Yaoi for a lot of girls that young isn’t even about the porn at all. Seriously, they don’t comprehend it as anything more than kissing. I don’t know how to explain it, but if you showed actual gay porn to those girls they would run screaming. It’s Harlequin novels featuring two guys instead of a guy and a girl. Most people wouldn’t care if their 14 year old was reading Harlequin novels, and this is the same thing.
I’ve gotten flamed for saying this before, but there are two types of yaoi fans: the ones that see it as the newest trend and grow out of it when their friends do/their social circle moves on (like ‘lesbian until graduation’) and the ones that actually actually grow up and see the societal issues behind homosexuality and mature into the realization that a lot of yaoi basically has a macho man (the seme) and a feminine man which is almost a female substitute (the uke). Many of the latter category move onto slash, which is more realistic.
All other things being equal, if we had a parent like the one described in the OP, and a parent like the one you describe, I’d put money on your parenting style being the most likely to lead to a teenage pregnancy.
All us girls did in school was pass around porn, either underlined stuff in books or written by one of us (the boys were nice but not quite up to par yet). I wrote some quasi-stuff myself and, for the most part, wasn’t putting any of it into practice.
My understanding is that yaoi is based on pretty-boy anime characters. While slash fan fiction is based on melae characters from more mainstream media (The Sentinel slashfic, Due South slashfic, X-Files, Stargate, or Star Trek slashfic, etc.) The writers, and probably the audience tend to be older. I think there’s a higher quality ration when it comes to realistic relationships. And there’s probably a higher volume of NC-17 rated stuff in slash than in yaoi. Well, good NC-17 stuff.
I still think that if parents relaxed more about the fact that their teenage girls will think about sex, and will touch themselves, and will explore, and be curious about boys, and furthermore, all of this up until this point is treated as perfectly normal, girls will grow up to have healthier sexual attitudes.
Pharmboy isn’t really thinking through his entire thought process. Because I’ll tell you, here is what happens.
Girl writes porn. Father tells someone.
Father gets in mega uber trouble and people make a huge deal about it and maybe gets his custody revoked and whatever.
You may think this is all good and fine. But here is what happens next.
14 year old girl thinks “OMG - what I did caused Dad to get in so much trouble. I must be bad.” Maybe she doesn’t vocalize it but IME 14 is an extremely sensitive and tough age.
So she has learned that not only is sex bad and dirty but even writing some smut gets her dad in big trouble. And her, too, no doubt. She learns that this is not the “correct” way of expressing her sexuality. Well…then she wonders, what is? Where do I go from here?
The same family that repressed her here is going to tell her that expressing it at all is DIRTY and bad until she’s 18, at which point it automatically becomes OK somehow.
Naw, that doesn’t work - I can tell you from experience. Instead, she comes out with majorly fucked-up ideas about sex and takes years to get over them.
I don’t have kids, I can only tell you what I remember, but yes, fourteen, and even younger, is a pretty natural age to be thinking aboutboys, and yes, even sex, even if it’s vaguely formed. And I also think that right about now is when I’d probably buy my daughter a vibrator and leave it quietly in her room. Better that than sleeping around with any boys yet.
Alternative: girl writes porn. Dad finds out and flips his lid, forbidding her from reading or writing about that kind of stuff. Of course, she’s still thinking about it. But now she knows that she can’t talk to her parents about it. So instead, she gets all of her information about sex from her friends, some of whom are going to be boys who are primarily interested in getting into her pants. She gets a lot of bad information (“You can’t get pregnant your first time!”) and gets a lot of peer pressure with any sort of adult guidance on how to deal with it (because dad’s made it clear that these sorts of things are Not Okay to Talk About) and she ends up getting pregnant and/or with an STD before she’s sixteen.
here. I was lucky. Oh, and replace “dad” with “mom”. But I was going with the parameters in the OP.
I don’t think a lot of people really realize how much teen girls think about boys. Maybe they don’t think about sex as much, but we certainly do think about boys!
In addition to differences in the source of fanfic characters, yaoi is a professionally published book category-cum-genre in Japan and (mostly in translation) in the US; there’s even an Amazon.com category for it. Professionally published Japanese yaoi has been around since the mid-70’s (like slash fanfic) and has acquired its own set of tropes and cliches (like slash fanfic), so Anglophone m/m fanfic that uses those tropes is yaoi, while Anglophone m/m fanfic that doesn’t is slash.
It should be pointed out that both the fanfic and the professionally published stuff runs the gamut from squeaky-clean hand-holding to flat-out porn (the Japanese market is considered to start around 12, so there’s a lot of innocent fluffy stuff aimed at the younger set), so I’m not disturbed by a 14-year-old’s involvement. Her dad may well have been joking or exaggerating when he said she wrote “gay porn”. Or maybe not. It wouldn’t be the first time a younger teen wrote smut, and I doubt it will hurt her in any way, unless she has to deal with people like PharmBoy.
What about the openness of all of it? I can assure you that kids are having sexual thoughts well before puberty and certainly by 14 years old. I’m quite sure I was writing all kinds of porn in my head by then. But discussing it with your parents, who in turn discuss it with their friends? That seems odd to me, but I can’t tell if it’s just hypocrisy or not. Somehow I feel that keeping your sexual feelings secret from your parents is part of a natural growing away from them.
I’m willing to bet that Pharmboy doesn’t really get what Yaoi is.
Which is understandable. As kushiel explained, Yaoi is fucking weird, and calling it “porn” is bound to give anybody unfamiliar with it completely the wrong idea of what’s going on. As other posters have said, it has nothing to do with gay people or relationships or sexual acts. At all. A lot of what the girl in the OP is doing is probably more properly described as “bishonen” anyway, I bet.
Obviously there’s icky stuff out there, but I’ve read plenty of professional, published Yaoi and any phsyical contact at all between characters is a huge deal. Romance is typically displayed with longing embraces and maybe a kiss. Lots of silk sheets and flowers.
Kushiel is absolutely correct that if this girl saw actual gay porn she’d scream. It has about as much to do with gay porn as Twilight does with straight.
Or maybe you stopped reading it a few years back, before the American licensees stopped living in fear of being besieged by outraged conservatives with torches and pitchforks and started dishing up healthy doses of smut. It’s served with a heaping helping of blushes, longing glances, and tearful declarations of eternal devotion, but nowadays there’s actual sex happening in quite a lot of yaoi-in-translation (still usually not all that explicit, though).
And the professionally published Original English Language yaoi stuff is overwhelmingly flat-out porn.
It’s also worth pointing out that slash can refer to same-sex pairings of either gender, while yaoi is specifically male-male (the female-female equivalent being yuri). Too, slash wouldn’t refer to a canonical pairing.
As far as the actual girl goes - it may well be that not only the OP but she herself isn’t entirely aware of what the word means. It wouldn’t be the first time i’ve seen arguments about what “yaoi” actually entails so far as content, even with such extremes as being entirely porn-without-plot and entirely sex-absent. I’m not entirely sure i’d be entirely worried about what a 14 year old girl thinks is “erotic” as far as two guys go.
