https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/789099401121529856/do-you-have-preferences-assign-different-meanings?source=share
Genuine question, why is the term yaoi problematic but yuri isn't? Isn't yaoi just a term for M/M relationships and yuri a term for F/F relationships in Japanese media (typically anime or anime-related things?)
English-speaking fandom adopted those terms for works about m/m and f/f relationships, yes. That's how they filtered out to a number of other languages.
In Japan, the actual use of 'yaoi' was more complicated. If you were saying "This person wrote a manga series that was in this marketing category", the term you'd have been using varied over time.
'Shonen ai' was used for some 1970s stuff. (It never meant softcore content. It was used because it appeared in some Japanese book on the history of pederasty in Japan and how it was similar to that in the West.) 'Tanbi' was used in the 80s. It means 'aestheticism'. It got re-borrowed into Chinese to create the current term there, 'danmei'. At some point, 'BL' for "boys love" started taking over. (Often pronounced "Bee Ell" even in Japanese.)
In the middle, 'yaoi' turned up as a somewhat jokey or disparaging way to call something a pwp. It was used more about doujinshi.
So when people insist on using 'yaoi' now, it's often in the same context where they'd call their m/m fanfic "sin" or a "guilty pleasure" or something. If someone wants to self-deprecatingly identify as a "yaoi fangirl", fine. If you want to call some currently-running manga series "LOL, it's a pwp, LOL", that's annoying.
I would rather go back to fucking 'tanbi' than call everything 'yaoi', frankly. If you're operating neither in English nor in Japanese, fine, use whatever the local terminology is, including 'yaoi', but I wish English-speaking fandom would calm down with the overuse.
'Yuri' is different because its history and use have always been completely different from that of 'yaoi'. There are no parallels here other than them starting with 'y' and Western fandom seeing them as a matched set.
I'm not really up on the nuances of 'yuri' vs. 'GL' and who thinks which one is more by-and-for-ladies or whatever. I think 'yuri' coming from the yurizoku column in a gay dude magazine is cool. (Barazoku, literally Rose Tribe but probably more accurately translated as Pansy Tribe was the magazine, so they made a Lily Tribe section for letters sent in by women. 'Rose' being used offensively about gay men predated the magazine, but they're the ones who forged the lily=lesbian connection.)
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