context: comics > Subjects

Sex

a boys' love cover image, from Haruka Minami

This is a huge part of Japanese comics, and an understandably controversial one. There is a large range of titles aimed at men, including lots of specialised areas - gay, hermaphrodite, 'lolita' porn - many of which are very nasty, not just in their use of females who look extremely young but also in the violence involved. Some titles don't do much to hide this tendency - 'Ultra Gash Inferno' is one that caught my eye. But unlike the old erotic prints with their huge and detailed genitalia, realistic modern comics normally omit the genitals (except in cartoony humorous strips). All sorts of strategies are used to avoid them, from censorship bars to fake-pixellation to trained scenery to symbolic representations to simply leaving blank space. This is generally put down to overenthusiastic adoption of Western/Christian morals, but then when these comics are being translated for the west, the artists are often asked to redraw to include the genitals...

One interesting major sexual thread is "boys' love" comics - stories mostly sold to girls and women about gorgeous boys falling for each other, a genre that more or less starts with Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya in the '70s. Besides the appeal of looking at pretty boys kissing, a strong theory is that these stories avoid the difficulties of the very strong gender roles within which Japanese women are mostly constrained - but having noted that, in most of the stories one is clearly more feminine, and the other is more dominant, and often they look like girls in drag (another major theme in girls' comics since 'Princess Knight').

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