=====================================================================
Footnote 1 - In this essay, I put forward many controversial ideas. Know that I'm considering these ideas to explore the definitions of "men" and "women" in a patriarchal society and how yaoi may help women transcend it in a space all their own. All these ideas are generalizations (see here), they are not meant to account for every incidence of something: i.e. there will be exceptions. If the exception is considerable, I will address it in the text or in a footnote. If not, I ask that you treat these ideas as just that: ideas, points of discourse, not absolute arguments to either conform to or disagree with. I wrote this essay to open up new ways of thinking, not intellectual warfare OR a cult-like following. With that said, after reading my paper, I encourage you to write up responses, even if you disagree. You may point out exceptions to me, but if you don't consider the ideas and connotations sutured to the definitions of "women" and "men" in our society as you craft your responses, more than likely your claims will not considerably enrich this discourse.
=====================================================================
Footnote 2 - There's a bit of controversy over the way I have used "yaoi" and "boys love" interchangeably. "Yaoi" is still sometimes used in the US as an umbrella term for all male/male works created for women, but in Japan, as "yaoi" became associated with +18 male/male works, the term "BL" or "Boys Love" came into use for all male/male works for women, explicit or not, and "yaoi" became a term for the smuttier stuff. The term "yaoi" works best for my essay because I spend a lot of time distinguishing sexually explicit, fictional male/male material created for girls from pornography, not in terms of obscenity. "Yaoi" is understood to include sexually explicit material, however, the feminist elements of BL or yaoi apply to the nonsexually explicit and the explcit. Obviously, I wouldn't waste time arguing something that isn't explicit isn't pornography: the controversial aspect of my essay is that I argue sexually explicit yaoi isn't. Please treat yaoi as both an umbrella term and a term for the explicit given the context.
=====================================================================
Footnote 3 - There are gay male yaoi manga artists, which is why I used the word “primarily,” but yaoi is distinguished from bara by its intended audience. Hirosegawa Susumu, a gay male manga-ka, is quoted as saying that writing for women when he made yaoi was more challenging than writing for gay men as the yaoi was nothing like the kind of sexual practices he himself engaged in (Lunsing). Yaoi as a genre is understood to be intended for women. Any exception is that, an exception.
=====================================================================
Footnote 4 - This isn't to say working class people don't look at porn, although the lowest of the working class cannot afford much of it. But like women, the working class are not porn's intended audience, and like women, they can only look at erotic materials that degrade them. Patriarchy and capitalism intersect to subjugate both women and the working class.
=====================================================================
Real Gay Men Comic
=====================================================================
Love Recipe Image - Boy's Love Not Porn
Page 2 of Love Recipe - Boys Love Not Porn Example
Here, Tomonori explains that as a manga-ka of yaoi you "need to touch [yaoi readers'] hearts!!" Inukai says, "I don't understand. How do you make girls go pant pant?" But Tomonori replies, "Not pant pant! It should be ba-thump and squee!" He makes a distinction between creating material like porn, which aims just to turn the audience on and creating material that aims to move people emotionally.
=====================================================================
UPDATE: Pornographic movies and pictures women take of themselves and post online are the only exceptions to this statement. We wouldn't consider many of these pictures pornographic if the women, like those in playboy, are just nude in them, but if they are masturbating or engaging in sexual acts with another girl or a man, then the material becomes pornographic. These images are still for men, however. We see many instances of this on 4chan's /b/ board (NOT SAFE FOR WORK), where the so-called "camwhores" post pics to "get attention." These women only better illustrate my point. They have, like many romance novelists, internalized patriarchal constructions of women. They have internalized these ideas to such a degree that these women (many of whom have low self-esteem) seek self worth using the only real measure of a woman's worth in a patriarchal society: by how well they please men. We can amend my definition of porn for this exception to say porn is traditionally made by men and always controlled by men and made for men. These women do not objectify themselves (which is impossible): even in an ordinary picture, men always have the power to objectify them. These women, internalizing patriarchal norms, cannot see beyond a sense of value outside of a relation to men, and thus, these "attention whores," in a bid for a sense of worth, unable to percieve of anything beyond a male-centric measure of value, work desperately for approval from men.
=====================================================================
Footnote 5 - Further, we can view pornography as a more condensed, uglier miniature of capitalist society. Here, the bouregois, whom Marx defines as business owners who collect a profit from their work, control the wage labrors who recieve no profit from the success of an enterprise, but merely is paid a fixed hourly wage. The wage laborer's body is owned, he does not choose his working hours. Porn and prostitution anly make the bouregois' control of the wage laborer's body more obvious: literally bouregois men sell and exchange working class men in market of bodies. Anyone who tries to claim I'm thinking of rhings in terms of "men versus women" are wrong. The situation is more complex.
=====================================================================
Footnote 6 - If you aren't familiar with Lolita, please note the pedophile is not portrayed in a positive, but rather, a complex manner. Nabokov discusses pornography not because Lolita is porn but because he was distinguishing the structure of Lolita from porn.
=====================================================================
Footnote 7 - The former are more common than the latter not because yaoi is has no concern for romance (quite the opposite!). The former are the norm for two reasons: 1) The uke identifies as straight and this is how the seme eases him into the idea of a relationship—kissing indicates a relationship; however, the uke can just think of the seme jacking him off as mutual masturbation, but the seme, always with a plan, ultimately aims to win the uke's heart; 2) the uke resists so this is how the seme gets him to succumb, the uke can push a kisser away, but if the seme starts sucking his penis, he's overcome with desire. Finally, this can all be read from a feminist point of view as exploration. A woman in the same situation would either be sexually harassed or labeled a whore. More than that, unlike men who are held unaccountable the moment someone stimulates their genitals, women are considered to have less intense desire and to have the ability to resist sexual desire more than men. Through yaoi women can more freely explore their sexuality.
No comments:
Post a Comment