A former aficionado of the vintage girl-power anime series Sailor Moon, the twenty-six-year-old Michigan illustrator known as Pluto has a new passion. She now spends her days drawing hot young men who cruise, pursue and inevitably fuck the bejesus out of each other. In collaboration with a friend, she has been working on a story titled Bottled Up; the plot involves a hapless dreamboat who seeks help from a male spirit for a "performance" problem. As treatment, the spirit (who resembles a willowy Heath Ledger) unzips the boy's pants, drops to his knees and introduces the young hero to pleasures hitherto unknown.
Pluto specializes in yaoi, a subculture of Japanese manga that depicts romance and sex between attractive young men. Made by women, it is also written for women. The form originated in Japan in the '70s as a kind of fan art; it made the leap Stateside in the '90s via imports and bootlegs. Today, a general search for the keyword "yaoi" on Webring.com yields more than 1,500 yaoi sites, but the industry is still relatively small. American manga houses like Tokyopop, Central Park Media and Rightstuf only started licensing Japanese yaoi a few years ago.
But thematic differences between East and West were immediately apparent. In Japanese yaoi, genitalia are indicated by a big white circle (per industry jargon, a "glowing cone of white light.") Its American counterpart shows
"Women read these stories because they make them feel sexual in a way that hetero romances don't."
everything: sloppy blowjobs, penetration, facial come shots. While Japanese protagonists are androgynous and can easily pass as women, American yaoi men are manlier (but still never too butch). In Japan, certain subgenres of yaoi feature prepubescent boys; American yaoi artists take great pains to announce somewhere in each story that characters are of post-jailbait age. Still, many conventions stuck. One: a rigid top-bottom power dynamic, in which struggle is foreplay. Two: the sex.
Fans are the first to admit that yaoi is a form of porn, although most bristle at appending the word "gay." In Japan, theories abound as to why the genre appeals to young women. Some believe it functions as a screw-you to a button-down society; others say it allows young women to approach sex without shame or fear of "competing" with another female character. "At least for me, there's something accessible about yaoi — I typically don't like romance stories. Maybe it's the excitement and the taboo. I love the innuendos, the suggestions, the almost kissing, the consummation," says Pluto, whose website showcases her work. "Beyond that, it's hard to explain." Tricia Owens, a Vegas-based yaoi novelist, is the owner of JuxtaposeFantasy, the first yaoi website to charge a membership fee. "When you read a yaoi story, you're reading it for one reason only: you want to see two men falling in love and/or having sex. Women read these stories because they make them feel sexual in a way that hetero romances don't."
"Most boy-love comics foster an aesthetic of purity, even
when depicting hardcore sex acts," writes
Deborah Shamoon, a doctoral candidate in Modern Japanese Literature and Film
at UC-Berkeley, in an essay on manga. "Heterosexual romance, by comparison, is distinctly more
threatening."
So yaoi signifies a peculiar kind of chastity. "Women enjoy it because they don't have to worry about anything being done to women," says Linda Williams, director of Film Studies at UC-Berkeley and editor of the book Porn Studies. "A woman is likely to be sensitive to any potential abuse of female anatomy or power, even though that abuse itself can be a turn-on. You're free from that baggage when you are looking at men-men fantasy scenarios."
In Japan, yaoi has long been a bona fide enterprise, complete with its own auteurs, bestsellers and bookstore signings. For now, it's a largely closeted taste in the US. Although more and more women are speaking up in general terms about their affection for gay male porn, the idea still seems disproportionately transgressive. "The fact that they're enjoying something extremely sexual is embarrassing to some women," says Owens. "Then it's between two men — not to mention two men who are there for women's enjoyment." Before yaoi can flourish here, fans say, more women must fess up to and own their kinks. Owens estimates that ninety percent of her readers are female, aged eighteen to forty: housewives, college students, lawyers, lesbians, bisexual, straight. "I like everything really, but the struggle for dominance is definitely one thing that stands out to me," says mosey_pussycat, a seventeen-year-old denizen of a LiveJournal.com yaoi group. "A little of the foreplay is important too, but . . . am I breaching rules by saying this next sentence? I read yaoi to get turned on."
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Fiona Ng is a freelance writer living in New York. She's written
for Bust, the Los Angeles Times, RES, Black Book and other publications.
