Is Physique Inflation Ruining *BL?
If consuming a steady media diet of images of wall to wall hegemonic masculinity is destructive to straight men’s self esteem, to the extent it gives them body dysmorphia, chemical addiction and eating disorders, what do you think is happening to queer men’s psyche when all the leading men in the BL they predominantly consume are suddenly Masc4Masc?
The answer should be more than obvious straight off the rip, but you can also see the impact in the increasing frequency of queer men on social media (finally catching up with women’s sentiments) who are complaining more and more that Thai BLs are just not hitting like they used to. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the ever narrowing representation of male-male intimacy here, a worldview now so entrenched in certain BL industries there was a huge uproar when a Chinese BL creator team refused to replicate this shortcoming in the finale of Revenged Love. The narrowing of representations of what male looks like down to how this would be represented in the west is a huge problem on its own.
I don’t know what is this man’s orientation but A. K. Savage is in Clinical Psychology, Fitness, and is and a fantasy writer who centers male characters. In this video he’s taking on the issue of Physique Inflation as a problem in the *writing community* by exploring a term all of us have been seeing but many struggle to make the connections with the quality declines in media that take this route to mediocrity.
Link to full video in comments.
This previously untheorised phenomenon in BL live-action discourse, clearly influenced by western filmmaking (like everything else that diminishes BL) is one I do notice in Thai BL but not Thai Lakorn, so it doesn’t seem to be a Thai media problem per se. Personally, since 2021 whenever I see muscular men shirtless on the poster or in the trailer I instinctively know that particular BL is getting ready to disappoint before I had a term for what was going on. An entire graveyard of flops gives credence to my hunch, to those with the ability to spot patterns, that conservative visuals are meant to compensate for the lack of any radical narrative and I haven’t been proven wrong yet. Only now my suspicions have been confirmed as to exactly where that phenomenon arises from - not from the BL community but from the hegemonised elites managing the most prolific BL TV industries instead.
How Physique Inflation isn’t blatantly obvious to gay Directors of BL adaptations who turn our most popular ships into bodybuilding twins (Adachi had a sixpack in Cherry MagicTH y’all), and the terrible impact it would have on queer men watching their series, is mind blowing to everyone. Or is it …?
- Censorship is More than the Absence of Sex Scenes -
A couple of years ago I was re-watching the OG Lovesick the Series 2014 with some BL fandom friends and noticing how lovely and natural everyone was and how confident in their bodies, facial looks and their acting abilities those young actors were way back then.
One unforgettable scene is when the femme-presenting cheering squad had a crisis of confidence about their looks and mannerisms; it was the engineering jocks who assure them how vital their presence was just as they are and the cheer team came back after to thank them for the psychologically affirming support with a present. How often can we see such sentiments in a BL script today?
To this day many international fans don’t even grasp why *Engineering*, a highly gendered, male dominated and exclusionary profession, has been repeatedly centered by Thai BL authors and instead keep demanding TBL move away from deconstructing this bastion of patriarchal hegemony - not a single clue 🤦♀️ .
That Lovesick rewatch also made me remark how if Love By Chance were made today Ae would’ve had to have been bigger and a lot more muscular and had gone through all kinds of special make up and even cosmetic procedures to make him appear more like the hyper masculine male ideal you see on Western TV.
What post-LBC BL hits has Perth been the star in since he embarked on his masculinisation tour? The fact he hasn’t had a hit like LBC is not because of his looks but because the best actor in Asia cannot out-act a mediocre script.
Lately I’ve been watching a great reactor react to Until We Meet Again and the same thought comes up. First how beautiful and gorgeous everyone looks with their own faces, noses and no unnecessary false teeth, and how relaxed and assured they are in their natural bodies that looked like perfectly healthy, young and active Asian people with high self-esteem and obvious cultural pride.
Compared with the years since Cvid, it is certainly the case that the more artificial features and mandatory muscularity that we see in visual storytelling on BL screens the worse is the quality of the production.
- The Return of the Male Gaze in BL is Ideological Censorship -
The reimposition of the male gaze where it resolutely doesn’t belong also says something about the specific forms of censorship creeping into Thai BLs. This isn’t even that the principal audience is asking for this because from the time they started interviewing women about male body preferences it was never for the hyper masculine norm men are more likely to embrace because of colonisation and patriarchal conditioning. Women and girls are indoctrinated into masculinity worship too but it doesn’t have the same visual hold on them as minority men who are excluded from what masculinity means, and this departure is even greater among women in BL circles.
This particular visual preoccupation, which is actually opposed to the aesthetics of the BL Canon and even Asian masculinties, reflects the wishes and desires like everything else in a BL of the decision makers behind the camera - the Director who is directing and of the companies and investors who are paying for normativity to take pride of place in a BL.
They’re opting to participate in an ostensibly transformative sphere but still favour the logic of a conservative, anti-queer, foreign media mainstream. Bringing back the male gaze is not something that comes from male DNA, it is a reactionary political stance that is white, western and straight. This means anyone indoctrinated into unacknowledged male supremacy can perform it and express a bias towards masculinity performance, describing it as a “preference” despite its harms.
The peak irony of this particular development is that China’s censoring authorities have been demanding particular visuals but the stubborn response from Chinese BL creators of screen adaptations is a resounding No in the one country where blind critics try to tell us tell us censorship is everything and is the defining feature of every dangai that reaches the screen.
But in supposedly “uncensored” BL industries this norm has been self-imposed in the exact same post-2021 period and in the complete absence of official state sanction! Thai Directors are doing willingly - installing reactionary propaganda in their storytelling, that which Chinese BL Directors are going to great lengths in defying institutional pressure by refusing to do. Look around you for the past year since Dangai production resumed and tell me who blinked first.
In order to be emancipatory, in order to be substantively ideologically and politically transgressive, BL must actively resist the dominance of hegemonic ideologies and practices, not comply with them, even if they’re accepted as warped preferences within elite hierarchies of the oppressed communities in question themselves.
