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?)

Content note: Self harm (involuntary)

My sensory-processing issues are a physical element of my disability that would absolutely still exist in a world without capitalism. Like my poor fine motor control and reduced muscle tone, my sensory processing issues debilitate me: there are tasks I simply cannot perform because of how my body is wired, and this makes me different from most other people in ways that are non-negotiable.

Still, my physical disabilities are worsened quite clearly by capitalism: Because large corporations have both a profit motive and a vested interest in reinvesting those profits into advertisements, and because the internet does not receive public financial support, my daily life is bombarded with bright, noisy, flashing, disruptive advertisements, which makes it far more difficult for me to process relevant information and can swiftly bring me to the verge of a meltdown.

If the internet were funded as a public utility and was therefore not sandblasted in ads, I would be less disabled. If my local streets were less plastered in billboards and littered with junk mail advertising chain restaurants, I would be less disabled.

-Devon Price, "My Disability is Manufactured"

Maybe I should've picked something more fun for the first post of 2025, but… Happy New Year! Let this be the year we all start taking better care of each other and ourselves (and stop using speakerphone in public).