One Hand in the Air Yaoi is a handy name for Gratuitous Dirty Sex, ie: fanfic 
and fanart that would make a pornstar blush on all four cheeks. It's come to be 
used more widely to refer to Japanese media - manga, anime, video games - 
depicting male homosexuality. More recently, yaoi was adopted by, or adapted to, 
western fandoms, such as the Harry Potter slash fandom, which includes a sizable, 
arguably volatile crossover contingent with anime/manga/game slash fandom.

Rather than pounce all over semantics and resort to nitpicking, I'll open up a 
more salient dialogue on why the staples of yaoi are prevalant, not so much why 
women like it. Why women like yaoi on a fundamental level is so obvious, only 
affected machismo would posture in disbelief. Yaoi is itself not a mystery, not 
something worth clarifying and cleaning and breaking down for adverse passersby. 
You get it. You may not relate to it or like it, but you get it.

So, the cliches, because that's what they've become. Electrified psychology may 
account for one out of ten yaoi manga, but I expect more of it is hackneyed 
melodrama. Let's not give mangaka too much credit: few of them give us profound 
new insights into misogyny, misandry, homophobia, or heterosexism, any more than 
Hollywood action films give us profound new insight into the desensitization of 
America. Yaoi and its fandom isn't that complicated. At its most meaningful, it 
tells us that women from all over the world are hung up on overly emotional, 
oftimes violent, and sometimes abstract sex. If that surprises you, you don't 
know much about women.

Traditional yaoi feminizes the participants. Yaoi is feminine expression in the 
extremes, written primarily by, for, and about females, registering their 
interests and exploiting their cravings. The girly uke, or bottom, supplements 
the female on a direct, even visual scale. The domineering, possessive seme, or 
top, may represent the threat males hold over the heads of smaller, weaker, less 
extroverted females - females who stereotype themselves with a degrading 
efficiency - but more importantly, he, too, is a feminized rendition of 
masculinity. This is sex filtered through the female lense. It has nothing to do 
with homosexuality and everything to do with heterosexuality.

Insofar as the allegation of heterosexism goes, it isn't hard to see why I make 
it. The relationships in most yaoi have all the twilight distortions of a bodice-ripper 
romance novel. Hardy, strong male; frail, weak "male." The seme and uke are 
roleplaying, both of them deprived of the essential masculinity to alleviate the 
pressing realization that at their core, yaoi bear an ugly face of female hang-ups. 
Not, I daresay, that all female share these hang-ups, nor that all are turned on 
by yaoi, but that the blatant cliche of a male/female dynamic is omnipresent and 
undeniable.

In addition, though, there's a sizable base of lesbians who write male/male 
fiction. The gist of this is that they tend to incorporate power struggles, 
rather than power standards, into their writing. The result is that much of the 
best gay buttsex on the Internet is written by the other side. They tend to 
focus less on conforming males to crisis-ridden female identities, and instead 
allow the males to remain males, albeit written from a female point of view that 
is not as likely to be tainted by the Big Man and his Little Woman.

Yaoi, in the vein of much erotica, is severely inclined toward being the poor 
woman's drama. It's a simplification of human nature by reducing it to 
unadulterated sexuality - yes, we are sexual creatures, and, logically speaking, 
our sole purpose is to procreate, but gay sex is not procreative and, besides, 
supposedly rationality is "above that." While a great many complex, intricate 
stories involve sex, let's be blunt, here: a good deal of yaoi is about using 
sex to communicate ideas that would be better off communicated in other ways. 
Writing a bad but tense sex scene is easier than writing a bad but tense 
dialogue. Sex, for all its finer qualities, tends to be overwrought with 
amateurish zest for authorial, oft youthful assumptions about human interaction. 
The idea, there, is that anything can be said through sex. That much is true. It's 
also difficult, and at some point the nature of a relationship is dilluted by 
the nature of bodily fluids. It's entirely possible to write solid, compelling 
drama as pure drama. It's also damned difficult to accomplish this without 
making considerable sacrifices.

My honest, concise opinion is that I don't think most yaoi is a writer's or 
artists's means of consciously or subconsciously conveying how frightened she is 
of the unwholesome side of sex and gender. I think most yaoi is a pile of 
idealistic rubbish, and I think attempts to characterize most fans of yaoi as 
frothing psychopaths are outrageous. What we see with yaoi is, as a rule, a 
marginally talented Nobody's enterprising method of jumping up the social strata. 
She types or illustrates her story, she posts it, she waits for feedback, she 
engages her friends. She also gets off on seeing two guys - they have cocks, 
they must be guys! - entangled in bedsheets. The number of yaoi fans whose work 
or opinions constitute sexism, phobia, or insecurities is, I posit, slim. Very 
slim. Heterosexism, feasibly and indirectly, but not a cry for help or a call to 
arms. Something more like, I dunno, entertainment.

return to a thousand pardons