khyungbird (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} khyungbird) wrote,@ 2006-07-31 16:53:00 |
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Boku no Shonen Ai (or "Jason overanalyzes something and takes all the fun out of it")
For the last few months, I've been reading a lot of manga. One of the most interesting genres that I've discovered in that time has been shonen ai (or yaoi, or boys' love, or whatever... yaoi is just shonen ai with more sex) which, to me, joins romantic comedies and horror as one of the most archetypal genres of manga. I initially considered asking someone else to do all the yaoi research for me, but I decided that it was something I should learn more about -- and how often do you get paid to read gay porn? So I started gathering yaoi/shonen ai manga from Digital Manga, DramaQueen, Be Beautiful and the other companies. (I still haven't read any of TokyoPop's Blu manga yet.)
I first heard about yaoi/shonen ai in 1996 when I was just starting to work for Viz. Matt Thorn wrote an article about yaoi dojinshi for Viz's old online magazine, including a shot of Piccolo going down on Gohan, which prompted someone to e-mail me (I was the webzine editor), saying (paraphrase) "That's disgusting! That's the most disgusting thing I've seen! Where can I... I mean where do you get this manga?" :/ Nobody had any copies around the office, and I didn't hear much about it, although I was aware of a few '90s titles like KIZUNA and FAKE and oldies like THE SONG OF THE WIND AND TREES, which I flipped through.
A typical perspective on yaoi manga was Chikao Shiratori's brief writeup in PULP magazine in 2000. To quote his opening lines:
"I feel that I can appreciate a wide range of manga...but even I have absolutely no understand of yaoi manga."
Yeah dude. I already know you're straight, I saw you getting all kissy with your wife/girlfriend Murasaki Yamada when I met you in Tokyo in December 2000. Moving on further down the article...
"In class, I asked one of the students who is a fan of yaoi manga about the appeal of yaoi manga. The student, who is a 19-year-old girl, bluntly replied, "To be honest, it is the most convenient form of porn that is available to us.""
Did the Internet exist in the year 2000? I don't remember... hmm... moving on...
"According to her, girls... have sexual needs just as boys (do). However, if a woman, especially a young woman, were to walk into a porn shop, she would be seen as a nymphomaniac. In addition, according to my student, "99% of the material on the market is made from a male perspective." Most certainly, "the women in porn"... are all created from a male perspective. My student said that women just cannot respond to such material."
Well, this makes some sense, I think. The porn shops on Columbus and Broadway a block from my house seem to mostly attract a clientele of men, although I've never been inside, since I'm too busy reading yaoi manga. Stereotypically, most porn is aimed at men... and when I was in high school, I myself had the Andrea-Dworkin-meets-the-Victorian-Era attitude that women weren't into porn because porn was evil & exploitative and only scummy guys thought about that kind of stuff. (See any chapter of THE STIFF.) But, frankly, that attitude is totally outdated & condescending & sexist in its own way. Times have changed, porn is mainstreamed like never before, and (at least in San Francisco, the home of the Good Vibrations chain of sex stores) there's all kinds of consciously progressive, non-sexist porn options aimed at both straight & gay women.
Yaoi is yet another bombing raid on the already smoking ruins of the "women don't like porn" myth. But the interesting thing about yaoi is that it ISN'T what you'd normally think of as "women-centric" -- it's all guys, for god's sake -- and frankly, it isn't usually very progressive either. ("What?! Of COURSE the #1 thing people want in their sexual fantasies is political correctness!" ;) ) It comes from an entirely different perspective and it's very effective at what it does. The nearest analogue is straight men's fascination with lesbians, but I think that shonen ai is a little more complicated and less superficial than just the desire to see the opposite sex getting it on without any distracting male genitals.
The first thing to realize about shonen ai is that it really has almost no relation to actual gay men. (Although Carl Gustav Horn was extremely skeptical of Shiratori's statistic that yaoi has "99% female readership"... I myself ran into a gay friend from college on my first trip to YaoiCon in 2001.) I wasn't aware of yaoi's apolitical nature when I first read it... in fact, I was hoping to find some cool progressive manga about gay issues, or failing that, some really juicy tormented pre-1970s-style repressed-homosexuality melodrama. In fact, it's usually neither; almost all shonen ai takes place in a world without homophobia, and most of them don't even use the word "gay," although it's still not as wimpy as your typical shonen/shojo manga where characters say things like "I'm not gay, I just like Minami-sempai!" or whatever. There's usually just enough acknowledgment of gayness for there to be a faint feeling of forbidden love, but not enough for any kind of political statement or even self-identification. (When I first read HANA-KIMI, I thought its depictions of gay themes sucked, but they're deep compared to most shonen ai manga.) I've heard that in Japan, "coming out" is less common because of social stigma, so maybe this reflects the actual prejudices of Japanese society, but I really don't know -- I think it's because the audience of shonen ai (at least in Japan) isn't really interested in those things, whether out of homophobia or, more likely, because it's a distraction from the emotional fix they seek. Yaoi is pure fantasy, and doesn't pretend to be anything else... it doesn't claim to "realistically depict the emotional lives of gay men" or anything like that. It isn't like some kind of gender-reversed STRANGERS IN PARADISE emo sensitive-wankerboy fantasy. On the other hand, American shonen ai fans tend to be more politically aware, like Abby Denson, whose recent book TOUGH LOVE (which she started drawing in the mid-90s) aims for realism in its depiction of gay boys in high school.
ANTIQUE BAKERY is one of the only even remotely yaoi-ish manga to have a scene like this.
The books often have beautiful covers and production values; Digital Manga's lineup, in particular, looks like a scattering of jewels (or perhaps flowers is a more shojo-appropriate image), each one promising strange pleasures. The evocative, ambiguous titles...the discreet covers, as opposed to the blatantly pornographic covers of straight male porn like Eros Mangerotica... the varied art... and the formulaic stories. Shonen ai/yaoi is, frankly, EXTREMELY formulaic. It's one of those things where you have to read book after book in hopes of uncovering some slight variation on a theme, some marginal playing around within the restrictions of the genre. Every genre is formulaic -- there's not that many fighting manga which end with the hero getting his ass kicked, or romance manga which end with the main characters breaking up -- but shonen ai seems unusually so, possibly because the stories are so short. Basically, every manga is a monogamous romance between two guys, with no serious rivals, and it always ends happily. ("Happily" meaning that they get together, that is... there may be rape, coercion or borderline incest and pedophilia involved, but the moral of shonen ai is that it's always okay because they love eachother.) :/
I've never read Harlequin Romances or anything like that, so shonen ai is the first time that I've encountered "emotional porn" -- by which I mean, not porn with emotions, but stories where the emotional content is as predictable (and often as extreme) as the sex scenes in porn. "I love you. I always loved you -- I've had a crush on you for the last three years. I set up this insane stalker-like scheme because I loved you. I'll never leave you. I don't like it when you talk to other guys, don't you know that I love you?" This kind of stuff is the emotional money shots of shonen ai. (Or at least the more story-centric shonen ai -- some of the shorter ones, like CLAN OF THE NAKAGAMIS, are more humorous and self-parodying.) To put it in standard shojo/shonen manga terms: there are no shonen ai "harem manga" where one character is torn between multiple suitors. All the 30+ shonen ai I've read is "perfect, idealized pair" relationship manga. Everyone, even the rapists and bad guys, loves the target of their affections with a deep, obsessive passion, never having second thoughts or feeling attracted to different people at the same time or getting confused or getting rejected or wimping out and giving up. In shonen ai, neediness and possessiveness are positive traits, when in real life, someone would probably be rushing these characters to a counselor. The sexual content, whether explicit or PG-rated (there is a wide range), is linked directly to the emotional content. There's no casual sex in shonen ai manga (except occasionally offscreen and with peripheral characters). In EMBRACING LOVE, which always skirts on the very edge of the genre, one of the characters suggests having an orgy, but it all falls apart because no one's into it. "What's wrong? You're not even hard." "What about you? Your mouth is totally dry." (I love that last line, for the same reason I love the line in LEVEL C, "I'll make sure you have multiple orgasms.") ;)
As these lines indicate, most shonen ai is aware that it's not realistic, and that the men aren't exactly realistic men. Considering that it's an escape from reality, one of the more disappointing things about shonen ai, to me, is that it usually follows a model of stereotypical male-female relationships. It's all seme-uke, dominant-submissive; big aggressive guys with dark hair pursue little delicate guys with light hair, and when they get in bed (again, except in EMBRACING LOVE, once or twice) no one ever flips over and switches sides. Is there no equality? In the few manga which don't have a clear seme-uke, the most common alternative is to have lovers who are exactly alike, like in SAME CELL ORGANISM, where the characters basically form two halves of the same person, as if with an intuitive understanding that lovers of different genders can supposedly never have. But the seme-uke relationships in shonen ai manga have one big advantage over straight porn, one big purposeful ambiguity; since both lovers are the same gender, it's up to you, in your heart of hearts, to choose who you identify with more.
In a way, all shonen ai manga is an attempt to break free of the prison of gender, not entirely different from most male-written American superhero comics with female protagonists. In both cases, the opposite sex is depicted in a stereotypically "idealized" way, according to the tastes of the writer; and in both cases, when they're not being heroic and passionate, they're often suffering serious abuse. When I first read BATTLE ANGEL ALITA over 10 years ago (and it's a pretty innocuous example), I felt that the main character was serving a double function as a sort of sex object and action figure. On the one hand: "She's a strong heroine! She's independent! Look at her beat up creepy, sexist bad guys!" On the other hand: "She's got breasts! She's got panties! She moves at the (male) artist's command! The sexist bad guys make the male reader feel oh so much less sexist by comparison, and plus as long as she's single, the reader's still got a chance!"
Obviously it shouldn't be a big deal to identify with the opposite gender -- unless we're total jerks, we all attempt to identify with people of different sexes, sexual orientations, social groups, etc., every day. Escapism is one of the places where morality comes from. What's interesting is the amount of fantasy that goes into the mix; escapism usually isn't much of a genuine attempt to experience something new, as much as it is an attempt to deal with (or escape from) our own issues. One theory about shonen ai is that it's a "safe" expression of lesbian feelings. (There are many lesbian shonen ai fans.) Moto Hagio wrote some of the first proto-shonen-ai manga in the 1970s. In her interview in The Comics Journal #269, she explains that the first draft of her boy's love manga THE HEART OF THOMAS was written as a lesbian story involving girls. But:
"When I wrote it as a boys' school story, everything fell into place smoothly. But when I wrote the girls' school version, it came out sort of giggly...It's interesting you can have a girl and a boy say the same line, but though the girl sounds so cheeky when she says it, the boy can sound so cool. (laughter)."
Well hmm. That's interesting, because I feel the exact same way with the genders switched. (Except substitute "unsympathetic" for "cheeky.") When I was in my early 20s, when I was a virgin and didn't know if I was gay or straight, I was really into lesbian-themed comics, like Ariel Schrag's. I was also into gay comics like Howard Cruse's, but they were secondary; why would I want to read about a bunch of lame men when I can read about fascinating women? I wasn't comfortable enough with my own body to read about men. But on the other hand, Alison Bechdel's comics were a little too "domestic" for me. I wasn't particularly interested in stories about middle-aged lesbians going about their daily lives. I wanted passion, I wanted angst, I wanted characters who I both found attractive and kind of wished that I was (everyone who knows me, as you read this line, please purge your mind of the reality of my physical appearance). All this wrapped up in the allure of gayness, the "homosexual mystique" plus the "feminine mystique." (And today, there's even a Taschen photo-book of 1970s macho advertisement art called "The Male Mystique.") To Schrag, they were autobiographical comics; to me, they were a form of escapism that I could only experience through female characters. I hope it was healthier escapism than watching some crappy all-female moe bishojo anime.
So I liked Ariel Schrag's comics for a long time (I still do), and now I feel, perhaps delusionally, that I'm seeing the other side of the mirror -- the "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" gender question. When you think someone is beautiful and awesome, is it because you admire them and want to be like them, or because you're attracted to them and want to have sex with them? Which is the stronger drive: sex or identity? Both are present in the shonen ai phenomenon. The (male) characters in shonen ai are escapist vessels into which (mostly female) readers can pour themselves. They may be gently treated or horribly abused, but their bodies are the battlegrounds for fantasies which people can never play out, at least not under normal circumstances. Since they are unfamiliar battlegrounds, they are particularly roughly treated. Emotionally and physically (those hairless bodies, that long, sleek hair) they fuse male and female traits in a way that matches the readers' desires, creating a sort of perfect hermaphroditic creatures who happen to have penises.
Oh yeah, and it's just fun pr0n. The one-to-three-volume yaoi/shonen ai series, the shortest and most formulaic ones, are the shonen ai equivalent of crack pipes or fast food or stroke mags. But the slash-fanfic approach of shonen ai has seeped into the most mainstream anime and manga (example #1: Naruto and Sasuke's kiss in the second chapter of NARUTO). It is a respected form of fanservice, as ubiquitous as the panty shot, if not more so, since it's easier to get away with without pissing off the censors.
There's probably many more reasons to like shonen ai than the ones I've listed (like, possibly, the sex), but frankly, my basic reaction is that it's great. I respect its role, even if I find a lot of it pretty boring, and even if I don't want to say "Thumbs up! Thumps up to everything!" to some of the more bizarre and nonconsensual stuff. (Yeah... always Mr. Moralistic.) I think there was a missing piece in the world before it was invented; it makes me wonder if women in past ages were turned on by the idea of hot gay dudes. They probably were. I hope it continues to thrive (and, even though this isn't its main purpose, makes people less homophobic), and I hope that good artists (like Fumi Yoshinaga, creator of ANTIQUE BAKERY) continue to push the envelope of the genre. As for myself, I think I'd like to write a shonen ai manga someday. It will be a cruel and vicious and beautiful one.
For the last few months, I've been reading a lot of manga. One of the most interesting genres that I've discovered in that time has been shonen ai (or yaoi, or boys' love, or whatever... yaoi is just shonen ai with more sex) which, to me, joins romantic comedies and horror as one of the most archetypal genres of manga. I initially considered asking someone else to do all the yaoi research for me, but I decided that it was something I should learn more about -- and how often do you get paid to read gay porn? So I started gathering yaoi/shonen ai manga from Digital Manga, DramaQueen, Be Beautiful and the other companies. (I still haven't read any of TokyoPop's Blu manga yet.)
I first heard about yaoi/shonen ai in 1996 when I was just starting to work for Viz. Matt Thorn wrote an article about yaoi dojinshi for Viz's old online magazine, including a shot of Piccolo going down on Gohan, which prompted someone to e-mail me (I was the webzine editor), saying (paraphrase) "That's disgusting! That's the most disgusting thing I've seen! Where can I... I mean where do you get this manga?" :/ Nobody had any copies around the office, and I didn't hear much about it, although I was aware of a few '90s titles like KIZUNA and FAKE and oldies like THE SONG OF THE WIND AND TREES, which I flipped through.
A typical perspective on yaoi manga was Chikao Shiratori's brief writeup in PULP magazine in 2000. To quote his opening lines:
"I feel that I can appreciate a wide range of manga...but even I have absolutely no understand of yaoi manga."
Yeah dude. I already know you're straight, I saw you getting all kissy with your wife/girlfriend Murasaki Yamada when I met you in Tokyo in December 2000. Moving on further down the article...
"In class, I asked one of the students who is a fan of yaoi manga about the appeal of yaoi manga. The student, who is a 19-year-old girl, bluntly replied, "To be honest, it is the most convenient form of porn that is available to us.""
Did the Internet exist in the year 2000? I don't remember... hmm... moving on...
"According to her, girls... have sexual needs just as boys (do). However, if a woman, especially a young woman, were to walk into a porn shop, she would be seen as a nymphomaniac. In addition, according to my student, "99% of the material on the market is made from a male perspective." Most certainly, "the women in porn"... are all created from a male perspective. My student said that women just cannot respond to such material."
Well, this makes some sense, I think. The porn shops on Columbus and Broadway a block from my house seem to mostly attract a clientele of men, although I've never been inside, since I'm too busy reading yaoi manga. Stereotypically, most porn is aimed at men... and when I was in high school, I myself had the Andrea-Dworkin-meets-the-Victorian-Era attitude that women weren't into porn because porn was evil & exploitative and only scummy guys thought about that kind of stuff. (See any chapter of THE STIFF.) But, frankly, that attitude is totally outdated & condescending & sexist in its own way. Times have changed, porn is mainstreamed like never before, and (at least in San Francisco, the home of the Good Vibrations chain of sex stores) there's all kinds of consciously progressive, non-sexist porn options aimed at both straight & gay women.
Yaoi is yet another bombing raid on the already smoking ruins of the "women don't like porn" myth. But the interesting thing about yaoi is that it ISN'T what you'd normally think of as "women-centric" -- it's all guys, for god's sake -- and frankly, it isn't usually very progressive either. ("What?! Of COURSE the #1 thing people want in their sexual fantasies is political correctness!" ;) ) It comes from an entirely different perspective and it's very effective at what it does. The nearest analogue is straight men's fascination with lesbians, but I think that shonen ai is a little more complicated and less superficial than just the desire to see the opposite sex getting it on without any distracting male genitals.
The first thing to realize about shonen ai is that it really has almost no relation to actual gay men. (Although Carl Gustav Horn was extremely skeptical of Shiratori's statistic that yaoi has "99% female readership"... I myself ran into a gay friend from college on my first trip to YaoiCon in 2001.) I wasn't aware of yaoi's apolitical nature when I first read it... in fact, I was hoping to find some cool progressive manga about gay issues, or failing that, some really juicy tormented pre-1970s-style repressed-homosexuality melodrama. In fact, it's usually neither; almost all shonen ai takes place in a world without homophobia, and most of them don't even use the word "gay," although it's still not as wimpy as your typical shonen/shojo manga where characters say things like "I'm not gay, I just like Minami-sempai!" or whatever. There's usually just enough acknowledgment of gayness for there to be a faint feeling of forbidden love, but not enough for any kind of political statement or even self-identification. (When I first read HANA-KIMI, I thought its depictions of gay themes sucked, but they're deep compared to most shonen ai manga.) I've heard that in Japan, "coming out" is less common because of social stigma, so maybe this reflects the actual prejudices of Japanese society, but I really don't know -- I think it's because the audience of shonen ai (at least in Japan) isn't really interested in those things, whether out of homophobia or, more likely, because it's a distraction from the emotional fix they seek. Yaoi is pure fantasy, and doesn't pretend to be anything else... it doesn't claim to "realistically depict the emotional lives of gay men" or anything like that. It isn't like some kind of gender-reversed STRANGERS IN PARADISE emo sensitive-wankerboy fantasy. On the other hand, American shonen ai fans tend to be more politically aware, like Abby Denson, whose recent book TOUGH LOVE (which she started drawing in the mid-90s) aims for realism in its depiction of gay boys in high school.
ANTIQUE BAKERY is one of the only even remotely yaoi-ish manga to have a scene like this.
The books often have beautiful covers and production values; Digital Manga's lineup, in particular, looks like a scattering of jewels (or perhaps flowers is a more shojo-appropriate image), each one promising strange pleasures. The evocative, ambiguous titles...the discreet covers, as opposed to the blatantly pornographic covers of straight male porn like Eros Mangerotica... the varied art... and the formulaic stories. Shonen ai/yaoi is, frankly, EXTREMELY formulaic. It's one of those things where you have to read book after book in hopes of uncovering some slight variation on a theme, some marginal playing around within the restrictions of the genre. Every genre is formulaic -- there's not that many fighting manga which end with the hero getting his ass kicked, or romance manga which end with the main characters breaking up -- but shonen ai seems unusually so, possibly because the stories are so short. Basically, every manga is a monogamous romance between two guys, with no serious rivals, and it always ends happily. ("Happily" meaning that they get together, that is... there may be rape, coercion or borderline incest and pedophilia involved, but the moral of shonen ai is that it's always okay because they love eachother.) :/
I've never read Harlequin Romances or anything like that, so shonen ai is the first time that I've encountered "emotional porn" -- by which I mean, not porn with emotions, but stories where the emotional content is as predictable (and often as extreme) as the sex scenes in porn. "I love you. I always loved you -- I've had a crush on you for the last three years. I set up this insane stalker-like scheme because I loved you. I'll never leave you. I don't like it when you talk to other guys, don't you know that I love you?" This kind of stuff is the emotional money shots of shonen ai. (Or at least the more story-centric shonen ai -- some of the shorter ones, like CLAN OF THE NAKAGAMIS, are more humorous and self-parodying.) To put it in standard shojo/shonen manga terms: there are no shonen ai "harem manga" where one character is torn between multiple suitors. All the 30+ shonen ai I've read is "perfect, idealized pair" relationship manga. Everyone, even the rapists and bad guys, loves the target of their affections with a deep, obsessive passion, never having second thoughts or feeling attracted to different people at the same time or getting confused or getting rejected or wimping out and giving up. In shonen ai, neediness and possessiveness are positive traits, when in real life, someone would probably be rushing these characters to a counselor. The sexual content, whether explicit or PG-rated (there is a wide range), is linked directly to the emotional content. There's no casual sex in shonen ai manga (except occasionally offscreen and with peripheral characters). In EMBRACING LOVE, which always skirts on the very edge of the genre, one of the characters suggests having an orgy, but it all falls apart because no one's into it. "What's wrong? You're not even hard." "What about you? Your mouth is totally dry." (I love that last line, for the same reason I love the line in LEVEL C, "I'll make sure you have multiple orgasms.") ;)
As these lines indicate, most shonen ai is aware that it's not realistic, and that the men aren't exactly realistic men. Considering that it's an escape from reality, one of the more disappointing things about shonen ai, to me, is that it usually follows a model of stereotypical male-female relationships. It's all seme-uke, dominant-submissive; big aggressive guys with dark hair pursue little delicate guys with light hair, and when they get in bed (again, except in EMBRACING LOVE, once or twice) no one ever flips over and switches sides. Is there no equality? In the few manga which don't have a clear seme-uke, the most common alternative is to have lovers who are exactly alike, like in SAME CELL ORGANISM, where the characters basically form two halves of the same person, as if with an intuitive understanding that lovers of different genders can supposedly never have. But the seme-uke relationships in shonen ai manga have one big advantage over straight porn, one big purposeful ambiguity; since both lovers are the same gender, it's up to you, in your heart of hearts, to choose who you identify with more.
In a way, all shonen ai manga is an attempt to break free of the prison of gender, not entirely different from most male-written American superhero comics with female protagonists. In both cases, the opposite sex is depicted in a stereotypically "idealized" way, according to the tastes of the writer; and in both cases, when they're not being heroic and passionate, they're often suffering serious abuse. When I first read BATTLE ANGEL ALITA over 10 years ago (and it's a pretty innocuous example), I felt that the main character was serving a double function as a sort of sex object and action figure. On the one hand: "She's a strong heroine! She's independent! Look at her beat up creepy, sexist bad guys!" On the other hand: "She's got breasts! She's got panties! She moves at the (male) artist's command! The sexist bad guys make the male reader feel oh so much less sexist by comparison, and plus as long as she's single, the reader's still got a chance!"
Obviously it shouldn't be a big deal to identify with the opposite gender -- unless we're total jerks, we all attempt to identify with people of different sexes, sexual orientations, social groups, etc., every day. Escapism is one of the places where morality comes from. What's interesting is the amount of fantasy that goes into the mix; escapism usually isn't much of a genuine attempt to experience something new, as much as it is an attempt to deal with (or escape from) our own issues. One theory about shonen ai is that it's a "safe" expression of lesbian feelings. (There are many lesbian shonen ai fans.) Moto Hagio wrote some of the first proto-shonen-ai manga in the 1970s. In her interview in The Comics Journal #269, she explains that the first draft of her boy's love manga THE HEART OF THOMAS was written as a lesbian story involving girls. But:
"When I wrote it as a boys' school story, everything fell into place smoothly. But when I wrote the girls' school version, it came out sort of giggly...It's interesting you can have a girl and a boy say the same line, but though the girl sounds so cheeky when she says it, the boy can sound so cool. (laughter)."
Well hmm. That's interesting, because I feel the exact same way with the genders switched. (Except substitute "unsympathetic" for "cheeky.") When I was in my early 20s, when I was a virgin and didn't know if I was gay or straight, I was really into lesbian-themed comics, like Ariel Schrag's. I was also into gay comics like Howard Cruse's, but they were secondary; why would I want to read about a bunch of lame men when I can read about fascinating women? I wasn't comfortable enough with my own body to read about men. But on the other hand, Alison Bechdel's comics were a little too "domestic" for me. I wasn't particularly interested in stories about middle-aged lesbians going about their daily lives. I wanted passion, I wanted angst, I wanted characters who I both found attractive and kind of wished that I was (everyone who knows me, as you read this line, please purge your mind of the reality of my physical appearance). All this wrapped up in the allure of gayness, the "homosexual mystique" plus the "feminine mystique." (And today, there's even a Taschen photo-book of 1970s macho advertisement art called "The Male Mystique.") To Schrag, they were autobiographical comics; to me, they were a form of escapism that I could only experience through female characters. I hope it was healthier escapism than watching some crappy all-female moe bishojo anime.
So I liked Ariel Schrag's comics for a long time (I still do), and now I feel, perhaps delusionally, that I'm seeing the other side of the mirror -- the "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" gender question. When you think someone is beautiful and awesome, is it because you admire them and want to be like them, or because you're attracted to them and want to have sex with them? Which is the stronger drive: sex or identity? Both are present in the shonen ai phenomenon. The (male) characters in shonen ai are escapist vessels into which (mostly female) readers can pour themselves. They may be gently treated or horribly abused, but their bodies are the battlegrounds for fantasies which people can never play out, at least not under normal circumstances. Since they are unfamiliar battlegrounds, they are particularly roughly treated. Emotionally and physically (those hairless bodies, that long, sleek hair) they fuse male and female traits in a way that matches the readers' desires, creating a sort of perfect hermaphroditic creatures who happen to have penises.
Oh yeah, and it's just fun pr0n. The one-to-three-volume yaoi/shonen ai series, the shortest and most formulaic ones, are the shonen ai equivalent of crack pipes or fast food or stroke mags. But the slash-fanfic approach of shonen ai has seeped into the most mainstream anime and manga (example #1: Naruto and Sasuke's kiss in the second chapter of NARUTO). It is a respected form of fanservice, as ubiquitous as the panty shot, if not more so, since it's easier to get away with without pissing off the censors.
There's probably many more reasons to like shonen ai than the ones I've listed (like, possibly, the sex), but frankly, my basic reaction is that it's great. I respect its role, even if I find a lot of it pretty boring, and even if I don't want to say "Thumbs up! Thumps up to everything!" to some of the more bizarre and nonconsensual stuff. (Yeah... always Mr. Moralistic.) I think there was a missing piece in the world before it was invented; it makes me wonder if women in past ages were turned on by the idea of hot gay dudes. They probably were. I hope it continues to thrive (and, even though this isn't its main purpose, makes people less homophobic), and I hope that good artists (like Fumi Yoshinaga, creator of ANTIQUE BAKERY) continue to push the envelope of the genre. As for myself, I think I'd like to write a shonen ai manga someday. It will be a cruel and vicious and beautiful one.
