"Trendy Russian girls aren't really interested in straight men," Anastasia says, noting Russia's dominant cult of masculinity. Thanks to the 2013 Russian law forbidding "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors," anyone accused of even creating " an interest in nontraditional sexual relations" could have to pay a fine. On the Russian social network VK, which operates like a a Tumblr–Facebook hybrid, the blog No Hope Kids pastiches signifiers of hip (dip–dyed hair and vague rejections of capitalism) with pictures of lip–locked men who have what Anastasia refers to as a " post-Soviet look." The blog is careful to display an "18+" disclaimer. Gay porn is coded with the coolness of youthful contrarianism.
more androgynous and boyish, yet still somewhat muscular."įor a teen girl, in Russia at least, part of the allure of two nice-smelling men getting intimate with each other is tied to the imagery's illicitness. "I imagine gay men smell better, or at least the gay men I like. "I feel more comfortable being attracted to gay masculinity than straight masculinity," she continues. As it turns out, when you ask a teen girl, or former teen girl, why she likes gay porn, she'll actually answer quite bluntly: "The attraction was undeniable, but hard to explain," Anastasia tells me over email after responding to my call I put out on Tumblr in a bid to to help me understand #teens. But when she started to realize she was developing small crushes on her gay, male friends, she decided to explore her attraction. Īnastasia, 20, "has loved gay porn since about 16." Growing up in Moscow, Russia, where same–sex sexual activity has only been legal since 1993 and anti-gay attitudes are the norm, Anastasia always considered gay porn salacious and sinful to watch. And as I ventured deeper into weird teen Internet, following links from gay porn blogs down a rabbit hole, I eventually found an entire subset of young Russian girls who find man-on-man action fixating. Yaoi-con, a three-day manga and anime festival that celebrates "male beauty and passion," is holding its 14th annual conference this September in San Francisco. The Internet, of course, has also allowed the Japanese "boys' love" frenzy to gain young fans in every corner of the world. I don't know if teenage girls would have had much success finding gay porn before the Internet." "The internet makes it easier to find different types of sexual behavior. "It's part of the spectrum of desire and attraction, especially since adolescence is a time for exploration," Kalyanam says. She chalked the obsession up to the Internet and teens being teens. Kalyanam works as a licensed clinical social worker in New York, specializing in working with LGBTQ youth. Toward a more unified theory, I called up adolescent psychotherapist Anupama Kalyanam to figure out why teen girls suddenly like gay male porn. Read More: Phoebe Gloeckner's 'Diary of a Teenage Girl' Is a Frank Look at Teen Sexuality
Some girls obsess over the manga, some teens want to see the real thing, and others just identify as fangirl "shippers" who delight in pairing their favorite male characters from TV shows in fictional relationships. Clearly, these blog's readers are far from a monolithic entity. Another blog with a mostly female following, Pretty Gay Boys, features a more American aesthetic.
The blog advises the uninitiated to "prepare to get blown away by most sexiest, cutest, and hottest guys" and, ostensibly, it delivers-if you're a teen girl who is into J- or K-pop stars who look like they're about to kiss. The blog Boys Love World, for instance, garners most of its notes from its active following of young girls.
Girls only recently started rebloging yaoi manga (graphic Japanese comics that depict plotlines of "boys love" written mostly by and for women), androgynous male models' underwear shoots, and cutesy photos of regular, yet genetically blessed gay couples. While we generally accept straight men and women's love for lesbian porn-we, as a society, have centuries of experience sexualizing women's bodies and portraying female sexuality as fluid and performative-gay male porn hasn't been subject to the same treatment.