Yikes

I’ve seen a lot of folks talking about yaoi/fujoshi culture and how it’s especially harmful towards mlm, which is fantastic!!! It’s definitely helped a lot of folks reconsider their actions and behaviors, including myself. But another part of it, and one that I actually have the authority to talk about, is how that culture effects those consuming it.

I was eleven when I started reading yaoi. I know that that whole sentence might sound silly, but a child should not have been intorduced to that content. I shouldn’t have seen so many people talking about it in whatever self-insert fanfics I was reading or youtube videos, with no warning that I can remember about the content, that I genuinely felt encouraged to go looking for it. The older I get the more I understand how that warped my view of the world for a few years and just how young I was. Not only was a lot of the stuff I saw on the internet normalizing a media that is basically just porn, to be frank, but it was unhealthy on a number of other levels. On top of fetishizing same-sex relationships between men, I can hardly think of anything that I read during that time that didn’t have issues with consent, age differences, or deeply unhealthy relationships. Those factors were entirely treated as just part of the genre, or worse, as part of the allure. 

And I can say with certainty that those things warped my perceptions, as a fifth grader, of relationships and sexuality. I’ve had to actively unlearn some of that stuff and I know that it affected some of the mistakes I’ve made in the past. I’ve absolutely learned and grown so much since then, but looking at all the self-proclaimed “fujoshis” on the internet, I think about how that could’ve been me. I could’ve based my personality around reading yaoi even more, to the point where criticisms of it became a personal attack. Even once I moved away from that stuff and into broader fandom/internet culture, I remember reading posts just pointing out that calling same sex ships “sin” or “tiny gay babies” and actually feeling defensive about that, because I didn’t know any better. 

Yes, I was choosing to consume that content and yes, I’m definitely aware that this culture fully harms mlm way more than it does me (and I really regret that I participated in it). I just want to establish that yaoi being normalized and encouraged as an interest to the point where it’s normal for actual children and young teens to consume it is a huge problem as well. 

A few things I’ve learned on this site multiple times today is that no one has reading comprehension.

completely agree with it honestly fuck terfs lol

some TERF: trans “"men”“ have been poisoned by the patriarchy! They just need to accept that their lesbianism is okay and they can be butch without having to -

me, rolling past on skates wearing sunglasses and sipping starbucks: i like men, sharon