What Is Yaoi?

Written by Jeanne Johnson

What is yaoi?    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 (surprisingly 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 gives real gay men the giggles.

For a start, the first requirement is that all the men be better-looking than any real man can possibly be, like the heroes of Japanese cartoon series (anime.) The relationships are given a highly romantic slant that appeals to a lot of women, but rarely to men. Yaoi emphasizes the emotional side of things 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 pictures may clearly be intended to represent all the varieties of m/m sex, the crude anatomical details are often glossed over for the sake of aesthetics. A little blurring here, a discreetly bent limb there, and what Monty Python calls 'the naughty bits' fade into the background. A total innocent could read a stack of yaoi comic books and still not have an accurate idea of what a man looks like.

Where'd it come from?    Japan, naturally. Japan has a 1000-year long aesthetic tradition of admiring male beauty. Its samurai warrior society added a theme of strong but unspoken emotional attachments between men. Both these traditions were originally male-focused. But about thirty years ago a group of female comic book artists (manga-ka) began using them to create their own distinctive manga, this time aimed at women readers. This new genre was called 'aestheticism' (tanbi) and focused on all things beautiful, decadent, perverse and erotic. A famous sub-branch was called 'boy's love' (shounen ai), and told stories of willowy young teenagers who nurtured deep but platonic passions for each other which always ended in tragedy.

Boy's love inspired a horde of Japanese female fans to draw their own stories about their own favorite men. These men were usually the heroes of cartoon series aimed at adolescent boys (shounen anime). A series that features soccer players or Formula-1 racers has more good-looking guys and less canonical m/f love interest than series targeted at girls, and thus provides lots of fodder for m/m stories. Take two gorgeous young men- the Gundam Wing pilots or the Weiss boys will do nicely- 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.