s examination of Freud’s "A Child is Being Beaten" to explore “the difficulty and structuration of feminine sexuality across contradictions in subject/object positions and areas of the body—the desire of the woman is indeed not a ‘clear message’” and Rose concludes that “male and female cannot be assimilated to active and passive and that there is always a potential split between the sexual object and the sexual aim, between subject and object of desire” (56). Moore
goes on to explore this further, via an examination of Luce Irigaray’s idea that:

the realm of visual in our culture as intrinsically problematic for women in that the process of looking always requires a split between subject and object. The transformation of the object of the gaze into the object of desire which is premised on difference—a splitting—it’s therefore regarded as an essentially masculine activity. Women whose auto-erotic pleasure is in closeness, sameness—in what Doane calls ‘over-identification’—are unable to distance themselves from images in the way that men are. According to the theory, in terms of visual discourse it becomes impossible for women to become subjects of their own desire (56).