That first uncontrollable and unexpected jubilation that I experienced watching my first yaoi was very revealing. I’ve been managing a yaoi page for some time now, and speaking from experience, I can confirm that boys and men come to yaoi to take a breather too. Yaoi is a refuge from a reigning machisme, from a patriarchal dictatorship. Sensitive to a T, dashing handsome (forever) young men. Well, here you go – there’re yaoi men! Men, created out of desire for a perfect man.
So, in full possession of my mental faculties and of sound mind, I repeat – I hate those men.
It is not that I identify very strongly with women (I don’t). And, mind you, there were people present during the scene, like camera men, sound, etc… No-bo-dy stopped. (Now to justify the Master they are looking for excuses. That feeling was somewhat confirmed by the recent revelations about the extreme abuse during the shooting of the Last Tango In Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) – “They DO do that on purpose!”. I have an insidious feeling that men actually enjoy exposing women in a degrading way. I still haven’t watched so praised Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002) (I’m quite a cinephile, I watch a lot). That’s why I have difficulties to watch any form of abuse. I have a very strong sense of empathy, and I always identify with a victim. Well, here’s something that got me thinking in a particular direction. I’m doing yaoi research on my skin, living a firsthand experience.
Well, I’m not a scholar, not a certified professional on the field. The genre created by women for women is misogynist? That’s absurd. Huh?! Seriously? Where did they fetch that? “At the beginning Yaoi was seen as misogynist” (Wiki). And made them walk in that shit that is by birth a women’s destiny. And made them suffer, made them cry, long for love and affection so that we could watch them go silly and cute and – finally – adorable. Do you know that the genre is created almost exclusively by women? What does it tell you? Before me was a trail of unanswered questions.īecause it inverses the accustomed situation. It did two important things: confirmed the official existence of yaoi and failed to define its too extendable nature. It’s full of information that made me gasp and reach for a glass of water. I’ve binged everything I could put my hands on for a couple of months, and then decided to go have a look at what scholars have to say about it. I’m not going to bore you with the definition, you can wiki it, just as I did at the beginning, needing some common sense to organise my yaoi overload. Yaoi rarely tackle issues of homophobia and often have problematic portrayals of rape, where violent sex is seen as a display of passionate love.It’s a question I’ll be trying to answer all along this blog.Īs soon as I discovered the word for my experience, I wanted to know what it signified. The majority of comments in online forums argue while Yaoi authors fetishize gay men, they rarely refer to the men as gay, but rather two people in love. Gay men on the other hand are conflicted about whether it’s ok for straight women to be writing gay erotica. ‘We ‘rotten women’ recognise that homosexuality exists and it is beautiful.’ Yaoi: is it ok?
‘Since (gay marriage] is illegal, gay love is in a sense taboo,’ said one fujoshi in the documentary series Gaycation. The rotten girls who create and read Yaoi argue they are acknowledging real love in its purest form. Yaoi is big business in Japan raking in about $120 million (£94,800,000) per year and has a dedicated fan base of self-confessed fujoshi – ‘rotten girls’. Many of the images in the manga show images of romanticised love, but also graphic sex scenes.
One character is always more masculine – often called the pitcher – while the other man in the relationship tends to display more feminine characteristics and is referred to as the catcher.
Yaoi is predominantly written by straight women for straight women with stories that depict heteronormative ideas of romance. That is Yaoi, Japanese anime or manga (comics) whose stories centre around ‘boy love’ and homoerotic tales. So, any stories about LGBTI should be applauded, but there is one genre of gay storytelling that has people scratching their heads. LGBTI people have been underrepresented in pop culture for decades.