Gender Inequality and Why Yaoi Exists
Happy New Year, All!
I have been reading Anne Rice's The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, the first of her erotic/porn series, and it has made me realize anew why yaoi exists. This book prompts comparisons to Ai no Kusabi: both have protagonists who are forced to be sex slaves for implacable social superiors whom our protagonists find irresistibly sexy despite their being sadistic bastards bent on taming/training their new toys in various painful and humiliating ways. The difference? Well, there are many, but the most notable is that while Riki is presented as a human being, Beauty... is not.
Riki's chief response to being viciously abused (yet aroused) by Iason is "I hate him; I hate him; I hate myself too; get me the fuck out of here!" Beauty's chief response to being viciously abused (yet aroused) by her Prince is "I adore him; I adore him; I hope I won't do anything horribly, unforgivably wrong [like not kiss his shoe enough] that will force him to punish me; please let him take me back to his room where I can be his entirely right now!" Now, I'm not going to say that people like Beauty don't exist because it takes all kinds. But I will hazard a guess that 99 percent of the people in the world would respond to those circumstances like Riki. Yes, I suspect even 99 percent of all women would. I mean, when someone kidnaps you, rapes you, beats you up, and imprisons you, what's you're gut reaction going to be: "I hope I'm good enough for him" or "Where is the nearest knife, and can I jump out of this window without breaking my leg and make a dash for the police station?"? We certainly assume that a man would take the second option. But when we're given a female character (even one written by a rather feminist woman), we very easily find ourselves immersed in the old cliché that what a woman really wants is to be dominated, humbled, helplessly exposed, to live only to please her man.
The problem with this mindset should go without saying (but given the persistence of this narrative, evidently doesn't): it promotes rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and misogyny in general by inculcating an ideological assumption that women enjoy being abused slaves. Since this is true of very few real human beings, this narrative is sustained by the representation of women as un/subhuman. Consider Beauty as a "person": she has almost no backstory. She was a bored princess who wandered around her castle and had a sense of class-consciousness. Full stop. Compare this to what, in roughly the same number of pages, we learn about Riki: he was the leader of a gang called Bison that was the terror of Ceres yet widely respected for its good treatment of its own members; he had a lover named Guy who was his lieutenant in the gang and to whom he was very close, yet this did not prevent him from wanting to make something of his life by getting out of the slums, possibly by becoming an agent in the Black Market. This is the backstory of a human being.
It is true that AnK, in general, is much more character-based than TCoB. Iason is also much better developed than the Prince, and they're both men, so this difference is not entirely attributable to gender. But here's something that is: the sex slave in TCoB who has a personality is not the female protagonist but a man, Prince Alexi. In his first couple of paragraphs, he's allowed to be witty, subversive, rebellious, smart. He answers questions with a clever mix of "respect" and quiet irony; he casts meaningful glances, steals kisses. He is, of course, infinitely more interesting than Beauty. And if I would much rather read about the sexual enslavement of Prince Alexi (or Riki) than Beauty that is not entirely because I find men sexier than women. It is rather mostly because I find interesting characters sexy.
Some time ago, whitebird asked me why I thought it was okay for narratives to present men in sexually compromising positions but problematic to do so with women. This is why. Until we, as a society, can fully wrap our heads around conceptualizing women as human beings, we will need the men of yaoi (and other narrative outlets) to represent female experience. [1]
[1] I don't mean to suggest that yaoi ukes only represent women. They do, of course, represent men too and in productive ways, but that's another essay.
I have been reading Anne Rice's The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, the first of her erotic/porn series, and it has made me realize anew why yaoi exists. This book prompts comparisons to Ai no Kusabi: both have protagonists who are forced to be sex slaves for implacable social superiors whom our protagonists find irresistibly sexy despite their being sadistic bastards bent on taming/training their new toys in various painful and humiliating ways. The difference? Well, there are many, but the most notable is that while Riki is presented as a human being, Beauty... is not.
Riki's chief response to being viciously abused (yet aroused) by Iason is "I hate him; I hate him; I hate myself too; get me the fuck out of here!" Beauty's chief response to being viciously abused (yet aroused) by her Prince is "I adore him; I adore him; I hope I won't do anything horribly, unforgivably wrong [like not kiss his shoe enough] that will force him to punish me; please let him take me back to his room where I can be his entirely right now!" Now, I'm not going to say that people like Beauty don't exist because it takes all kinds. But I will hazard a guess that 99 percent of the people in the world would respond to those circumstances like Riki. Yes, I suspect even 99 percent of all women would. I mean, when someone kidnaps you, rapes you, beats you up, and imprisons you, what's you're gut reaction going to be: "I hope I'm good enough for him" or "Where is the nearest knife, and can I jump out of this window without breaking my leg and make a dash for the police station?"? We certainly assume that a man would take the second option. But when we're given a female character (even one written by a rather feminist woman), we very easily find ourselves immersed in the old cliché that what a woman really wants is to be dominated, humbled, helplessly exposed, to live only to please her man.
The problem with this mindset should go without saying (but given the persistence of this narrative, evidently doesn't): it promotes rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and misogyny in general by inculcating an ideological assumption that women enjoy being abused slaves. Since this is true of very few real human beings, this narrative is sustained by the representation of women as un/subhuman. Consider Beauty as a "person": she has almost no backstory. She was a bored princess who wandered around her castle and had a sense of class-consciousness. Full stop. Compare this to what, in roughly the same number of pages, we learn about Riki: he was the leader of a gang called Bison that was the terror of Ceres yet widely respected for its good treatment of its own members; he had a lover named Guy who was his lieutenant in the gang and to whom he was very close, yet this did not prevent him from wanting to make something of his life by getting out of the slums, possibly by becoming an agent in the Black Market. This is the backstory of a human being.
It is true that AnK, in general, is much more character-based than TCoB. Iason is also much better developed than the Prince, and they're both men, so this difference is not entirely attributable to gender. But here's something that is: the sex slave in TCoB who has a personality is not the female protagonist but a man, Prince Alexi. In his first couple of paragraphs, he's allowed to be witty, subversive, rebellious, smart. He answers questions with a clever mix of "respect" and quiet irony; he casts meaningful glances, steals kisses. He is, of course, infinitely more interesting than Beauty. And if I would much rather read about the sexual enslavement of Prince Alexi (or Riki) than Beauty that is not entirely because I find men sexier than women. It is rather mostly because I find interesting characters sexy.
Some time ago, whitebird asked me why I thought it was okay for narratives to present men in sexually compromising positions but problematic to do so with women. This is why. Until we, as a society, can fully wrap our heads around conceptualizing women as human beings, we will need the men of yaoi (and other narrative outlets) to represent female experience. [1]
[1] I don't mean to suggest that yaoi ukes only represent women. They do, of course, represent men too and in productive ways, but that's another essay.