The Japanese are nuts. Everyone knows that. And nuts are unpredictable. You never can tell what they'll say or do next.
The Japanese are also crazy for new stuff. So are we, of course, but how we respond to novelty and how the Japanese respond to novelty is where we part company. The Japanese see something new, they make it better. We see something new, we crap it up. Disagree? The Japanese see American transistor radios and they make Sony. We see Belgian Waffles and we make Eggo's. I rest my case.
And now, as nuts as it may seem, the Japanese have seen gay bears and they love them. The latest comic book craze soon be exported to our very shores from the land of Chrysanthemums and Samurai: Gay Bear San.
I've long been fascinated by Japanese comics, specifically the gay porn ones. For those of you unfamiliar with this fascinating genre, you're in for an odd treat because Japanese gay porn is mostly designed for a young female audience, defying the stereotype about women and porn. American women may turn a disapproving eye on the antics of Dirk Yates and Michael Lucas, but Japanese women go crazy for Ranmaru Samejima and his boyfriend Enjoji.
With Japan's comic book industry accounting for more than 35 percent of all printed matter in the country, there are thousands of porn manga (Japanese for comic books) to enjoy. And the raunchiest, prettiest and most intense gay porn on the printed page is "Yaoi", entirely for women.
When I was first exposed to Yaoi some years ago, I was confused. It appeared to be gay porn but I was left cold. Fascinated but sexually unaroused. The graphics were charged with emotion and beauty but something critically male was missing.
Japan has a long tradition of romance and relationship-oriented manga for girls and women, and yaoi (rhymes with wowee) grew out of that. In the late 1970s and '80s girls' romance comics began to include stories where male/female romances were supplanted by a sort of idealized, platonic male/male friendship and then later a male/male romance. Although the work was created entirely by women and was serialized in women's magazines, the male/male relationships became a hit with the readership and the audience demanded more.
Why? Well the males in question were about as effeminate and nonsexualized (and therefore nonthreatening) as possible and many manga fans argue that this created a perfectly safe and balanced — although incredibly unlikely — template onto which female fans could project themselves. Relationships in Yaoi break down along hard lines of submissive ("uke") and dominant ("seme") and with women officially removed from the proceedings the female reader could project herself into either role (apparently none of these people has ever heard of a power-bottom). While the work has gotten considerably smuttier since its platonic origins the reality of gay male romance still has more-or-less nothing to do with most of the relationships depicted in these pages. The men in yaoi have often been compared to the "lesbians" in porn for straight men, there for the titillation but about as realistic as unicorns.
As many of you may know, Yaoi has been growing in popularity throughout North America since the turn of the century, and now North American Yaoi grows raunchier and more "gay" attractive drawing in growing numbers of gay male fans.
Experts in these matters point out that just three or four years ago even the most hard-core Yaoi releases were almost "decent" thanks to Japan's censorship laws which prohibit displaying the actual sex act (or, somewhat bizarrely, pubic hair). Most of these early manga suffered from points of insertion that were tastefully obscured with frustratingly placed pixilation to hide the naughty bits. Much of the material coming out of Japan was like soft-core porn, lots of rubbing around with nothing to show for it.
Luckily censors have been turning considerably blinder eyes to Yaoi production as of late, and most of the mature-rated material making its way to North America has all the hard cocks and spurting cum we've come to expect from our pornography... and, in defiance of stereotype, the female fans are eating it up, so to speak.
But with the spread of Yaoi to the Americans, the Japanese have developed a classical yen for something new. And something new that comes this way? Bears. Gay bears.
The next big comic book porn trend coming out of Japan is bears, cubs and daddies--the big hairy Japanese men of comics and anime (and the less-hairy men who love them) are coming out of the comics closets with manga, calendars and expensive, hard-to-find artbooks actually designed for real gay readers.
The smooth graceful Japanese queer is soon to be replaced by the bear-san. So if you're a bear and planning your next vacation and want to immerse yourself in world where you will be worshiped like...well...like a comic book hero, wrap yourself in a kimono and get your big hairy ass over to Nippon!
Nerd.
Posted by: Prince Gomolvilas | Sunday, 06 January 2008 at 12:43 PM
I love the Japanese Bear Art, Woof!
Posted by: alfredo | Sunday, 06 January 2008 at 11:10 PM