Demographics of Yuri Fans in Japan, and English Speaking Fandom

[alias_sqbr]

A conversation made me curious so I looked up if there was any information, and found two very interesting posts by the same blogger.

Yuri isn’t Made for Men: An Analysis of the Demographics of Yuri Mangaka and Fans compiles existing information on Japanese creators and fans

Report on the Yuri Fandom Demographic Survey discusses a survey they ran in English speaking yuri fandom

"Yuri" is f/f manga and anime made in Japan, which has a very different culture and history to f/f made in English.

tl;dr: Analysis I've seen of English speaking femslash fandom has it being like 90% queer women. But English speaking yuri fandom is more evenly split between (mostly straight) men and (mostly queer) women, with a non-negligible number of non binary people. And while there's gender differences in how people approach yuri, they're not as big as you might expect. I find this a really interesting counterpoint to the general assumption that f/f for straight men and f/f for queer women involve completely separate and distinct genres and social groups.

More thoughts and numbers below the cut! Also a brief mention of works containing incest.

There's a lot of discussion of yuri's history and the flaws in their methods in those posts, and to be honest I skimmed a bit >.> So here's a summary of the results I found most interesting.

nb I'm going to use "queer" as a shorthand for "not straight", but it's not clear how trans women etc were handled in these surveys.

Mangaka(creators):
26% unknown, of the rest 82% female and 18% male
Hard to say how many are queer but seems to be a fair few

Japanese Yuri Fandom:
About 50-50 male/female, varies depending on where you look, 2% other
30% queer women, 15% straight women, 3% queer men, 50% straight men, 2% other

English Speaking Yuri Fandom:
47% female, 44% male, 9% other
45% queer women, 2% straight women, 10% queer men, 34% straight men, 9% other

Age: clusters around 21-25
Country: Mostly the US
Preferred medium: Manga
Like fanworks: 85%
Porn: Generally enjoyed but not the top priority. No difference by gender!
Interest in BL (m/m): Women not much, men even less, non binary people have about even odds of being into it.
Favourite works: Straight men, queer men, and (mostly queer) women all have the same top 3, all fairly fluffy, while non binary people prefer Utena (crossdressing, social commentary, dark themes) and Citrus (pseudo-incest) and are the only group to include "My lesbian experience with loneliness". *sheds a tear of pride for my fellow edgy nbs*

The blogger noted:

Utena is very popular among women and non-binary people and doesn’t even rank with men. I suspect this is due to its heavy focus on gender, something that tends to be less interesting to men. Also interesting is just how popular Girl Friends is with straight men. It’s popular with all groups of course, but for straight men, it towers over the others. This is a bit of a trend; non-straight women’s favorites are more diverse, while straight men are more top heavy before dropping down to lesser liked works.

It's also worth noting that while Girlfriends is very sweet it has a lot of lovingly drawn boobs. Yet Girlfriends was created by a woman and Utena by a man (at least for the anime, and afaict that's what most Utena fans are into). I'd be curious to know if there's any correlation between the gender of a mangaka and their work's popularity between genders.

The blogger didn't ponder non binary people's motivations so much. But it makes sense to me that we'd be more into m/m than everyone else, considering our messy relationship with gender categories. I wonder if the same thing is true for non binary fans of slash/femslash etc. I don't know why we're so edgy, though, lol. I wonder how we compare to trans women into yuri.

Comments

[hebethen]

Not only that, but the Utena manga was written by a woman who apparently actively rejected the (gender)queer themes, so that's the that. But, like, queer women can also love to draw boobs! I was just thinking about this and like -- yes, the issue with fanservice isn't that we hate sexy women, it's that it's usually shoved in and comes with a raft of misogyny and heteronormativity (and in art, poorly drawn), but importantly, even if the technical aspects are all on points, the malegazeyness of a work impinges on any sexy appeal it may have had much as a nosey pet dog who won't leave or stop staring may impinge on one's inclination to get down with a date.

Re: edginess: Fluff by nature doesn't tend to question, doesn't tend to perturb boundaries, right? It's entirely possible that the apparent tendency is just sampling error due to our smaller proportion, so take that post-facto attempt at justification as such :P

Reckon you'd like to xpost to fem_thoughts?

[alias_sqbr]

Heh, yes, there's a lot of post-facto reasons I can come up with too, and that's as plausible as any.

I'd totally forgotten about fem_thoughts, hmm!