Yaoi-Con 2008 | A Celebration of Male Beauty & Passion in Anime & Manga

What Is Yaoi?
by Jeanne Johnson

Yaoi is a woman's genre of manga (comic books) and short stories, produced by female artists and writers for the enjoyment of female readers. It's a fantasy form which focuses on the romantic, emotional and above all sexual relationships of guys together.

Huh?

That's right. M/M. Men in Love. Homosexuality, homoeroticism, platonic love. Whatever you want to call it. Two Guys.

So it's gay porn for women?

Nope. It's a female fantasy of what's sexually attractive, not a gay male one. Yaoi embodies the (actually quite common) female notion that m/m relationships are the stuff of high romance and beauty and true love and angst and impossibly wonderful sex five times an hour. Not surprisingly, yaoi tends to make real gay men snicker

For a start, the first requirement is that all the men be more good-looking than any real man can be, like the heroes of a Japanese anime. Their relationships are presented in a deliberately romantic way that appeals to a lot of women, but rarely to men. {josquote}Yaoi emphasizes the emotional as much as the physical, and the stories happen in a very unrealistic version of the real world. Yaoi men tend to have impossible anatomy and very unlikely psychology. (Silver hair, purple eyes, and a tendency to self-mutilation as an expression of love are not uncommon.)

That doesn't mean yaoi works aren't sexually explicit. Some of them are very much so, and definitely not for minors. But while the action may clearly represent all the varieties of m/m sex, the crude physical details are usually glossed over for the sake of aesthetics. A total innocent could read a stack of yaoi comic books and still not have an accurate idea of what a man looks like, while she'd gain a very inaccurate idea of how he functions. (Yaoi men tend to talk non-stop through the act, for instance, generally about stuff utterly unrelated to the activity. The guy on top never seems to orgasm either, poor chap, probably because he's the one doing most of the talking.)

So it isn't for guys?

Did I say that? There are guys who like yaoi just as much as women do. There are indeed a few guys who draw it themselves. It's just not intended to appeal to gay men. Much the same as romance novels:  it's a genre targeted at women and mostly read by women that shows the kind of thing many women want to see. Men are certainly welcome to come play in both the yaoi and romance novel sandboxes if they like, if they can restrain their natural mirth at what they find there.

Where'd it come from?

Japan, naturally. About thirty years ago a group of female comic book artists (manga-ka) began reworking some traditional themes of their culture (the beauty of fifteen year old boys, for instance, and the doomed nature of romantic love) to create their own distinctive stories. These comics produced for girls (shoujo manga) came to be called as shounen-ai (boy-love), and told stories of willowy young teenagers who nurtured deep but generally platonic passions for each other which always ended in tragedy.

A decade or so later, possibly inspired by these boy's love stories, a horde of Japanese female fans began to draw their own stories about their favorite men. These were usually the heroes of cartoon series aimed at adolescent boys (shounen anime). A series that featured soccer players or Formula-1 racers had more good-looking guys and less canonical m/f love interest than series targeted at girls, and thus provided lots of fodder for boys love stories. Take two good-looking men or two pretty teenagers — the Gundam Wing pilots or the Weiß boys will do nicely as an example — draw them angsting for each other or rolling in the hay, and there you are. Instant boy's love. This amazingly popular form of fan activity was called yaoi, an acronym from the Japanese for "no peak, no point, no meaning." "All in fun" is the general sense of yaoi.

The Japanese m/m form of manga and anime spread to the west in the '90s, under a variety of names — boys love, tanbi, yaoi. Yaoi came to be the catch-all phrase westerners use for all m/m, whether fan-based and amateur, or original and professional. But though it covers a huge variety of forms, in the end it comes down to the same thing — two guys together, all in fun.