That comment was really... bewildering. And I don't mean it in a bad way. I was just very surprised by the depth of the person's self-analysis, as well as the severity of the side effects she suffered from her hobby. I recognised some of those things in myself, too, but on a much milder level. I was very much into M/M fanfiction as a teen, too, but if memory serves, I grew disinterested at age 17 or something. I never liked any kind of anime or yaoi, though: I thought the stereotypes depicted were super obvious and annoying. I came back to fic in my late twenties because I had time to kill, and what's more fun than reading unrealistic romantic stories?

M/M is definitely not only for straight girls/women; I know for a fact I'm not the only one who wanted to experiment with same-sex relationships without putting my own self out there. There was also convenient plausible deniability there: if my homophobic mother would have seen the stuff I read, I could have just gone "I just really like men, what can I say?". I couldn't have explained F/F content away like that. I certainly thought I was working on my internalised homophobia back in my teenage years when I was reading all that stuff, and maybe it did help me a little bit. I don't know. I'm a grown ass woman in my thirties now, and reading F/F and M/M stories is pure entertainment to me.

I don't know what's happening in Japan and Korea, I'm afraid, but I doubt a lot of people are transitioning over there. They are very conservative societies in their own unique ways.