Shipping Discourse or whatever

I have been online for a long time. I started on LiveJournal, if anyone remembers that. My best and only friends there were two much older adult fujoshi who drew really amazing fanart of the character Black Jack, a character who is directly responsible for my career choice in art. I wasn't particularly into yaoi/BL at the time, but I didn't care -- their art was just so amazing. In this sense, I say, yes, ship and let ship. When Ishihara Shintaro proposed the Seishonen Hogo Ikusei Jorei, I agreed with many creators and the Comiket folks in opposing it. Not to mention Ishihara is an insane right-winger. The purpose of this page is to both explain my stance and to counter some misinformation I often see online.

I am also Japanese (though raised in the US) and was groomed online as a child. These facts are relevant as many people partaking in this culture war like to speak for both survivors and Japanese LGBT people. My grooming was directly facilitated by the supposedly harmless fiction -- as a child, I was deeply fixated on lolicon, shotacon, and big brother/younger sister content. Aside from giving me deeply incorrect information about AFAB anatomy, it also instilled in me a lot of misguided and dangerous ideas. The less harmful end of misinformation was that hentai made me think that something was wrong with me for the shade of my nipples, due to the colorist notion that darker shades mean you are a slut. This did irreperable damage to my psyche and put me in a situation where a much older adult man was asking me to meet up, though he was thankfully in Japan so this did not happen. I liked an Utaite whose main schtick was that he's a lolicon (Samuraiman, if any of you are wondering). This is the reality of this kind of content being allowed to exist.

I've also noticed through years of observation of the self-labeled "pro-fiction" community that many of them are actually quite reactionary. This isn't too surprising when you center your identity around consuming media -- the utmost capitalist behavior. What was a bit more surprising was how many of them are becoming open transphobes.

• Fiction does not exist in a vacuum. There is cultural context for what a horror movie expresses fear about. In the same way, it speaks many volumes about misogyny in Japan how women are depicted -- raped into submission, limbs amputated so they can't escape, beaten, killed. This is an unfortunately unchanging aspect of otaku culture. I know because I immersed myself in it for over a decade. This isn't even mentioning the homophobic stereotypes in Japanese media, or the racist charicatures. On this note, I've noticed an influx of BL fetishizing Indigenous men, and it's insanely racist and primitivist.
• Fujin isn't a word that Japanese LGBT people came up with. It is an external invention that nobody Japanese uses. I know this because I looked up 腐人 on Japanese websites and only found a BL whose title includes a pun on the word for lady 夫人(also read fujin). The fact that this myth is so prevalent demonstrates how little these folks care about actual Japanese people. This is, of course, reinforced by people shutting me out and blocking me without acknowledging any of my criticisms when I bring this up. I find it incredibly demeaning that a presumably American white person made up a concept and ascribed it to us out of some sense of holy duty. This is white knighting at its finest.
• Not all coping methods are healthy. Dependence on substances or self harm are also coping methods. This is something people seem to gloss over when talking about this despite taking a pseudo-psychiatric approach to it.