Quote from Crenshinibon
Quote from Blique
People keep leaning on the general picture and not thinking about the details. Yes, I'd say the "majority" of yaoi has sex in each chapter or two, but it's hardly porn level. Most of the time I've seen, the artist uses the common method of making the genitalia invisible, because you're supposed to focus on the bonding of the characters, not use it to get aroused with.
And I could understand if you still consider those to be porn, but there's still the "minority" of yaoi titles to consider.
As I've said before, yaoi is an incredibly broad genre. We can separate manga into romance, ecchi, smut, borderline H, and hentai. Yaoi can contain any of those elements. It could be 76 chapters long, have 1 chapter that involves sex, and be labelled yaoi (yes, I've seen it).
This situation makes me imagine throwing two people in jail, one for murder and the other for jaywalking...
Well, aside from the fact that
you actually can be put in jail for jaywalking (the maximum penalty is 3 months in the states, iirc), and the fact that you're obviously exaggerating, here's the thing.
The genitalia being hidden in most cases is due to Japanese law more than anything else- remember, you have to censor artwork with a mosaic or fog or whatever. Some are less explicit simply to avoid ruining the artwork. But in either case, that would still fall under the category of "softcore porn" because it's still showing sex. That doesn't make it better or worse in terms of storytelling, it just means that from a semantic standpoint the label would still apply.
As to your whole "in the details" argument- look, you can find exceptions for every rule. What we do have is a... we'll say "artistic movement" because genre isn't quite the right word, which traditionally includes sex. Anything following that tradition takes the label of "pornographic material," and so the entire body of work is going to have that applied as a general rule unless otherwise stated. Heck, we actually base the yaoi classification on this site on the inclusion of sexually explicit material. If we're talking general BL there's more leeway, but if the majority of the titles fit the description then there's going to be a general label.
Well, yes, the censorship law. But, the censorship law has been lifted, and many BL mangaka STILL censor their work. Its an artist's preference.
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