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seigakuduelist wrote:

I'm not saying rape is okay, but what I am saying is that the act seems to be more of a "forcing you to accept or realize your feelings"? Does that make sense?

Not to me in the slightest. Then again, I prescribe to the idea that you can totally have feelings for someone without wanting sex, which is certainly in this day a rather strange thinking.

If they say no, it's not because they don't love the person or whatever. It's just that they're not comfortable with having sex at the point in time.

Forcing the issue seems to be more of disrespecting their morals and has absolutely nothing to do with "accepting feelings".

Heterosexual female yaoi fan here.

Just to put in my two cents - like CCSYueh I too am over 40, and I remember the old attitudes well, i.e., "proper" women aren't supposed to enjoy sex.

I honestly don't mind the whole debate over this - because I believe in open debate about anything that interests people - but I do think it's ironic that men's sexuality and its full range ("vanilla" hetero sex, as well as porn, fetishes, kinks, etc.) seems to be accepted and not questioned too much - but when women like something that isn't "normal" it gets questioned and analyzed nearly to death. There's still a double standard here.

SnaphappyFMA wrote:

There's still a double standard here.

No double standard at all. I guarantee you that I would be just as perplexed if a panel of guys had a column and stated that the rape in hentai isn't really rape since the girl enjoys it in the end and is totally in love with the guy.

micchan wrote:

A very good point! The whole idea of women going "oh nooo~ I must'nt!" is a huge cliche, and is generally conisdered moe ("look how cute and innocent she is! She is far too bashful to do anything sexual!"). You got to remember the in Japan women are SUPPOSED to be passive - they can't run around actually WANTING sex. If they are forced into sex (and honenstly, alot of the "rape" scenes contain a part which goes "ok, I stopped, ran away" and then the girl/uke does not, hence making the seme all "AH HA!" and legitimazing the sex) obviously they cannot be held responsible - so it's a "safe" way of enjoying things women are not supposed to enjoy. I think this is a major part of the whole non-con sex idea (although in most cases it IS a plot device/fanservice, due to the obvious angst it creates all around).

This is what I was getting at.
I remember reading The Reincarnation of Peter Proud AGES ago whe I was a teen (smut city, yeah) & I remember the woman in tha past being represented as "loose" & "slutty" because she liked sex as much as any guy which is ok for mistresses, but proper men didn't marry those, they married the nice. proper woman who maybe sucked in bed, but could cook/clean/provide heirs & played with the mistress if he could afford one or fantasized about such things if he couldn't afford to buy a sex toy. There was a time rich & powerful guys were pretty much expected to have the proper wife for appearances with the mistress on the side for fun.
And that seems to be where Japanese women are coming from
If the guy "forces" himself on the girl, she didn't ask for sex, thus she's still a "good girl". "Good girls" (nice meek Japanese girls) don't ask for sex. Girls in brothels want sex.

But the usual rape in yaoi seems to be the frustration level-Seme's been drooling over uke & takes him, but uke's sort of ok with it once he thinks it over.
Is rape wrong?
Of course. But this is fantasy.
Just like we all know teacher/student sexual relations are a HUGE betrayal of the teacher's power over their student/whatever, we see this fantasy repeated again & again & again because that is what romance is-fantasy.

Wanting to see the dark little thoughts from the deepest recesses of one's mind that one has possibly never voiced to anyone on paper for one to enjoy is what this stuff is about. Why else do we see the gender change, etc? These things are impossible to wrong, but you can't stop the fantasies some people are going to have. I understand in the sex trade there are people willing to pay a pretty penny to have things done to them or to allow them to do things to the prostitute that most of society would consider pretty perverse. There are scads of jokes out there about sex games-the priest & the choirboy, the cheerleeder, etc. I believe the rape fantasy is pretty much included in several of those scenarios. Manga/print is a lot cheaper version of fantasy fulfillment. I rememer the 3 Hustlers my husband got his hands on had some pretty strange sex fantasy photo portrayals including the chick with a crankshaft (he usually got Playboy or Penthouse when he saw them at yard sales maybe once a year).
Isn't that why hentai exists? So japanese men & women can play out their wildest/sickest fantasies in the privacy of their own homes? I remember someone (this site maybe) mentioning a game where the point was to grope as many victims as one could on the train. It certainly prevents accidentally groping the wrong person if one were bold enough to set up such a sex play in real life.

Last edited by configspace on Thu Oct 15, 2009 2:37 pm; edited 1 time in total

Sara wrote:

Whatever turns you on, I guess.

Yep. Bring on the seme's and uke's!

Let the girls and everyone else have their fun. Truthfully the contents don't even matter to me--and shouldn't matter in free society--be it guro or whatever more extreme stuff, but if people really need to rationalize it (which I again, I think there is no need), then like was mentioned before, fantasy "rape" in contrast to real rape is always characterized by "I say no, but I mean yes!", i.e. tie me up in chains, "please no", but orgasm nonetheless.

I'm a guy and am not the least bit bothered by it. Why should anyone be? Objectively, it doesn't affect anyone and if people who are bothered actually didn't know about it, life wouldn't be any different for them. If anything, it provides for a kind of catharsis, perhaps even a necessary i.e. healthy one for their inner most desires. It's very much like how many women including married women read romance novels and live vicariously through them.

In fact, I'd be extremely bothered if they weren't allowed to, like Christopher Handley (ugh, makes me mad and sad whenever I think about it).

Cait wrote:

branewurms wrote:

How is it insulting? I already said that I a) am a BL fan and b) enjoy rape fantasy. I have said this 2 or 3 times already, but I do not have a problem with erotically portrayed rape. I have a problem with rape being justified or excused within the text. People who read this kind of BL aren't going to automatically be brainwashed into thinking rape is sometimes okay - obviously they aren't, as I read BL and I don't think that. But fiction helps to shape the way society as a whole thinks. Not everyone is going to question what they read.

I laugh at it too, tbh, but not everyone does.

Some people complain about how the lack of realism in BL is insulting towards gay men, which I honestly think is ridiculous; are heterosexual romance novels realistic? Is porn generally realistic? Who the hell reads romance or porn for the realism? It's escapism and titillation, it isn't supposed to be realistic. But that doesn't mean that we should be okay with heterosexism or rape apologism in our escapism. There's a difference between "rape fantasy" and "rape apologism", there really is.

I think I need an example of what you are talking about, then, because I think there is a communication breakdown somewhere in here. Where is the line between "fantasy" and "apologism" drawn? I also think that BL is a very small niche genre and I seriously doubt, particularly in the US, that any depictions of rape, whether fantasy or apologism is going to affect "society's" perception of rape.

I see the line as being pretty clear. Rape portrayed in an erotic fashion is rape fantasy. When you then send the message (often explicitly, though sometimes implicitly) that there was nothing wrong with what the rapist did, or that what he did was not rape, that's rape apologism.

Here's an example I can think of off the top of my head: Junjou Romantica. One of the first things that happen (in the anime, I have not read the manga), is the seme forcing a handjob on the uke. That is serious sexual assault. But the text treats it as if he'd done no more than say something rude.

branewurms wrote:

I see the line as being pretty clear. Rape portrayed in an erotic fashion is rape fantasy. When you then send the message (often explicitly, though sometimes implicitly) that there was nothing wrong with what the rapist did, or that what he did was not rape, that's rape apologism.

Here's an example I can think of off the top of my head: Junjou Romantica. One of the first things that happen (in the anime, I have not read the manga), is the seme forcing a handjob on the uke. That is serious sexual assault. But the text treats it as if he'd done no more than say something rude.

But why does it matter?

There are tons of violent games where it's perfectly alright to blow everyone's heads off to bits and pieces, and tons of people who play those violent games who remain perfectly sane and commit no crime.

Unitl we see real effects tested in a black-box manner (we measure only effects and then try to find the causes, rather than looking at supposed causes and assuming their effeccts) where we see people assaulting other people purely as a result of reading/seeing this material--where they would otherwise not have--then we can start to worry.

micchan wrote:

Fans of K-ON! and Kobato will disagree. I mean, now days the default for women in anime/manga is a 14 years old with small breasts and smaller brain (fine, I can't crack an egg as well, but I don't go all "uuu~" about it). It's the moe thing - either you adore it or it pisses the hell outta you. Alot like BL, actually.

That's not agreeable in the slightest. It's not like that for everyone, at least not me. I don't adore or despise moe or BL(t). I gotta say that I've watched a few yaoi/bl shows and a lot of moe, but I didn't feel anything in special, including hate/love. Having a moe girl or bl in shows might make the show less interesting or better, it's not just the genre, it's about the anime in general. Clearly, I won't watch an anime with just BL and Moe, it needs a decent plot, good character depth and a nice pacing.

What's a rape in my opinion? Let's say character A is the victim, B is the culprit:
Character B desperately wants to have character A, but A refuses to. But B didn't accept that and forced A, despite A having said a clear "no".
From that point it's a rape already. It's simple and whatever happens after that, it's still a rape.

Cait wrote:

Megiddo wrote:

I've never heard anybody call that rape fantasy. It's just rape. I understand that the girls reading yaoi/BL with rape are doing so NOT fantasizing about being raped themselves. However, they are still reading/watching rape occur. Just like the ones watching/reading the het "rape fantasy" are reading/watching rape.

I think you're still missing one crucial thing here: no matter what is happening on the screen or the page, it isn't actually happening at all. It's fiction. No one is getting raped because none of these characters actually exist.

I think a lot of people that have a problem with rape fantasy have a problem with it because they can't separate the fantasy elements of the situation from reality. In fiction you can explore anything that in real life is completely unacceptable, because in fiction no one is actually getting hurt. It's just a story, holding it to the same morals that we hold each other to in the real world is what social conservatives are doing when they try to ban anime and manga or pass laws about virtual child pornography.

To bad Equality Now doesn't get this message, as they're still trying to pressure Japan to pass a law banning rape in all forms of media, ncluding manga and anime.

And yes, if it's passed, yaoi will also be affected.

Honestly, why can'yt people understand that fantasy is fantasy...

Cait wrote:

branewurms wrote:

Fiction doesn't exist in a vacuum; it is not only affected by but affects the culture it exists within. The concept of rape sometimes being okay or "no means yes" mentality showing up in lots of fiction is both evidence of a problem and reinforces the problem.

While I agree that rape is overused in BL (although I personally have little problem with rape fantasy), I would disagree that its existence in fiction is somehow reinforcing a problem in society. I can't remember what study it was and I don't have a link for you, but there is evidence to suggest that at the same time that pornography became widely available in America the rates of sex crimes plummetted. I'm not suggesting the porn stopped the rapes, but if rape fantasy in porn didn't stop men from raping women, it certainly didn't cause a spike in sex crimes by giving them the idea that it was okay, either.

Just because a kid plays a violent video game, doesn't mean he's going to grow up to be a violent adult. It's still fiction, and fiction is a safe place to explore the things we know are not acceptable in the real world and would never dream of doing.

from yestofreedom.org Research oage.

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/06/rape-porn-and-criminality-political.php

is this what you're talking about?

vashfanatic wrote:

neocloud9 wrote:

vashfanatic wrote:

While the butch-femme style of relationship is very real outside of yuri, it often gets used as a way of playing it safe and only having a girl be interested in someone who's practically a guy anyway so far as the art and writing goes.

Which reinforces the notion that a lot of yuri is intended to fetishize lesbianism for a mostly male audience - something that yaoi does for its female audience with those stereotypically feminine uke characters. I would venture to suggest that there's a least a small amount of projection intended with these non-gender gender roles...

Absolutely! Most of both yuri and yaoi are intended for the opposite gender, and certainly do next to nothing for gay rights. You'd think, looking at the profusion of same-sex relationships in Japanese media that go by with nary a fuss from the general public, that homosexuality was completely acceptable in Japan, but it really isn't, albeit for different reasons than in America.

That is correct. Homosexuality is something that is considered taboo and abnormal in Japanese society even though it's glorified in anime and manga, they tend to look at gays as "freaks". most japanese gays tend to hide thier affection and keep it in the closet. If you see two girls in Japan holding hands walking down a street there's probably only a 10% chance that they are lesbians. A short haired Japanese woman is normally a bishoujo who just broke up with a boyfriend( In Japanese custom brokenhearted women cut thier hair as a symbol of moving on). The last time I saw a gay pride march in Toyko, there were only about 40 or 50 people marching.

That said, I think Caseys' bias about getting off on boys sodomizing each other in yaoi is obvious. But she failed to make a proper point and came across sounding way too naive about the issue.

I'm a male and I personally find yaoi strictly for women. I'm not homosexual so I don't like viewing yaoi or hentai. It's too dark, disturbing and unpleasant.

I find yuri to be light hearted, sweet and serene. Sasameki Koto, Utena,Kashi Masi,Maria Sama Ga Meteru all seem to keep the yuri at a certain tame level henceforth I tend to watch it. When it comes to yuri comedy like Otenki Onesan,Cutey Honey e.t.c I tend to buy this type of shoujo ai.

Now when it comes to viewing hentai manga, yuri,futanari,shota and loli are the fetishes I tend to enjoy. I view it in the same way that Japan views it, if it's fictional,doesn't desentize or cause real sexual violence it's benign. I think a Japanese man my age(I'm in my latter 20s) would share the same view.

egoist wrote:

micchan wrote:

Fans of K-ON! and Kobato will disagree. I mean, now days the default for women in anime/manga is a 14 years old with small breasts and smaller brain (fine, I can't crack an egg as well, but I don't go all "uuu~" about it). It's the moe thing - either you adore it or it pisses the hell outta you. Alot like BL, actually.

That's not agreeable in the slightest. It's not like that for everyone, at least not me. I don't adore or despise moe or BL(t). I gotta say that I've watched a few yaoi/bl shows and a lot of moe, but I didn't feel anything in special, including hate/love. Having a moe girl or bl in shows might make the show less interesting or better, it's not just the genre, it's about the anime in general. Clearly, I won't watch an anime with just BL and Moe, it needs a decent plot, good character depth and a nice pacing.

What's a rape in my opinion? Let's say character A is the victim, B is the culprit:
Character B desperately wants to have character A, but A refuses to. But B didn't accept that and forced A, despite A having said a clear "no".
From that point it's a rape already. It's simple and whatever happens after that, it's still a rape.

Well, duh. Obviously forcing people doing things they don't want to do with their own bodies is wrong. But once again, THIS IS FANTASY. If a guy treated me like that, I'd kick seven kind of crap outta him. But seeing it in fiction is exciting in a way, because people are attracted to bad things - the proof is in the blood pudding called Twilight (sucking people's blood = bad, but it's being shown in a very romantic [as in naive] way, thus making it attracting and interesting rather then scary or wrong).

No one is trying to say real-life rape is excusable. But more often then not, it's used in fiction with characters so un-realistic, you can't really apply real-life logic to it. It's a form of a fetish, a fantasy, and if you shift your mental gear from RL to lala-land, it can be every bit as exciting as other silly notions (like the odd idea that getting bitten and sucked blood out is hot).

It's like with yandere boys - a favorite of mine, and a common rape-non-con-sex "heroes". I assure you I don't want any guy to treat me like crap and go around saying idiotic things like "you're mine and I get to decide what you do" but I enjoy it in fiction. Why? I can't be sure (it's the angsty-drama, I suppose) but I only take it as a fantasy, where the most basic rules of the world are different. That's the most important rule about fiction - knowing the difference between it and real life (a rule that is sadly not as solid as it should be in most people's mind).

branewurms wrote:

Here's an example I can think of off the top of my head: Junjou Romantica. One of the first things that happen (in the anime, I have not read the manga), is the seme forcing a handjob on the uke. That is serious sexual assault. But the text treats it as if he'd done no more than say something rude.

But the seme also carries around the guilt and insecurity that arises from having begun a relationship in such a way for about half-a-dozen volumes. So the author didn't exactly write it off in this case. However, I'd venture to guess that if the series were less successful and didn't last as long as it did, we probably wouldn't have gotten that. A lot of yaoi manga don't.

lol forced hand job. Sounds like the first villain of Nerima Daikon Brothers.

GrilledEelHamatsu wrote:

I'm a male and I personally find yaoi strictly for women. I'm not homosexual so I don't like viewing yaoi or hentai. It's too dark, disturbing and unpleasant.
[...]
Now when it comes to viewing hentai manga, yuri, futanari, shota and loli are the fetishes I tend to enjoy.

Begging your pardon, sir. But...what?

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