How Britain Became "Fuguo," the Fujoshi's Promised Land | QDaily Anthropology

When men become a consumer product.

"Fuguo" is a name Chinese girls gave Britain.

Some explanation is in order. Fu ("rotten") comes from Japanese, where it carries the sense of "beyond saving," and it now refers specifically to a fascination with romance between men. A girl with this habit is a fujoshi, a "rotten girl." Fuguo means "rotten nation."

So Fuguo does not mean Britain is a country teeming with gay men. It means a country that gives fujoshi everything they want. When someone once translated it literally as "gay nation" and asked a British friend about it, the friend was furious: We beat the Germans, we're as hard as they come, how are we gay?

Friends, it's only a nickname, young Chinese people poking fun at the most conspicuous feature of your pop culture. In the same way, we call Japan the land of otaku, Russia the fighting nation and Australia kangaroo country. And to foreigners, China is just the land of kung fu and pandas.

Britain earned the title in front of the TV. In recent years, the British films and shows that took off in China have been full of male-male "CPs" (fan slang for couples). The BBC's four great "fu dramas" are Merlin (Prince Arthur and Merlin), Doctor Who (the Doctor and his villains), Torchwood (Captain Jack and his secretary, Ianto) and Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, known to Chinese fans as "Curly Fu" and "Peanut").

The biggest push came from Sherlock, a sensation from 2010 on. The bond between two British detective buddies stirred the hearts of countless Chinese fujoshi, and few couples since have come close. It sealed Britain's reputation as the Great Fuguo.

Then, once fans fall for a fictional pairing, they naturally start fantasizing about the real actors. Britain does turn out plenty of handsome male stars who can actually act (we've studied this too: read the related article here). They are often openly affectionate in public, and many of them are "self-shippers" who happily play up the pairing themselves.

By now, fans who crave the fu and the people who sell it, female viewers and male actors, have reached a tacit understanding.

Sherlock

The "fu" of Fuguo is different in kind from Japan's BL. It is not real homosexuality but bromance between buddies

If fujoshi held a vote for their favorite country on earth, there would be two joint winners: Fuguo, and Japan, home of BL manga (also known as danmei).

But the two countries' products are different in kind. BL stands for Boys' Love. Its heroes are beautiful gay men drawn by (mostly) female manga artists, and in an imagined, two-dimensional world they act out real same-sex romance.

The essence of Fuguo is ambiguity between straight men. They can be entangled for life without being gay, and touch without ever going to bed. Look at the four fu dramas: their most striking feature is that, apart from Jack in the sci-fi series Torchwood (pansexual, fine with any gender), none of the male leads is actually gay. And the actors we fantasize about, Benedict Cumberbatch for one, all have wives.

Fujoshi grasp this nonexistent relationship instantly, without a word said. But how would one define it scientifically (or, put more politely, with some refinement)?

An article in The Guardian in 2013 said that the crucial question about Sherlock is what, exactly, Holmes and Watson are to each other. The answer is one word: bromance.

"A portmanteau, bromance: gently place 'bro' in front of 'romance' and you get, without question, one of this year's key words. No wonder screenwriters today are bending over backwards to give their male lead a loyal male companion, muddying the water between buddy and hubby."

The word "bromance" was coined in the 1990s by an editor at the American skateboarding magazine Big Brother. People found it extremely handy, because it named a storyline that had existed for a long time, across all kinds of art and literature, throughout the long history of human civilization.

Taron Egerton and Colin Firth in Kingsman: The Secret Service

Bromance has always carried the human longing for intimacy and romance, and a testing of how gender is defined.

Gay chemistry did not appear overnight. From the dawn of civilization, relationships between people showed every complicated possibility. The more an age was known for freedom and openness, the more it respected human nature.

Take the stories fujoshi love most. In ancient Greece, the all-too-human gods of myth loved beautiful women and handsome youths alike. And the oldest artistic pioneers left romantic legends of teachers and their students. What we call Platonic love may well have originally meant a nonsexual bromance. Plato himself often hosted gatherings where upper-class men could socialize.

But as human relationships grew more complicated, people had to follow a single way of life to keep the group stable, whether in the name of religion or of morality. Men were husbands who started families and built careers. Women were wives who bore and raised children. Homosexuality was a taboo that made people blanch.

Still, people kept voicing their longing for romantic feeling. In the Renaissance, humanism revived in art and literature. Shakespeare, the greatest of playwrights, celebrated intense passion, and his own sexual orientation remains an unsolved mystery. Of his sonnets, 26 are addressed to a married woman, the "Dark Lady," but 126 are addressed to a pure young man, the "Fair Youth."

Then, as now, the line between love and friendship was blurry. Some of these works may be veiled homosexuality. Others may be pure praise of friendship.

The French philosopher Montaigne wrote an essay, "Of Friendship," in which he took care to set it apart from sexual relations between men, which he called "that Greek license." He regarded this Platonic feeling as a primal capacity of men.

Montaigne clearly had a touch of male chauvinism; he failed to see that relationships between women are just as complicated. But he proved one thing: when people believe their intellect and taste stand at the leading edge of their age, the feelings they have and the beauty of human nature they experience become something they tell the world about.

Merlin

Buddy pairings have always been a mainstream film genre, and at the end of the 20th century gay culture seeped into mainstream entertainment

Britain won the title of Fuguo in China through its film and TV exports, the form of entertainment the public knows best today.

In fact, if you count with tinted glasses on, bromance has always been a major subject on screen. In early dramas, men and women played different roles, and in thrilling, dangerous stories, only a team of two men was usually considered fit for the mission.

So a long-standing film genre emerged, the buddy film, spanning comedy, cop films, adventure, action and animation. The relationship between the men dominates and comes first; relationships between men and women are secondary. These films are not necessarily romantic, and even fujoshi would have trouble reading them that way. If you don't believe it, just say one title, Toy Story, and the very thought feels like a crime.

But these films did set a template: two men, with room for story and room for feeling. The male leads get more vivid personalities. The Los Angeles Times has said buddy films hold special meaning for men, offering them a kind of escape: in real life they are expected never to seem effeminate, but in these stories they can express their feelings freely.

Most of today's fu dramas are built on this tradition. Sherlock magnifies the traits of Conan Doyle's Holmes and Dr. Watson, making them more lovable and funnier on screen. At the same time, if two city men willingly tie themselves together without a convincing emotional reason, the partnership looks wooden.

But none of this is an excuse. Some of it is absolutely deliberate. In the first episode of Sherlock, Cumberbatch's Holmes has barely met Freeman's Watson before he invites him to share a flat. The landlady, an old lady and clearly a friend of fujoshi, says there's another bedroom upstairs, in case they'd like to sleep separately. Watson: Of course we'll be sleeping separately. Landlady: Oh, don't worry, the couple next door are married, you know.

What on earth is going on? Why that line? Why play it like that? And why am I so excited?

Calm down and think it through. A line like that could only turn up in mainstream film and TV today. First, whether or not the two are gay (honestly, who cares), in the world of this show homosexuality is something even an old London landlady takes in her stride. Second, good buddies get teased about it as a matter of course. The creators have made an unspoken calculation: this is fashionable, so throw in a few lines; viewers like it. Oh wait, straight men watch too. Never mind, they don't look that closely.

Viewers in the past would not have liked it. Over the past 20 years, society as a whole has come to see gay people in a new way. An American collection of sociological essays, Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television, points out that after 1990, as people broadly came to accept homosexuality as natural, gay culture began to claim a place in the mainstream, usually in veiled and conflicted forms.

In 1997's Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon's character has strong feelings both for his teacher, played by Robin Williams, and for his friend, played by Ben Affleck. Lost and naive at first, he grows up through his relationships with other men.

Only in the past ten years, as viewers' enthusiasm for CPs exploded, has selling fu become standard entertainment fare, and only then did fu elements become widespread in mainstream film and TV.

Good Will Hunting

In fashionable countries, artists have always been proud to throw off sexual constraints, and Britain's awkward aristocratic tradition turns playing hard to get into the most intoxicating game

Europe was the first part of the world to show a friendly attitude toward homosexuality. From the second half of the 20th century, a wave of gay rights movements broke out across Western countries. In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. Britain decriminalized homosexuality in 1967 (in England and Wales), let same-sex couples enter "civil partnerships" in 2005, and saw its same-sex marriage law take effect in 2014.

In this process, the United States was actually a laggard among developed countries. In 2013, Angelia Wilson, a professor at the University of Manchester, published Why Europe Is Lesbian and Gay Friendly (and Why America Never Will Be). She argues that much of the reason is the large place religion holds in American life. In the Southern states especially, churches and extended families do more of the work of social welfare than the government does, and the conservative, traditional view of the family cannot be broken.

Britain, though it clings to aristocratic standards of etiquette, is open-minded about freedom and human nature. That is why British TV has two hallmarks: it adapts traditional classics, yet it is full of rebellion and novelty.

In the arts, the constraints of gender were the first to be broken, and accepting different sexual orientations came to stand for being avant-garde and free. David Bowie, the legendary British rock star who died just days ago, caused uproar with his androgynous, seductive image. He said at different times that he was gay and that he was bisexual, then finally denied both. Perhaps he was using gender to announce his avant-garde, free-spirited stance.

As more gay icons like him emerged and achieved great things, gay people won a voice in every field, especially the arts. At the end of the last century, gay creators also entered mainstream, mass-market film and TV. Here we must mention Russell T Davies, whose 1999 British series Queer as Folk transformed the place of gay people on television. Americans remade the series, making it more popular and more explicit. Davies helped create the revived Doctor Who and developed a new series, Torchwood. As mentioned above, Captain Jack was deliberately written as pansexual, because that is the coolest.

Whether an actor can play gay has become, to some extent, a benchmark of his ability. British actors have three treasures: full nudity, drag and playing gay. All of them are ways of performing the most complicated parts of being human.

This openness sits comfortably with the reserved, introverted British character (awkward and tsundere, prickly on the outside and soft within), with its pride in a long aristocratic tradition and its elitist sulks.

It should be noted here that homosexuality was once widespread among boys in the public school system. In her well-known A History of Homosexuality in Europe, Florence Tamagne describes in detail how the public schools related to the liberal homosexual habits of the upper-middle classes in the 1920s and 1930s. The cult of homosexuality that arose in Britain in that period was bound up with the male elite, and it has carried on to this day as a "tradition."

This odd but charming aristocratic tradition shows through fully in the characters of British TV and in the actors themselves. In Sherlock, the two are intimate while insisting they are not gay. Even the creative team denies it.

As the Douban user @Yanlynn put it: "British tradition, culture, art and TV seem born with this indescribable air: always a deadpan, proper shell, while inside they quietly sink to new lows, indulge in heavy tastes, hold nothing back and stay ahead of their time. It's as if they were tailor-made to catch the new concept of fu."

Of course, all of this also rests on the cultural reach of the English-speaking world. Whether other European countries would qualify, Chinese viewers can't say. Spain has a channel devoted to gay content, but we don't watch it.

Eton College

As Chinese girls wake up from repression, the two-dimensional world is the freest space to express their tastes and to consume men

In the 2010 American film The Kids Are All Right, Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play a lesbian couple who enjoy watching gay male porn. Their son finds out and can't understand it. Julianne Moore's character says there's no helping it; that's just human sexual desire.

That line explains why fujoshi exist. People of every gender and orientation have complicated drives. In the film it's lesbians who like watching gay men, but in everyday life straight women are the main force, because they like men, and two or more men are even better.

Through the long ages when men were held above women, women had no right to say what they liked. Perhaps their tastes were never even discovered. In 1980s China, with no danmei manga and no handsome actors, how would you know you liked watching gay men?

For Chinese girls, Fuguo is also a free virtual space. Fujoshi began to appear in large numbers after 2000, and today they seem to be everywhere. Behind this lies a long repression, after which young women have won an awakening of consciousness, and their attitudes to sex have finally caught up with the West. But it has happened too fast. For many women, whether because of pressure from their parents, the influence of their schooling or the state of social welfare, complete freedom in real life is still out of reach. The one place they can do exactly as they please is the hidden two-dimensional world: expressing their tastes, getting smitten by some tsundere CP, switching to a new "husband" every few days. Everyone in this world is a contemporary of theirs, and it doesn't cost much.

There may be another question. Isn't gay the same as effeminate? Why do girls love it so much? Not so. As we noted in our piece on how Hollywood's tough guys have changed, women today want a more complete kind of man. In fact, the standards for judging men and women are converging: be brave and strong, but also emotionally rich. When Colin Firth weeps over his lost lover in A Single Man, when the freckled Eddie Redmayne puts on women's clothes in The Danish Girl, when Cumberbatch and Freeman show the kind of ambiguity once dismissed as sissy, they actually seem more manly.

The applause of female viewers in turn drives more fu-baiting. The Guardian said that even if Sherlock's creators deny writing a gay romance, the writers know perfectly well how fans react. And when Cumberbatch was promoting The Hobbit (Freeman plays the lead; Cumberbatch voices the dragon), he was asked whether anything was going on between him and his friend Freeman. He made a point of answering: oh, of course, he's the one who got me the contract, he looks after me on set, oh, and he knows exactly how hot I like my bath water. (Yes, and one last thing: we'll need two rooms.)

It's easy to understand. If you stood beside your partner and audiences all over the world started screaming, you couldn't resist teasing them a little either.

The Danish Girl