Posing as an academic for a change

[zenkatsuo]

I haven't written a proper rambling entry in a long while. Likely because I've been hung up about homework and bidding on auctions every single night for the past God knows how long. Like all my entries after a while in posting, this one too is about nothing that's actually happened. Nothing much happens to me anyway.

Recently I read this comment

Comments

[chrysa]

Well, yaoi is predominantly written by and for women. There are a few exceptions to that, but even when male mangaka write yaoi, I feel like there is something... off about it. Presuming they're straight and have not had gay sex or something.

But let's be honest, yaoi is just glorified shoujo which - in the best case scenario - has more action and plot and and in the worst case scenario more flat chested-girls (and invisipeens) and -- I was going to say less tears but that's not even true. *SIGH*

I hesitate to use the term BL interchangeably with yaoi though, even if the difference is superficial outside of my mind. (That is, I'm insane.) Maybe because I think of BL as a more overarching term and yaoi as something very specific - probably because I've read yaoi for so long when really the term BL didn't exist in the fandom conscience.

I guess - in terms of the manga you were talking about that was being posted - my problem with their problem is that it bothers them that he asks the seme to "let him come" but they completely ignore the fact that in the first place, the seme had blackmailed him into sex in the first place. Or that the seme started screaming in very obscene detail in the hotel lobby about the sex they had last night and no one even turned a head to go "D8 WAHT". Or that, after the seme blackmailed him into sex and kept him up all night, he leaves thinking, "Despite everything, I enjoyed it"? That's not exactly the kind message you want to be sending: oh, if someone raped you/sexed you up without your consent, if you enjoyed it, then you are a whore it was consensual. (!)@#*!&$(*

That's not even to get started on the laundry list of complaints I compiled last week when I reacquainted myself with yaoi and some new trash series on the market. (Seriously, Punch Up? If you're going to talk about how much better sex is without protection, then it might be better if you didn't talk about condoms at ALL.)

Their complaint was really akin to having been shot in the heart and complaining about a paper cut on your finger kind of thing.

I have a lot of feelings, and now I'm done. See? Completely off topic.

[zenkatsuo]

Mm, sorry, I got used to using the term yaoi in reference to noncommercial works, i.e. doujinshi, in my BA work, so now I have trouble using it to refer to commercial works. Actually, appears that the Japanese themselves have no clear picture on how to differentiate between the referents of the two terms. I took my cues on the fact that yaoi was originally coined to refer to fandom generated works. But of course, at the time, there was no commercial equivalent... I guess in The States people generally think yaoi refers to "the hard stuff" and BL is the translation for shounen'ai?

It is shoujo. I don't know where the "glorified" comes in. My beef with the majority of other readers is that they don't seem to understand that. I guess because then they'd actually have to sit back and think about the message it's unintentionally sending, like condoning rape and endorsing unprotected sex, and they don't want to do that, because as long as it's just a male ass being fucked, you can turn it all into a funny little game of "spot that trope".
On the other hand, because the whole genre is in fact stylized depiction of female sexuality (stylized to the point where there're no females even present), I also think that it's a bit harsh to think the authors are trying to send those kinds of messages or themselves think that rape is okay if the sex is good and the rapist simply can't articulate his "love" in any other way. Like any other genre in manga, yaoi/BL has it's own set of conventions, and it's rare to find groundbreaking titles in this genre just like in any other genre.
Yaoi/BL bears striking similarities to Western trashy romance novels, like Harlequin novels. I don't dare presume you've read any, but if you by any chance have, they also have this (ridiculously unrealistic and at times deeply derogatory) script they all follow with minimal variations. The appeal of the genre is in knowing exactly what'll happen. This is, sadly, the female romantic ideal, I guess. Yaoi/BL follows that, and that's why it's so incredibly popular among women.
Women, I assume (not knowing that much about women), have a fantasy of being "taken" by a brooding man who may say "I love how tightly your hot little hole is squeezing me", but not "I love you". What the hell do I know, really, but when I read comments on y_d, that's the impression I certainly get. And when I say fantasy, I mean fantasy. No one really wants a shithead like that. Just making it clear that while I have my troubles with understanding women, I'm not quite that challenged.

I think I remember posting the guidelines to dealing with male rape I found on some universitys home page in the past. I was actually surprised that it's common for rapists to tell their victims "You're already hard, so you want this" to mindfuck with the victim and justify their behavior. I actually lost my train of thought here... Maybe it was about how differently women and men respond to genital stimulation. I mean, you can stick a guy who hasn't gotten any in weeks into a room with an amputee dressed as a nun and he may get an erection. But for women it's not all about the plumbing and the body responding even though the brain is screaming "NO!". So for what it's worth, in yaoi/BL, whenever a character is raped/blackmailed into sex and it feels so so good, it in fact is consensual... Same with it not really being rape if the rapist makes a sad face during it. Because it's not really even sex, it's love. Just like in Harlequin romances. Same with the safe sex practises. In the stupidly repressed and twisted Japanese sexual imagery going at it raw doesn't mean risking infection. It signals intimacy. These tropes are no different from the shoujo flower puke or specific angles. They're just conveying a meaning.
I'm not making excuses for mangaka or for the fans who end up condoning the behavior every time they say "UGH rape but that smex was HAWT", but sometimes I do feel we're the real dorks here, for putting it under a microscope and analyzing it.

And your comment wasn't even off-topic.

[chrysa]

I'm aware that yaoi is a term that originated from describing doujinshi, but in the Western BL fandom's conscience, it primarily describes manga (and doujinshi) works produced by mangaka (doujinshika) that run in phonebook mangazines and/or are self-published etc. I can't speak for how fandom thinks of the term "BL" but in my mind, it's a generally encompassing term. So I think of the fanart on Pixiv, the trashy RPS fanfiction I'm reading, and Japanese published "yaoi" all as BL, but yaoi as something more specific. But that's only in my own mind...

What I mean by glorified is that, a lot of women who read shoujo are really against ... shoujo (used in this sense as Yuu Watase-style of shoujo). But yaoi is like... if you're a woman who hates women's shoes, and some company is like, "Yeah, we hate shoes too! We understand everything you dislike about them, and have made shoes to cater to your needs." So it's like, shoes for women who hate women's shoes. But ultimately, they're still shoes for women - just women who hate shoes. Don't I have the best analogies? ♥

In any case, I think yaoi is glorified shoujo because it's a niche genre within shoujo [1] (used as a demographic/encompassing term) whose audience primarily or predominantly dislikes shoujo [2] (used in terms of Yuu Watase/Shoujo Beat sense). Not that yaoi is necessarily better or even particularly different than [2], but a glorified version of it. And with all the [1]/[2] I feel like I'm writing an academic paper now.

I pretty much agree with everything else you said, so I don't really have much more to add. I did read one romance novel once, when I was stuck in China. Except it was more like I read the first 50 pages, got bored and tried to find a sex scene which proved to be also boring, and then died of embarrassment at end. I didn't want to complain about a genre I never read, but since it proved to be just as terrible worse than I thought it would be, I have that right now.

In general, I take yaoi at its crappy face value and deal with it. I guess it just gets on my nerve when people complain about it because they complain about trivial things when ...yeah. But I guess even people living in collapsing houses have the right to complain about the shower water being too cold.

[zenkatsuo]

Well, using yaoi in reference to print media and BL as an umbrella term to refer to mixed media products like games, drama cds, as well as print media certainly feels more logical and less contrived. I think I remember now hearing of it before, so maybe it's not just you. ...Or maybe I'm just remembering the last time we've discussed the subject.

Indeed, your analogies are marvelous. A fact I've noted before. I guess I should look into more about the relationship between shoujo and yaoi, and the relationship yaoi readers have with shoujo. Probably the attitude toward shoujo will be different in the West than in Japan, since the Japanese have access to a wider selection of shoujo and not just the generic shoujo that ends up being licensed in the West.

Isn't it strange though, how the fans of yaoi (the Western fans at least) seem to be motivated by a dislike of shoujo, yet so many of them have complaints about yaoi. So what's the problem with shoujo if yaoi's still better? Girls instead of ukes?