Forum - View topicChicks On Anime - Seme Like it Hot
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CCSYueh
 Posts: 2707 Location: San Diego, CA |
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That's pretty rare in licensed yaoi. Maybe there's more in the fansubs, but usually the uke doesn't really protest. Drunk happens probably the most for non-con. (guy wakes up in bed--all indications usuakky he was pretty willing while drunk sort of scenario) Blackmail, but we had that in Hot Gimmick didn't we? There's always Challengers where the seme admits his love & at one point they're both buying books/asking opinions on how 2 guys do it. Overall it seems the licensing companies go more for stuff that stays in the pretty legal area. Drama Queen put out a dr/patient where the patient was pretty young which was squishy in particular because the dr was the instigator. They still adjust ages if necessary so far as I know. But I really remember a lot of one party yearning for it for ages with some confusion/angst that it's just sex friends/he'll leave me for a woman because I can't give him an heir/etc.
Really? A lot of yaoi tops out at 3 volumes or less, There are a lot of 1-volume titles, or the sequels come out very slowly-like years apart |
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Cait
 Posts: 503 |
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Okay, so as a fan of both BL and rape fantasy as you claim, when is rape fantasy not doing this? As far as I can tell, all rape fantasy in fiction in some way or another attempts to legitimize the act of rape for the sake of the romantic resolution. Often, it is the "victim's" willingness to forgive and/or accept his feelings ("all along" in many cases) that is the qualifier of the "happily-ever-after." If you're suggesting (and I'm not suggesting you are) that the only acceptable form of rape fantasy in fiction is outright rape, with no inkling of enjoyment or romantic feelings for the aggressor on the part of the victim, you're sort of missing the point of "fantasy." People don't want the big, scary world in their fantasies. They want nice, safe places to explore their desires. When two people role-play rape fantasy in real life, they are pretending it is actually rape, but it isn't and they both know it. They don't stop every five seconds and say, "hey, you know this isn't really happening, right?" They have "safe words" and ground rules (agreed upon beforehand) to prevent things from getting out of hand so that they can delve as deeply into the fantasy as they feel comfortable. They always know that if they suddenly don't like it anymore, they can stop it at any time. But in works of fiction, the author is not going to write about two characters "pretending" to be in a rape situation (that would break the fantasy by admitting it isn't real before it ever started). The fantasy in fiction is in that the characters themselves are not real. It isn't really happening because it isn't really real at all. The safe distance that fiction affords allows a person to read or watch that fictional rape without the fear or guilt of being witness to something real. But that doesn't mean people are comfortable with the "rape" enough to simply watch someone force someone else into sex, fictional character or not. On some level, the audience wonders if enjoying something like this means something about how they really feel about rape, so they try to find the differences in the fantasy that make it safe. In the real life rape fantasy scenario, both parties know it isn't really happening and that it will stop if either one wants it to, but in fiction, in order to "get into" the story, a suspension of disbelief (of the fact that the events aren't actually happening at all) has to be made. The audience of a story can't change the story if they become uncomfortable, they can only bear witness to it. Basically, these "apologisms" you are talking about are a way to distance oneself from the big, scary rape of the real world by creating a universe with rules that are quite different from the real world. BL has a lot of rules. We call them cliches and laugh at them, but they exist, not only to streamline storytelling in a medium that is rife with "get to the good stuff already," but also to quickly assuage any lingering concerns about why one enjoys things normally considered taboo or immoral. Of course the uke actually likes the sex the seme forces on him: deep down he actually loves the seme and this traumatic experience will force him to realize that. So, it's okay to read and enjoy this story, because it's rape, but it's not really rape. If we strip away "apologisms" we end up with creepy stories like "You Can't Call it Love," which was bundled with the English release of Makoto Tateno's Hate to Love You. There was absolutely nothing titillating about that story of stalking that ended with rape, and because it was written "straight," without any suggestion that what happened was at all acceptable, any enjoyment of the story as "rape fantasy" was completely stripped away (and honestly, I wonder why Deux published that story and not the story that was bundled with this book in the original Japanese printing, "Water Lily;" as far as I'm concerned that incest pairing was way less creepy). |
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neocloud9
 Posts: 1178 Location: Atlanta, GA |
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Which is a big reason why Junjou is one of the better examples of a series that is overcoming yaoi clichés - and boy, did that series have its share of clichés to overcome. Its 12th volume was just released in Japan and it's still going strong. Guess if a series is given more room to grow, it does. |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
 Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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In almost all the yaoi I've encountered, but let's point to one in particular like No Money, I think I and most viewers mistakenly interpret it as rape. In yaoi, often there is definite distinction between the masculinity and forwardness of the individuals in the pair. I think its specifically because it's a taboo type of relationship in the eyes of the characters themselves too that there is a unique type of resistance to intimacy that does not occur in a typical M x F relationship where if they are already in the bedroom, intercourse is probably implied.
That sense of resistance alone (I can't have sex with him tonight, we are both male) gives the impression that the sex is totally unwanted and the larger, more masculine person will have to force himself upon his love interest. This also seems independent of the characters actual sexual orientation. It's like for some reason a carnal lust occurs, sex is irrelevant, it's taboo and forbidden so that makes it even more appealing. Hormones rage, desires take over, it sets the story in a way that would be totally uninteresting otherwise. But the reader assumes this is rape; it's unwanted sex, the weaker individual was resisting, so it can't be anything other than rape. That viewpoint comes from our traditional, western and the usual male x female oriented sexual situations we are used to. Maybe these are some points that might help the other girls in the a column get a better feel for Casey's argument. Perhaps it's not really rape, since depicting it as a happy go lucky, welcome relationship is kind of defeatist to some of the intent for BL to exist in the first place. |
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branewurms
Posts: 19 |
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When it portrays it as the f-ed up situation it is, and not in a happy-go-lucky or sweetly romantic light, which BL quite often does.
No, not at all - especially since it is in fact possible for a victim of rape to experience arousal and often enough, the perpetrator is someone they're romantically involved with. All I'm asking for is for it not to be glossed over, excused, made into something sweet, or so forth. Such a pairing isn't emotionally healthy, and it shouldn't be portrayed as emotionally healthy. A non-rapey, non-BL example of the concept I'm trying to get across: In the ridiculously popular book Twilight, Edward's stalkerish, very creepy and controlling behaviors are portrayed as if they were romantic. I wouldn't have had a serious problem with the book if their relationship had been portrayed as the twisted, messed up thing it is, and Edward had not been portrayed as the "really good guy at heart" that he was. |
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Cait
Posts: 503 |
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Okay, but honestly, people don't want to read/see that. They don't want the big scary world creeping in on them while they're trying to enjoy their fantasy. It can't be real, or realistic (for most people, not you, clearly) in order for them to enjoy the concept. It's the same with the entire presentation, or rather lack thereof, of homosexuality in these stories. It's the same as with the lack (until more recently) of safe sex practices or any real reference to the physical consequences or dangers of sex in these stories. No one is actually believing that what they are reading is real or realistic and you see just such the backlash in popular tites like Twilight: people that know it's not realistic complain about it. A lot. Last edited by Cait on Fri Oct 16, 2009 2:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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lebrel
Posts: 374 |
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This thread seems to have derailed onto rape fantasies. Getting back to the original topic of the article: I think the question is misguided. Instead of asking why female readers don't like submissive female characters (and I must say, this may be a function of the filtering of material for the US market, since they appear to be much more common and well-liked in shojo in Japan), the discussants could have more profitably focused on submissive male characters outside of yaoi. Aside from shy/submissive/feminine guys in shojo/josei (the original love interest in Never Give Up, "Momo" in Tramps Like Us, the protagonist in Otomen), rummaging around in the more explicitly pornographic yaoi material (the wilder doujinshi, the fanart, and the overlap with other porn manga for women) suggests strongly that the uke is the primary point of attraction. The submissive, feminine, insertable male shows up in a quite broad range of erotic material made by and for women; yaoi is the subset of this material where the necessary phallic apparatus is provided by another human male.
Also, Casey argues that Japanese readers are primarily responding to yaoi as a scopophilic genre and do not see themselves as either the seme or the uke, however my experience is that many of the women I have talked to (filtered through a total lack of Japanese, so possibly biased by who speaks English and who is willing to talk to the nosy foreigner) are quite likely to imagine themselves as the cool, masterful stranger who sweeps up the shy, pretty uke and carries him off to a bed of roses. I think that one of the attractions of yaoi, in Japan as well as overseas, is that it is an expression of female sexual agency in a culture where sexual agency expressed by actual *women* is construed as slutty or (undesirably) masculinizing. In other words, in a heterosexual equivalent of a yaoi relationship, the seme would be the one with boobs. |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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What I was trying to express in my previous post is that to make the seme and uke analogous with a male and female relationship some differing characters need to exist that identify one taking on the male role and the other taking on the female role. This is not just limited to the uke being the receiver it goes farther in ascribing characteristics as frailness, awkwardness in sexual encounters and an initial resistance to being touched intimately. But is it the seme who is really in control? If the seme is not careful and does something the uke definitely does not want and hurts him both emotionally and physically the relationship is over. Period. If the seme truly loves and cares for his partner the most loving thing he can do is let him go. |
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Youkai Warrior
 Posts: 505 Location: Sarayashiki |
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I'm sorry, you misunderstand me. I said some girls don't recognize some yaoi as porn. I did not say all girls. I specifically said I had viewed yaoi. The only reason why I don't do it as much, is because of a personal obligation. There are some gay boys in my choir class who are really nice and talented, and I felt like I was offending them by viewing something that can fetishize homosexuality. I'm not telling everyone else to do the same. [/i] |
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lebrel
Posts: 374 |
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"men who are not intimidating yet at the same time are still men"; I don't think that's it, so much as wanting to be the "aggressive" one in the relationship without having to be either slutty or bitchy. In redicomi (= "ladies' comics", hetero-porn manga for women), aside from the smutty-shmoopy-romances (which tend to adhere quite closely to standard shoujo romance tropes, but with sex) there are, oversimplifying a bit, two kinds of stories; the ones where the "good" girl gets blackmailed/tricked/coerced into sex, and the ones where the predatory, sexually aggressive woman molests her students/sexually harasses her secretary/gets her hot-but-shy-'n'-virginal neighbor drunk and tears his clothes off while he blushes and protests/etc. (There is a small but non-zero chance of a strap-on being involved here.) But the women in the latter kinds of stories have to be either sex bombs in peek-a-boo lingerie or ball-busting dominatrixes; they can't ever be "nice girls", or even cool, confident, self-assured women. Semes in yaoi, on the other hand, can be suave and cool and admirable even while they're screwing the uke until he faints.
I've read a number of Japanese books on how to be a shoujo manga-ka, and they emphasize things that Western authorities would never advise, such as the importance of using stereotypes and cliches, and of making your characters recognizable "types", in order to make it easier for the reader to get into the story. One piece of advice that seems weird to me but is *quite* common is the idea that the two parties in a romance should be completely, exaggeratedly opposites; if one is responsible and reliable, the other should be a total scatterbrain and completely irresponsible. As applied to yaoi this idea could perhaps explain the emphasis on the "totally girly uke" as a foil to the suave and masterful seme. |
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rinmackie
 Posts: 1040 Location: in a van! down by the river! |
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Sorry for going all harsh on you,Youkai Warrior, but I like yaoi and don't worry about offending anyone because I don't normally tell anyone. If you don't read it because you personally think yaoi is offensive, that's fine but you shouldn't not read it because you're afraid of what people might think. For example, my mother (and most of my family) would find yaoi/BL offensive because they disapprove of homosexuality and porn. But I'm an adult and I don't have to worry about it and there's no reason they should have to know. Besides not all gays think yaoi is offensive; some actually like it. Not many, but some of them do.
Not to turn this into a tit for tat thread, but one of the reasons I'm responding is because I'm enjoying this thread even though there's a lot of "I'm right, no, you're wrong" going on and we need to be careful not to get this locked. I hope we can get beyond some of that and have an interesting discussion. |
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liannesentar
Posts: 29 |
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I think you're oversimplifying a very complex societal issue. Sorry if this is long and a bit off-topic, but I wanted to talk about this and how it relates to the debate of rape in BL. Have you read about the concept of "privilege"? Here's the Wikipedia article on white privilege specifically, but "privilege" can apply to anyone with birth rights in common with the more "powerful" section of society. Treating anyone differently because of her/his sex, race, orientation, etc. is wrong, but not all wrongs skew the same way. I think Casey's tried to make this point before, but I don't feel like she's explained it very well. Let's say you're rich and white. Someone drives down the street and yells "kill whitey!" at you. Could you laugh that off? You'd have the right to be insulted, but would you actually be afraid that someone was going to get out of that car and hurt you? Do you expect this to be a harassment you've received often while walking down the street? Did a friend of yours get harassed, hurt, or even killed for being white? Now let's say you're poor and black. Someone drives by and screams "kill the *racial slur*!" Would you answer all those questions above the same way? Would you react the same way to the person who shouted from the car, and then how would you be treated for having that reaction? Power in society tends to skew toward certain groups--in North America, it's mostly straight white men in the middle and upper classes. That doesn't mean life is necessarily easy for these men, but it does mean that society doesn't usually heap the same baggage on these men that it does on someone outside of that group. He is generally thought of as the "default human." His race, orientation, social status, and gender aren't usually an issue and he's judged for what he does, not who he is (for the sake of brevity I'm not going to talk about affirmative action here, although it was specifically made to combat the type of systemic discrimination I'm talking about). A person who fits the description of most of the people in power is shielded from a lot of the inherent "othering" that our society pushes through media and widespread systemic prejudice. So when he's discriminated against, he can usually see it and fight it as an isolated incident. This probably isn't something he's been suffering from all his life, often to the point of internalizing it and thinking he really IS worthy of less power. When you live in a society with a power imbalance, making frequent victims of society ALSO victims in media can pull a lot of reactions from people. If you have an anime where a boy rapes a girl, sure, you can see that as an escapist rape fantasy and not at all link it to real rape. But something like 1 in every 6 women are raped in real life, which means many people who watch that could be a woman who was raped or know a woman who was raped, and with the way mainstream media so easily objectifies and dehumanizes women and links sex with women and violence (sometimes very directly, what with all the dead strippers in CSI and whatnot), there are a lot of people who are going to be made uncomfortable with that boy-raping-girl anime because of the society we were raised in and NOT because of the specific anime. So now you have BL, where boys are raping other boys. This certainly happens in real life, but far less frequently than male-on-female rape, and is not an obvious extension of the pervasive mainstream message that "boys are passive objects for you to have sex with." So if someone picks up a manga, and there's a rape scene, and s/he is somehow made more uncomfortable when a boy is raping a girl than when a boy is raping another boy, that doesn't necessarily mean s/he thinks real rape is okay (as other people on this forum have explained pretty well) or that a boy being raped is somehow less serious than a girl being raped. But it's more likely that s/he can watch the boy-on-boy rape with a cooler head than had it been a boy-on-girl rape, which very often drags in emotional, societal baggage. Anyway, I've always thought of this as one of the explanations for the knee-jerk offense people feel with boy-on-girl rape in media that they may NOT feel as strongly with boy-on-boy rape (or girl-on-boy rape, or girl-on-girl rape). Media isn't created in a vacuum, and it isn't READ in a vacuum, either. |
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h2326q
Posts: 15 |
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How can you fantasise about rape and say that you can't stand the thought of that happening to you? People do not fantasise about things that they don't wont completely, to some degree at some level they want it. I have never fantasised about something I did not at least partially want. I love bloody violence in anime, video games etc, and part of me really does desire to hurt someone severely (the greater part is strongly against that).
No I will attempt to answer my own question.I think the whole females enjoying rape fantasy is an instinctual thing. We might not like it but humans are not as in control of our base instincts as we might like. Take a look at the animal kingdom consensual sex and rape can be hard to distinguish. Both male and female are essentially breeding machines, the female wants healthy offspring and if the male is capable of forcing her, than he must be fit and strong and her offspring could inherit those traits. Humans are more evolved but the females desire to to be the weaker sex physically is still present. Girls prefer guys who are bigger and stronger than them and could force them if they wished. Animal instincts say if he can force me there is a better chance of him being a good protector. Basically the sexual desires have not evolved quite quickly enough compared to the rest of the psyche. So they desire this, but humans are more than just instinct, other stronger things say no. As a side not it is not uncommon for women to enjoy being raped, it is because of this that victims feel guilt and do not report the crime. Whether you like it or not if they are talented you are going to enjoy yourself, you aren't in control of your nerve endings. They have to realise that enjoying it does not mean that they secretly wanted it all along (reason for guilty feelings), but that it is like someone forcing something down your throat it is going to be digested no matter what. It is not their fault. |
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Jadress
 Posts: 807 Location: Seattle. It purdy and nerdy! |
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Holy crap... oh man, do I regret opening this thread. I really haven't been following this thread at all, but I opened it and saw h2326q's post, and I have to say, that's probably one of the most offensive things I've ever read. Girls secretly like getting raped and that's why they feel ashamed and don't report the crime? My mind is completely blown that you would genuinely believe this. Have you ever thought that our society often blames the victim? That victims are afraid to come forward either out of retaliation of some kind or because they won't be taken seriously? (Cause they secretly wanted it, right??) Or because (in some cultures) being raped brings shame to the whole family and themselves? Also- girls like real rape- you do know that victims often have to go to the hospital, right? Because their bodies and muscles were tightened and closed, but forced/ripped open? There is nothing of secret consent about that. Also, I don't buy these BS psuedo-evo-science arguments that women want to be overpowered or raped and guys love to rape because of these old animal kingdom/reproduction comparisons. We are past that. Also, I don't think fantasies need to have any basis in reality at all. You might play a WWII shooting game and fantasize about being a soldier storming Normandy, but to actually be there would be a terrible, not fun thing. But in your fantasy, you know you're safe, you know you're not *really* killing anyone, or in danger. That's why it's a *fantasy*, it's not realistic.
Sorry for this ranty, unorganized post, but I just had to respond to your comment, because it shows a terrifying lack of education and understanding of rape and abuse. Please check out some resources online about sexual violence, because frankly your views seem damaging. |
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Cloe
Moderator
 Posts: 2728 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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Welp, THIS is sure going to lead to some calm, rational debate. Locked, before this gets out of hand. |
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