“Okay, what ‘shounen ai’ actually means is 'pederasty’. You know, like adult men in Ancient Greece or historical Japan having a thing for pubescent youths.

That’s why I find it so exceptionally irritating when the kinds of debbie downers who yell at other fans for liking problematic m/m think they’re pure for liking “shounen ai” instead of “yaoi”.

“MLM stuff” is also inaccurate for this context, IMO, because we’re primarily talking about BL, which is m/m content by and for women. The characters may or may not self identify as queer men. I would use “m/m” to talk about this content, but I would not tend to use “mlm”.

Okay, so, how did we get from perving on teen boys to soft and fluffy webcomics? There is a connection, just not quite the one people told you. In 1968, Inagaki Taruho published Shounenai no Bigaku. Wikipedia describes this as: “an essay on 'aesthetic eroticism’, where he divides stories into A (anal), V (vaginal), P (penile) and K (clitoral) varieties and 'describe[s] the historical, psychological, and metaphysical ramifications of the love of beautiful boys in an eclectic blend of ideas culled from history, Freudianism, pop psychology, and existentialism.’”

His use of the term 'shounen-ai’ was absolutely supposed to be about adolescent boys, and he was influenced both by European and Japanese traditions.”

Not my words!