@waxcandle wow! A wikipedia link! Damn, you totally got me beat… except, I have legitimate sources of what BL actually is from those who are not only just gay men but from Japan or Korea; I also asked for a reliable sources, not source, and while I love Wikipedia, it’s easy for people to edit it.
I will be using sources researched and provided by @rottenboysclub @satans-tiddies @celciusdiscourse and any others I may forget I’ll provide sources.
BL means Boy’s Love, and refers to comics/shows in Japan where the main focus is on the love (usually heavily romantic) relationship of two male characters.
“By BL, you mean yaoi, right? Yaoi means pwp smut of two men made for cishet womens’ consumption! That’s fetishization!”
Incorrect. In Japan, “Yaoi” originally refers to a specific subset of anime parody doujinshi that satirizes the “no homo” male-male bonding of earlier (usually) shounen series by portraying it as romantic or sexual. (x)
It’s basically a dead genre.
(x) “Yaoi” referring to R-18 pwp mxm interactions is a western fandom thing. ****(It has also been used in western fandom to refer to all mxm interactions, so this is likely where the conflation of BL and yaoi probably comes from.)
While BL is mainly marketed toward women due to the expectation that romance is a “girl’s thing”, a fair number of BL readers are male.
((And even if they were all cishet women reading pwp smut, porn does not inherently equal fetishization.))
Also, here’s a small list of male BL artists and geicomi artists who work on BL anthologies / BL Magazines. Keep in mind that these are just a few that are public about their gender, and a lot of other male BL authors are closeted and will not disclose that information
yaoi: an old form of parody doujinshi, taking the intense male friendships from shounen media and interpreting them as romantic.
and just to hit the homerun:
So I’m gonna go ahead and assume you really just mean BL, but didn’t know what these words meant, which
BL: the Japanese category of fiction focusing on m/m romance, most famously comics, but also anime, games, novels, etc. Literally just as varied as any other LGBTQ+ fiction, if not more, considering there’s just so much of it in Japan. I can personally attest that it’s got everything from hardcore kink porn to the softest most wholesome first-crush-stories ever.
BL is simply a category that suggests there will be some type of male-on-male interaction and relationship, regardless if it’s healthy or not, explicit or fluffy.
‘yaoi’ and its related genre ‘boy’s love/shounen ai’ seem to have a similar relationship to Japanese fans as ‘slashfic’ and mlm fiction does to American fans.
But that doesn’t mean we understand yaoi/BL in the context of Japanese culture or that we interact with yaoi/BL the same way Japanese fans do. Same for the word ‘fujoshi’ - a term that seems to have been coined in a derogatory context but was ‘reclaimed’ by the very female-aligned fans that it was meant to denigrate. (but more on ‘fujoshi’ later.)
‘yaoi’ has fallen out of use in Japanese fan circles. ‘BL’ - ‘boy’s love’ - is the word which is more of an umbrella term for mlm in the way ‘slash’ is in English-speaking fandom, covering everything from explicit sex to soft pre-romance hand-holding. however, ‘yaoi’ was the word that became known as the Japanese-equivalent mlm fan genre to ‘slash’ in English-speaking circles, which had the unfortunate effect of leading English-speaking animanga fans to compare only the most tropey, explicit mlm content from Japanese fandom against all varieties of mlm ‘slash’ content from English-speaking fandom.
Also, yaoi isn’t necessarily sexual doujinshi - it just has to be a mxm parody/satirization of an existing series, with little or a nonsensical plot. The best example I can think of is the Clamp in Wonderland 1994 Summer’s yaoi parody “Jojo’s Bizarre Married Life” - which contains no explicit sexual moments.
I suggest researching and educating yourself more on these genres instead of generalizing and taking on a rather stereotypical American view on another culture’s literature.
It was also never explicitly stated it’s just for the pleasure of females– you’re acting as if males don’t enjoy this type of fiction? I mean, considering many gay men create works like Gei Comi [commonly very sexualized mlm]
So, no, they aren’t the same! Thanks for playing, though!
No bitch, you started this on my motherfuckin’ zackray positivity post– you wanted to fight? Then show me the sources, show me what you fucking got– don’t give me that “Google it” shit because I didn’t lay claims that fiction has so much control over us braindead species.
My research states otherwise on how art or fiction imitates or, as you’re trying to beat around the bush, influences someone’s morals:
No, fiction does not affect reality the way you want to believe.
The statistics for rape, child abuse, assault, murder, etc. have all experienced a dramatic decline over the past few decades, in spite of our media becoming more graphically violent, and pornography being more easily accessible. Your logic just doesn’t hold up to the facts (by the way, this also applies to stories with mature themes like rape or murder, or stories with abusive or taboo relationships. IT’S JUST FICTION, PEOPLE. It’s a reflection of various aspects of our humanity, which includes the things we most fear. Writing and reading about them is one way we can strip them of that fear and power they hold over us. It doesn’t mean we stop recognizing those things as morally wrong–it’s just a way of reconciling their existence, and coping with it).
Psychology of Scary Movies No correlation to murder or violence
In New Study, Video Games Not Tied to Violence in High-Risk Youth No correlation to murder or violence
Listening to ‘extreme’ music makes you calmer, not angrier, according to study no correlation to murder or violence or even becoming a satanic lesbian who sacrifices unborn babies. Shocking.
Violent Video Games and Movies Causing Violent Behavior
But research is clearly lacking on a direct causal relationship between violent video games and youth violence. Interestingly, the US has the highest homicide rate in the world. But, as Fareed Zakaria noted in The Washington Post, the Japanese are avid video game players and have a homicide rate close to zero.
The fact is that analyses of school shooting incidents from the US Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime do not support a link between violent games and real world attacks.
Why Fictional Media Doesn’t Desensitize Us to Real-Life Violence
Desensitization, in general, refers to decreased emotional response to aversion stimuli.
So you may remember the first time you got behind the wheel of a car, you might have felt nervous, anxious, even terrorized you might smoosh some little old lady trying to cross the road. But after repeated practice, you become an old hat at driving, often finding it boring. Granted you may still be terrible as a driver, but now that only horrifies other people. That’s basically desensitization.
It’s a normal and even adaptive process. Indeed, we use it in treatment for anxiety disorders to decrease fear responses to the objects of phobias.
Media related discussions of desensitization imply that it is always a bad thing, but this is clearly not the case. For instance, emergency responders typically experience less emotional reaction to distressing scenes than the rest of us…and hence are “desensitized” but it’s this process that allows them to do their jobs. And few people would argue that emergency responders are uncaring or non-empathic, given they’ve dedicated their lives to helping others in need.
So the problem with the concept of media violence inducing desensitization is right in the definition. Unlike real-life violence, many people don’t find media violence to be aversive. There appears to be a clear distinction in the ways our brains treat and respond to fictional violence and real-life violence in regards to our emotional reaction, as my student Raul Ramos observed in a recent experiment.
In that experiment participants felt much more empathy toward victims of real-life violence than victims of fictional movie violence.
And it didn’t matter whether they’d seen a violent or non-violent television show prior to this.
So if media violence isn’t aversive (after all, if it were no one would watch it and we wouldn’t be having this debate), what we’re talking about isn’t really desensitization. But perhaps more critically, the very idea of media desensitization transferring to real-life violence rests on the assumption that our brains do not distinguish between real-life violence and fantasy violence.
Sounds like some group of idiots I know who spout this kind of bullshit of fiction is reality…
For instance, the authors of one recent paper asked, explicitly “What psychological theory would explain how observing violence in the home, school, community, or culture would increase the risk of violence but observing it in the mass media or in video games would not increase the risk?” There are, in fact, theories that explain exactly this, but the authors of this question appear to directly equate real-life violence with fictional violence.
The problem is that many media effects theories assume people are idiots. Ok, some people are idiots, but I mean *really* idiots, in that for brains to work the way some scholars seem to suggest really makes no sense at all.
Very few of us are building shelters to survive an alien invasion or using the wands we buy at Universal to try to cast magic spells, so clearly our brains distinguish between reality and fantasy,
a process that research now suggests begins very early in childhood and typically is completed by the latter elementary school years.
Here’s the problem with literally every entry on that bullshit excuse for “proof”: Being inspired by something does not equate to causation.
“Slippery Slope” is a logical fallacy that has been used for years (usually by conservatives and overzealous religious fanatics) to blame certain behaviors on the media a person consumes.
Yes, that’s right: You’re regurgitating the EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS used by conservative, Republican, religious extremists. If your argument sounds like a Jack Chick tract (like this one implying that playing Dungeons & Dragonsrecruits teens into the occult), you should be SERIOUSLY FUCKING EMBARRASSED. By your logic, you’re placing the blame for an incident of a child jumping off the roof in the 90′s on Wile E. Coyote (and before you even try to pull the “Jaws” argument, don’t bother: It holds less water than a thimble).
So yes, I will compare you to fucking ignorant bigots who spewed the same bullshit you’re spewing years ago in the 80s and 90s about video games, fantasy books or games like DnD, and heavy rock music or metal music.
Just because you don’t like something that may be considered taboo or problematic in fiction doesn’t make you special– like, what, you want a fucking cookie? I don’t like SAW but you don’t see me going around accusing the fans of being murderers or torture apologists or whatever.
Because FICTION =/= IRL MORALS.
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