Yaoi written for women is bad for the same reasons yuri written for men is bad. The mischaracterizations of male sexuality that make the former bad are just much more noticeable than the latter if you're a man.
wot if "male sexuality" is not a monolith and different males have different sexualities
Then replace that with, "that kind of yaoi/yuri has no grounding in realistic characterization of anyone in existence and is mostly just fantasies derived of horniness"
I actually prefer slash and yaoi type stuff to a lot of gay male erotica. The biggest problem I have with sexy cartoons is that everyone looks too young. It was fun when I was a teenager, but it’s less hot to me now.
lowkey realized im not straight due to me discovering i like to beat it to anime boys and gay fanfic
Semi-serious answer: I'm a LiveJournal vet from the early 00s, probably one of the few who never migrated to Tumblr, and am also passingly familiar with the even earlier Western slash discourse along with its modern MxM romance offshoots... and can still probably rattle off most of the major arguments. You'll notice a lot of them are inextricable from the very concept of "fandom", due to the history of the category.
"Yaoi bad"
- gays bad (this was, after all, the dark ages before the coming of Liberal Savior Obama)
- "how dare you contradict the almighty canon"
- it's inherently misogynistic
- it simply transposes heteronormative gender roles to a superficially queer aesthetic
"Yaoi good"
- it's inherently subversive/anti-corporate
- queer representation matters
- support female creators
- female gaze good, male gaze bad
- it's better written/better characterized than het romance (very few who made this argument stopped to question why they might feel this way)
Basically liberal feminism in a nutshell, I guess. These days my personal opinion is somewhere between "let horny people be horny" and "it's another potential avenue for education/radicalization."
The big "yaoi bad" argument I see nowadays is "straight women fetishizing gay men"
Yeah, that used to be seen as a net positive (the female gaze argument). Rarely saw LGBT people participating in the conversation... these were predominantly spaces for straight white women.
yaoi is cool when its not written by dolts, tho im using yaoi rn to describe all animated Japanese mlm content
