I never said you needed an I.D to buy eromanga in Japan, I just meant they aren't on bookshelves in the states. Sex is something I use to express the characters devotion, it IS not bullcrap. Not all my work has sex, but the sex is a way I use to show my characters love and passion for one another.

And in the US, BL manga is clear-shrink wrapped. I haven't seen black-shrink wrapped BL, considering that most BL covers are not like most hentai covers that show something like a busty woman bending over spreading her labia open to the world blushing like a red tomato.

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“𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝓇𝑜𝓈𝑒'𝓈 𝓇𝒶𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓉 𝑒𝓈𝓈𝑒𝓃𝒸𝑒 𝓁𝒾𝓋𝑒𝓈 𝒾𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓇𝓃𝓈.” ― 𝑀𝒶𝓌𝓁𝒶𝓃𝒶 𝒥𝒶𝓁𝒶𝓁-𝒶𝓁-𝒟𝒾𝓃 𝑅𝓊𝓂𝒾.
あたしは腐女子です。少女漫画、たくさん読んでください。

See this is the problem:
-Offensive: matter of personal opinion
-Sex-driven: both yaoi and hentai are in this category
-``No meaning other than to turn someone on``: both yaoi and hentai are in this category
-No artistic merit: matter of personal opinion

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"It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

BL isn't always meant to turn someone on

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“𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝓇𝑜𝓈𝑒'𝓈 𝓇𝒶𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓉 𝑒𝓈𝓈𝑒𝓃𝒸𝑒 𝓁𝒾𝓋𝑒𝓈 𝒾𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓇𝓃𝓈.” ― 𝑀𝒶𝓌𝓁𝒶𝓃𝒶 𝒥𝒶𝓁𝒶𝓁-𝒶𝓁-𝒟𝒾𝓃 𝑅𝓊𝓂𝒾.
あたしは腐女子です。少女漫画、たくさん読んでください。

Yes, it is.

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♪MONSTARR~ will eat all your cookies and steal your bishies~♪ Φ_Φ

No yaoi is not porn. Not entirely at least. I think of it the same way I think of movies (which may be faulty reasoning on my part, but hear me out). A movie can be rated R, show half-naked or fully naked people having sex and not be considered porn because there is a storyline and it isn't solely focused on sex. A sex scene is usually meant to turn the audience on, but it still doesn't make the entire movie a porno.

Most of yaoi out there does have a storyline, whether you think the storyline is good or not is of personal opinion. It's rare to find yaoi where from beginning to end it is nothing but sex, or even where just the majority of it is sex. Some people were also mentioned showing genitalia. Most yaoi does not explicitly show genitalia. Unless you're reading the more smuttier stuff, there's a general aversion to drawing an actually penis going into an orifice. They usually show enough for you to get the general idea of what's going on without going into details.

Anyways, you guys who call all yaoi porn should pay attention to the other genre tags of the manga such as smut and adult. If its labeled adult, it's on the pornographic side. If not, its more on the rated R side than on the rated XXX side.

in general?? no..whats wrong with a love story about two homosexuals (not my cup of tea), but i will say that alot of yaoi manga are smutty though..i mean if there was a yaoi manga that had no plot except for the main character to bone/ get bonned then yeah i guess it would be hentai/porn but since most Yaoi/ Yuri manga have plots, and character development and sex isnt really a main focus but just a aspect of the manga then its not really porn just a mature manga

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"when i'm sad, i stop being sad and be awesome instead."
- Barney Stinson

Miisa hath spoken.

it is

and so are shojo smut

nothing wrong or offensive about that.

Wise those words are.

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This week's favorites:

- Golden Kamui





ççççççç[Ô .Ô] tsutopodus© will eat your manga and steal your cats!

Well if THE miisa has spoken it, it must be the truth.

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.

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Reviews of my Work:
You are kind of boring - Blackorion
Congratulations! Ur an asshole! - tokyo_homi
Your awesome!!! - Cherelle_Ashley
NightSwan also said that she wanted to peg me, once, but I'm not sure whether to take that as a compliment or a threat...

Yes, I'm aware of that. I was thinking more along the lines of the controversy with the Three Strikes law, but yeah, that's getting sidetracked.

I agree with your view on softcore porn for those yaoi, exempting the ones where the sex scene(s) makes up a small part of the overall story. For example, there are some artists who don't find sex to be something that must be hidden, in the same way kissing is a pretty intimate act, yet I doubt many people will demand that kissing must only happen off-screen lest it taint the story with vulgarity.

You can find exceptions for every rule, but the amount of exceptions found isn't insignificant in this case. I've seen plenty, plenty of yaoi that would be considered josei or seinen if the relationship was heterosexual instead. Kimi wa Pet has more sex than a lot of yaoi, and it doesn't even have a mature tag (your mileage may vary).

Gender does not have any effect on whether something is pornographic or not. And yaoi is "males in a sexual relationship". So consider the many stories that have "a male and female in a sexual relationship" and try calling them porn. Yes, there are many of them that are porn, but there are many that aren't.

It's fine that yaoi is a broad genre/artistic movement/group of elements that form a story, but it's troubling that people take all of the stories that fall under "yaoi" and say it's "porn with maybe some exceptions here and there".

I can understand this sentiment in particular, but you have to remember that originally that's what yaoi was created exactly for. Yuri too, to a lesser extent, comes from a bunch of bizarre, sexually charged subcultures during the 60s. The whole "no rise, fall, or meaning" yaoi acronym as well as the fujoshi moniker stems from that, so to a certain extent it makes sense that you would need additional exemptions to remove the labels. After all, it comes from a movement that was originally just porn in the strictest, all-sexual sense of the word, rather than the slightly broader terms we're applying here.

On the other note- anything that depicts sex in an explicit manner would also fall under the pornography categorization in some capacity. I don't care about gender, but the majority of heterosexual romances don't actively depict sex, hence the difference. I personally am not the one who applies labels to series like Kimi wa Pet, but I'm always happy to apply the mature, adult, or smut labels whenever applicable. We're having an argument about semantic labels, here, so obviously the logic applies to everything in the same manner.

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Reviews of my Work:
You are kind of boring - Blackorion
Congratulations! Ur an asshole! - tokyo_homi
Your awesome!!! - Cherelle_Ashley
NightSwan also said that she wanted to peg me, once, but I'm not sure whether to take that as a compliment or a threat...

Most of what I've seen that has been labeled "Yaoi" has also been pornographic. Crenshinibon already mentioned this, but you can find exceptions for almost every rule. IMO, in this case, the exceptions prove the rule. I just assume that Yaoi that happens to have no sexually explicit material was inappropriately labeled (and should have been labeled BL instead).

It isn't a big deal to me. I don't care if some girls want to justify their affinity for Yaoi and want to distance themselves from porn-addicts as much as possible. As far as I'm concerned, there's a thin line between porn, yaoi, and estrogen-soaked stories like Meyer's Twilight series.

Not that there's anything wrong with any of that. Before losing interest in finding GREAT PORN, I thought some of the older stuff from Oh Great (Ogure Ito) was pretty cool... like Junk Story (interesting story... but it's still porn). Same with some of the more explicit stuff in Muira's Berserk. I won't spoil anything, but I thought the rape scenes were done really well and mind fucked me, so much so that I was almost turned on... (So you can see I don't have much room to judge others' tastes. ) Yet I still don't consider the latter to be porn. Hmmm.