@middaydraws replied to your photo “confessionsofa-roleplayer: A fujoshi is a female fan of m|m shipping,...”
@purpledragonrp actually no I'm not. I hate the term because every single fan I've ran into has either ignored what real life gay men have said about how they treat ships, been told that real life gay men are gross, or have been fetishized. The community for Yaoi has fetishized us and our relationships and continue to do you. You yourself might not do it but a large chunk of the community does. And I mean large.
Okay, but your personal experience doesn’t change the actual meaning of the term. That’s what I’m trying to get across. Yes, it has negative connotations - for you. But you’re getting onto the OP of this post for using it properly solely because it means something different to you. I’m sorry that a portion of the community that enjoys yaoi has treated you in the ways you've described. That’s not something I (or any other rational, reasoning person) would condone. But how they’ve treated you doesn't change the meaning of the acronym. You can hate it all you want, but that doesn’t change it.
Also that's wiki. You know the site that every professor tells you not to use as a source.
And yes, I know it’s a wiki, but that particular page has 151 cited sources. Wiki’s gotten better about that over the years - mostly because of disparaging remarks just like that one. Although, as a librarian, I still encourage students to use Wiki and then go to the sources wiki has cited for verification. So that’s what I did for you.
The book is called Reading Japan Cool: Patterns of Manga Literacy and Discourse by John E. Ingulsrud, Kate Allen. Here is a link to the GoogleBook (the cited information is on page 47), but the search box was giving me trouble, so just in case, here’s a screencap, too. If you want to see for yourself, you might also have luck accessing the page in question via Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ preview.
Granted, even the book’s language seems iffy on whether or not Osamu Tezuka did or didn’t use the term that way. And it looks like the book they took the information from is in Japanese, so I can’t delve any deeper into Kubota Mitsuyoshi’s sources myself. However, even the book refers to yaoi encounters as ‘romantic/sexual’ and talks about their similarity (as I mentioned earlier) to PWP fan fiction.
I guess what I don’t really understand is where the idea you have - of yamanashi ochinashi iminashi meaning there’s no romance involved - comes from. That’s where your belief that the word is homophobic stems from, right? Did you come to that conclusion on your own? Did you read it somewhere? Why do you believe that?
You can be a fan of gay relationships but when you start referring to them as "My gay sinful babies uwu" (the you in this case meaning anyone not just you specifically) then that's fetishizing it and making it seem as though gay relationships are wrong.
First, I’m not in any way denying that fetishization of homosexual men exists; it does. However, I do want to offer you a different perspective on the whole ‘sinful’ thing. I haven’t always been into yaoi. Once upon a time I was strictly het - way back in the dark ages of my high school years. And I referred to my favorite pairings and my OC pairings (on occasion) as being ‘sinful’ or being my ‘guilty pleasures.’ Why? Because they were smutty, sexual creatures. It had nothing whatsoever to do with WHO they loved, only that they liked to ‘get it on’ like rabbits. I come from the South, most of my family are tried and true Southern Baptists, and to a lot of them, the VERY ACT OF ENJOYING SEX, is itself a sin. Let’s go bigger than that. There are A LOT of religions where sex itself is viewed as something perverted and shameful. Not just GAY sex, but ALL sex.
So, have you ever considered that when someone talks about their ‘gay sinful babies‘ that the use of the word ‘sinful’ is referring to them having/enjoying sex and not the fact they they’re gay? That people who use terms like that might use the same terms when referring to any other sexual pairing, too? I’m not saying that’s always the case, and if you choose to read it differently, then you’re welcome to take offense at whatever you’d like, but why? Why create anger for yourself that doesn’t have to be there? Why walk around angry and offended by what you think someone meant, rather than what they actually meant?
Someone telling you that real-life gay men are gross - that’s something to be angry over. The fact that someone’s actually said that to you and that you had to deal with them makes me angry, too! People like that need need to be drop-kicked into real life - the sooner the better! But from what you’ve said, it sounds like at least some of your anger comes from slanted interpretations. Why? Why allow yourself to be angry and offended by things that can easily be interpreted in other ways?
I have a right as a mlm to point out when a community is homophobic or the members of a community is homophobic.
You do have that right, yes. And as a member of the community which you’ve stated fetishizes gay men, I have a right to speak out and defend myself, in return. In all fairness, I’m not mlm, so I can’t claim to know your experiences. I’m also not overly active in the anime or yaoi fandoms here on tumblr, so I don’t know how much of your perception stems from your experiences here or elsewhere.
What I saw in your comments was generalization and misunderstanding, so I spoke up. If you don’t believe the ENTIRE yaoi-loving community is like what you described, then good. I’m glad. All I wanted to do was share some knowledge and insights with you from ‘the other side of the fence.’ You can absorb it, or take it with a grain of salt, that’s your choice. But please try to remember, we’re not all out there trying to undermine real-life mlms, and just because we use terminology that you’ve chosen to interpret differently, that doesn’t mean we’re homophobic.
