two characters from Junjo Romantica: Pure Romance

When he finally (after weeks of angst!) kisses him, one hand on his cheek the other aggressively crushing his fingers, I clutch my heart to keep it from bursting. This is a flashback to one of the fantasies I was conjuring at age fourteen, at 2 a.m., when I should have been sleeping but was reading dirty fanfiction written by another teen girl about two male anime characters instead. I read late into the night (and possibly touch myself), as the two remove their pants and play with each other’s genitals.

I never got into gay porn as a young teen, finding it too crude and obscene, but sexy words about drawn characters on a webpage always did the trick (at least for a while). Later, the anime about boy bands called “Gravitation” made its way to the States, and while it had its male characters kissing on-screen, I never became a fan: The fantasy, the cerebral aspect of this forbidden, oftentimes tragic, male-male idealized romance in text was what I craved.

This was more than a decade ago, before this type of “Boys’ Love” — known in Japanese as “yaoi” — was all over the place, and even seeping into the mainstream beyond anime in a practice known as “shipping.”The most well known instance of this happening in today’s pop culture is the “shipping” of two band members of One Direction, Harry and Louis who together are known as “Larry”.

Contrary to its name, “Boys’ Love” is not actually about little boys in love, but depicts high school or older males getting hot and bothered by each other. By definition, yaoi is homoerotic work created by women for women. It is estimated that at least 80 percent of consumers are women most of whom are heterosexual (I am not). Characters tend to be thin, well-educated, feminine, and white collar, as opposed to characters in “Bara” — the genre of anime about gay men for gay men — who are more masculine, blue collar, and beefy.

Flash forward to today and you have things like Yaoi-Con now in its twelfth year and fan-made yaoi videos all over YouTube collecting hundreds of thousands of views and comments like these from what appear to be young women (possibly early teens) trying to process something sexual:

The genre has definitely gotten rougher — there’s now a yaoi game depicting brutal prison rape — and the audience has grown larger due to digital distribution, but the appeal has clearly stayed the same. The anime series with graphic depictions of sex and make-out sessions just don’t draw as large fanbases of young women as those that don’t.

The most popular “Boys’ Love” anime right now is the brand spanking new “Free! Iwatobi Swim Club” but it isn’t even technically yaoi (yet) as the high school swim team boys have yet to kiss, though this idea is teased on occasion. The series is considered “Boys’ Love” because of the large body of homoerotic works the female fanbase has created, like the featured DeviantArt piece by dreamxxdream about the two main characters on the verge of an underwater kiss. “Free! Iwatobi Swim Club” started off as a promo for an animation studio who ended up producing it after the concept took off online among young women, and as an anime it is full of slow-motion shots of these males undressing and showing off their trim and toned bare chests. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it, “Free! Iwatobi Swim Club” was purposefully made to spark fantasies in young women.

Free! fanart by dreamxxdream

I reached out to Lauren Orsini, a friend, colleague and someone I consider an anime expert, to ask why she thinks “Boys’ Love” is, well, the thing it is today.

“Two guys together is a safe sexual environment, free from rape and women’s other worries about sex and violence,” she said.

This idea of the opposite gender creating distance between the young girl and the realities of her budding sexuality, in turn creating a safe environment to explore herself, rings true with my own early teen experiences. I was uncomfortable with the thought of a boy touching my nether regions at 15 and vice versa, but yaoi fanfiction eased me into this idea of pleasure as a woman, even if it was about men pleasuring each other. In my early teen masturbatory fantasies, I was one of these young men.

Rape, sexual violence, and even domestic violence comes up a bit in yaoi, as does tragedy and homophobia; the genre definitely has a flair for the dramatic with the hero rescuing the other dude. But because the pair is male, the drama is more digestible and examinable. The fact that the two characters are male, a different gender from the female observer, creates an emotional wall that keeps the female reader/viewer from getting as hurt while also providing a venue for self-reflection. Matt Thorn, a cultural anthropologist at Kyoto Seika University in Japan, theorized these types of abusive themes in yaoi are a “coping mechanism.”

Orsini also wondered if the growth of the genre has something to do with guys not being “shamed for being sexual” by their peers as much as young women are. One only has to think of the slut-shaming and bullying that drove Rehtaeh Parsons to commit suicide after classmates circulated photographic evidence of her being gangraped, and the lack of peer criticism of the young men who did the raping, to see a high profile example of this double standard.

“Women can write about two guys expressing themselves sexually, and not feel bad about it because men are supposed to have these feelings, while women are supposed to repress them,” added Orsini.

Thorn wrote in the 2004 book Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan about female fans of yaoi:

“Some speak of despising femininity, and even of wishing they had been born male, rather than female. For most such women, yaoi and boys’ love allow them to indulge in the fantasy of loving a man as a man, or, to rephrase it, as an equal, free of predefined gender expectations.”

Dienfang Chou, an academic at Taiwan’s Tzu Chi University, wrote in 2010 “Boys’ Love’s” appeal among some women lies in it eliminating the gender inequality seen in most heterosexual relationships, while also theorizing young girls love the young men in the genre because they are “the idealized self image” of themselves.

There is something sad about young women coming to terms with their own sexuality and wants and needs by projecting them onto the opposite gender, and something sadder still about women wishing they had been born male just so they would be afforded the freedom to be sexual. One could easily argue the growing popularity of yaoi as a genre is related to the continued repression of female sexuality in modern society. At the same time, however, the growing popularity of the genre, along with the genre becoming a legitimate industry (it started as fan works in Japan in 1970), is a cause for celebration because it gives young women a safe space to explore themselves. The fantasy world of yaoi is a type of environment they currently don’t get from their peers, homes and schools, free from worries about teen pregnancy and slutshaming from their peers.

If I had a daughter, I’d rather she read and consume pictures like these than go to 4chan or PornTube.com and get scarred for life — and possibly a computer virus. Boys’ Love, you’re all right with me.