But what are your thoughts on yaoi?

I have a confession to make: I read yaoi. Not just the respectable, officially-translated-into-English, published-by-Tokyopop-and/or-DMP type of yaoi either, oh no: I'm talking scanlations, baby. Illicitly scanned, translated and exchanged via IRC among fans of the hot man-on-man action.

Or perhaps I should say, I used to read yaoi. Because I have this bad habit of obsessing over one particular topic, gorging myself on it for weeks at a time, up to the point where I go too far and get the urge to puke if I even think about it. Couple this with the inevitable operation of Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crud) and you begin to understand why it's been a long time since I've downloaded a yaoi scanlation. There are some exquisite works of yaoi out there, and there are some that while they're not exactly exquisite are still perfectly entertaining, and then there are some that have good qualities but could probably have stood to be worked over a couple of times... and then there's the 90%. Which don't actually stab you in the eyes with their ugliness and stupidity, but man, sometimes you wish they would because it might be less painful than reading them.

Since my days of downloading 20MB of yaoi scanlations a day came to an end, I've suffered a massive computer crash with loss of data and the scanlation groups I got most of my yaoi from have vanished from the face of the net, so I can't even be sure about the titles of most of them. I do remember the clichés, though, simply because they kept coming up (er... no pun intended).

The most obvious cliché, so pervasive that perhaps "cliché" is the wrong word (convention? archetype?), is seme/uke. Every yaoi story is about two (or more, but usually two) guys who are sexually interested in each other. One is the seme, the dominant partner; the other is the uke, the passive partner. The closest English comes to an equivalent is "top" and "bottom", but that doesn't quite work, because it isn't just a sexual thing. The seme is taller, older, richer, stronger, socially superior, more confident, more independent, more experienced, less prone to showing emotions. The seme gives, the uke receives. The uke shows his love by talking about it; the seme shows his love by (in most cases) providing for the uke, protecting him, giving him gifts. Added to this is the artistic convention of drawing the seme with small eyes and the uke with big eyes.

Now, what does that sound like? Yeah, it pretty much sounds like a stereotyped image of masculinity versus femininity. Embodied in two male characters. Written and drawn by women, in manga intended to be read by women (and girls). I find this... interesting. On many, many levels.

On the one hand you have the fact that this is obviously fantasy -- of all the yaoi and shounen-ai I've read, I can only think of one short story that dealt with characters who referred to themselves as "gay" and lived lives with some resemblance to the actual lives of contemporary Japanese gay men, and (quelle surprise!) that story didn't fall into the usual seme/uke pattern. I don't want to speculate on why Japanese women find this kind of sexual fantasy so appealing, though the existence of the "slash" phenomenon in English-speaking countries suggests that it isn't a peculiarly Japanese leaning[1]; regardless, I'm happy to leave that kind of theorising to the psychoanalysts. I do find it interesting, though, that creators of yaoi feel the need to perpetuate heterosexual stereotypes in their fantasies -- nice, fluffy, relatively harmless heterosexual stereotypes, but still. The idea that there might be a sexual relationship between two people of equal strength would never enter your head if yaoi was your main source, and you have to wonder: do gay Japanese teenage boys borrow their sisters' yaoi manga and get confused by all this, thinking that that's what it means to be a boy who likes boys? It's a depressing thought.

On the other hand, while the fact that there always has to be a (weak, poor, socially inferior, emotionally volatile) "woman" and a (strong, rich, socially superior, emotionally stoic) "man" in the relationship is a bit wearing, the fact that it doesn't actually matter whether the "woman" is biologically female is a little subversive in itself. (Not a lot, but a little.) And while most of the stories just use the seme/uke role split as if it was entirely unproblematic, there are stories where the creator questions the split and has some fun with it -- I remember one story where the entire plot was about the fact that both of the guys in question were naturally inclined to be semes, so they couldn't possibly get together (despite being Madly In Love). I don't know how that one ended, though; maybe the stereotype got reinforced in the end.

Seme/uke aside, there was one highly specific recurring storyline that came up far, far too often. It went something like this: Seme is on his way home from work, or just out walking the streets of the city one evening. (Ideally it should be raining or snowing, but this is optional.) He stumbles across Uke, who is sleeping rough/unconscious after drinking too much/bleeding from having been beaten up. (In one instance, the seme actually watched while the uke got beaten up, remarking that since the uke had been picking pockets, he deserved the beating! Not the most auspicious start to a relationship, I would've thought...) Seme takes Uke in, cleans him up, offers him a bed. At this point, Uke probably says "Hey, are you doing this so you can have sex with me?", which Seme denies fervently. But they have sex anyway. There is usually angst later about the nature of the relationship, though the initial picking-up-a-pretty-stranger-on-the-street stage never, ever results in the Seme being burgled or murdered with an axe. Or even infected with HIV (despite the fact that characters in yaoi don't use condoms -- hey, condoms? what're those then?).

(Variations of this story show up in non-porny titles, too. Legal Drug, for instance, which is respectable enough to be published in translation by Tokyopop without being shrinkwrapped, has the not-Seme-yet-but-give-it-another-couple-of-volumes Himura Rikuo saving the not-Uke-yet-but-etc. Kudo Kazahaya from freezing to death as he lies on the ground being romantically covered with snow. )

What would a story on those lines look like if it was about a man picking up a woman? A woman picking up a man? A woman picking up a woman? This is an exercise I leave to the reader.

There are other clichés, too -- schoolboys falling for their teachers is annoyingly common, if understandable; incest is equally common, and less understandable. (I didn't mind so much when it was the main plot, because then I could read the summary and avoid it; when it popped up in otherwise very sweet and fluffy and innocent shounen-ai stories, I got rather annoyed. I'm looking at you, Menkui. No, the fact that one of them was adopted doesn't make it all right; it's still icky.) The worst thing was when a story that was really very good set my eyes a-rolling because it used these clichés in an unreflective way. Sometimes it doesn't matter how well you use the cliché: it just can't be fresh or fun to read about because the cultural context has pre-staled it for the audience.

By and large, I think it's a good thing that I've given up on yaoi. It's fun enough, if you're into that kind of thing and you're just being self-indulgent, and there are occasional gems -- the gorgeous Kaze to Ki no Uta (Song of the Wind and the Trees, for instance -- but my God, the laziness of most of the writing drove me up the wall. Just because it's pornography doesn't mean you don't have to make the characters distinct, you know.

[1]That said, I've noticed that while slash writers sometimes fall into the trap of feminising one partner and über-masculising another, this tends to be regarded as a problem rather than just How Things Are. There are three essays at the Fanfic Symposium on the topic.