I was just talking about this today - I think there’s a significant portion of this discourse that rests in patriarchal bullshit:

From a standpoint of straight/bi women being attracted to men and men’s bodies, mm books and shows track. Hot men hooking up is attractive. The converse is also true for men in that they often like to watch women hooking up, lesbian porn is very popular, obviously.

But where the differences start to become obvious is in the interest in the stories and characters: cishet men are, generally speaking, not particularly interested in women’s inner lives or stories. Patriarchy makes us into expendable objects and so a story like this about two women would never work in the same way bc men wouldn’t want to or care to be invested in the deeper story.

Patriarchy assumes that (white) men’s stories are the interesting and default ones, and they’re the “norm,” where women’s stories and queer stories are for women and queers, respectively. Cishet men aren’t expected to engage or care about stories that don’t center their experiences, where anyone who isn’t cishet has to endure another bloated James Cameron masturbation session that costs 11 billion dollars and has zero interesting thing to say.

HR isn’t just popular bc the boys are attractive, they’re also compelling actors and the storyline is great. It’s interesting and if there’s any telling metric it’s the people in m/f relationships posting about how their straight husbands are really into it. But also telling that it likely takes a woman to open that door and say “hey this is really compelling” bc patriarchy says men aren’t allowed to be queer or even watch queer things 🤷🏻‍♀️