Depends on the place and context. I don’t know as much about the Chinese market for these things, but in a lot of cases for Japanese/Korean titles in this genre there’s a number of fascinating elements that combine to make it appealing.
It’s about beautiful men and can focus on them a lot, for one, but it also offers vectors to discuss and engage with dynamics and/or social things which women are discouraged from expressing. A lot of the time, one of the couple in Boy’s Love (for example) is intended to be a bit of a proxy stand-in for the female reader. They’re more often the viewpoint character, and they get to be more vocal about sexual desire for men than a woman may feel comfortable writing a female character expressing.
They also can engage with some kinds of stories about bigotry that can intersect with women’s problems in sympathetic ways; and, if you’re trying to deal with something that’s really sensitive or traumatic as a woman, then having male characters go through something similar can give the appropriate level of emotional remove.
Also, pretty men kissing!
Like, I’ve been reading CLAMP stuff again and wow those are pretty men!
I’m not a woman, mind you, but I’ve been reading this stuff for, like, 15+ years and these are my (incomplete) conclusions.
inconel@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Same reason cis hetero men are the majority of the lesbian porn consumer. It’s not sonething people usually say out loud in broad daylight but there’s nothing wrong expressing someone’s fantasy in form of fiction if proper zoning and warnings there.
apotheotic@beehaw.org 1 day ago
Sorry this is untrue because I am a woman and I consume 95% of the lesbian porn. I guess, as lesbian porn georg, I am an outlier and have not been counted
inconel@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Ok I stand corrected, based on pornhub statistics lesbian porn 2024 is the most popular among women. I factored more men watch porn than women hence the majority in number, but it seemed viewership has been shifting toward more balanced state too.
The point I made is that cis men like women body and some prefer more of them than having a guy.
apotheotic@beehaw.org 1 day ago
To be clear I was making a joke about myself as an individual accounting for 95% of all visits to lesbian porn, and tying it in with the “spiders Georg” joke
Nice one doing your research though!