The following is neither a joke nor as blindingly obvious as one might initially think: Yaoi fans love gay men. For what it’s worth. And what is it worth? I have wondered. On the one hand – love. Good! On the other hand, love because of sexual preference. Creepy. It isn’t possible to objectify someone respectfully.

We try, though.

Some women feel that they get a pass re. respect/objectification – we are ruthlessly objectified, and men run the world, so fuck you. This is perhaps an oversimplification – maybe it’s more “hey, no harm, no foul.” That wouldn’t work here, even if one believed it – the world works differently for gay men and straight men, as Dirk’s essay makes clear.

From I Shall Never Return Vol. 4

I’ll table that conundrum for a moment to comment on gay. A lot of us – yaoi fans – are queer ourselves. I don’t know about “the yaoi community” in general, but I do know yaoi fanfic writers (a fairly dedicated subsection), and a lot of us are queer.  We understand the difficulties presented by homosexuality in the real world. We respect it. We are not comfortable with the idea that we are offending or exploiting people we perceive as our comrades.

The most obvious corollary to yaoi is the girl-on-girl porn that many straight men are into. It’s not lesbian porn – these women are not lesbians. Well, some of them are, but that’s not the point. At all. I have never thought this kind of porn was actually about me. It’s about a sexual category that doesn’t exist in the real world: pure fantasy.

For the same reason, I have never especially liked it as porn.  The women in girl-on girl-porn for men are acting out straight men’s fantasies, and they only occasionally intersect with mine. This surprised me, at first – it seemed like it should work. It’s readily available, it’s women, I like women; we should be in business. But not so much. I had initially assumed this was the reaction gay men have to yaoi – all the right parts, but used in service of different fantasies. That isn’t exactly the case, though – a number of gay men like yaoi (and a few also create it).

One reason for that, I think, is that romance is more flexible than visual porn. Yaoi, even the raunchiest, most explicit yaoi, tells a story. There are more points of entry, as it were. If you don’t find the girl-on-girl-for-men porn fantasy hot, there isn’t anything else to it. You’re out of there. Game over. But if there’s a story, there’s some background, there’s something else happening, and therefore there are more ways for you to be drawn in.

From Antique Bakery Vol. 3

This also brings us back to the question of respect. I create man-on-man porn for women – again, the direct corollary of girl-on-girl-porn for men – and I think about the gay men I portray. It isn’t clear to me that all men are even aware that lesbians exist, in the sense that are different from the women in the pornos. On the other hand, yaoi creators and consumers (again, in the West; I still don’t know much about Japan, although what little I do know leads me to believe the dynamic is similar) are acutely aware of actual, real-life gay men. Yaoi fantasies are not accurate representations thereof – we are well aware of that. But most of us do know what we’re fantasizing about. Does that matter, in any larger sense? I don’t know. It feels like it does.

I’ve also thought a lot about Noah’s insistence that if one wants to better understand yaoi, one should read and react to individual yaoi stories. There is a fundamental problem with trying to talk about yaoi as one specific, cohesive thing. He mentioned Let Dai and Antique Bakery, two manga series that are close to my heart. Both of those might be more accurately characterized as Boys Love rather than yaoi (yaoi features explicit sex, and neither of these titles exactly qualifies as explicit; there is sex, though, and for the purposes of this discussion, I’m not sure the distinction matters anyway). But at any rate, these titles couldn’t be much more different, down to the style in which they are drawn. They both feature male characters who love other male characters, and that’s where the similarities end. Scooping them into the same category for anthropological analysis is like equating Rolling Stone magazine and Love in the Time of Cholera. Because, you know, they’re both set in type.

You might think you’d be on firmer ground trying to look at, say, Weiss Kreuz fanfic as a cohesive whole, but even that doesn’t work. Well, it does if the only thing you care about is “girls writing porn about men! how curious/exciting/transgressive/something sexy I can write about for my thesis!” These stories are all about the same obscure-in-the-West anime, but they also run the gamut. Just like yaoi overall, and any area of art, topics, quality, intent and execution vary wildly. There’s really excellent writing, and there’s absolutely excruciating writing. There are professional writers, and there are 12-year-olds who can’t tell “their” from “they’re” from “there.” There are happy little pieces of romantic froth, and there are serious angst-fests. There is mega-plot, and there is almost no plot at all. There are stories that follow the plot of the anime with excruciating exactitude and stories that cast the characters as pirates.

Noah frames this as an issue of respect, and I agree – these people are creating art, and refusing to deal with these creations in artistic terms is insulting, as well as leaving enormous, gaping holes in your analysis. If you actually wanted to understand this curious tribe and its exotic ways, you would probably have to think about the art. I don’t see how you’re going to come up with anything of substance without diving into the damned stories and doing some critical analysis.

I don’t have any serious disagreements with my co-roundtablers. Everyone pretty much agreed that, to varying degrees, Boys’ Love Manga was obtuse and poorly written. I was probably the most viscerally mean-spirited (to no one’s surprise), and Shaenon was probably the most forgiving, but at least from my perspective there weren’t stark differences.

So, since there aren’t big conflicts, I’ll quibble over minutiae. This quote is from Dirk’s essay:

Ladies and gentlemen — but mostly ladies — I give you the Dream Police, now ready to monitor your fantasies to ensure that you don’t get off on those handsome young lads rogering each other without, you know, properly respecting them and shit. Why, you’d almost think that there was some sort of objectification going on, here! Like you just wanted to fantasize about their bodies or something, and not think about their Bitter Struggle For Equality at all!

This is from Kinukitty:

My big, huge, festering resentment with this sentence, though, lies with the last part, about how fantasizing about rape must be a result of ambivalence and resentment. The conclusion here is that if I, as a woman, fantasize about rape, it’s the result of some sort of pathology. I reject that fairly strenuously. Women like to fantasize about all kinds of things, including rape. This does not have to be explained in the context of women being victimized by men specifically or society in general. It’s a case of a cigar just being a cigar.

And this is from Shaenon:

It’s fun when people get all intellectual about porn. I’m impressed by the level of research and familiarity with the subject matter in most of these papers—with a few exceptions, like Mark McHarry’s “Boys in Love in Boys’ Love,” which seems to think that yaoi is mostly shota—but at the same time there’s a running sense of the academic protesting too much. Do we really need to spill this much ink over the question of whether girls like porn?

In these quotes, Dirk and Kinukitty are strenuously, and Shaenon is lightly, pushing back against the idea that porn and sexual fantasy should be subject to (over)analysis, dissection and moral interpretation. People’s sexual fantasies are just cigars, should not be subject to the Dream Police, and probably should not be the occasion for too much spilt ink.

From Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery Vol. 4

Dirk and Kinukitty are both, as they make clear, coming from a place of righteous fury powered by personal experience. They’re both queer, and they’ve both been told, throughout their lives to varying degrees, that their sexual fantasies are evil, wrong and/or shameful. They’re therefore both acutely aware that telling people that their sexual fantasies are evil can have extremely unpleasant consequences for the objects of your derision.

I don’t want to deny that that’s true…but at the same time, I’m coming from a somewhat different place. I’m a boring straight breeder — all my sexual kinks (big breasts! girl-girl action!) are so thoroughly typical that they barely qualify as kinks at all.

Moreover, my sexual fantasies are not policed in any meaningful way. On the contrary, they’re catered to. By everyone, everywhere, constantly, all the time. In fact, it’s not an especially large exaggeration to say that our culture — movies, comics, music and on and on — is built with the primary function of reproducing and/or encouraging the fetish material banging about (as it were) in my skull. My fantasies rule the world! Yay for me!

The point is that I know to an absolute certainty that the sexual fantasies in people’s heads have a noticeable impact on the world, and I know this because I look out from behind my brain and there are people dressing and getting surgical procedures and behaving in ways which are, not necessarily entirely caused by, but are nonetheless clearly intimately connected to, my boring porn imaginings.

This is the basic split between second-wave and third-wave feminism. Both waves believe, I think rightly, that sexual fantasies are tied to the outside world — that is, that they are political. Second-wave feminists, though, thought that said fantasies needed to be analyzed, discussed, placed in a moral context and (at least sometimes) censured. Third-wave feminism — drawing, not incidentally, on the development of queer theory — tended to argue (a la Susie Bright) that censuring sexual fantasies inevitably led to censuring the sexual fantasies of the folks with the least power, and that the best thing to do with said fantasies is, therefore, what Dirk and Kinukitty suggest; i.e., leave them alone.

And, again, I have some sympathy with that. But, on the other hand, if the stories we tell (and sexual fantasies are just another kind of story) are connected to the world we live in, then it seems worth trying to figure out what that connection is and how and why it works — both for insight into ourselves and for insight into the world. That’s the logic for doing criticism in general; I don’t see that it breaks down when you talk about sexual fantasies in particular.

From Mister Mistress Vol. 1

For me, then, the problem with Boys’ Love Manga’s forays into analysis isn’t that one shouldn’t analyze sexual fantasies — it’s that the analysis in question was fucking stupid.

Part of the reason I think it was stupid, as I tried to say in my first essay, is that most of the discussions in the book were too generalized. A cigar may not always be a cigar, but it’s hard to tell what it in fact is if you’re not looking at a particular, individual cigar, but rather at some general platonic cigar floating around in quasi-Freudian n-space. The rape fantasy of I Spit on Your Grave is quite different than the rape fantasy of Shivers, for example. Among other things: the first is explicitly feminist while the second isn’t; the first is committed to justice and a moral order, the second to anarchy; the first presents the fantasy from a female perspective, the second from a male. And both are really different from the rape fantasies in, say, Fumi Yoshinaga’s Gerard and Jacques, not least in that the first two have little if any interest in romance, while the third is obsessed with it.

I understand the urge, after reading a book like Boys’ Love Manga, to just wish that everyone involved would shut up forever. And maybe that is the best realistic outcome. But I can’t help but think it would be nice if we could get an anthology that actually thought about what particular works were doing and why and maybe even contrasted work A with work B, rather than just assuming every manifestation of boys’ love was part of a single monolithic sociological phenomena. If we can talk about superhero comics as if there’s a meaningful distinction between Blackest Night and Empowered, it seems like we could come up with a way to talk about boys’ love that distinguishes between Gravitation and Pam Nunn. And if we can’t…well, then, we really ought to shut up.

From Maki Murakami’s Gravitation Vol. 4

Author’s Note: This essay was originally intended for a roundtable discussion of Boys’ Love Manga, a collection of academic essays edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry and Dru Pagliassotti. As often happens, my writing got the better of me, and what should have been a thousand-word-or-so piece grew to 10 times that target, touching on a variety of subjects extending beyond the confines of the assigned work. Obviously, this is grossly unfair to the other participants. By common agreement, therefore, my fellow editors and I have decided to set the following essay aside as a sort of sidebar, a companion piece to the roundtable that my fellow contributors are free to discuss or ignore as they wish.

Man and boy lover, drawn by Miyagawa Issh? circa 1750.

My ability to take the book Boys’ Love Manga at face value lasted for exactly 322 words into co-editor Antonia Levi’s introduction, after which it was derailed by the following assertion:

The content of boys’ love stories is not terribly shocking or even surprising to the Japanese audiences for which they were originally intended. Male same-sex romances and erotica intended for a wider, often at least partially female audience, have a long tradition in Japan. Even Lady Murasaki’s usually heterosexual hero Genji indulges in a same-sex affair in the eleventh-century novel Tale of Genji. Stories of same-sex relationships between Buddhist priests and their acolytes (chigo) were common during the feudal era, as were stories about same-sex relationships among samurai. Woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) further illustrated and celebrated such relationships. Kabuki theatre was patronized by women as well as men. The erotic desirability of adolescent male actors (wakashugata), as well as male actors playing female roles (onnagata), was described in widely circulated theatrical critiques (hyōbanki) sold in major cities. This advanced the tradition of same-sex male romances and what can only be described as a fascination with androgyny and the liminal possibilities of gender.

In the nineteenth century, the West brought homophobia to Japan [...]

There’s an entire history wrong with the above statement. Like homosexuality itself, “homophobia” is a modern concept. It didn’t exist before the last century, when the contemporary conception of queer identity began to take hold, pioneered by such late 19th- and early 20th-century writers as John Addington Symonds, Magnus Hirschfeld and Edward Carpenter. Prior to that, homosexuality was a fluid and ill-defined idea, often resting on base assumptions so contradictory and flawed that the very terminology rendered any discussion of the subject farcical and malignant. One wasn’t discussing “homosexuals,” but rather sodomites, catamites, tribades, inverts or pederasts. The people being discussed didn’t have identities but rather inclinations at best, sicknesses and corruptions of the spirit at worst. And in cultures where same-sex relations were excused or (occasionally) celebrated, it was almost never in the form that we accept today — adults in sexual and/or romantic relationships — but rather relationships between grown men and teenage boys.

This was certainly the case in Japan before Admiral Perry forced that nation’s opening to the West. Contrary to what Levi implies, there is actually ample evidence for same-sex pederastic relationships in Japanese history and folklore, not the socially acceptable homosexual relationships as we define them in the modern sense. The distinction is more than one of mere semantics. Levi cites a scene from The Tale of Genji, for example, but fails to note the exact circumstances, in which the protagonist sleeps with the adolescent brother of the girl he desires after being refused by her. Boy love was actually fairly common in pre-Meiji Japan, and was the focus of a variety of traditions, depending upon caste and occupation. All, however, shared a single common feature: The passive role in same-sex relations was considered to be the exclusive province of boys. While grown men retaining this role was not unheard-of, such men were the objects of ridicule and satire. It’s true that they were not actually sanctioned by law, but they certainly drew social opprobrium.

(It should be noted that this phenomenon extends only to same-sex relationships among men — heterosexual men typically have had little problem with marrying younger women or teenage girls, but if there’s ever been a corresponding proscription against relationships with women one’s own age or older, I’ve never heard of it. And to the extent that anyone noticed lesbian relationships to begin with, historically speaking, little if any mention seems to have been made of age differences.)

The best text in which to see this pederastic social dynamic of historical Japan in action is the celebrated Great Mirror of Male Love ["Nanshoku Ōkagami," also translated simply as The Mirror of Male Love], Ihara Saikaku’s 1687 collection of romantic short stories. From Rutgers University associate professor Paul Gordon Schalow’s introduction to his 1990 translation of same:

A careful reading of Nanshoku Ōkagami makes clear that constraint requiring that male homosexual relations be between adult male and a wakashu [teenage male partner] was sometimes observed only in the form of fictive role-playing. This meant that relations between pairs of man-boy lovers were accepted as legitimate whether or not a real man and real boy were involved, so long as one partner took the role of “man” and the other the role of “boy” in the relationship.

Schalow cites several stories to make his case, and indeed, a certain amount of “excusing circumstances” can be found in Mirror — but always with a careful dance around social custom, and usually with a certain amount of snickering. In “Two Old Cherry Trees Still in Bloom,” for example, there’s an ageing samurai couple who’ve remained by each other’s side for decades. Schalow writes: “In fact, the man playing the wakashu role is labelled an eccentric in a headnote to the story, reflecting that society was probably less comfortable with an adult man retaining the boy’s role than with a boy playing the adult role. This is perhaps not surprising, since the latter involves the anticipation of a mature future role, but the former means retaining an immature role and abandonment of adult male prerogatives.” Even in the supposedly non-homophobic Japan of antiquity, gay bottoms are not properly perceived to be men.

Detail from the Warren Cup, a Roman drinking cup dating from the first two decades A.D.

This phenomenon wasn’t by any means unique to Japan. Far from it — to the extent that same-sex relations between men were ever considered acceptable anywhere, it was boy-love that escaped censure, not sex between adults. Take what at first glance would seem to be the most obvious example of homosexual culture thriving in the ancient world: Greece. The nature of this culture is so widely known and commonly accepted that you can extract a summary from virtually any source, so let’s take the easy route and go with Wikipedia:

In classical antiquity, writers such as Herodotus, Plato, Xenophon, Athenaeus and many others explored aspects of same-sex love in ancient Greece. The most widespread and socially significant form of same-sex sexual relations in ancient Greece was between adult men and adolescent boys, known as pederasty. (However, marriages in Ancient Greece between men and women were also age structured, with men in their 30s commonly taking wives in their early teens.) Though homosexual relationships between adult men did exist, at least one member of each of these relationships flouted social conventions by assuming a passive sexual role. It is unclear how such relations between women were regarded in the general society, but examples do exist as far back as the time of Sappho.

The ancient Greeks did not conceive of sexual orientation as a social identifier, as Western societies have done for the past century. Greek society did not distinguish sexual desire or behavior by the gender of the participants, but rather by the role that each participant played in the sex act, that of active penetrator or passive penetrated. This active/passive polarization corresponded with dominant and submissive social roles: the active (penetrative) role was associated with masculinity, higher social status, and adulthood, while the passive role was associated with femininity, lower social status, and youth.

As in the Greek world, so elsewhere: During the Roman Republic and later Empire, boy-love was seen as acceptable, while adults with the desire to be penetrated anally were at best objects of scorn, and at worst genuine threats to the prevailing moral order. The Satyricon of Gaius Petronius (also known as Petronius Arbiter) provides what is perhaps the best picture of how the social rules of homosexuality were seen and enforced during this period of Roman history. The work, which has survived to reach us in incomplete form, depicts the adventures of two friends named Encolpius and Ascyltus as they move through a wicked satire of Roman society — the latter of whom was implied to have once been Encolpius’ lover when younger but has since graduated to adulthood and chaste friendship — and the complications brought on by the allure and beauty of Encolpius’ current lover, a teenage slave named Giton. It’s not that men we would consider to be “gay” in the modern sense are missing from the story, mind you: it’s just that they are perceived to be beneath contempt. In the course of the text, our heroes are confronted by the aggressive advances of adult passive homosexuals, referred to contemptuously as “catamites” and presented unambiguously as antagonists, their desires accepted without question to be vulgar and immoral. In ancient Rome as in most of world history, proper grown men do not take it up the ass.

Arabic culture has also left us with ample documentation of the acceptance of pederasty — but not adult same-sex relationships — as a cultural force prior to the rise of Islam. A flowering of poetry devoted to boy-love appeared in Baghdad circa 7-8th century A.D., for example, but it fell in line with the standard seen in ancient Athens and elsewhere: The adult lover was the top, the boy was the passive bottom, and relations ended once the boy reached adulthood. While these love poems sometimes danced at the edge of the boy’s entry into manhood, it was nonetheless universally understood that continuing such relationships once after the passive lover unambiguously reaches adulthood was socially and morally unacceptable:

Convention stated that a boy lost his allure once he became adult, the transition being marked by the growth of his beard. The first down on the cheeks was universally considered an enhancement of the boy’s beauty, but also heralded its imminent termination.

This crucial transition became an extremely popular topos for poetry and soon enough generated a response defending the unspoilt beauty of a fully bearded young man. Both points of view continued to find advocates for centuries, resulting eventually in anthologies of “beard poetry” devoted exclusively to this debate.

Nevertheless, the age differential between active and passive partners in a male homosexual relation remained crucial since the sexual submission of one adult male to another was considered a repugnant idea in this society and assumed to be the result of a pathological desire to be penetrated.

Literary works turning a blind eye to homosexual acts between grown men would occasionally appear in antiquitous Arabic culture, but the social circumstances that they reflected never lasted long, and usually involved some form of obvious inequity, such as sex with slaves and eunuchs. From Europe to China, anal sex between two grown men of good standing was always seen as distasteful and immoral, with exceptions invariably “proving the rule” in the Wildean sense.

Detail from a photo of members of the Zuni tribe (circa 1885), with females on the left, males on the right, and Two-Spirited tribal member Whe-Wa standing in the center.

I’m aware of only one real, unambiguous example of a pre-modern set of cultures that have dealt with homosexuality through any avenue other than pederasty: Many Native American tribes practiced what was initially known to Westerners as the “berdache” tradition, and later as the Two-Spirit tradition. Put simply: Prior to the arrival of Westerners on the North American continent, an estimated two-thirds of Aboriginal American tribes dealt with homosexuals through a variety of cross-gender rituals, in which feminine boys and [in some cases] masculine girls would be declared to possess the souls of the opposite gender, and would undergo a variety of tests and ceremonies to reposition them as members of said gender for social purposes. The wide range of cultural variations among tribes makes balderdash of sweeping generalizations, and the nature of such traditions differed from tribe to tribe, so I want to tread carefully here, but it’s important to note that even among Native Americans who practiced such traditions, male same-sex relationships between adult men were not simply accepted as such, but were instead ritualized to make one partner the “woman” of the pairing, and therefore no longer a threat to the community. Men would become “magic women,” and (sometimes) vice versa. This is what the ageing lovers of The Mirror of Male Love were depicted as attempting, but to be declared Two-Spirited was to be invited into the tribe to a degree that would have been unimaginable to the Japanese, Greeks, Arabs or virtually any other culture on Earth prior to the 20th century.

All of which is a long way of saying that modern definitions of homosexuality and homophobia really have no place in the discussion of same-sex relationships prior to the rise of the modern gay-identity (and later gay-rights) movements of the past century or so, and certainly no place in the discussion of what happened to Japanese culture when Admiral Perry and those who followed him imported the Western world onto Japanese shores. Christianity’s big innovation regarding homosexuality, after all, was to declare sex with boys to be just as repulsive as sex between grown men. Perry, accustomed to life on the high seas with an all-male crew, almost certainly would have been familiar with the concept of buggery, but that’s not what he found in Japan. What he found was man/boy pederasty: a subset of homosexuality, not homosexuality in the larger sense. The West did not “import homophobia” to Japan in the 19th century; rather, it made plain its revulsion to the corruption of what it considered to be boyhood innocence. You could make a solid and defensible argument that homophobia was introduced to Native Americans post-Columbus, but not to Japan post-Perry.

I don’t mean to extravagantly castigate Antonia Levi for the willful and deliberate distortion of history, or even single her out as some particularly unreliable narrator — certainly not for a few relatively trivial comments (and certainly not in light of some of the authors who follow her in the book in question). In discussing the history of homosexuality, after all, she swims in murky waters with often difficult currents. In the past few decades, historians looking to reclaim or outright construct “gay history” have found ample evidence of subcultures and larger cultural mores devoted to same-sex love between males, but many have danced very carefully around this dichotomy between pederasty and actual sexual relations between adults, sometimes excusing it as little more than the homosexuality of the era or even blurring or ignoring the line altogether. Exceptions to the rule — and as with all human experiences, there are always copious exceptions — are sometimes presented as though they were the rule themselves.

It’s easy to understand why some historians have done this: Given the homophobic nature of world history prior to the rise of the modern gay-rights movement, it’s perfectly natural to want to offer a more balanced corrective. Nonetheless, this need to offer redress, when combined with the imposition of modern political and cultural ideas upon periods and people where they would have been seen as alien, has led to a certain amount of scholarly chaos, and writers and researchers covering the same peoples and periods have disagreed wildly over competing interpretations of the same documents and records. This phenomenon has lessened since, say, the 1960s and ’70s, but has not gone away entirely.

So what does all of this have to do with Boys’ Love Manga? Two things: Reading the book, I’ve found myself thinking that yaoi-related scholarship seems to be going through similar birthing pains right now. Many of the authors quite obviously see themselves not only as academic chroniclers of the boys’-love manga subculture, but advocates for it as well. This tends to lead to a sort of “conclusions first, then the evidence” methodology that tends to preclude the act of discovery through investigation so vital to proper scholarship. Over time, this can lead to a false consensus that becomes harder and harder to unravel as narratives become further entrenched. Which is a shame, because the other thing that the above should remind us is that the truth behind a given subject is usually far more complex than whatever one might have imagined at first glance.

OK, I’m just going to clear up this whole mystery of why women read and write yaoi fanfic. I should save the money shot for the end, but marketing has never been my strong point. Here’s an outline:

1) You fall in love with a character.
2) You read all the manga and/or see all the anime the character is in. (It works with books and movies and TV shows and even presidents, too, but that’s slash, which is, apparently, a whole other barrel of anthropological pickles.)
3) Damn it, you want more. You need more. You must have more.
4) You read and/or write fanfic so there will be more.
    a. But – what about the romance?!
        i. People like romance.
    b. But – what about the sex?
        i. People like the sex.
    c. But – the gay!
        i. See 4) b. i.

It goes like this. You know, I love these characters! There’s not a lot to see or read about them, though – woe. But wait – there’s an almost unlimited universe of stories about them on the Internet? Having sex?!!? Yes!!!! Maybe I’m a pervert, but this line of reasoning (well, maybe reasoning isn’t the right word) seems pretty straightforward (hah!).

I’m a longtime yaoi fan, and I’m also a fan and a writer of Weiss Kreuz yaoi fanfic – or manporn, as I call it. Weiss Kreuz is an anime from the ’80s that never got shown on TV in the West, but it really generated a huge amount of fanfic anyway, when Western girls found out about it. Which is slightly unexpected because Weiss Kreuz kind of sucks. I love it, but it sucks. The animation couldn’t be worse (I mean that literally; I actually don’t think it could be worse). The characterization is almost nonexistent, and the story lines are rife with plot holes so large you could back in a moving van. And I’m not going to bother to exactly explain the plot, such as it is, because no amount of explanation would really leave you with any clear understanding. Suffice to say the story centers on four attractive young men who are florists by day and assassins by night. Assassins who use, among them, a bow and arrows, a wire (shot across long distances with great accuracy), a sword and — my favorite (by which I mean the dumbest) — a sort of baseball glove that fixed knives spring out of, like Charlie Brown playing Wolverine. I think a lot of fangirls like Weiss Kreuz because it’s goofy but with a dark undercurrent, and the laxness of the characterization allows fic writers to take a lot of license in filling in the blanks. And, come on – florist assassins! Who work in a shop called “The House of Kittens.” That’s good stuff (by which I mean crack).

I was pretty darned excited to find out there was a chapter in this anthropological vivisection of my favorite genre that focused explicitly (see what I did there?) on my little corner of the psychosexual playground known as the World Wide Web. I remained excited for days. That’s how long it took me to get around to reading “Rewriting Gender and Sexuality in English-Language Yaoi Fan?ction,” by Tan Bee Kee. Not a very promising title, is it? I mean, you’d have to be nuts to see that title and expect to be entertained. I did not expect to be entertained. I expected to be annoyed by clumsy interpersonal theory and agitated unto madness by brutally ugly academic jargon. And on these points, I assure you I was not disappointed. But, I thought, surely my prize for slogging through this shit will be wisdom! Insight! Personal insight, even — the very best kind!

As it turns out, I was reminded of an observation by G.K. Chesterton. In a 1911 essay, he said (in his cheerful, racist turn-of-the-20-century British way) that he felt Japan had imitated many Western things — the worst Western things. “I feel as if I had looked in a mirror and seen a monkey,” he wrote. And, reading “Rewriting Gender and Sexuality in English-Language Yaoi Fan?ction,” I had a similar experience. I love yaoi. I love Weiss Kruez fanfiction. And, to be overly dramatic about it, this essay ground my longtime passion and obsession into dust and ashes. I looked in the mirror and saw a demographic slice, vaguely exotic, in a Dances with Manporn sort of way, and ready to be dispassionately observed.

I did not enjoy this essay, for so many reasons. Let’s pick one almost at random and jump right in. I have a lot of concerns with the feminist theory the writer employs to back up her assertions. Like this one: “Gender is not only an identification with one sex; it also entails that sexual desire be directed toward the other sex.” (That’s Gayle Rubin.) I have given myself a headache from the force of my eye-rolling. This is — I guess I’ll just go with “stupid,” for elegance and economy of words. Kee also paraphrases Sarah Gwenllian Jones, saying slash is “an ‘actualization’ of a ‘latent’ property of the text itself, meaning that queerness is already situated in the text itself … [Ika] Willis however suggests seeing fan readings as a reorientation.” That is some fancy dancing. An unwieldy wad of thinking, sort of like trying to stuff a porcupine into a cookie jar. Here’s my explanation: yaoi fanfic is an exercise in getting exactly the kind of porn you want. If we have to then go forth and dissect why, we should at least start from a sane and explicable premise.

This also troubles me: “Society conventionally defines only vaginal intercourse as ‘real,’ natural, and acceptable sex, but yaoi extends intimacy to cuddling, kissing, and oral/anal sex.” This is a bizarre statement of the sort that frequently gets Kee into trouble when she discusses porn. Because society does see cuddling, kissing and oral and anal sex as intimate. Quite intimate. Then Kee quotes Andrea Wood: “Therefore, in opposition to a one-sided visualization of pleasure that emphasizes the importance of the penetrating partner’s orgasm, a mainstay of heterosexual pornography, yaoi manga are more interested in illustrating both partner’s erotic fulfillment and gratification.” I don’t know. I’ve seen and read a certain amount of porn, and I don’t think everything but yaoi and slash is one-sided. The porn industry discovered women, in the capitalist sense, in the ’80s, and there is a lot of heterosexual porn out there that caters to us. Kee concludes, “Yaoi fans have roundly rejected the social scripts of conventional pornography as models by writing their own stories.” Later in the essay, Kee says, “[Yaoi fanfics] portray the tenderness between partners totally absent from pornography…” Kee’s idea of pornography seems to be limited to things like the Desperate Asswives movie on offer at a hotel I recently stayed at. There is a wealth of porn out there, people. The Internet, especially, has made more porn available to more people than anyone had ever dreamed might be possible. Some of it is visual (movies, images, comics) and some of it is literary (by which I mean it is written in words, not that it is necessarily The Tropic of Capricorn – and, frankly, thank God for that). Pretty much every shade of kink and intimacy are covered, all there for the browsing.

And speaking of that… Kee inserts some editorializing and limitations that really bother me. “PWPs [sex-heavy, plot-lite stories; PWP stands for “plot? what plot?”] often feature outrageous and experimental scenarios such as exhibitionism and use of household objects as sex toys … Disturbingly, rape and degradation are sometimes eroticized.” This, madam, is called kink. Porn exists to fulfill people’s kinks. If Kee finds the use of household objects as sex toys outrageous and experimental, that’s her own (and fairly benign) problem, I guess, and perhaps that sentence could be read as enthusiastic. The use of “disturbingly” for the rape and degradation fantasies is pretty unambiguous in its censure, though. And naïve. For Christ’s sake, don’t limit my sexual fantasies like that.

Similarly, I have a fairly major bone (as it were) to pick with the “Unsettling Ambivalences” section. The author felt like she had to tackle rape in yaoi, which is fair enough, but in the course of six paragraphs, she revealed a lot about herself in the guise of trying to explain me. She starts out with this: “Given the contradictory messages from society (women are caught between being ‘prudes’ and ‘sluts’) and risks of sex such as pregnancy and diseases, it is not surprising that this ambivalence and resentment should show up in women’s sexual fantasies.” Whoa, Nellie. That’s a hell of an assumption to throw out there casually, as if it were a done deal. The women being either prudes or sluts thing is fairly long in the tooth, as far as cultural assumptions go. This idea hasn’t entirely died out, but it is no longer the norm the way it was 30 or 40  years ago. I don’t think women tend to be all that frightened of pregnancy and disease either. My big, huge, festering resentment with this sentence, though, lays with the last part, about how fantasizing about rape must be a result of ambivalence and resentment. The conclusion here is that if I, as a woman, fantasize about rape, it’s the result of some sort of pathology. I reject that fairly strenuously. Women like to fantasize about all kinds of things, including rape. This does not have to be explained in the context of women being victimized by men specifically or society in general. It’s a case of a cigar just being a cigar.

Or let’s look at this one: “Women are free from that baggage when they are looking at male-male fantasy scenarios. Such abuse would be far too real and frightening in a heterosexual context because females do live under the constant threat of male sexual violence and comprise the majority of rape victims. Furthermore, female victims of rape are commonly regarded as ‘tainted,’ while the uke who is raped by his lover is portrayed as imbued with innocence.” Hold on, I need to grab a diet Dr. Pepper before I tackle that one.

Thanks for waiting. I have more problems with those three sentences than I could shake a bake at. Seriously, I have so many problems with it I just went back and recounted because I couldn’t believe so much bullshit could possibly be packed into so little space. I’ve already addressed the idea that I have all kinds of baggage about sex as a result of being a woman. I am not weighted down with said baggage, and I am not driven into the arms of manporn by some sort of emotional inadequacy. As for the idea of rape being so terrifying that I couldn’t possibly read about it — I don’t know. I don’t even know what to say about that. Let’s chalk it up to hyperbole and move on – to the phrase where I live under the constant threat of male sexual violence. Technically, I suppose I do, but so do men. I’m not especially traumatized by it. Obviously, I might feel differently if I had been raped or sexually abused, as many women have been – I’m not minimizing the trauma of that; I’m just saying that not all women are driven by a fear of sexual violence. Many are not. And I’m flabbergasted, again, by the assertion that female victims of rape are commonly regarded as tainted. Does that happen? Yes, it does. Is it the cultural norm? I don’t think so. And the uke who is raped by his lover is imbued with innocence? That strikes me as a weird, twisted take on things — pretzel logic, I mean, more than deviant.

Kee doesn’t go astray at every corner. For instance, she nails it when she says, “…the sex is not meant to be realistic gay sex but idealized fantasies of what women would like lovemaking to be like.” She also points out that “yaoi is not meant to be realistic.” This is a crucial point. Yaoi is a fantasy world where everyone is queer. People miss the boat when they criticize yaoi fanfic writers for not understanding how homosexuality works, in society and in the bedroom (or wherever), and for making straight characters gay. And, as Kee says, “When writing yaoi fanfiction, fans adopt a variety of queer reading strategies that differ from fan to fan.” One of Kee’s “informants” does a good job with this: “Basically what BL [Boys Love, a term that is often used interchangeably with yaoi, although yaoi is actually a subset of BL] says is, ‘This isn’t about real gay men. I’m just using men in a sexual relationship as a fantasy that has nothing to do with reality.’” Another informant says, “…I don’t read yaoi for (coded) het sex and romance. I read it for gay sex and romance.” Here, at least, Kee has managed to communicate something essential about the broader yaoi community.

At the end of the essay, Kee also makes an important point about what yaoi fanfic means for the writers, saying: “For female fans, yaoi fanfiction offers them a creative outlet to engage with love/sexual issues and hone their writing skills … They learn from one another how to critically reorient media texts for their own benefit and generate fantexts that are even more complex, satisfying and richer than the original sources.” It takes a certain amount of work to fully imagine a fantasy scenario, flesh it out enough that it will have meaning for other readers and then write it all down, edit it and post it. (The degree to which writers fulfill all these categories differs, obviously, and for a number of reasons; but everyone who writes fanfiction is making an effort in this direction.)

In other words, writing is an integral part of the community — it isn’t just about appreciating manporn, but also about writing it. Writers want not just to fantasize, but also to write; this is obviously true because writing takes a lot more effort than fantasizing. To me, the yaoi fanfic community is interesting not because, wow, women thinking about men having sex! Transgressive! What could it possibly mean? It is interesting because of the symbosis among people who are driven to write down their fantasies and offer them to the community, and the community that reads those fantasies and comments on what they have read, urging writers to write more. (Or stop writing entirely; I’ve seen that, too — it isn’t all nurturing and positive.)

I have been writing yaoi fanfic about and inspired by Weiss Kreuz for years. There isn’t a lot of life left in the old bird, unfortunately — I refer to the WK fanfiction community, not to myself. The fandom is dying out — there aren’t a lot of people writing and reading Weiss Kreuz fanfiction any more. They’ve moved on to other manporn pursuits. It’s had a good run, though, and I have read some very fine writing there, and gotten to know some very fine people. I don’t write fanfic because I’m trying to find the perfect romance novel, as Kee argues. Or maybe I am. Not because romance novels limit women’s roles to that of trembling virgin and newlywed (seriously; Kee has apparently not seen a romance novel since 1978 and also never read Jane Austen) but because I want a romance novel with gay sex and, yes, some hot, schmoopy male/male true love action as well. To me, that doesn’t seem unusual enough to merit a big old anthropological discussion, though. It doesn’t feel especially transgressive, either. It all seems like a fairly obvious, if delightful, outcome of the Internet.

Tomorrow: “The Mirror of Male-Male Love” sidebar by Dirk Deppey.

Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre; Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry and Dru Pagliassotti, eds.; McFarland; 280 pp., $39.95; ISBN: 9780786441952

This book really helped me come to terms with my past, my regrets, my desires. Speaking as a straight white cisgendered male, I occasionally regret my transgressive decision to drop out of grad school to explore the fluid, abject jouissance of the non-(i)voried and nontowered. But then I encounter a text like this, and in its quivering, jellylike prose I remember why, though riven by radical difference, still numerous numinous heterogenous communities speak with a single pleasurable speech-act when they utter: “academics fucking suck.”

This book is written as if its contributors’ brains threw up in their collective skulls. Seriously, people:
_________________

The inclusion of the local allows for an emendation to Pagliassotti’s already productive call for more research into yaoi reading practices, particularly as such permits the possibility of similarity as well as difference, for, as the rehearsal of yaoi and slash’s critical reception suggests, perceptions of appropriation and agency can be a matter of micro- politics, which are variable—but not wholly independent of—the larger socio-political sphere Altman gestures toward.

____________

Thorn’s observation may point to an understanding of the genre as it results from a meta- narrative rupture for the postmodern generations of women who, in addition to facing continued sexual oppression coupled with changing gender roles, have had to face the reality of (homo)sexuality, particularly as it creates the possibility for their opposite sex desire accruing to a body that exhibits a same-sex desire.

__________________

My reading has always been affected by the social and cultural contexts in which I constructed my sexual identity and if, as it has been suggested, the marginalized individual, by necessity, has to create another story that they can read themselves into (Appiah 1994), it has been between the pages of ?ction that I have imagined, scripted, and played out my sissy-boy desires.

_____________

If you’re Julia Kristeva and have actual complicated ideas, you can be let off the hook when your writing is involuted and complicated. If, on the other hand, all you are saying is (in order): “People in different locations may have different reactions to yaoi,” “Yaoi came about because women’s gender roles are changing and homosexuality is more visible than it used to be,” and “I’m gay, and I fantasize” — well, it starts to look a little like you’re using the big words not to express big ideas, but to conceal the fact that you. are. stupid.

Though perhaps that’s cruel. To be more charitable, maybe the problem is just that you can’t write worth a damn. Which, admittedly, when raised to this level of incompetence, is kind of a gift. After all, here you have a young, vibrant, energetic, unexpected new genre, bursting with ideas, romance, sex and violence. And you take it and, through the mystical alchemy of cultural studies, you turn it into an interminable, turgid slog. It would almost be fascinating to watch if it weren’t so godawful boring.

But why is it boring? What drives these academics and academic wannabes to write so badly about yaoi and boys’ love? What compulsions have caused them to quit their quaint ethnic dances, draw the bones from their multifarious noses, and sit at their keyboards festooned (no doubt) with images of girls dressed as boys dressed as ravening Lovecraftian penguin vaginas, so that they can type words like “female gaze” “problematize,” “queering the quotidian” and even, with an almost visible shiver of daring, “fuck”? Is it a commonality of sexual desire? A shared history of being oppressed by the vast majority of people who are objectively less irritating than they are?

From I Shall Never Return Vol. 1

Alas, my survey results aren’t yet in, so I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I did, much to my sorrow, read the whole damn book, and so I am willing to hazard a guess. As near as I can tell, the authors here seem to be united and inspired by that wonderful fetish known as “anthropology”, or, in Japanese, “condescension.” The pages here are hot and heavy (in, you know, a dull way) with the sweaty excitement of declaring large swathes of other, lesser human beings to be…”transgressive!” Or, less often…”maybe homophobic just a little”! or “Dionysian”! (Try it yourself — it’s fun! And transgressive!)

Of course, most of these authors are pro-yaoi, pro-fangirl, and generally enthusiastic about the idea of queering everything in sight through some boy-boy lovin’. They would absolutely deny that they were condescending in any way towards this unique demographic phenomena. But…well, let’s cut to the tape, shall we?

There are no “critical” tools a teacher can provide without somehow deducting from the “feminine,” “uncritical” or “subversive” that is yaoi. (p. 224)

That’s Alan Williams, who claims to be a staunch foe of anthropologizing his subjects. And because he does not want to anthropologize his subjects, he has decided instead to cheerily equate the “feminine” with the “uncritical,” because, you know, women — they’re like those subversive, Dionysian dark peoples, overthrowing rational thought with their inability to think logically.

Ann Snitow, in her analysis of mass market romances, delineates their dark aspects. She shows that the heroine is not allowed by social mores to acknowledge sexual desire honestly and has to do “a lot of social lying to save face, pretending to be unaffected by the hero’s presence while her body melts or shivers” because she has to save her virginity for marriage. Distance between the sexes is glori?ed and the sexual inexperience of the heroine adds to the excitement. (p.128)

That’s Tan Bee Kee, arguing that women enjoy yaoi because it avoids the stereotypical roles of paperback romances. To prove her point, Kee references an essay about romance by Ann Snitow — who was writing in 1979. Of course, the romance heroines of 2010 are not sexually inexperienced, nor are they (as Snitow says they were several decades ago) necessarily obsessed with marriage. Also, contemporary romances have lots and lots of sex. Thus, to cheer on/explain the appeal of yaoi, Kee has nonchalantly mischaracterized the huge number of women who read romance novels by suggesting that they (a) are confusedly disconnected from their desires and (b) cling to a sexual ethos that was on its way out when their mothers were young. Thanks Tan Bee Kee! Your ahistorical generalizing has empowered us all!

While violence and anti-gay discrimination are certainly present in the lives of many gay men, it is troubling that this association goes so far to victimize gayness that any representation that does not fall within the con?nes of these negative factors are viewed as “unrealistic” or “idealistic” as TJ says. In other words, this response suggests that “real” gayness is reached through experience of victimization. (p. 217)

That’s Alexis Hall, tut-tutting at fangirls who think that yaoi is unrealistic merely because nobody in yaoi-land ever seems to notice for a second that being homosexual bears a stigma. Hall explains patiently to the silly fangirls that gay identity in Japan is not like gay identity in the West and that they’re being so darn ethnocentric when they suggest that a realistic depiction of Japanese gay life would occasionally mention discrimination. Besides, it’s not like any queer theorists have actually suggested that discrimination and loss are central parts of gay identity and experience. And also, just FYI, suggesting that yaoi is not realistic because the penises therein are invisible demonstrates a horribly ethnocentric and ignorant view, because, in fact, in Japan, all penises are invisible. And all assholes are mystically lubed. It’s a law. Or maybe a side-effect of Hiroshima or repeated Godzilla attacks or something. I know because I took a class once. Nyah!

But while it’s entertaining to pull out and sneer at individual bits of arrogant idiocy, the real problem here isn’t just in the particulars. It’s systematic. Specifically, it’s amazing how little boys’ love fiction there is in this collection of essays purportedly about boys’ love fiction. A certain amount of this is excusable. For example, the book’s first three chapters — which discuss the economics and distribution of yaoi in Germany, Indonesia, and U.S. fan circles — are interesting and mostly inoffensive. But as the page count remorselessly mounts, one gets more than a little tired of the writers’ predictable fascinations with fan investment, communities, general themes, cosplaying and the all important question of “why” — with everything, in short, except the main thing, which is the stories themselves.

The one aspect of boys’ love these essayists don’t seem to want to talk about, in short, is art. What are particular artists doing in particular works in the boys’ love genre? How does one slash writer in particular — not slash writers in general — approach issues of sexual violence, or love, or gender confusion? It’s true that these questions are occasionally addressed. But the texts are always approached as illustrations of some “larger” point, never as worthy of investigation in their own right.

From Future Lovers

To take one for instance: Mark McHarry starts his essay “Boys in Love in Boys’ Love: Discourses West/East and the Abject in Subject Formation” by discussing Keiko Takemiya’s groundbreaking BL series Song of Wind and Trees. McHarry argues that Song of Wind and Trees demonstrates the development of a gay identity through an experience of abjection. To prove his thesis, he engages with an actual text as closely as anyone in the anthology. And yet, even so…well, here he is talking about Gilbert, Takemiya’s main character.

Gilbert has suffered a great loss. Takemiya makes its cost clear, for example, as when a younger Gilbert submits to a man’s rape of him. Gilbert’s strangulated “oui, oui” is written in Western characters, clarion amid the Japanese, a signal of the weight of the act (vol. 1, 266). The most urgent representations of human desire and loss are in terms of sex and death. Takemiya’s depiction of Gilbert’s so-called promiscuity is a masterful way of showing the extent of his calamity. Emphasizing the undoing of his corporeality via drawings of his body is a perfect visual expression of the undoing of his mental state. (p.178)

OK. Except…what loss has Gilbert suffered exactly? And how do drawings of his body show the “undoing of his corporeality”? Why couldn’t these drawings, for example, emphasize his corporeality instead? And, good lord, are we really supposed to be impressed by the knee-jerk invocation of “sex and death”? These seem like fairly basic questions, but McHarry doesn’t answer them. Instead he wanders off, eventually ending in quack anthropology and sociology so that he can earnestly retail lame clichés like this:

Stories are a key to understanding ourselves, whether they are used in psychoanalysis, in popular ?ction or in other discursive forms. Drawn images, with their immediacy, illusion of completeness, and ambiguity have the power to stimulate the imagination—to imagine new outcomes—in a way that the printed word alone cannot. (p.184)

… which of course is why Nancy inspired a revolution and “The Communist Manifesto” didn’t.

McHarry goes on to argue that child porn laws shouldn’t be used to censor boys’ love books — and OK, fine, I’m basically in agreement with that. But it’s telling that in order to justify the worth of yaoi, he turns instinctively to (ahem) half-assed theories about the “power” of images, rather than to particular aesthetic achievements. Surely, explaining with greater clarity why he believes Song of Wind and Trees is beautiful or insightful would be more useful in defending boys’ love as a genre than generalized grandiose assertions such as “Boys’ love participants claim power to represent a type of child, the male adolescent, and in so doing create entertainment that obstructs (queers) the ability of the state to organize sexual identities.” Because such assertions make it appear that you can only justify art in terms of practical political efficacy — and if that’s the measure, then you need to stop writing about art altogether, get your sorry writing implement out of the university, and run for office on the “Child Porn” ticket. Good luck with that.

This book, then, treats boys’ love as a sociological and cultural phenomena rather than as literature. Most everyone in the collection babbles on about the wonders of diversity, but they seem unable to process the relatively simple fact that, say, Won Soo-yeon’s Let Dai and Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery (to name the two BL series with which I can claim more than passing familiarity) are really, really different from each other. Their creators have different ideas about men, about women, about homosexuality, about love — about most everything, really. It’s almost as if they were written by two different people rather than, you know, by some sort of communal anthropological Jungian hive-mind. (There is one essay in which the author, M.M. Blair, notes that different manga portray women characters differently, and concludes that manga readers react differently to those characters depending on how they are portrayed. This is treated, rather endearingly, as a revelation.)

The way to show that you respect someone is not by saying over and over, “I respect you.” It’s by treating others as if you actually care what they think. Each work of BL, or yaoi, or slash, is created by a particular person who put into it what she had of craft, of genius and of love. Obviously, the works are created in the context of a community and a genre, and it’s fine to talk about that. But to talk about that exclusively, as if it’s always desires and conventions which shape the individual work and never the other way around — it gratuitously denies BL writers the agency and respect that comes with the label “artist.”

So to all these gender-theory steeped writers trying so hard to show that they’ve overturned patriarchy, heteronormativity, and even the c-word of capitalism itself, I say to you: the next time you read a BL manga or slash fiction story? If you really want to be subversive, instead of trying to figure out what that story says about yaoi readers and the yaoi community, and gender and homosexuality and what have you — could you start by figuring out whether you like it? Not whether you like yaoi in general, but whether you like that particular story. And you know what? Even if you think that that story is the worst thing you’ve ever read, you’ll still be showing the author, the community and yourself more respect than you’ve shown anyone or anything in this condescending, embarrassing, abominable dog-turd of a book — which, in the interest of treating you all as colleagues and peers, I make free to say I loathed.

Songs of Wind and Trees image nicked from Web; copyright its respective copyright holders.

Tomorrow: “The Mirror of Male-Male Love” sidebar by Dirk Deppey.