Well, Easter was interesting. Before dinner a guest at friend’s dinner informed us that his fourteen year-old daughter writes gay porn. He was quite comfortable with this, and I’m not sure how I would feel about this if it were my kid. His daughter was at the dinner, so I asked about it and she told me it was called “yaoi” and from my understanding, it is based on pairings of male cartoon characters that serve as inspiration for erotic fan-fiction. She told me she is part of the Deviant Art community and that she considers herself a fangirl.
Now, I am vaguely familiar with fan-fiction and I thought Deviant Art is where you go to get cool wallpapers. What exactly is a fangirl? Is this stuff okay for a fourteen year old?
It’s something that follows logically from playing with dollhouses. With dollhouses you get to play make-believe; who is mommy, what does daddy do, what are the roles they all play (daddy stays at home with the kids while mommy is a FIREFIGHTER!)
Yaoi is pretty much that. In written form. And with guys. Maybe guys makes it more comfortable, because it has nothing to do with girls and girly-parts. And don’t get this wrong, yaoi written by girls is not the ‘tab A goes into slot B’ hardcore crap. It usually centers about feelings, ‘twu wuv’ and all that mushy stuff. Romance novels, if you will. Since it doesn’t involve girls it won’t go too close-to-home, but they still get to describe relationships, to figure out how they feel about the roles involved… and have fun in the process.
I don’t know if (were I a girl) I’d be comfortable about my parents knowing and reading my stuff, but to me it seems like a good outlet of certain energies.
Rigamarole: Why the direct attack? As far as I can tell, he’s just looking to educate himself, and tries to form a non-judgmental opinion on something he doesn’t know all that much of.
A fangirl is just like a fanboy, except her obsessions tend to be different. The type the OP is referring to is a yaoi fangirl. This particular type of fangirl obsesses over stories or manga-style art depicting highly idealized homosexual relationships, usually between way-too-pretty-to-exist men. Some yaoi fanfiction and fanart involves existing fictional characters paired off either because there is already a relationship, whether friends or enemies, or just because they would look good together, according to the girl (because yaoi creators are mostly females) who wrote the story or drew the picture. I think I’ve said before that yaoi is about men, by women, for women. Gay men tend not to like it because it’s unrealistic.
I have to admit, I sometimes read yaoi, some of which seems to have been written by 14-year-olds with varying degrees of knowledge regarding sex and male anatomy (not dissing your friend’s daughter, just stating the facts of what I have read). I found it interesting that she and her father would freely admit this to a guest. Most parents would be horrified, I would think. One of my favorite authors on fanfiction.net was on her second account, the first having been taken down by her mother, who is very religious and rather homophobic, according to this author, who may or may not be still a minor. As for me, I would be a bit shocked if I were to find that my own daughter was reading or even writing yaoi at age 14, but not particularly surprised. I have never consciously exposed her to it, to my knowledge - I always erase the history on my web browser every time I visit deviantArt and other less than child-friendly sites, and avoid them when she’s awake. Still, she likes to pretend her cousin’s Batman and WWE action figures fall in love, get married and have babies. This past Easter, I was a witness at the same-sex wedding of a Batista action figure and a John Cena action figure. So I think I have a second-generation yaoi fangirl on my hands. :o
It depends on where you’re coming from. I tend to think of “fangirls” as those readers or writers of fanfiction who care more about the pairing and their super-special author-avatars than things like internal consistency, good characterisation or spelling, but in general I think it just means a female who is into a show, on the level of “Trekkies” rather than “people who watch Star Trek”.
If she’s already into yaoi, that ship has already sailed. If it was my daughter, I’d be more concerned about her writing and encouraging bad yaoi fanfiction than the yaoi itself.
I only learned about this yaoi business because one of my oldest friends got her Ph.d writing a thesis on it. I think the porniness runs a pretty wide range from explicit to very much relationship based One True Love stuff. I flipped through some of the books she bought when she visited me in L.A. once. Couldn’t understand the appeal.
Oh yeah, and one of the guys is usually very femme and androgyny abounds. I think women are supposed to identify with the femme-y character. But I will admit that my friend finds my tastes plebeain and lack of insight into this type of stuff very frustrating. Currently she’s teaching a class on zombies and she was bitching to me about a student who couldn’t adequately respond to the question “and what does the shovel represent” and I said “the best possible tool for bashing in a zombies head, how is that at all hard” and she got very huffy and told me it was actually a phallic symbol.
Not being female, I can only guess, but here are some suggestions:
(1) Good-looking young men (often verging on female prettiness).
(2) All the emotions of a real love affair, but,
(3) Without the threat of the young men actually being interested in you (they are gay, after all), and,
(4) Without the distraction of other young women in the story competing with you to get them.
I suspect that the attraction is a bit like that of lesbian porn for straight males, except that straight males go for the visual side mainly, while straight females go for the emotional side of the fictional relationships.
And it would be interesting to know how many gay men go for yaoi: I suspect that a significant number do, but I doubt if many straight men are interested.
Absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t be able to form an opinion about it. I have various opinions on how friends and family raise their children. Having those opinions does not cause me to interfere.
I’d rather have my fourteen year old writing porn, even bad porn, and masturbating in her room, then going out and having sex with boys. I think 14 is (in most cases) too young to be having sex. It certainly isn’t too young to be thinking about sex, and responding to said thoughts.
Shovels are phallic now? Turns head sideways How does that work?
Anyway, the yaoi is not something to be worried about. Be more concerned with the potential for bad writing. I’ve never really read yaoi, but I have read slash fic written by women of varying ages (and a few pieces written by one of those rare and elusive males). One hallmark of bad slash is two male characters who not only don’t act like a gay couple, they don’t even act like a het couple. They act like some really fucked up stereotype of men and women. One partner is hypermasculine like the worst examples of 70s/80s romance novel alpha males. I’m talking something that makes Christine Feehan’s men look positively cuddly. The other partner is like every bad stereotype of women ever. Just, ugh.
Sorry for the digression.
Really, you’re not sure? Because, as the parent of a 13-year old I’m pretty sure: the father is a jack-ass and should lose custody for a few weeks until he grows some brain cells. In the meantime, he may want to get used to the idea that he’s going to be a grandfather soon, because this girl is well on her way to Knockedupsville…
I guess I am not a hip and modern father. Some of you are saying to yourselves, “weell, I guess ol’ PharmBoy’s not very tolerant of alternative view-points”.
Perhaps. I’ll tell you something, though: I can recognize innappropriate behavior by young people - and writing porn is IT.
I’m with Anaamika on this one (as the parent of four children, now all grown up). I don’t think writing about this stuff means that the 14-year-old girl is going to go out and have sex with anyone.
You want the father put in jail (or have a restraining order put on him, so he has to go live in a motel or something) because his daughter wrote some fiction? Or is it because he didn’t punish her when he found out?
When people say, in effect, “There oughta be a law…” they really should be more specific.
Oh, and I take it you never had a single sexual thought until you turned 18? How sad…