In the 1980s, Japanese fans began writing a form of amateur male/male homoerotic comics that romantically and sexually paired male characters who appeared in popular anime shows. Terms for this new type of homoerotic manga that were used over the decades included tanbi mono (aesthetic fiction), June mono (fiction of the type published in June magazine), bishōnen manga (beautiful boy comics), shōnen-ai ( shōnen = boys, and ai = love) and kunnaben riibe (derived from the German Knabenliebe, or boy’s love). Homoerotic male/male manga created primarily by female artists for female consumers originated in the 1970s as a subgenre of shoujo, a manga genre specifically written for a younger female demographic. According to a recent survey conducted by the Yano Research Institute, the yaoi market (including commercial and fan-created products) generated 2.2 billion yen (24.5 million USD) in sales in 2010, and shows no signs of decay in recent years. Yaoi viewers and readers often discuss original yaoi products and distribute fan-created yaoi materials in large online fan groups. Although yaoi is primarily targeted at young, heterosexual women, previous studies have found that bisexual and homosexual male and female enthusiasts also account for a considerable proportion of yaoi viewers/readers.
Yaoi and boys’ love (BL) are umbrella terms for commercial and fan-created Japanese media (e.g., anime, comics, short stories, and artwork) that portray the romantic and erotic love between two men. Corresponding with this expansion, yaoi materials have attracted increasingly widespread interest among young women. Japanese media (e.g., anime, manga) have been increasingly popular over the past two decades in the United States and several European countries. These results indicate that the 31-item YCMQ is an appropriate instrument to assess individuals’ motives for consuming yaoi media. The nine-factor YCMQ demonstrated strong psychometric properties in terms of factor structure, internal consistency, and measurement invariance. According to confirmatory factor analyses, the bi-factor model of nine motives yielded closer fit to the data than the theoretically proposed, first-order ten-factor model and a second-order nine-factor model. Using an online survey, 724 yaoi consumers (58% male M age = 30.1 years, SD = 10.4) completed the Yaoi Consumption Motives Questionnaire (YCMQ).
The present study aimed to explore and operationalize the motives for yaoi media consumption based on previous qualitative research (Pagliassotti, 2008).
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Despite the widespread popularity of this Japanese subgenre, there is a lack of empirical studies on the motives for consuming yaoi media that analyze the full range of motives using reliable research methods. Yaoi is defined as commercial and fan-created media that thematically focus on the romantic love between two men, often in a sexually explicit way.
In recent years, yaoi has been increasingly popular among youth interested in Japanese media such as anime and manga.