owlectomy

Like I said, I'm completely wishy-washy about it!

If you look, not at yaoi, but at the shounen ai that was being written in the 70s -- I totally accept Fujimoto's thesis that these classic manga are primarily about the inner lives of girls, and I think it's possible that at that point in time, for the women who wrote and read them, this was the best way of processing things that were going on in their own inner worlds. Particularly as a way of thinking about sex in a way that could be detached from their own bodies. (And I know, too, that's what some of these manga were for me when I read them as a 19-year-old.) But couldn't you say the same about Edgar Rice Burrough's depictions of Africa, or classic westerns' depictions of the west? "I'm just using it as a metaphor so I don't have to worry about the real people" doesn't really fly in those cases. And on the third hand, there's such a lot of baggage that comes with telling girls and women that their fantasies are bad and wrong. Fujimoto says a lot that rings true to me about how I personally relate to shounen ai and yaoi, but I keep coming back to "All of this is true for me, but it's not necessarily true for the person who feels objectified or Othered by it."