'Why do we like to watch/ think about/ fantasize two guys having sex?' It's a question that gets asked a lot by both slash and yaoi fans. I'll be up front about my personal gut response, which is, 'Why not?' A liking for m/m is a sexual taste ('kink' where I come from) like any other, and there are only two possible responses to a kink: 'Yowza!' and 'Hunh?' If someone shares your kink, you don't have to tell them why it's hot. If they don't, all the explaining in the world won't enlighten them.

   This laissez-faire attitude doesn't quite meet some people's needs, I'm aware. Most of the slash fans I know are academics who analyze their hobbies the same way other people play video games, as a pleasant way to pass the time. For them, half the fun of a thing is talking about why it's fun. The yaoi fans I know are different. Don't ask me why, but it's the yaoi fans who seem to want an assurance that a liking for m/m is normal, or at any rate not proof of a hopelessly depraved nature. OK- let's get that one out of the way to start with. A liking for m/m sex is about as normal as writing with your left hand. Most people don't, but an awful lot of people do, and it's an innate bias. For the southpaws of the world there are now left-hand shops. For the m/m fans there are now slash and yaoi. Life is wonderful.

   Don't ask why we like m/m. Ask what's the fun of m/m. This turns the discussion from a defense of yaoi into a list of all your favorite reasons for reading this stuff. Works much better. The slash fen I knew used to argue the question of what's good about slash endlessly, and some of the reasons I'm about to give owe a lot to those thick-paged discussions in the APA (amateur press association) Strange Bedfellows back in the mid-90's.

   In no special order, then, we have the following. Note that most of these reasons slop over into each other:

1) The Role Thing. (Freedom from roles) In m/f you're always working within set ideas of What Men Do and What Women Do. The expectations are always there, and they get in the way of what the characters can do. Two guys alone remove those expectations. The characters can then just be themselves. The strong silent one will be the guy who's naturally strong and silent, like Kei. The loving supportive one will be the guy who's naturally loving and supportive, like Ranmaru. In m/f the bitchy weepy vindictive hysterically possessive character is a woman (see: Fatal Attraction). In yaoi it's Kouji Nanjo.
    Since the roles in m/m can be fluid and changeable, why do so many people (and it's not just the Japanese) give one partner the role and characteristics of the female all the time? Why all the weeping ukes and wimpy Mulders? For one answer to that, see under Gender Fuck. I think the other answer is that some people don't know any better and possibly, don't care. The m/f model is the one they see all around them, the one that seems right to them as a model of human interaction. Certainly it's easier to do a story that runs on familiar dichotomies (strong/weak, active/passive, cold/loving) than one where two characters have the same characteristics but in different degrees. 

2) The Power Thing. (Who's got the gun?) OK: we all know most fiction isn't realistic? It's not like real life, where power and roles are a constantly shifting thing. Fiction runs off a number of assumptions, one of which is that men have power by definition and women don't, unless they're given special magic powers like the Sailor Senshi or conquer through the purity of their hearts like Basara's Tatara. In fictional m/f, the relationship is unequal by definition. He's got the gun and she doesn't. In m/m, it's a level playing field. Both have it, and the question becomes whether one partner will give up his gun or whether both will hold on to theirs and negotiate. Westerners, with their democratic bias, are suckers for the story where emotional and sexual roles are negotiated, sometimes under very unlikely circumstances, like when both guys have fallen into bed with raging hard-ons. Under those circumstances, the last thing real-life men do is talk. Classic slash likes to celebrate the mutual empowerment of both partners: a paradise of equality existing between two fully equal and empowered people. As a contrast to most m/f, it does make a nice break, I'll admit.
    I still prefer the scenarios where one (fully equal and empowered) person tacitly agrees to relinquish power without requiring a signed contract from the other guy. The uke gives up his gun and walks naked (literally) into the sexual badlands. I prefer ukes because they have the guts to be vulnerable, and I don't think I'm the only woman in the world who finds vulnerable men a turn-on. It's probably why I've always liked visual representations of m/m. There's a guy bending over for another.
(Classic submission posture in apes. Obviously a taste inherited from our primate ancestors.) As Jenn has put it, 'A man ain't more vulnerable than when he's got a dick up his ass.' And hey! these guys are vulnerable for love! Who could ask for more?   

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Cuts from Hommes Lapis (Samurai Troopers), You Higuri (Seimaden)