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Take this with a grain of salt, as it’s mainly something I’ve just heard floated around in weeaboo haunts, but apparently, a significant proportion of fujoshi are actually lesbians; supposedly, yaoi gives them a way to explore non-heterosexuality in a less personal setting. If this is true (again, absolutely no reason to think that it is), then yaoi would serve the role of “gay smut for lesbians” as well.
Interestingly, I’ve also heard (again, based on screencaps of Japanese polls posted on imageboards) that a significant number of yuri fans are straight women. This is a priori somewhat surprising, but fits with surveys I’ve seen of Japanese yumejoshi (women who enjoy things like otome games and other genres involving extremely handsome men romancing a female self-insert) highly ranking certain female characters (with masculine/“princely” demeanors) as among their favorite and most attractive characters. (To put this in perspective, this would be like various otokonoko characters (better known in Anglophone circles as “traps”) ranking among the most beloved girls in a poll of male anime fans. From what I understand, this is very much not the case, with traps largely being relegated to “niche interest character” status, although who knows, maybe some of those otokonoko characters who have achieved “meme” levels of status might fit the bill.) The common cause of these two phenomena (that is, straight female interest in yuri and yumejoshi interest in “handsome” female characters) probably is just the usual “women are all bisexual” theory.
In the 90s-00s (western) fujoshi were what was called Fag Hags (mostly sexless women who hang out with gay men for a vicarious thrill), and were the reason I never went to any anime convention. For anyone reading who doesn't have experience with the subculture, google "yaoi paddle" and you'll instantly understand.
Yuri fans in the west have had a strange evolution. The ones into cute slice of life haven't changed much, but every scanlator of yuri porn I ever met has decided he's a lesbian in a man's body sometime in the last 8-10 years.
Interesting thread
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Playing actual gay male (typically though not always softcore) porn at Certain Types of lesbian meetups was a thing for a while, although from my understanding it's fallen out of popularity. This sometimes reflected complex gender stuff -- especially in the 90s, the line between butch lesbian and FTM was a lot blurrier than today -- but just plain lesbian fujoshi is definitely a thing.
The official story is that femmy gay guys in 90s porn were more appealing and nonconfrontational to women than the fake boobs and long fingernails (why!?!) of a typical porn starlett, and in the recent era female/female porn either filmed or (more often) written for female interests has become more widely available. But given fanfic worlds or spaces in the furry fandom (cfe SkylarShibe/RedfeatherStorm for a lesbian's take on f/f as discrete from f/m and m/m), I'd expect that there's other social and political pressures playing a role.
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