so since @oliveragainstpedos apparently blocked me after reaching for the stars for excuses to not have to stop appropriating a term from a foreign subculture, i’m respond like this. just the fact that they’ve seemingly blocked me though says quite a bit about not wanting to own up despite knowing.
really long post ahead. i’m so sorry to anyone on mobile. there was originally a readmore but it broke.
fujoshi is still being used with the original definition in Japan, and the “morphing” of the meaning is entirely forced by westerners, so.
this isn’t natural development or language, and it’s certainly not adopting, it’s appropriation.
…and frankly it’s even more hilarious that you didn’t mean BL. I just told you what yaoi is. I added sources. “Yaoi”, as a stand-alone thing, as opposed to a mislabeling of BL, is an old doujinshi genre known for it’s plotless fluff. The genre of exclusive harm and stereotyping that you’re trying to describe as yaoi doesn’t exist in Japan.
BL is marketed to women and often written by women, BL has unrealistic portrayals and abusive behaviour. Just as much as it has male authors and male readers and wholesome and healthy portrayals. There IS no separate genre of ‘filth’.
(And OGN and UGH are also both considered BL by Japanese standards. The sites calling it yaoi are mostly western scanlation sites, which are the main perpetrators of the mislabeling. They’re all professionally published aka not doujinshi aka none of these would generally be considered yaoi by their countries of origin.)
And should I repeat again?
They didn’t define themselves as rotten. They reclaimed it, à la “if shipping m/m ships means we’re too ruined for marriage, then we’re fine with that”.
if someone is misunderstanding the context and meaning of “rotten”, then they’re probably young enough to be corrected and willingly learn.
And i now realize i must not have made the following clear enough.
When people still said sinful (which isn’t a whole lot nowadays, for the same reasons you’re upset with it), they were referring to themselves. They were sinning by enjoying something sexual. The nsfw content was sin because it was nsfw. (And sometimes overly sweet and fluffy content was ‘sin’ in an ironic way)
A lot of the people that even said sinning were LGBTQ+ themselves and poking fun at the fact that their local church would disapprove.
So here, i’ll repeat one more time:
‘sinning’ was almost never used to mean in reference to someone being gay, it was used in reference to something being sexual.
“for being gay” you say, except it mostly wasn’t for being gay. I get feeling like it was an insensitive joke to make in the first place, but it ever referring to being gay and not being ‘horny on main’ is just false. (in any significant sense anyway - there’s outliers everywhere)
And as I said, it’s already fallen out of usage. The first and last time I actually saw it being used on this site was almost exactly 4 years ago.
And there it is again. This site.
“Fujoshi” is still being used exclusively as ‘female shipper of m/m’ in it’s country of origin. The people on American websites are not and will not ever be the ‘vast majority’ of self-identified fujoshi, because fujoshi is a term actually native to Japan. That’s where it’s an actual part of the vocabulary, where it was born, where the subculture has grown around it. The world extends beyond what you’ve personally seen on your corners of the internet.
The vast majority of fujoshi are Japanese, and currently using that word the way I defined it for you up there. That’s where the definition comes from in the first place - current Japanese fujoshi communities. Last I heard, they were appalled that the term was being slandered like this.
And I can guarantee you that the people who identify as fujoshi (or fudanshi, or fujin, which are terms you’re entirely glossing over too) on this website don’t mistreat real gay men like this as much as you think. If that much at all. (Tbh I’m more concerned about the kpop community atm.) The ones acting cringy or creepy are 99% teenagers who haven’t learned any better yet, but can (by, yknow, actually telling them which behaviours to stop, not what to stop calling themselves), and they are far from the majority of fujoshi worldwide.
And yknow, if this discourse stayed on this corner of the internet, if it never affected anybody outside it, I probably wouldn’t care this much. I probably wouldn’t write two whole essays to you in particular and more to others.
But that’s not what’s been happening, is it.
Instead it’s being co-opted by TERFs who feel ridiculously at home calling trans men “just gross fujoshis fetishizing gay men so bad that they actually wanna become one” (which in turn encourages trans gay men to become more and more misogynistic in an attempt to ‘prove’ that they’re nothing like that). It’s being co-opted by racists who are happy to get another chance to shit on Japanese people for “all being creepy pedophile perverts”. Misogynists and homophobes are having a jolly good time watching women get shat on just like when ‘fujoshi’ was first coined. (And I have witnessed these more in the past 4 years than I have witnessed ‘sinning’ irt m/m ships. That’s basically as good as a personal anecdote of course, but it’s definitely not nothing.)
And actual Japanese people not doing anything wrong are being affected because they’re using it the way they defined it and y’all are using it in accordance with western slash fandom relics. One of the people working on Yuri On Ice!!! got hate online for referring to herself as a fujoshi.
When your definition is based entirely on a definite minority of the group, and is contradicting the active definition set by the majority of the group, the ones who reclaimed the insult in the first place,
then that’s not the natural development of language. It’s not justified. It’s bastardization, and it’s playing into the hands of people who are glad to target huge groups of innocent people knowingly.
And altogether very few people outside of the malicious ones actually benefit from where this discourse has gone. The people who know what fujoshi means continue using it as usual, except for when they’re harassed to the point of not. The ones who act creepy act the same as always, except they’re not calling themselves fujoshi. (Ironically, I’ve seen more of the people who mockingly accuse others of being ‘gross fujoshi’ act weird about real people who resemble their cartoon ship.)
Not even the Japanese gay men have been happy about this, as if they were some monolith in the first place. For every “I’m an asian mlm and fujoshis should kys” anon, there’s another one going “actually I don’t give a shit what you read or what you call yourself as long as you treat me normally”, and even “for fuck’s sake please stop shitting on an asian fandom in our name already”.
It’s not some sort of rightful crusade. You’re not helping the LGBTQ+ rights movement by demonizing a majority-asian fandom based on western fandom’s mistakes.
And when you look at a post about how the term is being misused and misunderstood, and you respond by accusing OP of misunderstanding the term, while actually misusing and understanding that same term… One of us missed the point here, yeah, and the other is just grasping for reasons to keep acting the same after being called out on the bullshit.
Call a homophobe a homophobe.
There is no reason for you to appropriate ‘fujoshi’.
‘Homophobe’ fulfills the purpose better and doesn’t require you to reach to the stars to justify turning asian people into targets.
so yes, it’s absolutely understandable to want to oppress those people. and those people identify themselves as fujoshi.
This is not actually okay.
You’re forcing a whole new horrible definition of fujoshi, and in turn making targets out of an already-marginalized group!
Shocking, I know, but women, especially in Japan, are in fact marginalized.
And it only becomes more awful when you consider that around half of them are also LGBTQ+ themselves.
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