Swimming with swimsuit and wetsuit at typical vs cold-water temperatures (26 vs 18ºC)

banners supporting freedom of speech, gay rights or similar sentiments on their websites.

Transgression is part of the pleasure of being a yaoi fan. One hears of young fans that boldly type their x-rated fics on school computers in full public view. They often persevere even when parents delete their fanfics from the family computer and restrict their computer use. Fans often swap tips on how to hide their yaoi from parents and other authority figures. One particularly memorable tongue-in-cheek online forum signature I spotted around Christmas 2007 featured a stern Santa informing the fan that she would get no presents because she had been “naughty”. Santa had found yaoi in her computer!

According to an informal poll in Aarinfantasy forum about whether they would give up yaoi if their lovers objected, most female fans replied that they would never do it just to please their partners. One well-known yaoi writer named Wiggle, who received a message describing her as a "sick balls sucking bitch”, reacted by defiantly writing a kinky fic involving erotic use of pubic shaving.

Yaoi fan typhonblue created a video entitled “72 yaoi fangirls,” which featured the photos of 72 self-professed yaoi fans and posted it on youtube. The video features girls and women of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds and is aimed at dispelling negative stereotypes about yaoi fangirls.

In Sept 2002, fans organized an unsuccessful online petition when

Fanfiction.Net, decided to purge fanfics rated NC-17 (for mature readers) in Sept 2002 to prevent legal problems, a move described tongue-in-cheek by fans as the

“Great Porn Purge”.

Many yaoi writers migrated in protest to smaller fic archives such as Mediaminer.org (2000) and Adult Fanfiction.net (founded to give the NC-17 fics a home in 2002), private mailing lists on Yahoo! Groups (founded 1998 which has also suffered from censorship problems), Livejournal and personal sites. It has become harder to find good fics in one place and searching for fics has become more tedious. Mailing lists have slowly died due to spam and other problems resulting in a major migration to Livejournal (which is free). This has caused fandom fragmentation as communities cater to increasingly specialized tastes and pairings with fans reading exactly the kind of pairings that they like, etc. It is also harder to search for fics on Livejournal. Livejournal has also tended to encourage shorter fics due to word limits and which has led to a decrease in quality feedback and increased fan chatting. (Hellekson and Busse 2006, 15)

During May 2007, Livejournal suspended many communities and personal blogs that included sexuality-related keywords like “lolita” and “boy’s love” in the “interests” part of their user profiles after a dubious vigilante group calling themselves “Warriors of Innocence” complained to the administration.

Unfortunately, amongst those suspended were not only perverts but many

slash/yaoi communities/blogs, sexual abuse survivor groups and even a discussion group for Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Most of the blogs and communities were

eventually restored with an apology from the administration after mass complaints and huge protests from angry fans.

…sometimes it’s hard to remember that there’s another world Out There, where the books and stories and art we love so much are

5.6. Censorship

considered aberrant…I am always briefly puzzled by such reactions before recalling that society still hasn’t gotten over that nasty fear of homosexuals and homosexual behavior.

(Katchan “Coming Out of the Closet”)

Yaoi is a diverse genre, and although a lot of it is romantic and

non-explicit, the rape/incest/kinks that some of it contains makes many people uneasy.

People unfamiliar with yaoi have also confused the Japanese term “boys’ love”

with pederasty (shota) which is only a subsection of the fandom (many yaoi fans are uncomfortable with shota).

Due to societal/religious opposition towards homosexuality and anti-pornography laws in many countries, it is not surprising that yaoi fans have run into a number of brick walls. Parents who know nothing about yaoi are often shocked to find their underage children viewing or engaging in the production of yaoi content. Mark McLelland in “The World of Yaoi: The Internet, Censorship and the Global ‘Boys’ Love’ Fandom” (2005) discusses the legal and censorship challenges yaoi faces in various countries such as U.S. and Australia. He points out that yaoi fan activities of young females are distinct from the male paedophile activity that comes to mind when discussing the circulation of homoerotic

materials online. (McLelland 2005, 67)

In May 2005, a well-known fan nicknamed Sahari who was responsible for creating one of the earliest yaoi websites was forced to shut down her website and blogs after she was stalked by someone who claimed to be an offended mother who caught her underage daughter viewing the site. Sahari’s real-life identity as a teacher in the U.S. was also exposed, and according to rumors, her

employers were informed of her “immoral” activities. According to “Drawn Together”, the owners of “Boys Next Door”, also a leading yaoi website, decided to register with Net Nanny and other adult site blocking software providers to prevent minors from going into the site after another site was hunted down.

(Strickland 2006)

False entrances, age warnings, and age verification systems have become ever more prevalent and elaborate over the years. The members-only section of Aestheticism.Com requires documentary proof of age to access. Likewise, Adultfanfiction.net now requires users to type in a virtual signature to confirm they are of age and well-known writer Jacques Koh requires Livejournal users to declare their age before they are allowed access to her Livejournal fics. Underage fans, however, often lie about their age in order to gain access to explicit

fanworks and it is often impossible to police.Yaoi fans are also sometimes threatened with local legislation against adult content or violation of the terms of service of Internet service providers and web hosts.

Fans also commonly argue for freedom of expression in their fantasies and artistic freedom in defiance of societal condemnation. They feel that yaoi harms no one because it does not use real human beings in its creation, in comparison to real pornography in which women and children are exploited and abused for male pleasure.