So, I Read My First Yaoi Novel and It Was Actually Rapey-er Than all the Terrible Hetero Romance I Read

I read this book because I’m a book blogger who is highly critical of the romance genre and the way rape is often fetishized and excused in the romance genre. Seriously, if you want to talk about “rape culture” the romance genre is a good place to start. Considering the vast amount of women who have rape fantasies, and the very weird way feminists like to play up their physical vulnerability to men constantly, I actually think crying about rape culture is literally a way for women to titillate themselves.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19085605/

I believe women are aroused by their own vulnerability to rape, and that is why women like to scream and cry that if a man approaches them to flirt in broad daylight and is perfectly polite, this is somehow super duper scary.
Anyway, this is my thing I carry on about constantly. I believe women are mostly to blame for rape culture, because it makes women wet, and I know that sounds awful, but if it’s true it’s true. I sure as hell wish it wasn’t, yet here we are.
I was asked by a reader of my blog to talk about consent in gay romance too.

I agreed and happened to stumble upon this yaoi novel in a used bookstore.

This book has all the same weird, rapey problems that hetero romance does.

There is a clear lack of consent, yet the guy saying “no” secretly likes it in his head. So…guess everything is fine then???


How is something like that not supposed to confuse people on what is and isn’t consent. If a guy is saying “no” or “stop” (as Tsukasa does in EVERY fucking sex scene with Takeshima) then you stop fucking him. That’s pretty simple, right? Person says no, you stop doing whatever in the hell you’re doing to them.

Look at this fucking review. Literally my proof that romanticizing rape fucks up peoples’ ideas of consent.

But this book, like a TON of hetero romance, makes the “no” an element of the erotic. Not only that but Tsukasa’s small size is emphasized constantly. Since yaoi is known to appeal to women, this brings me back to the theory I expressed earlier: women are aroused by their own vulnerability to rape. They probably don’t want to actually be raped. But knowing they are small and vulnerable to it turns them on. That’s why feminists talk about it constantly. I believe since this genre is known to appeal to women, the author emphasized the small size of Tsukasa, and in many other ways, infused the feminine psyche onto him. This is a gay romance, but there’s little here to distinguish it from a hetero romance. Tsukasa plays the role of the emotionally-damaged-but-trying-to-play-it-cool main character that we see in most MF romance.

The absolute most disgusting part of this book for me, was the scene where Tsukasa is nearly raped by his ex-boyfriend. Takeshima happens upon them and saves Tsukasa, which, okay I don’t love how sexual assault and being saved from sexual assault are eroticized so often in the romance genre, but whatever, we love a knight in shining armor. Is Takeshima knight in shining armor though?

Well he does save Tsukasa from being raped and threaten his potential rapist. But then he after the attacker leaves, he says to Tsukasa, “Why didn’t you fight him off?” and “If I hadn’t come along, would you have just let him have his way with you?” but it gets better, he also screams “Damn you! Who else are you sleeping with? How many people at Dai Tech are you fucking?”

So…I have a lot of feelings about this.

Look I have my own experience with the r-word, which I think I’ve trauma dumped all over the internet enough these past few months, so probably I won’t get into it. I’ll just say my own experience is the reason I get so pissy over the way rape is eroticized by women, both blatantly in the romance genre and insidiously in fainting couch feminist discourse. It’s also why this scene, where a man is almost raped and then the man he loves yells at him and blames him and acts like he wanted it because he didn’t fight harder, it made me absolutely sick to my stomach. The main character did not react realistically or appropriately at all to being so abused by Takeshima.

I can’t imagine how that would feel, this event that I lived through when I was 18, if on top of that, someone I admired and cared about walked in on it, yelled at me for not fighting him off, implied I wanted it for not fighting harder, demanded to know my body count, and expressed a general anger and disgust at me.

How could anyone write something like this and call it romance?

And the scene isn’t even over there.

“Answer me, you slut.”

Takeshima screams this at a man who was nearly raped only moments earlier.

This is love? This is romance?

No, this is sick.

And this author should be entirely, absolutely ashamed.

And I don’t want to hear fuck all about “respectability politics.” It’s a nonsense phrase used to sheild LGBT+ people from criticism.

If I would criticize a hetero person for doing something (and I have many times on this topic) then I will do the same for LGBT+ people. And that applies to works of fiction too. I will criticize LGBT+ works using the same criteria I use for hetero fiction.

That being said, from everything my LGBT+ friends have told me about MM romance, there’s a good chance this was written by a cis hetero woman. Idk anything about this author. I just know that’s a massive phenomena in MM romance, according to many of my LGBT+ pals. So even if a gay dude wrote this, he was still likely influenced by the sexuality of cis hetero women, as they create many of the tropes and standards for MM romance.

That being said, influence or not, this was a fucked up thing to write. Stories like this romanticize dubious consent and I am incredibly bothered by it.

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Published on July 09, 2021 18:53
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