Women Painting on the Clean Slate of the Male Body: A New Discourse on Boys Love

Note on this Essay and Why I Wrote It:
Although many people use Facebook and Twitter to interact with a vast number of friends and update a large number of people on their everyday activities, my roommate and I have often used these sites to communicate memos and inside jokes to each other. We actually feel more at home at 4chan, an anonymous image board where it is impossible to be judged for any crazy idea or inappropriate joke you've made. As m00t, the founder of the website states, Facebook and networking sites like it are working in a big brother way to eliminate anonymity on the internet. Now this essay isn't about anonymity on the internet, but keep in mind where I stand when I explain how I commenced to “dump” my yaoi pics on my friend's Facebook page (with her permission of course). At the time, her Facebook was named after a protagonist from a novel she owned, and she only had me, my best friend (also a fellow fan of yaoi), my brother (desensitized to it considering I, the yaoi advocate, am his sister), and a close male friend who found the entire thing humorous.

Unfortunately, the day after I posted these pictures coincided with my roommate's decision to befriend a large number of people and reveal her true identity. Neither of us thought much of it. The pictures had been bumped down (we exchanged wall posts almost constantly). But suddenly, the latest yaoi picture I posted (of L and Light from Death Note, incidentally) became a huge controversy the moment I began to defend yaoi by distinguishing it from pornography in the comments.

Suddenly, all these guys I had considered friends swarmed in from nowhere and began attacking me from left and right, including my own brother. One of these protesters went so far as to make a series of crude sexist jokes that I just laughed off at the time, but now, on hindsight, make me feel very disappointed in him. In the end, someone reported the picture, erasing all evidence of an extremely engaging, but upsetting and one-sided debate. 

I started writing this essay a week before any of this even happened. At the time, I called it “An Essay in Defense of Boys Love.” Some of the sources in this paper are from research I did a few years ago for a speech I gave in college on the subject. I took a defensive posture then, and I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to defend this genre. We defend it because it's more than porn to us. We defend it because yaoi is subversive and thus antagonizes many people. We defend it because the love affairs we read about move us, sometimes to tears, touch us and open our hearts and minds. But I recently amended the title because I realized that although this genre is made to kindle many emotions within us, violent emotions are not among those. To take a "defensive" posture is to take one of two postures a solider may take in war, and I realized that wasn't what I was seeking to do in this essay. So instead of defending Boys Love, I wish to reform the way we talk about it--within the community and outside it. After all, Boys Love is about just that--love. And I hope those who read this, fans and dissenters alike, may open their minds and hearts, not only to take in my words, but to continue this discourse in a new way.

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Before you dive in: Please remember to click on links to images and click on each * for each footnote in the text. Also, the essay is written in MLA format, so sources are cited directly or in parenthesis.

Yaoi, otherwise known as BL or Boys Love,* is a genre of manga, literature, and animated films featuring men in romantic (oftentimes, also sexual) relationships with other men created primarily by women, and always, by definition, intended for women.* Gay men may enjoy yaoi, but they are not the intended audience, as bara comics are traditionally made by gay men for gay men. Some readers may know these things, some may not. Either way, what many people do not know, both fans and critics, is that yaoi is precipitating important social change. I'm going to discuss how pornography (images of whores) is an extension of a masculinist market of bodies; how all images of women are influenced by this market and serve to continue it; how yaoi is a response to this male-centric model and an art form with which women can, by creating and consuming it, explore romantic and sexual ideas outside of what mainstream media and pornography dictates; and finally, that yaoi is the only art form through which we can do this.

First, yaoi, despite its depictions of explicit sexual intercourse, is not pornography—it actually exists outside of pornography and works to do something entirely at odds with it. According to the Oxford Dictionary, pornography is “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” But is this an adequate definition of pornography? According to this dictionary, the word was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, and it is derived “from Greek pornographos ‘writing about prostitutes,’ from pornē ‘prostitute’" and "graphein ‘write.’” What qualifies as pornography, as Andrea Dworkin, author of Pornography: Men Possessing Woman states, is nothing short of content depicting whores, the lowest castes of whores in fact, and she explains, broadening the Oxford definition, that “graphos” can actually mean “writing, etching, [and] drawing" (199-200). Considering we use the root “graph” in the word "photography," as well, this broader translation makes more sense. Who purchases and sleeps with whores? Men, of course. Who creates pornography? Men. For whom? Men. Then, doesn't that genderless definition of porn fall quite a bit short? Should it not read, “printed or visual material...” produced by men “containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings” in men?

But wait, someone might say now, women look at pornography. Men aren't the only ones. Sure we do. But we are not the intended audience. If we were, certainly, women would not so often be shown being raped, abused, or violently treated in porn. Further, if we were, why are female porn actors paid so much more in heterosexual porn than men? In fact the phenomenon of straight men entering the gay porn business is more common than you might think due to the disparity of pay in the heterosexual porn industry. I worked with a bisexual man who used to be in the porn industry and he explained to me the disparity in pay. Because the woman is the consumed object, the man is hardly present, the male consuming the porn is intended to inhabit the man's role. The man is not the focus, it is better if he is more or fully clothed; the woman, the whore, is the commodity.

With that in mind, I don't want to disregard the damage done to men working in the porn industry. They are equally exposed to the risks of the business (contracting serious STDs, for example) as women are, and they are working class men who, like their female coworkers, who are made inferior to bourgeois or middle class to upper class men. Unlike women, however, the working man's face is often obscured, he is meant to be ignored, to merely serve as a vessel through which the bourgeois viewer can enter to experience the woman on display.* Thus, men in pornography serve a different purpose than women: we are to forget the male's presence, because the video is made for the male watching with him in mind. The distinction here is that damage is not done to the image of the man. The man is the protagonist the male watching inhabits: damage is done to the working class man whose identity is obscured, whom bourgeois man uses as a means to an end—not his image, his image is a husk. The image of male remains neutral, as it always has (note that the default “body” in anatomy books are male—also, as Louann Brizendine, MD and author of bestselling books The Female Brain and The Male Brain states, there is a tradition of the default mind in psychology being male and psychology being flawed as a result of this male-centric assumption (2)).

But wait, what about porn featuring two women? Again, the women are the objects, engaged in sexual acts for men's pleasure. The porn industry caters to men and treats men as its sole audience.

Of course, homosexual porn featuring men exists, but this also made for gay men's benefit, not women's. Take a stroll in any one of Castro's sex shops or search porn of real men on the internet. Pornographers market the erotic material solely to men, categorizing it as “gay porn”--gay in content, for a gay, male audience. In fact, yaoi fan's are notoriously squeamish about sexual depictions of real men as seen in this comic making fun of this trend. Also, as protagonist Tomonori of the yaoi manga Love Recipe explains in these two manga pages to a gay male yaoi manga artist that yaoi does not have the same intent as gay porn. He kindly emphasizes for us on this page that “BOYS LOVE IS NOT PORNOGRAPHY” because its aim is to make girls' “hearts go ba-thump” not make girls “go pant, pant” (Higashizato).

Now, someone well-versed in all the uses of the word “porn” might claim the category “soft porn” commonly used for romance novels, erotic books written mostly by women for women, contradicts my claims. Traditionally, explicitly erotic romance novels have been considered “soft porn.” I, however, challenge this use of the term. Remember that our definition of porn only includes materials that are made to “stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional reactions,” but romance novels definitely elicit emotional reactions and they are created to do so, while depicting erotic encounters. Hence, the word “romance,” meaning “a book or movie dealing with love in a sentimental or idealized way” (Oxford), has come into popular use for a genre made for a primarily female audience. Since, romance novels, by virtue of their purpose and very definition, are created to elicit emotional as well as erotic responses in the reader, romance novels, even those that depict explicit sexual intercourse, are not porn.

One could argue the word “soft” modifies porn to allow for inclusion of an emotional element, but in that case we are going to have to call many novels, some classics even, “soft porn” as well—novels like Snow Falling on Cedars, Lolita, Morvern Callar, Memoirs of a Geisha, Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, one of Flannary O'Connor's short stories, etc. Of course, this list doesn't even begin to take into account artistic or mainstream films we would have to fit under this degrading monicker. Since porn also stimulates no “aesthetic” feelings, surely, these works should not be categorized as porn.

Then pornography is, currently, made by men for men to stimulate erotic reactions, not emotional or aesthetic ones ((UPDATE)). Perhaps one could argue watching a pornographic movie or reading such a book did incite an emotional reaction or did meet some aesthetic standard, but one must admit that that was not its aim, not what was “intended” as the definition words. In fact, it might anger me to watch a porn flick that depicts the humiliation or rape of a woman, but as I am not the intended audience, this was not the intent. Pornography “intends” to elicit only erotic feelings, that is its sole purpose.

I aim to distinguish yaoi from porn not because of a lack or lesser intensity of obscenity (the material being sexually explicit does not negate my arguments; actually, the fact our government doesn't consider pornographic elements that are prevalent in mainstream media to be “legally” obscene is central to my later claims), but in differences in intent and authorship. For centuries, men with the disposable income have made and consumed pornographic images. Men have sold and consumed the women depicted in the images, narratives, etc constituting porn, thus reducing women to commodities. These images reflect a physical reality—a transaction of bodies occurring in prostitution rings in our country and all over the world. This has not changed. What has changed is that, as of the past four decades or so, a small but growing number of women have begun creating and consuming erotic material that does not depict them. Further, there is a disparity between this erotic material and that men consume—and what creates this gap is an attention to emotional feelings. But how did yaoi come into existence and what makes it different from not only pornography, materials featuring woman as commodities, but also from romance novels, which depict female sexuality from a feminine perspective?

Most of us are familiar with manga, Japanese comics and their current, growing popularity. What you might not know is that manga is actually a fairly old art form in Japan—at least a century old, in different forms. However, until the 1970s women couldn't publish manga. But they did create it in the form of doujinshi or fan comics made based on popular, serialized manga. Amateur artists at the time (and still today) went to fan-run markets to buy and exchange doujinshi. Most of the comics those women made featured male characters from popular series in homoerotic relationships together. During this time, no published shoujo manga (manga for girls) existed, so the characters these female artists were appropriating were from shounen manga (comics made for boys) (Suzuki).

"Year 24 Group" is the name people use to refer to the very first professional female manga-ka in Japan. Like all aspiring female manga-ka at the time, the Year 24 Group drew doujins, many of them homoerotic. What set them apart was that they successfully published stories featuring their own characters, and much of what they created was philosophical, complex, and far from what most of us would consider “gay porn.” In fact, many of the characters were highly androgynous; academic scholarship on yaoi's history has compared the characters to “genderless angels” (Suzuki).

But why is any of this important? Think about it: for hundreds of years men were making paintings and stories, and, as technology advanced, photographs and movies of whores to sell to other men. It wasn't enough for men to commodify the physical bodies of whores, but they also took control of their images. Dworkin describes the camera as yet another phallus in porn, another means to dominate, sexualize, and penetrate the whore (42). And this double penetration continued with perpetuity, with a stubborn belief in women as objects, not sexual subjects who desire or might wish to create and consume erotic material of their own. Then, all of a sudden, in Japan, a place that is still quite gender conservative, women started publishing homoerotic depictions of men for other women's enjoyment, for the first time in history.

But note that they drew these men, just like romance novelists wrote their stories, these women created these characters. Unlike men, they had and they still have no power to engage in a market of bodies. Men control bodies. They trade and buy women. But women do not and cannot trade and buy real men. Porn is still not made for us. So, some might say, we make some for ourselves. But we don't make porn for ourselves. Like romance novels, yaoi does not intend to produce the same effect pornography does. In both works, both main characters are depicted as subjective thinking and desiring entities, with emotional and relational concerns. Almost all yaoi, like romance novels, is intended to elicit emotional feelings. But even the yaoi that is not comics or anime with story lines and characters proclaiming love, that just depicts two drawn men engaged in a sexual act, is not pornography by virtue that is not made by men or for men and that it does not depict whores. Sexual intercourse does not make someone a commodity, but the very fact women are traded as commodities, makes porn itself, the depiction of this trade, a commodification of her image. Yaoi has no real market of bodies to emulate or perpetuate through image. The figures in yaoi, unlike porn, cannot represent real whores.

In fact, the only kind of erotic images I've ever seen geared toward women of real people are in Playgirl, invented, incidentally, around the same time as yaoi in the 1970s, during the height of the woman's rights movement. However, even Playgirl, despite its title, is not geared exclusively toward women and is, in fact, turning more and more away from women as its sole audience. As Daniel Nardicio, Playgirl's director of marketing, a gay man, indicates, Playgirl did not want to exclude its gay male audience and has “succeeded in getting rid of [its] 'Entertainment For Women' byline” as it “was doing a disservice to the [male] gay readers” (Hess). Further, Playgirl still does not invalidate my claims as it is not pornography in that it does not feature whores--like Playboy, it features nude models. Women do not have whores. But Playgirl differs from yaoi sharply in that it objectifies bodies—not men, this is impossible in a society that does not market male bodies to females, but working class men for a bourgeois audience. Actually, the fact the “for women” has been stripped from the title, that the male portion of the audience has taken such precedence a woman is not at the head of operations, but a man, also distinguishes Playgirl from yaoi. Gay men enjoy yaoi, too, but the genre is still distinguished in that is garnered toward women. Here we see Playgirl is being made with men in mind, like all other erotic creations, but hell will freeze over when Playboy is going to take its lesbian audience into account. This just illustrates the asymmetry the market of bodies creates. Men are the consumers of prostitutes, so thinking of women as consuming erotic material is unconventional for most people. What Nardicio shows us is that women cannot be the primary audience of erotic media, at least, not for long, unless it takes the shape of yaoi, which is exclusive in that artists mold drawn figures for feminine uses as I'll discuss later.

Further, Nardicio makes a highly fallacious claim that is based on the kind of logic many men use to criticize yaoi: “women were objectified for so long, and now straight men are being objectified. It’s a great position to be in.” There are two major reasons this claim is problematic. First, we women are not in the kind of position in a patriarchal society to be able to objectify men. Men are never the object in patriarchy in relation to women. Not in our anatomy books, not in our language (only until very recently the word “man” has stopped being used to describe all humanity, and still “he” is the default not “she”), not in our politics (only a fraction of our representative government is composed of women, despite the fact women are not and never have been a minority; we have never been adequately represented in Congress or in any other federal or state institution), you name it. The male image cannot be objectified if the man is the subject, the center—as long men can reduce women to objects for male consumption and only perceive us in relation to themselves. This is the reason women make yaoi, the image of the male is both rigid and malleable: it isn't limited as the female form is (sexualized and commodified), but it also cannot be reduced to an object, and is thus rigid, always emerging above the female. My friend Elaine, an artist, said it best when she explained her experience posting art on deviantart.com (she has been a member for five years now) and how every time she posted a drawing of a female, comments from Elaine's followers inevitably remarked on the girls' attractiveness, while art of men would garner comments like “oh what a nerd” or other elements of his perceived personality. The female drawings could not escape being rated based on principles of sex appeal, in other words, according to their use-value for men.

Further, men cannot be objectified because, in a patriarchal society in which they control the market of bodies, they have an invested interest in keeping this from happening. This is why the working class man is objectified, not the upper class. A philosophy major I spoke with at my school criticizing feminists, ironically, talked about how the working class man is obscured in porn, how porn is often shot at fancy hotels and mansions, to valorize the bourgeois audience's wealth and assure these wealthier men that the working class man in the shot can never have those things he has, can never possess the woman in the film as he can. In a patriarchal, capitalist society, it's not subversive to objectify and commodify the working class. We already use his body to do dangerous and harmful labor (like construction). Porn does not disrupt this cycle. Playgirl does not objectify men, saying it does is like making the statement “I am objectifying myself,” which is inherently contradictory as "I" indicates a subject. The male viewpoint is the viewpoint of patriarchy, so Playgirl, like porn, only objectifies the working man in a capitalist society from a bourgeois or privileged point of view.*

Another problem with Nardicio's statement is that he acts like women objectifying men would be a positive thing (if doing so was even possible), but such a thing would not improve matters. Reducing anyone to his or her use-value strips him or her of dignity. The embarrassment Nardicio continually expresses feeling driving around the “Hulk Mobile” to advertise Playgirl in local cities is something porn actors and playboy and playgirl models become desensitized to to the point of losing all dignity. Perpetuating a cycle of bourgeois consumption of images of working class men does not help women, as this society is set up to commodify us as well. So s objectifying working class men in no way furthers the feminist cause.

Fortunately, women who create yaoi are not aiming to do that. We create enriched worlds in our stories, comics, movies, and anime, giving the characters an emotional depth and dignity, portraying them in egalitarian relationships as people, not commodities. Ironically, our unreal men are more real than the men in playgirl or gay porn, who are portrayed in ways that work to make the audience forget about the humanity of those in the footage, to reduce them to objects. Because yaoi has no stake in precipitating patriarchy as pornography does, it never has a need to reduce (and it couldn't anyway, as women have no physical whores) the men it portrays to anything short of human.

It is precisely these ideas that make yaoi not pornography like the CLICK HERE FOR BIG COCKS AND HOT BABES is pornography. Yaoi does not depict whores or prostitutes for those who have greater power to consume. And prostitutes can be men. This is why gay porn is still porn. But prostitutes exist for men. Prostitution and pornography are integral to continuing a patriarchal cycle of male ownership and dominance over property and commodities. Pornography does not depict relationships, it depicts the man penetrating the whore (be the whore female or male), the subject capturing the object. But as Dworkin states, in porn, the camera acts as a phallus, and in gay porn, we can consider the camera to be the REAL phallus: it is the camera that allows the man with the disposable income to take ownership of the whores depicted in the porn he consumes. All porn asserts bourgeois man's position and ability to control bodies because it is he who controls production, it is he who creates, sells, and buys. Pornography featuring women, however, serves to the direct detriment of women as not only is the whore captured, but the name “whore” that makes her a commodity, is perpetuated over and over, and used against all women, even bourgeois women in a higher social class. No woman is immune from the word “whore.” All of us have either been called it, thought to be it, have been framed in relation to it. Thus, men can read romance novels as depicted "whores," although they do no,  because men have the power to dub sensual women whore, as they have, what Dworkin calls the power of naming (17). Yaoi, however, liberates women from this cycle of degradation.

How? First consider the power of naming and what it entails. Turn on the TV and you can't avoid women with big breasts, with perfect, tanned, shimmering legs, red lips, flushed cheeks, high heels. A woman can be reduced to her usable, sexual, fetishized components. Open up an anatomy book: the default body is male. What separates female from male is nothing more than the extraneous adornments that men can use for sexual enjoyment. Any depiction of a women cannot escape this. Put her in a long skirt to cover up her legs, her breasts are still there, only depict a flat chested women, she wears high heels to sexualize her feet, has eroticized lips or hair. Take away more and she is only a woman by name, but she can still be defined as other women are by how she falls short of fulfilling her use-value for men. Take away the name and she ceases to be a woman.

Remember the genderless angels I described in the first yaoi created? What I outlined above, stripping a woman of fetishized body parts, leads us to yaoi. Most yaoi features two men, an uke (which translates roughly to “receiver,” describing the guy on the “bottom”) and a seme (“attacker,” the guy on top). The uke is often practically a woman stripped of fetishized female parts and with a penis. Ukes often think like women-- (a reviewer from Publisher's Weekly likens the uke protagonist of My Paranoid Next Door Neighbor to “a heroine in a Harlequin romance novel” and this is not uncommon), and often inhabit the passive position in a relationship women traditionally are depicted having with one important key difference: they are not called women and they cannot be fetishized as women. This way, women reading yaoi, who often identify with the uke, escape the male naming and male fetishization and objectification. Though a man can open a romance novel and, even on the rare occasion that a romance novelist hasn't internalized patriarchal constructions of female submissiveness, he can reduce the woman in its pages to “whore,” if he looks at yaoi, no matter how feminine an uke is, because an uke is named “man,” has no fetishized female parts, and has a penis, a man cannot use a sexual depiction of an uke with a seme to degrade women.

Now what happens when women make and consume yaoi? They don't just make and consume stories of masculine semes sweeping dainty he-women off their feet to sigh over and embrace those boring norms. While some yaoi certainly does this, a lot of it blurs or complicates those roles in some way.    Sometimes both characters are exceptionally feminine, sometimes they switch sexual roles, sometimes those roles aren't so clear or are problematized. More often than not, even in yaoi in which the seme is dominant and active and the uke is highly feminine and passive, the seme will do the cooking and/or cleaning in the house (for example, in Lovers in the Night, Antoine, an aristocrat, is the uke and his butler Claude is the seme)—which is a huge reversal in Japan, where house wives almost always are expected to fulfill those roles while men, even fathers, are gone for days at a time at work. Of course, yaoi is notorious for the commonality of rape or violence—it's not unusual to see a seme rape an uke to show his “love” or even hit him in a fit of jealousy (in the manga Truly Kindly, four out of six of the stories featured involve non-consensual sex). But this is the point. As scholars Brent Wilson and Toko Masami explain, through yaoi, women can explore sexual situations that would otherwise be harmful to them because, in yaoi, there are no woman depicted. They use effeminate, male bodies as a “nearly blank slate to scrawl, scrub-out, and sometime even with an elegant line draw new forms of femininity.” Through all these different kinds of yaoi (from sci-fi to mystery, from romantic comedy to historical fiction and more—all with various degrees of explicitness, some including no sexual content, some +18 material) women can create and read romantic material without ever having to box themselves or their gender into a restrictive or degrading role in a relationship. So, like romance novels, yaoi is made to sexually stimulate women, but unlike romance novels, even when written by women who have internalized patriarchal norms that subjugate women, yaoi cannot limit women to patriarchal constructions of what it means to be in sexual and romantic relationship as a women.

One will never understand yaoi if one thinks of it as comics, stories, and animations of “gay men.” The only way we can parse out what yaoi is really doing subtextually is by considering, as described above, how, women are using yaoi to rethink their own identities. In most yaoi, the main characters don't even identify themselves as “gay.” And even when they do, this is not the focus of the story. In many yaoi, one or both of characters are engaging in sexual or romantic relations with another man for the first time. More importantly, I've read many, many yaoi comics and seen many yaoi anime in my lifetime, and never, not once, have I ever seen either one of the male characters have an identity crisis over possibly being “gay” or even have any need to reevaluate his identity because of his homoerotic relationship. More commonly, not identifying as gay will drive a character to resist the other male character's advances, but once he succumbs (either by will or force) he does not, despite inevitably enjoying the sexual acts, feel the need to seriously reevaluate his identity. This also speaks to the subversive and liberating nature of yaoi. Commonly, the seme is sexually ambiguous, he has had many relationships with women and has fallen in love with this man, just this one. He does not usually have an orientation (or if he does, it is heterosexual!). At most, the comic might make a joke out of the character considering for the first time he is “gay” but it is never a central concern of the story.

Story. That's right. Say what you want about the apparent superficiality of many yaoi comics, but they always have some sort of story. And all stories have some sort of conflict or drama. So what is the conflict or drama in yaoi? Usually, it's the uke's resistance, for many different reasons: maybe he thinks he just likes girls or there might be another possible love interest, a misunderstanding, a kidnapping, what have you—sometimes even class differences come into play. The point of yaoi is that it features a love that transcends—gender, social restrictions, class, many seemingly insurmountable hurtles. This doesn't mean it always has a happy ending. In fact, most of the best yaoi involves someone tragically dying (Ai No Kusabi, Song of the Wind and the Trees, “Chinoiserie”). Hell, yaoi's not really about men anyway, it's about women—but gay men can enjoy it too because it's about the impossibility of unbridled passion, the internal and external struggles we face. And gay men, like women, have experienced oppression for their feelings and their true desires, have had to suppress who they really are.

That said, there are people will deride much yaoi as being unoriginal or 2-D, that it might be more concerned with getting two guys to have hot sex at some point than any real plot or achieving some aesthetic standard.  One might point to the general structure of many yaoi: two guys meet, have a steamy encounter or two, engage in some kind of conflict, and finally consummate the relationship with the ultimate sex act (anal penetration). While I don't consider yaoi to be pornography according the definition I've laid out, I'm positing that yaoi's father, if you will, is pornography, and its mother is romance novels. Yaoi has broken away from and rebelled against its father, but it has also derived a number of conventions from him. Nabokov, in his introduction to Lolita, a novel (now regarded as a classic work of literature) about a pedophile's obsession with the title character, discusses pornography's formula. He states that a number of publishers wanted to market Lolita as pornography, and suggested he change the second half which seemed to “drag.” He explains that pornography follows a certain structure: sexual acts that increase in intensity as the story goes on. An example he offers is that of a story that involves a man having sex with one woman, then as the story goes on, perhaps he has an orgy with multiple. The pornographic reader's interest isn't kept unless the sex acts crescendo, in other words.*

Certainly, not all yaoi follows that structure. In fact, most yaoi features multiple stories: there might be a main story, but the author includes side ones, and those stories don't necessarily crescendo in sexual explicitness or intensity. But each story, in and of itself, often does. Of course, there are many stories that also do not follow this trend (examples include Ai No Kusabi, Boy's Love, most stories by Fumi Yoshinaga—including “Truly Kindly” – all which end tragically).

But the pornography formula is common and exists to better sexually stimulate the reader. Usually, the first sexual encounter between seme and uke isn't full anal sex; often, he first jacks him off, or sucks him off or, sometimes, a kiss initiates the relationship and things amp up gradually from there.* In yaoi like the Level C OVA (original video animation), Little Butterfly, and My Paranoid Nextdoor Neighbor, the crescendo is quite obvious and formulaic: the uke resists, is afraid or hesitant for whatever reason, the seme initiates sexual encounters that bring the two closer to anal penetration and finally consummates the relationship with the uke.

But yaoi is quite unlike porn in many ways—one being the importance of love (and often monogamy) even in those comics and anime featuring the most pornesqe formulas. Even in My Paranoid Next Door Neighbor, considered hardcore smut in the world of yaoi, the main thing holding uke Yukito back from being intimate or in a full-on relationship with seme Hokuto, is his mistaken belief that Hokuto doesn't really love him, that he's just playing around with him and plays around the same way with other guys. This is a common conflict in yaoi. Sometimes, the situation is reversed with a loose uke who wants a purely sexual relationship with a loyal seme who wishes to have the uke to himself and is the first to fall in love (see manga cited under Hirokawa, Shimazaki, Tachibana, Kana). Almost always, love is integral. When love is not explicitly expressed by either character, usually its a sign of greater complexity and originality in the work. In Ai no Kusabi and in “Chinoiserie,” for example, class division allows some characters the ability to demand sexual favors from others, problematizing any deeper feelings the characters have for each other. In these works, the inequity of power distribution in both males in the relationship makes it impossible for them to be together in a fulfilling, mutual relationship, and both end tragically.

But love isn't always the central concern in the most innovative of yaoi, which takes it beyond the scope of the romance novel. In Thirsting for Love, for example, the characters are brought together by the death of a girl they have all slept with. It isn't so much love that drives them, but perhaps consolation, or the desire to be closer to the girl they have all lost through each other. Note the woman is allowed to be a sexual figure because she was terminally ill when she had sex with whomever she desired, and her imminent death, in a sort of carpe diem mentality, justified her acting on passion. In this work, with male/male and female/male relationships, the author seems to suggest, whether consciously or unwittingly, that the restrictions for women are so great compared to men, that the female character can only be depicted as a sexually liberated figure if death prevents readers from condemning her. The men live on afterwards and carry on, with sexual options open.

Nevertheless, despite these exceptions, a lot of yaoi is influenced by pornography. After all, there would be no yaoi if there was no porn or whores, if men had not taken control of the concept of woman so thoroughly that the only way we could express our sexuality outside of those restrictions was to eliminate her from our erotic works. Moreover, yaoi, like porn, also aims to induce a sexual response in the reader. Some yaoi does this at the expense of originality or artistic value. But unlike pornography, yaoi concerns itself with feelings beyond the erotic: and whether consciously or not, works against patriarchy. The only thing in existence remotely like yaoi is romance novels, the mother of yaoi. Romance novels, like yaoi, often depict the erotic and romantic at the expense of aesthetic achievement or complexity. However, romance novels depict women as subjects not objects, women who think and feel. The problem is, these women can only think and feel only in relation to men, within a male-centric society. In fact, many romance writers internalize anti-feminist notions, depicting swooning heroines being passively swept off their feet by hulky, protective men.

But can you blame romance authors? The only romantic depictions they have seen throughout history are those: men strengthened, women weakened: an active figure and a passive. Even the ancient Greeks had such a conception of sexuality and romance in both male-male youth and male-female relationships. And much yaoi follows in that tradition, featuring a strong, protective seme and a weaker uke who needs protection. Many yaoi manga and anime even have sappy titles reminiscent of romance novels, like Lovers in the Night. But unlike the romance genre, yaoi has the capacity to do more. Considering the superficiality of yaoi's forebears—pornography and romance novels—it's amazing what some works within the genre have managed to do. And how have works like Ai No Kusabi managed to delve into complex issues such as class, race, and the inequitable distribution of power in  capitalist society? Contrary to its forebears, yaoi runs counter to a social system in which men control bodies. It exists outside the market of women between men. It not only accepts and is built around the notion of women as subjective, sexual entities, like romance novels, but it portrays two people who are on equal footing in a mutual, loving, sexual relationship.

Portraying this kind of reciprocty in yaoi is crucial consider much yaoi targets girls in high school who are young and impressionable. Think about it. If these girls were to write and read comics that featured high school-aged girls in sexual relationships with boys, it would be like walking in a mine field because, necessarily, the girls must attribute that girl and all the baggage patriarchy has attached to her, to their own identities. Thirsting for Love shows us that it's impossible, in our current society (particularly in Japan), to depict a sexually liberated woman without the author or audience either demonizing her, modifying the situation to justify her behavior (she is terminally ill, she was sexually abused and really just wants love, etc), or making a didactic example out of her. This is because a sexually liberated female is threatening in a society in which men control female bodies: she is called “slut” and “whore,” names given to women men directly consume as commodities, as men can only control her by giving her the name of a woman who exists for their pleasure. It's as yaoi artist Tanigawa Tamae stated, in a defense of yaoi to a gay activist who claimed yaoi objectified gay men: women are “weaker” than even gay men because women are “victims of patriarchy, which prevent[s] them from loving themselves as women” (Lunsing). Tanigawa points to gay men's ability to defend themselves by creating images of themselves as they like, contrasting that power with women's inability to even love their own image.

Put a promiscuous woman in a story and you must defend her...but can the girls reading it defend themselves? Men have not only taken our image from us for their own purposes, but they have turned it against us. Now the very IMAGE of our own bodies poses a threat to young girls in particular, who can easily be commodified and reduced to a degraded relation to men with one word: “whore.” Yaoi is the only outlet women have to express their sexuality freely. Academic Kazuko Suzuki explains, in a chapter in her book entitled “Yaoi: Pornography or Therapy?”, by watching two men engaging in sex and romance women can actually see what a mutual, egalitarian relationship looks like. Yaoi is the only solace for a population that has never had materials through which to explore even romantic, nonsexual egalitarian relationships. Any woman with critical thinking skills can see the lies and sexism inherent in romantic comedies, supposedly made for them, in which women are emotional messes who can only define themselves in terms of the men they hopelessly pine for. Movies tailored for men are, at the very least, blatant in their portrayals: women in sexy suits are damsels in distress or cheerleaders on the sidelines for Bond, Ironman, Batman, or whoever the sexually empowered hero is.

In defining pornography, I used a very broad definition that may be problematic for another reason I did not address: it could apply to mainstream movies and TV shows that include gratuitous sex scenes “with the intention of sexual arousal not emotional or aesthetic feelings.” But this actually is no problem. We can include these depictions in mainstream movies for all I care. I am not a Supreme Court Judge. I'm not using the word “pornography” to determine what is “obscene” or not. That is not what this essay is about. Much of yaoi would be considered “obscene” in a court of law, this is why I have to have proof of being at least eighteen to enter a yaoi convention this Halloween. But explicit content is not what makes something pornographic in terms of whether or not it is “content featuring whores” or its sole intention is producing “erotic feelings” or purpose is maintaining male dominance in a market of bodies. In fact, many depictions in mainstream media would meet many of those criteria. Currently, I think it is impossible to portray a heterosexual relationship in the media without presenting the possibility of degrading women. Even with the best intentions. Actually, one could argue that being in a heterosexual relationship as a woman in a patriarchal society also poses that risk. One could even argue that the only way a woman can retain ownership of her body is by rejecting the depiction of female beauty in popular media, by boycotting makeup and clothes that enhance the fetishization of the female body, and by either remaining asexual or having sex only with other women who also reject a male-centric standard of fetishized beauty.

That's a pretty extreme position. Many men, as well as women, would probably take issue with that idea. And I'm not necessarily saying one has to do those things. But one must accept the reality of the current situation in our society—in most, if not all societies around the world. Recently, Princeton University conducted a study in which men were shown pictures of women. When they were shown ordinary women walking down the street, parts of their minds lit up for social interaction. When shown pictures of women in bikinis and sexy positions the part of the mind that lit up was that for using a tool, like a fork. Even on a physiological level, when wearing certain clothes or presented in certain ways, men perceive women as a means to an end, as a commodity (Landau). There is physiological basis for what feminists have been saying for years, and we, all of us, women, gay men, straight men, everyone, should care. Why? Because men are being manipulated as much as women are! Men are trapped in stifling constructions of masculinity and are brought up on images that objectify women—they can't escape it anymore than we can. And as long as white bourgeois men in power feminize working class men and men of race to weaken them, all minorities have an invested interest in the cause of feminism  as long as negative construction of femininity can be used against them. In a sense, these conventions have taken control of all our bodies, impelling us to keep up the cycle of pornography and prostitution in various ways: by consuming porn, watching mainstream television and movies that depict women in male-centric and hyper-sexualized ways, by only having relationships with women who strive to fit those norms, or by, as women, striving to fit those norms ourselves. What we wear, make up if we are women, baggy pants and t-shirts if we are men, is controlled by these conventions, strict divisions that inhibit all of us and work to continue this cycle.

In the 1960s, women had sit-ins just to be able to wear pants in public. In the 70s, the feminist and gay movement went into full swing, protests abounded. Now, an employer cannot legally say to a woman's face he/she will not hire her based on her gender. Still, women face the very real threat of sexual and physical violence to a degree grossly disproportionate to men, still we fight for reproductive freedom, equal employee benefits and pay, and intellectual recognition (particularly in the sciences). There are still women advocating women's rights through political action, as they should. But from what I can see, the next stage of feminist revolution is mostly about image and body. Maybe we can only reclaim our sexuality and identities by watching, reading, drawing, writing, dreaming of, thinking about men (or genderless angels) having deeply romantic and sexual relationships and encounters with other men (who knew revolution could be so fun?). Is it any wonder that both men and women alike (particularly in the anime community) ridicule, slander, attack, and loath yaoi and yaoi fans? The genre itself is subversive; it threatens patriarchal conventions, striking nerves in both men and women who have internalized patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality.

I honestly would have no artistic outlet for my sexuality if it weren't for yaoi: I am morally opposed to pornography for the reasons I have outlined here, and from what I have accidentally encountered, it does not entice me. What many yaoi fans are in search of (myself included) is real love, as trite as it may sound. For possessing and loving are not the same; objectifying and loving do not go hand in hand. In the yaoi OVA Hey, Class President!, a stalker molests the uke Kokosai in his sleep, and he dreams it is the seme he loves touching him. But when the stalker calls him a slut, he knows for certain that this cannot be the man he loves—the man he loves would never “show contempt for other people.” We yaoi fans wish we could say this is the norm for us. We are tired of being reduced to prostitutes. We are tired of being patronized by clichéd, deceitful depictions of heterosexual romance in which the man is always stronger, taller, or smarter than the woman. As Kirasaga, the chief editor of the fictional boys love magazine in Love Recipe states, yaoi exists to “make girls' dreams come true.” By reading yaoi and using the “nearly blank slate” of men in homoerotic relationships, we are reimagining our own identities in a world we have created devoid of johns and sluts—in a world where we may glimpse what it is like to be loved as we love.


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BEFORE YOU RESPOND TO THIS ESSAY:
1) Read this. I use terms you might already know in atypical ways.
2) Read this post about the kind of discourse this essay is built for.
3) Reread the first footnote here one more time.

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Works Cited and Consulted

Brizendine, Louann. The Female Brain. New York: Broadway, 2006.

Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Woman. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1981.

Hess, Amanda . “Playgirl Goes Gay, and the Straight Guys Love It.” 30 Apr. 2010     <http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/04/30/playgirl-goes-gay-and-the-straight-guys-love-it/>

Hey, Class President! Dir. Sakai Akio. Based on comic by Kaori Monchi. Video Streaming.
    Prime Time, 2009.

Higashizato, Kirico. Love Recipe. Volume 2. Gardena, California: Digital Manga Publishing: 2008.

Hirokawa, Kazuho. The Dawn of Love. Gardena, California: Digital Manga Publishing: 2008.
J-Boy.“We Will Love.” Kana Mizuki. Gardena, California: Digital Manga Publishing: 2008.

Landau, Elizabeth. “Men see bikini-clad women as objects, psychologists say.” Cable News Network.      2 Apr. 2009. <http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/19/women.bikinis.objects/index.html>.

Lunsing, Wim. "Yaoi Ronsō: Discussing Depictions of Male Homosexuality in Japanese Girls' Comics, Gay Comics and Gay Pornography." Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian   Context. (2006): 34 pars. 20 March 2008.     <http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/lunsing.html>.   

Minami, Kazuka. My Paranoid Nextdoor Neighbor. 801 Media, 2007.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995

"Pornography." Def. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. 9th ed. 1984. Print.

"Pornography." Def. Oxford American Dictionaries. Apple. 3rd ed. 2005. Digital.

Reed Elsevier Inc. “From Publisher's Weekly.” Amazon. August 2007.     <http://www.amazon.com/Paranoid-Next-Door-NeighborYaoi/dp/1934129062/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284325923&sr=8-1-spell>

"Romance." Def. Oxford American Dictionaries. Apple. 3rd ed. 2005. Digital.

Shimazaki, Tokiya. Love is like a Hurricane. Volume 1. 801 Media, 2007.

Suzuki, Kazuko. "Pornography or Therapy? Japanese Girls Creating the Yaoi Phenomenon". In         Sherrie Inness, ed., Millennium Girls: Today's Girls Around the World. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.

Tachibana, Kaim. Boys Love. Gardena, California: Digital Manga Publishing: 2008.

Takaguchi, Satosumi. Thirsty for Love. Gardena, California: Digital Manga Publishing: 2008.

Yoshinaga, Fumi. Truly Kindly. Libre Publishing Company: 2007.

Wilson, Brent and Toko Masami. “Boys' Love, Yaoi, and Art Education: Issues of Power and             Pedagogy.” Semiotics and Art/Visual Culture. (2003): 20 October 2008.     <http://www.csuchico.edu/~mtoku/vc/Articles/toku/Wil_Toku_BoysLove.html>.