Yaoi Menace - SF Chronicle takes note of man-love manga
More news on the yaoi craze threatening to swallow your children whole - this time, from the San Francisco Chronicle (’Brokeback comics craze‘):
“Yaoi allows for a kind of enjoyment - visual stimulation without the self-examination,” says Tina Anderson, a writer whose yaoi is published in the United States and Germany. “It allows you to distance yourself from the fantasy.” What Anderson touches on is the way heterosexual sex in entertainment caters to the male point of view. A common complaint among high school manga and yaoi readers is that male-female sex shows the woman and little of the man. Yaoi, on the other hand, shows the man, and as one 15-year-old remarked, “It shows everything.”
But the popularity of yaoi and the demand for pornographic man-on-man love has brought the industry to a crisis. Publishers polybag and label their books (some even put boilerplates inside their flaps, stating that all characters depicted within are 19 or older), but no amount of shrink-wrap can protect them from the content itself - or the resistance of the large chain bookstores to carrying it.
“Everything in print is available and orderable for our customers,” says Jim Killen, graphic novels buyer at Barnes & Noble. B&N carries mature fare like Preacher and From Hell but doesn’t stock everything its Web site does. But there is a certain line that the retail chain refuses to cross.
My question (and it was posed to me as well by our fellow blogger AnaKhouri) is - where’s the Yuri-love? Surely girl-on-girl action is compelling in its’ own right, yes? And yet I don’t see a comparable explosion in yuri manga.
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Yaoi hits the mainstream! I finally found some yuri to review, but it’s much harder to dig up than yaoi. I guess there is a stigma about people reading lesbian comics than there is for gay guys for some reason- like if someone saw me reading yuri they would probably think I was a lesbian, and if they saw a guy reading yuri they would automatically think he was a perv, but I guess the concept of girls reading gay-guy soap operas is so strange they just don’t know what to think.