I’m sorry if this is offensive and maybe I’m just really pea-brained, but I can’t grasp how someone can capture the raw appeal of men with such pinpoint precision while having zero attraction to them. Is it that you exclusively date women, hold a small amount of attraction to men, but just choose not to date them? Sorry if this is invalidating to you as a lesbian in any way. I know my share of being invalidated, given that I’m a bi woman, but I just had to know.
I'm not even remotely attracted to men and I never have been, I'm just a very good writer
Ok so I answered this with no coffee somewhat curtly, but I just reread and you weren’t actually being THAT rude, so I’m gonna give this another shot. Plus, it genuinely bothers me that there are people out there who can’t fathom how a lesbian might be able to write convincingly about attraction to men, because it leads me to believe there are people out there who might struggle to understand that humans can write convincingly and compassionately about human experiences they haven't personally been through, which is alarming in a lot of ways. So instead of being annoyed I’m going to make an attempt to describe my experience as a lesbian writer who writes about gay men.
First off: I have been out as a lesbian since I was 13. I have only ever had dated women save for weird prepubescent elementary school attempts at boyfriends. I have never had any sort of sex with a man and I’ve never been attracted to one beyond a vague sort of aesthetic appreciation which allows me to discern when men are objectively good looking. That being said, when I write from the point of view of someone who is attracted to men, I AM, to some degree, drawing from my own experience of attraction: queer attraction.
Queer attraction and gay desire are unique. They don’t function the same way heterosexual attraction/desire does. They’re shaped differently, they evolve differently, they happen in spite of fear, in spite of shame, cultivated in the darkness and born from connection, from authenticity from sameness. They exist without a rubric, and without the same symbolic weight heterosexual desire carries within society. It’s really easy for me to imagine the ways in which men are attracted to other men because I know what it’s like for me, to be attracted to women. I know the way that queer desire exists outside societal constraints, I know the way I was confused by it and fought it as a kid, I know the way I later learned to embrace it and feel pride and joy about it. I know how it feels in my gut, in my bones. These are the experiences which inform the way I write about attraction in my stories, not that nebulous understanding of what makes a man hot or not that I mentioned above.
Furthermore, bodies are bodies and humans are humans and it honestly feels weirdly gender essentialist and myopic to act like the things that men might find attractive about other men are SO different than the things I, as a lesbian, am attracted to in women. I am attracted to strength and sweat and body hair. I’m attracted to gender nonconformity and difference and unique, intentional presentation. I am attracted to other lesbians, and the unspoken, magical energy they have that I, as another lesbian, can pick up on. The things generally associated with women being attractive mean nothing to me, like I don’t get and am not attracted to 90% of Hollywood actresses of models. My attraction is queer, and I am attracted to queerness. This is something that I assume generalizes to many queer men, as well.
So when I’m writing about attraction I don’t ask myself “ok what’s hot about men that this man would notice?” I ask myself, “when I’m into something what do I notice? When I’m into someone’s pheromones where do my eyes go, what do I smell when I share space with them?” And it’s literally never something gender specific. That’s such a weird straight person thing to be attracted to gender specific markers, like “ah I love his man abs or how manly he is” like hell no when you’re into someone you’re like “oh god they breathed on me I can smell their breath, there’s a drop of sweat at their temple, their tendon just flexed in their wrist, when that breeze comes by I can smell their deodorant and maybe a hint of their sweat under it and fuck I want to feel the heat of their skin so fucking bad.” And those things are universal! All people have breath, and sweat, and tendons, and warm skin.
In fact, I can often tell when a writer is straight BECAUSE when they discuss attraction in their stories it’s not based on universal, human, pheromone type shit, it’s always weird and gendered and informed by what’s considered attractive in the mainstream. It’s a man’s biceps, his chiseled jaw, the way his stubble looks, his washboard ads, his size. Same with women—they describe her fragility, her breast size, her softness. And I absolutely see this style leak into fan fiction as well, and always is strikes me as gender essentialist and 100% unrelatable. Straight people are told what is attractive in the opposite sex and they buy into it and that is how they approach descriptions of characters who are the object of desire. But I feel like as a lesbian my attraction has far more in common with a gay man’s attraction than it does to cis het attraction! You mentioned the “raw appeal” of men--that phrase means nothing to me, I’m writing about the raw appeal of GAY SEX, I’m writing about a hunger big enough to risk safety and acceptance and normativity to pursue. That has nothing on whatever cishet women find sexy about cishet men, idk.
Lastly, on a super basic surface note: good writers are both imaginative, sensory, and compassionate. This allows us to imagine situations that we have not experienced, parse out sensory details about that experience which make the reader feel like they’re there, and compassionate enough to imagine what it would be like to be in that situation even if we never have before.
Most writers have not lived their books, they’re just good writers. It’s dangerous to act like writing convincingly about something means we must harbor a secret desire to do that something. Lesbians (or ace people) who write convincingly about attraction to men or sex are likely just practiced writers who have worked to find that balance between imagination and compassion. Just like crime writers and horror writers who write convincingly about murder and violence but absolutely aren’t partaking in such things Fiction is not autobiography, and there’s a well documented tendency for people to assume marginalized writers are always writing about themselves, where white male writers can put on any mask they like and have that chalked up to talent.
Here’s some supplementary reading about this.
I hope this clarifies things, and also makes you consider the structures at play when you “can’t wrap your head around” why a writer might be able to convincingly convey something outside their experience in the future.