The Self-Lubricating Penis and Other Yaoi Anomalies

by Jeanne Johnson

"Write what you know," the budding author is always told. Great advice-until it comes to physiology. Then it gets you into some weird situations indeed. A gay man once remarked about western slash that the characters always behaved like recognizable gay men until they got into bed and then they suddenly turned into middle-aged women. Hours and hours of foreplay are followed by gradually building climaxes and an explosive very wet orgasm- and then another, and another, and another... and then the two men have a cozy conversation about how much they love each other and fall asleep in each other's arms. Real men, he said, don't do that. 

Western slash fen were a little defensive about having men read their work for precisely that reason- they knew they were getting the physical details wrong, and frankly a lot of them don't care. Any number of academics who have analyzed women's slash have commented on the fact that often the characters are disguised women: that is, they have men's bodies but women's emotions and methods of relating, and female sexual responses. Joanna Russ went on to argue that these men are in fact neither male or female, but the female's concept of ideal humans: an androgynous blend of male and female traits. 

Russ was writing about the granddaddy of the genres, Kirk/Spock slash. In later years fen have gone out of their way to solicit male input on the subject, often with results we'd prefer not to have to accept. Did you know that an estimated 80% of men can't sustain an erection during passive anal sex? So much for those romantic simultaneous orgasms. Did you know that anything other than gentle licking if a man's balls is reputedly terribly painful? Don't have one man squeeze another's balls. It's as sexy as a clumsy Pap smear," we were told. Did you know that simultaneous orgasms themselves are fiendishly difficult to manage even between same-sex partners? That there's virtually no painless physical way to delay a man's orgasm, but that starting to talk about baseball scores is actually quite effective? 

To make matters worse, practically everything you know about male sexuality will turn out to be a myth  for some man or other. One correspondent told me that after orgasm it's all over for a couple of hours, or possibly a couple of days. Not so, said another: I had a partner who could ejaculate four to six times in an hour-long session (and no, he was not sixteen). Early commentators noted that there was a painful absence of lubrication in early slash stories-  "I lifted his hips and impaled him on my cock." Ouch, one man said. Not at all, said another. "I prefer to be dry-fucked; it heightens the sensations."

 Well, if the medically terribly-well-informed West gets it wrong, one can hardly blame the Japanese for doing the same. As with western writers, though, one has to wonder how much ignorance and how much is deliberate style. Female chauvinist that I am, I'll believe the male artists portray ejaculating women are drawing what they know i.e. the workings of male body. With the women, though...For instance, there are a lot of penises in yaoi- well, actually, there are a lot of glowing cones of light in yaoi- overflowing with moisture of some sort. The suggestion is that it's saliva from an absolutely slavering partner, but it's much too copious for that. It looks like the penis is self-lubricating. Now anyone with any sexual experience knows penises don't do that (though maybe glowing cones of light do). So what's going on here?

 There are yaoi stories where one partner uses lubrication, but in general it's legs-in-the-air and in. The anal passage as well as the penis seems capable of providing its own lube. Or possibly not. Consider the distorted expression on the passive partner's face, not to mention all the tears that flow so abundantly. But what follows penetration is a little puzzling. Instead of the active partner humping and pumping himself to savage orgasm, what we see is the passive partner in ecstasy. He's the one who groans and moans and runs with sweat and gasps out little bubbles (an oddity, but fairly common signifier of extreme arousal in yaoi) and clutches the sheets and goes red in the face and loses control- and occasionally pushes himself up and down on the other guy's cock before he coming with a scream. The active partner seems to be doing nothing at all. He remains stone-faced and unaffected and often enough, unmoving: unless  he's shown as experiencing fierce delight at his partner's orgasm. The active man seems little more than an animated dildo for the passive's pleasure.

 Gay male sex isn't like this but heterosex with a considerate man can be. I'd argue that a lot of the passive partners in yaoi are envisaged as women, and are shown reacting as an orgasming women does. But I don't think the Japanese are doing what their western sisters are: presenting men with female sexual patterns as idealized humans. I think a lot of them see the passive partner (the 'uke', in Japanese) as ipso facto a woman because he's passive. 

There's an old inglorious tradition of viewing gay relationships as if they were straight ones. Presumably this is natural for heterosexual who have no other model to follow, but it's surprising how long gay people themselves accepted the convention that sex can only happen between a man and a woman. If it happens between same sex partner, well, one of them has to become the opposite sex or else, well, sex can't happen. Thus men who preferred the passive role in the past often enough dressed as women even if they weren't true transvestites, while the butch/fem roles in certain lesbian communities were no more negotiable than male/female roles were in the straight one. In the west these hard-and-fast gender distinctions broke down under the triple attack of the sexual revolution, the feminist movement and the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement. These days both gay and straight relationships have become more personality-based and less dictated by defined social and gender roles.

 That's the west. Asia is another matter. Japan never had the sexual revolution, since the Pill which facilitated it here is still outlawed over there. The feminist movement is alive and well but moving very very slowly- the only things can be done in Japan- and focusing on practical goals like wage equality than on theoretical issues like gender. As for gay lib- well, in one sense, gay men never had the same oppression to liberate themselves from. Your private life is private in Japan, and there's no scandal in going to boy bars or having a male lover if you don't flaunt the fact. But your martial status isn't private. Being married is the public sign that you're an adult and able to be trusted. Unmarried men don't get promoted in companies, no matter how able or talented. The thinking is that the married men they'd be dealing with won't know how to relate to someone who's still a bachelor. So you can be as gay as you like in Japan, as long as you have a proper wife waiting at home and everyone knows it.

 The upshot of all this is that thinking on gender is still quite rigid- men should be manly and women womanly in very defined ways which, to the Japanese, simply reflect common sense. While some gay people have been influenced by the West to question role-breakdowns, most people simply assume that the male/female paradigm is the only one there is. Hence the uke is woman, very often. He's the one who does all the female things like feeling and crying and being hopelessly in love and raped and betrayed and abandoned. (The masochism content of yaoi is a whole other question, but one thing at a time.) And what makes a character uke? What's the indefinable quality that tells the readership that *this* character is ripe for hitting on? Height. Never mind age, experience, temperament or  senpai-kohai. The short one is uke. (The tall one, if you want the corresponding phrase, is the seme. Remember that both those words have two syllables.) That's why poor little Hiei raped by big bad Kurama is a standard; that's why Zechs forces his desires on a Treize supine on his desk rather more often than Treize sexually molests his underling (Treize goes in for sophisticated seduction, is what Seme Treize does.) And that's why in my own fandom the hero's beautiful uncle, who's definitely taller than the hero, goes up and down like a yo-yo depending on whether the artist wants to make him properly seme (Uncle/Hero- by Japanese convention the seme comes first) or can't bear the idea of a uke hero makes it Hero/Uncle. The only thing that can explain the Height Rule to me is the unspoken assumption that the uke is female.

 Having said all that, I have to add that this rigidity is breaking down in the yaoi field, especially among the artists whose work is being published professionally either in their own books or in anthologies of yaoi. I've read quite a number of just-guys-together stories in collections like Breath. But among the amateur dojinshika the conventions still seem to be flourishing happily. 

For myself- well, I like to have the best of both worlds. I don't want my guys (either the ones I read or the ones I write) to be real manly men because if they were they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. But I definitely need to know they're guys. Flowering, the series currently running in BBoy Gold, bugs me up a wall because, in spite of its interesting premise and graphic sex, the hero Sirus looks like, acts like, and pretty much definitely a woman- and a wimpy one at that, Give me Partners any day of the week with its sensitive New Age New York leathermen. Maybe I'm still in that slash mode of combined male and female-hunky guys who do female-type stuff: including, if they must, manufacturing their own lube.