No Climax, No Point, No Meaning? Japanese Women's Boy-Love Sites on the Internet

Abstract

Boy love (shoonen' ai) in Japanese does not refer to the love many young Japanese women feel for male teen idols, but instead refers to the homoerotic attraction the male heroes in a genre of Japanese women's manga (comics) feel for each other. Commencing in the early 1970s, women's manga began to describe love stories between “beautiful boys,” culminating in the mid-1980s in a genre termed YAOI (an acronym meaning “no climax, no point, no meaning”) which, dispensing with the elaborate plots of the earlier comics, focused instead on sexual interactions between boys and young men. The advent of the Internet has provided a new forum for women interested in boy-love fiction to publish their own and read each others' work. This article briefly outlines the history of boy love in Japanese women's comics and attempts to describe and account for the recent expansion of this genre onto the Internet, where young Japanese women have produced a huge number of Web sites extolling the virtues of homosexual love between beautiful boys.