longform journalism

There’s a word for this in Japanese: fujoshi, often translated as “rotten girl,” a reclaimed pejorative for women who love men who love men. In Asia, the genre is known as BL (“boys’ love”), an umbrella term sometimes called yaoi that can run from the chaste to the pornographic. In the West, it’s called M/M (“male/male”) romance. BL and M/M romance have separate yet parallel histories; both began as a cooperative female fan culture in which women would make canonical texts gay for one another. BL has since evolved into its own commercial industry in Asia with several boom cycles in manga, anime, and live-action TV shows and movies across the continent — in Japan, Thailand, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Meanwhile in the West, M/M romance has remained mostly in the basement of pop culture on fan-fiction forums and in e-books. Through Heated Rivalry, what was fringe has finally broken loose. The fujoshi switch has been flipped, and now everyone’s fujoing out.

-Girls Who Love Boys Who Love Boys by E. Alex Jung (February 2026)

Recommended reading:
Do Normies Have a Right to Read Heated Rivalry Fan Fiction? by Katherine Dee (March 2026)
Ethical and privacy considerations for research using online fandom data Brianna Dym & Casey Feisler (2020)
"Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking": Selections from The Terra Nostra Underground and Strange Bedfellows Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins and Henry Jenkins (1993? 1994?)