How do you feel about the way women are treated in yaoi? I know for me it always bothers me when all women are portrayed as terrible, vain people. I've stopped reading some manga if it gets too bad. I definitely don't expect all women to portrayed as strong, innocent, angels, but I feel like most get demonized for the sake of being a woman.

yeah, they are portrayed as pretty terrible. but the way i see it, the readers are mostly female, we are territorial, and we dont want to see any other female. thats why we read boy on boy, and thats why any other female should be demonized and discarded.

I see the reasoning but I disagree with the above post. Honestly, female characters who are crazy and out of lime (I see this in both yaoi and shojo) over boys annoy the heck out of me (I am a straight female). Jealously is just off the charts on behalf of BOTH the women and men in yaoi or shojo.

That said, the way women in yaoi are portrayed is no way better than the way the main male characters are portrayed in yaoi. The men-men relationships in yaoi are mostly COMPLETELY unrealistic (especially the heavily cliched uke-seme dynamic). So when I read most manga, I have to majorly suspend my disbelief in order to enjoy it.

i have to disagree with that. Not all yaoi have a female character that are b*tches. Most also have females that are nice too you. Obviously you've been reading having bad luck on choosing yaoi to read that aren't suited for your taste. And besides, yaoi are focused on male-male relationships. And it's not just the females that are awful, some other males too. It's just a part of reality that we can't hide from. Most people don't like the fact of gay relationships and thats how characters in yaoi or yuri react to. They mirror real life incidents. If you don't like it then don't read yaoi or yuri or anything like this. Though, i understand why you say something like that. I'm just saying that it's not necessarily always like that. Sorry for the long comment. . . .

What I find the most irritating is the "absent woman phenomenon",
where there're basically no women to be found in the manga.
I don't think women are portrayed in a negative way too often,
it's just that they aren't there at all, most of the time...

When women are portrayed as mean and obnoxious though, I find it no different (albeit annoying) than the "typical bitch" love rival in many a shoujo romance.

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I definitely feel like it's an issue . . . like it's either women are not there or are only there to be the love rival or the annoying obstacle in some other way. Even if you compare it to shoujo, that's just reinforcing what I feel is something in manga that's really very negative toward women, like very dismissive of them as either shallow and petty (comedic foils, usually, that push for a "cute gimmick" for the uke to do or whatever but are largely unimportant) or aggressive when they are regarded seriously; like, they're regarded just as a problem.

It'd be alright if it was one girl out of many treated like that in manga, but when the majority is like that, or even the only girl in the whole thing, it's a problem. I think it has to do with the weird sexism that is present in yaoi that makes it even more apparent than in shoujo, which is a little more subtle, probably because of the larger amount of girls with varying personalities and such . . . in yaoi, even though the focus is on apparent gay relationships, there's still a big "gender essentialism" that bothers me, like one must be the girl and the other must be the boy, typically.

The more hostile toward females attitude in yaoi reminds me of the ancient Greeks, actually, since even though they thought the male-on-male practice of pederasty was pure and good and great even, the thought of lesbians or women in general was loathed and regarded as disgusting. Like people say they were enlightened because they had these "gay rights" but they stemmed from a disgust of women. Of course not all yaoi is not like that, but I get that feeling sometimes when it's regarded as purely progressive because it deals with gay relationships, disregarding sexist undertones. Sorry for the length!

This. I was hard-pressed to remember the last time I saw a female character in a BL I read. That's how little impact they have on the story and how pretty nonexistent they are. They are just not there so I really can't recall the last time I read one where the woman was portrayed negatively, try my best all I can recall is the character from Complex and I read that yeeears ago.

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