I'm afraid I gave you the wrong impression. I was talking specifically about male habits there. Women are of course involved in both porn and politics, and you could say that their behavior in those realms also reflects their angst, but just in very different ways. Yes, manga is the dominant form of women's porn in…

You might be more interested in erotic manga created for gay men, though I don't think any of it has been translated. I think I've seen Japanese gay porn videos available on English-language sites. Not having seen much of it, I don't know how it would compare to American stuff.

Thanks for forcing me to better articulate myself!

Excellent points. The thing is that men seem to prefer visual stimulation to textual or aural stimulation, so if a man is looking at porn, anyone who can see his monitor even from a distance knows what he's looking at, whereas text looks like text until you get close enough to actual read it. On the other hand, the…

Cool. Thanks for the info!

What you said. Thank you.

Huh? Who said anything about a "feministic and female break-through"? What are you so annoyed by? This is an actual thing that sells quite well among Japanese heterosexual women. I'm sorry those women have the effrontery to not conform to your preconception of what a heterosexual woman should want to see in porn, but…

What you said. Precisely.

Oops. Sorry. I don't know how "boy" got in there. I meant to just write female. That is, it is the female heroine who is the focus of the gaze in Japanese women's porn, because that is specifically what readers have asked for. As for the way the image looks to you, I can only say that you are looking at it through a…

Very androgynous, by Western standards. Body hair is almost never shown, for one thing, and muscular characters are rare.

Yep. I remember a study a few years ago that ranked Japan quite low in the amount of sex people were actually having. Considering all the porn everywhere, the conclusion is that Japan is the masturbation capital of the developed world.

I don't think complex psychological explanations cover everything here. Simple lust is a good place to start. But there are all sorts of social pressures and conventions that come to bear, and that's when the psychology start getting funky, IMO. If it was just all simple lust, all heterosexual or bisexual women should…

I don't know how well the tankoubon (trade paperback) editions sell. I think most women prefer to buy the magazines and then toss them when they have fulfilled their purpose. Or to look at them on the mobile.

ERMAHGERD! Women looking at other women!

Funny you should ask! I studied that very question for years, interviewing and observing nearly a hundred fans and creators, and I wrote a paper about it that was published in the book Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan. You can read the whole thing here:…

Haha. Comics, sequential art...whatever. I have never seen the point of insisting on calling Japanese comics "manga." And I say that as someone who's spent nearly a quarter century studying, writing about, and translating manga. If it's all right to call French B.D. comics, I don't see why I can't call manga comics.

I wonder if anyone knows how big the slash community is, excluding fans who are only interested in Japanese (or Japanese-ish) BL. It has always seemed to me to be a more closeted, furtive fandom than Japan's BL/yaoi fans. If you go to the Tokyo Comic Market that is held every summer and winter, you can see ten of…

I was talking about hetero porn, but, yeah, your image is typical of BL stuff.

I had a girlfriend who was into erotic dojinshi (hetero stuff, not BL), and I admit it was embarrassing to go shopping for that stuff with her. Aisles and aisles of porngraphic, self-published manga. Ironically, she had zero interest in real-life sex!