So I haven’t read chapter 52 of “Saezuru” yet, but I did read the summary of it on twitter, and after having a conversation with one of my mutuals, I have a few thoughts about what it is Yashiro wants, and why he’s having so much trouble communicating it to Doumeki.
First of all, Doumeki himself still seems very hesitant to treat Yashiro with the gentility that they both want him to give, and obviously this stems from what happened the last time he did, with Yashiro pushing him away. You would think, okay, well, this has an easy solution. Doumeki wants to treat Yashiro with kindness, and Yashiro genuinely wants to be treated kindly, so all he has to do is tell Doumeki that, and problem solved.
But of course it’s not that simple, and after talking about it with others, and reading about how, during their sex scene, Yashiro was thinking about the Madam at the club, and how Doumeki treats her so gently, it got me thinking more about Yashiro’s difficult relationship with the idea of being treated as a woman.
Yashiro wants to be treated with the same care and tenderness that he perceives Doumeki to be treating the Madam with, and the belief that Doumeki is deliberately treating him differently than that, because he’s a man, and because he is who he is specifically, (someone who’s always been treated with cruelty and told, indeed, that he deserves to be treated cruelly), is clearly very painful for Yashiro.
The thing we have to remember about Yashiro is that, during the years he was being sexually abused by his step-father, he was being told by his abuser that he was really a woman, that his being born male was a mistake, etc… And we see how this later affects Yashiro. Afterward, whenever he was treated like a woman, or how he perceived a woman should and would be treated, anyway, he got spooked and made an effort to get away from that treatment. Like Hirata’s underling whom Yashiro got thrown out of the Yakuza after he started treating Yashiro like his girlfriend, or Yashiro’s dissmisiveness when Ryuuzaki asked him about whether he ever wished he’d been born as a woman, etc… I think Yashiro associated being treated kindly and tenderly with the memories of his abuse, and therefor, that kind of treatment was very traumatic to him. It’s why we see Yashiro, during his and Doumeki’s sex scene from chapter 26 (I think, lol), crying and seeing an image of himself being raped by his step-father. It’s why he freaked out so badly afterward and ran away. Yashiro realized that he LIKED being treated gently, but it reminded him of what his step-father said to him about him really being a woman. I think, in that moment, when Yashiro realized he wanted and liked being treated kindly, it was like a confirmation for him of everything his step-father claimed about him, that he was really a woman, that him being born male was a mistake, etc… In that way, it was like a confirmation of every negative, cruel, vicious thing his step-father ever said and did to him. An affirmation of Yashiro’s own, negative view of himself.
I think Yashiro’s experience in middle school with the girl he has sex with sort of reinforced Yashiro’s views about women too, and how they’re supposed to be treated, versus how he thinks men are supposed to be treated. When he tried getting rough with that girl, she started crying, and Yashiro immediately stopped and lost interest in her. He realized she didn’t want to be roughhoused. Subsequently, I always point to this incident as proof that Yashiro isn’t, and never was, a sadist. A true sadist would be turned on by another person’s pain and fear, but Yashiro had the opposite response. He was turned off by it.
Yashiro realizes, after his first, sexual experience with Doumeki, that he, like that girl, doesn’t actually enjoy being hurt during sex, doesn’t enjoy being roughhoused and mistreated. That of course was a coping mechanism he clung to to deal with his trauma, convincing himself that he wanted to be mistreated and hurt to defend against the reality that he’d been horribly vicitmized. He realized, in that moment with Doumeki, then, that he was more like a woman than a man (just like his step-father claimed), and so for Yashiro, admitting that he wants to be treated with tenderness is tantamount to his admitting that his step-father was right about him. This is why, I think, he’s still having such a hard time admitting to Doumeki what he really wants. I know certain people in this fandom are impatient with Yashiro and demanding that he just confess his feelings already, but they forget just how traumatized Yashiro really is, and what it is he’s dealing with.
It’s obviously going to take a bit more, or a lot more time before either Yashiro or Doumeki can fully open up to one another, and for Yashiro specifically, it’s going to be a lifelong process, being able to accept himself and what he wants without also feeling ashamed or guilty or wrong.
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