BL lovers have broken containment

The internet has always hated things teen girls like.

I saw it in the nineties the first glimpses of shōjo anime arrived in the West, only to be immediately shunted into after-school programming slots for little kids. I saw it when Twilight blew up in the late 2000s. And I saw it in the 2010s when everyone was screaming about the rampant degeneracy of the fujoshi (腐女子).[^ Translating to "rotten girl," fujoshi is used to describe female fans of anime, manga, and novels that focus on male-male romance — predominantly the yaoi or Boys' Love (BL) genres.]

What enabled BL to become the juggernaut it is today is women's collective desire to challenge the domination-based models of patriarchal masculinity we've previously been forced to accept.

These days, many women are starting to feel duped by heterosexual attraction

By the time we're adults, we aren't just sick of gentle parenting every man in our lives, training them to love us in a way that feels like love rather than ownership ("It's not a romance; it's a love story"), we're afraid of it.

Too many of us have been made to endure men who don't take "no" for answer, respond angrily to (real or imagined) rejection, and insist on performing increasingly-demeaning acts on us until ultimately, the mere thought of intimacy with a man comes with a nagging feeling that we would be engaging in self-harm if we did. We're afraid of weaponized incompetence, of misjudging a man and letting the wrong one around us or our kids. We're afraid of giving a guy a chance and getting dog-walked for our trouble — and we're afraid of being shamed for "letting" it happen.

So, what's a woman who's attracted to men to do — especially younger women, who are at higher risk of exploitation?

A future where women simply deter each other from engaging with men in any way isn't what feminists are clamoring for.[^ This alternate reality is written into my WIP's worldbuilding — it provides some horrific elements I wouldn't want to see reflected in real life.] Research explores how players of otome games like Love and Deepspace enjoy what's essentially a sandbox for (relatively) healthy dynamics in straight relationships[^ Hu, T., & Ge, L. (2025). Datafication of Digital Intimacy: The Dual Logic of Empowerment and Commodification. Games and Culture, 15554120251358522. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120251358522], but these sorts of narratives are few and far apart. BL provides an opportunity for women to visualize the types of relationships they might actually want without needing to see themselves in the narrative...which may explain why so lonely single men who subscribe to patriarchal values are quick to accuse BL of "feminizing" male characters. (These types would have you believe that basic kindness and empathy are inherently female traits, when in reality they simply don't understand them.)

That said, some BL is genuinely just smut. I doubt anyone's drooling over Mingi in a thigh belt as a means of examining healthier masculinities[^ I'm certainly not.]. Straight men threatened by BL often argue that gay men feel harmed by these stories — as has been the reality for women in the mainstream media they consume.

To this, I argue...throw out all your favorite movies, novels, video games, and TV shows where the creator makes a male and female character kiss. Block every spicy website. The next time you're called to utter the phrase, "That's hot," hold it in. Repent! If objectification is bad, and if women aren't allowed to enjoy an unhinged Wattpad fanfic or watch two hockey bros fall in love, you're not allowed to watch the millions of tentacle monster futanari gangbang videos that've been freely available without any public shame for decades.

Despite the fact that humans are social animals, some women have gotten to the point where they're telling younger women to avoid men entirely, for the duration of their lives. This is because many women have experienced relationships with men as largely predatory and dangerous — but demonizing alternative manifestations of masculinity isn't going to scare women into loving the demons that walk among us. Attempting to police women's imaginations on either side of the gender binary isn't going to fix the problem.

Let's not forget that smut can be healing. Yes, I'm serious.

Some women have even had a hard time finding fiction that treats female bodies with care. Male-male stories remove the dread of wondering if we'll be hit with a surprise DV scene disguised as "romance."

So many women (and let's be honest, men) have survived relationships with men that left them physically and/or psychologically scarred. Chloe Ellert is a coach who specializes in helping women dismantle the trauma stories built into their bodies through the use of scent and spicy content. It works because the body keeps the score; we physically carry our trauma with us. Somatic therapies help us rewire, process, and "unstick" what ails us most. Spicy stories where there's no chance of even watching someone else go through what harmed us can be a gentle reminder that healthy relationships are possible and even attainable — if not now, then in the future.

I'm glad BL has broken containment.

And I can't pretend it doesn't make perfect sense that this is happening right now, during what people insist on calling the "male loneliness epidemic." The men in my life aren't lonely; they're thriving. They have partners, and female friends, and touch grass regularly. The droves of lonely ones have everything they need to not be lonely...but for some reason, it falls on their female victims to do for them what they won't do for themselves. There's a reason women resonated with Obsession and music videos depicting regular men in public as hungry wolves.

Of course we'll turn to escapism when everyday life feels like a horror story.