The Problem with Fujoshi
This carrd contains some common misconceptions and falsehoods about Fujoshi, fudanshi, and BL content.
So why is this an issue? Racism and gatekeeping.
Asian fujin have asked people to stop misusing fujoshi but are often ignored or talked over, or told they don't know the real meaning. The discourse has also been used to misgender and erase the sexuality of many queer fans, by implying all fujin are cis straight women.
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Table of Contents
Fujoshis translates to Awful Women!
Nope. 婦女子, also read as Fujoshi, means a respectable married woman. Fujoshi replaces the character 婦 with 腐, and changes the meaning to “spoiled/rotten woman” as a cruel play on words. The rotten here does not mean awful, but more like food gone bad, meaning the woman is past her sell-by date for marriage.
As the word is Japanese, it is also both singular and plural. Don't add an s to fujoshi, no matter how many fujoshi you're talking about.
Fujoshi has always meant straight cis woman fetishiser!
Nope. Its intended meaning was to shame women out of fandom and queer interests, especially those making m/m fan content, as bad, undesirable women ruining their families' reputations. The targets instead reclaimed it, because they didn't really want to be desireable to the equivalent of dudebros and incels.
And the Japanese stereotypes of fujoshi are more likely to be of bisexual women, not straight women.
But the Western meaning of fujoshi-!
Insisting on changing fujoshi to mean homophobic, straight, white woman is appropriation of an existing term that is reclaimed and still proudly worn in some Japanese fandom cultures. It also returns the term to its original misogynistic roots and implications; making LGBTQ+ content for fandom is a bad thing and should be seen as shameful.
The word "fujoshi" was created by gay men to protect themselves!
The term was originally invented on 2channel, an anonymous Japanese message site known for its far-right userbase, and full of homophobia and misogyny. The only things they cared about were women not catering to their sexual desires, and keeping the gay away from their favourite media. Gay men had very little to do with the creation of the term.
Okay, but Western anti-fujo just wanted to protect gay men!
Multiple early Western anti-fujoshi "activists" have openly admitted otherwise. They usually fall into two categories:
Homophobes using the rhetoric to attack any queer content.
Transphobes directly and knowingly lifting TERF and gender-critical rhetoric to attack trans men by calling them straight women who have just read too much porn.
Fudanshi are men into F/F content!
Nope. Over time, 腐, meaning "spoiled" and read as "fu,", has come to represent any kind of BL fan. Fujin is gender neutral, and fudanshi is a backwards engineered variant for men into M/M content.
Meanwhile, fans of F/F content created the terms "himejoshi" for women, "himedanshi" for men and "himejin" for the gender neutral variant, using the character 姫、meaning princess.
Fujoshi read yaoi, which is made by straight women for straight women!
To be fair, you can mostly blame localisation for this one, but yaoi is a term heavily misused in the west. Originally in Japan it only referred to smut or comedy fanwork manga, aka doujinshi^. Yaoi as a published manga category does not even exist in Japan. As for "by women, for women", this is hard to prove either way, as mangaka are not always public figures. That said, there are BL mangaka who are on record as queer.
^As a side note, doujinshi refers to any self-published manga, but they are oftentimes fannish in nature.
Yaoi is full of gross tropes and stereotypes!
Well, again, yaoi is not a genre. The actual published genre is called Boys Love, shortened to BL.
And as a whole genre, BL cannot be generalised so easily. Many of the "rape-y" tropes people bring up were prevalent 30 or so years ago, but have been slowly phased out; modern BL covers everything from innocent first-time romances to explicit porn.
What about shonen-ai?
Shonen-ai is often touted as the cute, SFW equivalent of yaoi, but the term is actually mainly defunct in Japan. For a while it was used to refer to a subset of BL works mainly focussed on tragedy, but these days, it seems to have fallen out of use in Japan due to associations with actual pederasty.
Well, bara is wholesome and healthy, why not read that?
For one, if you're talking about m/m content written mostly by MLM for MLM, maybe use the term geicomi instead, as it is the more general term for "gay comics" in Japan. Geicomi also can contain many tropes commonly cited as a reason not to read BL, including rape and sexual violence, and can be very explicit.
Barazoku, from which bara is derived, was a Japanese gay magazine. Bara came to be on 2chan for their "gay art" channel, and it refers to a style of art that have very muscular men, roughly the equivalent of bears in Western gay culture. It may or may not feature content like BDSM and rape.
"But they always talk about how gay sex is sinning!"
“Sinning” often comes up in Western anti-fujoshi discourse, but “sinning” in a fandom context was never specifically about gay sex or primarily part of fujoshi culture. It was mainly pushback against Christian purity culture, about allowing queer people and women the chance to express their sexuality, in defiance of the kind of judgement that still gets even now. M/F and solo pinups got called sinful too... in the mid 2000s, which is how dated those references are.
This is also specific to Western fujin, as "sinning" isn't a thing in Japanese culture due to Christianity's lack of influence.