My Thoughts On Yaoi
There's not enough hours in the day for me to get into my train twins side fandom that much because there is SO MUCH CONTENT compared to other stuff I've liked, but I dip in so often by hitting the 'you might like..' section of Tumblr. One thing I noticed was that a lot of artists were posting borderline shippy content that was the next best thing to the twins pinching each others asses, yet they'd put captions like 'DNI shippers, they're brothers FFS!!1!' I thought...yeah right. You aren't into twincest the way Republican politicians are never gay.. Just for goofs, I grabbed a random post and pretended to be diplomatic on it even though it was obvious trolling (heyy I did say it might be nothing). A few people including the artist got PISSED over it. Oh well, that's what the block button is for, but more often than not, I'll get three new followers a day over that kind of shit because people like a character.
As an aside, I'll point out that if you look at fanart and can't imagine doing whatever is pictured with your own sibling, then it's fair game for shipping. It doesn't make it better if it's identical twins with a magical twin connection. You wouldn't see me crying myself to sleep or making a shrine for one of my siblings if they ever went missing. In fact, I wouldn't even notice until someone else told me they were missing. IE: Christmas rolls around, and here I am wondering what ever happened to (so-and-so). Mom would tell me he/she was sucked into a wormhole that brought him/her back two thousand years, and I'd be like, "Shit...that's weird!"
At work, I thought of a funny head canon based on my personal experiences. Even though we live in the age of feminism, cultural misogyny is still deeply entrenched in our culture. I had people assuming that I'd end up an old spinster auntie, just because I didn't have children by age 25. Just because I wasn't into the dirt bag office party culture and wasn't having back alley sex with loser potheads, it was assumed no man wanted me. If I wouldn't have eventually pointed out that half the men in our office in their forties and fifties were still single with no prospects, nobody would have noticed because it isn't treated as a big deal if men are single. It's assumed they either want to be or they have a good reason to be.
Hear me out now, so imagine the world of Pokemon which is a kinder, gentler world where the atom bomb and machine gun were never invented. People settled their differences battling with adorable, chibified little monsters. Unova region must be the pinnacle of their civilization because everybody rides bikes for lack of cars, but they still have the subway, go figure. In this world there is still cultural misogyny and that is why nobody thinks anything weird about why two fifty year old men who have never been married would show up for work in wacky complementary outfits and spend every waking moment together. Nobody would question it because they'd just take them at their word, the way people do irl. It would be something like, "We spent too much time focused on our careers and never had time to meet anybody. Simple as that!" The Kharmii wouldn't be around to wonder if they were secret serial killers.
The reason for this might be because throughout history, women have always outnumbered men. It's possible that either more are born female, or maybe more females survive the embryonic stage in greater numbers. Also, it has been of utmost importance to keep women not only dependent on men, but feeling like there aren't enough to go around...thus the pressure to keep up strict and almost ridiculous beauty standards. Then came feminism which threw off the whole dynamic because women started going to work with the feeling that popping out babies didn't necessarily have to be the primary focus of their lives. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, btw. There are problems with the way things were and problems with the way things are now. We haven't been able to find out a good solution to make everything work perfectly. I'm just working out something in my head and writing my observations.
Japan seemed to be the country where the birthrate started plummeting the quickest. I think they've consistently been below half of replacement rate for over a decade now. They might have a touch of Rat Utopia going on with people packed in urban areas, and where women used to suffer a strict, patriarchal culture. Funny thing is that a lot of them got into Yaoi as a substitute for real relationships, and men reacted to it with outdated, misogynistic assumptions. They were called 'fujoshi' which means 'rotten girl' insinuating that their interests ruin their prospects for marriage. It's the same old attitude that it's always on the woman to avoid becoming a spinster, and that single status means failure. The meme I found on it focuses on the woman's appearance, but realistically, in the age of feminism and women in the workplace, women no longer have to conform to strenuous standards of beauty. Many don't feel as if they have to spend outrageous amounts of money on clothes or have to starve themselves rail thin. Many don't want to keep up expensive hair styles or spend two hours in the morning on makeup. Men don't want to admit this, and they certainly don't want to admit that it's more likely they are still single because women aren't having them rather than the other way around. What's the solution? Well, I'm not sure. It's not like we could pressure men to conform to a Yaoi enthusiast's version of what male beauty is because I look at shit like this and can't imagine what that even is. I just know that I did my Protestant duty by putting four replacement humans into the world, so I don't feel bad getting into interests that many other women who choose not to have families are into.
As an aside, I'll point out that if you look at fanart and can't imagine doing whatever is pictured with your own sibling, then it's fair game for shipping. It doesn't make it better if it's identical twins with a magical twin connection. You wouldn't see me crying myself to sleep or making a shrine for one of my siblings if they ever went missing. In fact, I wouldn't even notice until someone else told me they were missing. IE: Christmas rolls around, and here I am wondering what ever happened to (so-and-so). Mom would tell me he/she was sucked into a wormhole that brought him/her back two thousand years, and I'd be like, "Shit...that's weird!"
At work, I thought of a funny head canon based on my personal experiences. Even though we live in the age of feminism, cultural misogyny is still deeply entrenched in our culture. I had people assuming that I'd end up an old spinster auntie, just because I didn't have children by age 25. Just because I wasn't into the dirt bag office party culture and wasn't having back alley sex with loser potheads, it was assumed no man wanted me. If I wouldn't have eventually pointed out that half the men in our office in their forties and fifties were still single with no prospects, nobody would have noticed because it isn't treated as a big deal if men are single. It's assumed they either want to be or they have a good reason to be.
Hear me out now, so imagine the world of Pokemon which is a kinder, gentler world where the atom bomb and machine gun were never invented. People settled their differences battling with adorable, chibified little monsters. Unova region must be the pinnacle of their civilization because everybody rides bikes for lack of cars, but they still have the subway, go figure. In this world there is still cultural misogyny and that is why nobody thinks anything weird about why two fifty year old men who have never been married would show up for work in wacky complementary outfits and spend every waking moment together. Nobody would question it because they'd just take them at their word, the way people do irl. It would be something like, "We spent too much time focused on our careers and never had time to meet anybody. Simple as that!" The Kharmii wouldn't be around to wonder if they were secret serial killers.
The reason for this might be because throughout history, women have always outnumbered men. It's possible that either more are born female, or maybe more females survive the embryonic stage in greater numbers. Also, it has been of utmost importance to keep women not only dependent on men, but feeling like there aren't enough to go around...thus the pressure to keep up strict and almost ridiculous beauty standards. Then came feminism which threw off the whole dynamic because women started going to work with the feeling that popping out babies didn't necessarily have to be the primary focus of their lives. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, btw. There are problems with the way things were and problems with the way things are now. We haven't been able to find out a good solution to make everything work perfectly. I'm just working out something in my head and writing my observations.
Japan seemed to be the country where the birthrate started plummeting the quickest. I think they've consistently been below half of replacement rate for over a decade now. They might have a touch of Rat Utopia going on with people packed in urban areas, and where women used to suffer a strict, patriarchal culture. Funny thing is that a lot of them got into Yaoi as a substitute for real relationships, and men reacted to it with outdated, misogynistic assumptions. They were called 'fujoshi' which means 'rotten girl' insinuating that their interests ruin their prospects for marriage. It's the same old attitude that it's always on the woman to avoid becoming a spinster, and that single status means failure. The meme I found on it focuses on the woman's appearance, but realistically, in the age of feminism and women in the workplace, women no longer have to conform to strenuous standards of beauty. Many don't feel as if they have to spend outrageous amounts of money on clothes or have to starve themselves rail thin. Many don't want to keep up expensive hair styles or spend two hours in the morning on makeup. Men don't want to admit this, and they certainly don't want to admit that it's more likely they are still single because women aren't having them rather than the other way around. What's the solution? Well, I'm not sure. It's not like we could pressure men to conform to a Yaoi enthusiast's version of what male beauty is because I look at shit like this and can't imagine what that even is. I just know that I did my Protestant duty by putting four replacement humans into the world, so I don't feel bad getting into interests that many other women who choose not to have families are into.