I'm not uncomfortable anon, I'm baffled. It's very different.

I'll be frank, to me this all reeks, absolutely and totally, of actively wanting to be victimized: a work "reproduces" the "patriarchal" dominance of every day life, which is to say, it just reflects the desire of people whose fantasies are influenced by their environment, no different than any transfem puppygirl. Trans women are not even in the equation for the question, so the fact that a general """reproduction""" of "patriarchal dominance" (like... what, the bottom is girly? Come on now) is somehow specifically transmisogyny as if it is at all aimed at trans people or focused on hatred and bigotry towards them, overtly or otherwise, and that this is said by transfeminine cliques.... well, victim narrative editorializing is pretty clear there, don't you think, anon?

"It’s all about creating a subordinate class that it’s okay to abuse and dominate because that’s their “proper” position to be subordinated."

And the matter of fact is, I'll be honest, this just sounds like it comes from people who do not read yaoi and have a very distortded idea of what it is about - you and the girlies seem to think that it mostly consists of hardcore omegaverse rape and porn torture - most of it is bland generic sex fantasies, lol. It is not a "class" that is "okay to abuse", it is transgression of basic societal and personal values - the basis of all eroticism, from the paleolithic to now (the Dead Man at Lascaux is dying and ithyphallic, violating the death taboo that was so strong to the archaic paleolithic man, while showing the eroticism of the situation by his erect phallus as he dies).

In other words, these people are not creating a scenario in which this is "okay" in real-life, they know it is wrong and enjoy it due to that knowledge, the same way that a blasphemy kink only works if the blasphemer is aware that they are engaging in a transgression of religious taboo.

"The transfeminized subject, the Uke/Omega/Twink,"

None of those are transfeminine, you are Coping. They are cis male diegetically and in the grander scheme of things they are feminine cis males so that the CIS FEMALE reader can self-insert into it. There is no "transfeminized subject" here at all, this is cope pomo speak to try to make random yaoi sound transphobic.

"as you pointed out can be subjected to violence to be put into their “proper place.”"

I'm sorry friend, but not only are you wrong, but you actually got it totally backward here on why these stories work for the women who enjoy them: the reason is not for the uke to be "put in his proper place", it is the woman self-inserting as the uke, who, now "metamorphosed" into a man in this romantic/sexual fantasy, is on more equal footing with the top than she would be if it was a straight fantasy. Increased equality between the uke and seme is the point and the basis of the whole fantasy, and the transgression of that equality being erotic is why it seems to turn rapey or why it tends to feminize the uke so commonly: because it is unexpected, "wrong" even, for the man to go through such female-coded violence.

Not to say you can't enjoy it from another lens - mine is wholly different obviously, I'm not a woman, cis or trans, and I am on HRT so I am not quite a man either - but this is the general lens people enjoy it through, whether they realize it or not. None of this is transmisogynistic. Often yaoi is about a man-wife who is treated more equal than an actual wife would be - in that sense, it reflects female anxieties around men. In another view, it is that men are not emotional with each other and yaoi allows for a breaking of that and makes the very emotionality of the stories erotic - this is why most straight men into yaoi are into it at all, that emotionality. Sometimes it is just about women wanting to peer into the "world of men" which is a transgression of the "proper place" assigned to them by society - it is no different than the instinct that drives yuri boys, himedanshis, then, and is motivated by rough equivalents (i.e. men don't talk to each other and that's hot vs women can be basically girlfriends with their friends and that's cathartic because I can't even cry in front of my friends without being called some slur) - again, no transphobia in any of this. To miss such basic analysis and interpretation - which are well known and widespread - and to go straight to "well it's gotta be bigoted against me specifically" is just wanting to play victim.

this is obviously the anon who spams me with twitter bullshit but since this is an actual question rather than bot spam I'll answer in good faith.

Most - not all - yaoi is in fact heteronormative. My question to you is, so what? Most things are, it is an heteronormative world, many gay men - and I mean many - have desires which could be described as such. The "feminization of the bottom" happens frequently in real life gay sex, I know, crazy, it's almost like our desires are shaped by our environment or something. These "transfeminist circles" you speak of are coping hardcore if they believe they harbor no heternormative desires, I'd say at best repressing something, and if not then they are delusional in thinking it grants them some sort of moral superiority.

And yes, bara also is full of feminizing imagery, so is real life gay sex, wow, crazy. Have you or these transfeminists ever gone to a gay bar, have they never seen how they talk dirty or fuck? Good lord.

I'm sorry anon but the reality is this: ancient men who were were equals and gay for each other mostly kept to frottage because the matter of fact is that there has not been equality in penetration since the neolithic, and potentially there never was. There is always going to be - in a general manner - "feminization of the bottom". "Transfeminists" can cope and seethe about this all they want.

As for it being transmisogynistic... what? How could it be, trans women don't factor in it at all, nor do opinions on them, this question alone told me you're that terminally hobbyless anon because it is such a terminally-online-discourse-poisoned question to ask. Yes, it can be heteronormative - who cares, so are most things, yaoi is merely a reflection of desires - and no, it is not transmisogynistic (???). Asking me if yaoi is transmisogynistic makes as much sense as asking me if Homeric epic is transmisogynistic.

I would say there very much is an equal degree of fetishism towards boy's uniforms in Japan, uniform shorts specially are the characteristically "boyish" wear and you see this in boy character designs in animanga culture very commonly - a good random example is Ken Amada's shorts which conspicuously stay on even during winter. Hanako-kun is another, very recent example. I would say that the Meiji-Taisho-early Showa era uniforms are all iconic pieces in the shotacon repertoire, indeed even some of these most fundamental ones. Shorts don't mean the same across the board, though most everywhere it is a boyish clothing - shorts on a girl in China, per example, is tied with imagery of gender equality because of what it meant for girls to wear them as opposed to traditional female attire. The Shorts of Gender Equality, if you will.

The actual answer is that males are not as sexualized as females sui generis and this is true for all age groups, including those in school. So the actual question that we must look into to find your answer is - Is that due to patriarchy? The form it takes for us certainly seems like it, but we live in a patriarchy, so that's hardly helpful - let's try and go to times before that development then.

I'm not so sure that the prehistorical, pre-patriarchal "documents", i.e. artworks of all sorts uncovered by archeology, allow us to make that call: the first depictions of male and female sexuality are similar to each other, i.e. exaggerated large breasts and hips for women and enormous erect phalluses for men, both of which suggest the subordination of sexuality to procreation and fertility already. Outside of this, sex is always connected to death, like the ithyphallic Dead Man in the Lascaux caves. "Venus figurines" are far more numerous than the ithyphallic idols, so I would say that as far as the natural tendencies (as natural as human sexuality can be, of course, which is to say, not that much... human sexuality is erotic as opposed to animal and has been since the earliest times we have access to) towards sexualization of one sex group over the other, the prioritization has always been for sexualizing women over men, even well before patriarchy established itself.

Of course, we are talking about pre-patriarchal times, and as such the meaning of the relative scarcity of male sexual depictions comes down to the Paleolithic and Neolithic belief in the ultimate supremacy of the female over the male in matters of procreation - again, the shape of the Venus figures and the ithyphallic statues makes it clear that they are about procreation, and the prevalence of the former makes it clear that it was deemed most important.

So there would seem to be a general trend of overprioritizing the female element in sexual matters in both pre-patriarchal and patriarchal society. In Japanese culture, I would say that the fetishization of school outfits is likewise related to the idealization of the "peak years" of someone's life, when they are regarded as most vital and brimming, which in Japan is not around the early 20s but in high school. Compare with ancient Egyptian statues, which invariably portray the person its meant to represent according to youthful ideals rather than how they look in the moment - the Pharaoh is always in his mid 20s, you'd think.

Potentially, as a specific Japanese development, it may be tied with notions of ritual purity and thus "maidenliness": a notion that comes from the isolation of miko in their shrines so they can avoid that which is kegare, ritually unclean, and please the kami. The high school uniform then, should be seen as semiotically similar to the pure white clothing of he miko. This is a specifically female prerogative, much like the fixation on school girls over school boys. But in this case, then, it is just a culture-specific form of a fetish or idealization of maiden status, which are found across the board in all sorts of forms: here in Europe we don't have uniforms for the most part, the maiden ideal I think remains that of the "Persephone-type", from my rural experiences lol. The association of maidenliness with flowers here is probably nothing short of as old as the first civilization here, the Minoans, le vegetation maiden has arrived etc.

In any case, these kinds of things need to be looked into more, for all my yapping I have barely covered it, but I hope I've made my point that these things are just more recent forms and types of certain human preoccupations which are very ancient, and under them lie even more fundamental, generic bases on which they lie - i.e. the answer to why schoolgirls over schoolboys has to be sought in the answer of a potentially "natural" predominance of female over male period as far as human sexuality goes. After that, it's a matter of getting increasingly specific and what elements go into "the schoolgirl uniform" that make it such a fetish object, which is something that has to be approached both semiotically (i.e. what does it "mean", what does it "communicate", etc) and comparatively (i.e. comparing with equivalents from other cultures) so that we have a better idea of both why it is and why it's different to roughly equivalent things in its specifics.

"Greek" pederastic relationships were a general Indo-European custom, related to the warrior function. They served for youths and men o initiate teenagers into the world of men - in a way it was very similar to, say, initiatory rituals among Pacific peoples and so on. It is just that Greeks and Romans were the only ones to talk about it openly - Germanics are documented as having done it (see what Ammianus Marcellinus 31.9.5 has to say about the Taifali) and Celts almost certainly did it too - see Cuchulainn's relationship with Ferdiad for a good example. Do not let Christians scribes passing in silence over it convince you that it was not a thing.

These relationships continued on in Europe, the church neither recording them nor punishing them. Where there is a record of them, you learn that as much as a third of the male population in this or that Italian city had one such relationship, per example - these are numbers known from the criminal records, and again, the church did not care that much. These mostly happened among guild members, worksman forces, etc, and there is a variety of reasons the boys did it: gifts, affection where it was lacking elsewhere (no girls till you get married mister), apprenticeships, favors, etc. There is a record I remember, per example, of boy worker who outraged whatever guild master because their princely lover had given them better shoes than the master himself, per example - a bad omen, because the working population did not worry about such accusations, whereas the nobility very much did.

A thing worth noting is that this remained an urban phenomenon; in the country, deviancy took other forms, like incest, covering up of rapes, bestiality specially, etc.

They most certainly were not continued "in the Catholic Church", though such relationships did happen there because of course lol, they happened in most places. In some places, homosexuality (sodomy) was not condemned because it would be awkward since the local clergymen were known to be engaged in such things too - in any case the Church was still most certainly not the place where this most happened, lesbian nuns were more common. Pederasty, in the medieval and early modern period, was a working populace phenomenon, and amid the nobility. The bastard son of Louis XIV, Louis de Bourbon, had an affair, when he was very young, with Philippe of Lorraine, a knight who belonged to La Sainte Congregation des Glorieux Pédérastes ("Holy Congregation of Glorious Pederasts", what a name), a secret society of libertine deviants a la Marquis de Sade (many such things). This very much humiliated his father and led to the young lad to die at 16 after catching a disease in combat, which he did to get his father's affection back. Philippe of Lorraine was himself an eromenos as a youth and was painted as Ganymede no less, look it up. It was a more serious offense to the reputation of a noble, though amusingly here we could tongue-in-cheekly say that this resembles very ancient warrior pederasty more, teehee.

If you want to learn more about this, pick, tbh , any book on historical homosexuality: the truth is, pederasty is not limited by "age" as we think of it - eromenos could be full grown youths in their 20s or early pubescent boys - and almost all expression of male same sex desire historically attested took on these forms, in the Indo-Euro world, and in different forms but equally age-bracketed ways in Africa, China, the Muslim world, etc.

The nasty truth is that historically novels that deal with such themes belong to the genre of pederastic fiction, which because of how same-sex attraction (notion I don't say "homosexuality") has worked until we went and made an identity of it due to it being pathologized by psychiatry at the end of the 19th century, includes a lot of early queer literature like Doria Grey etc. Examples here include Tony Duvert as do highly influential gay schoolboy novel Les amitiés particulières by Roger Peyrefitte (don't look up his private life good god) which, through its movie adaptation, has influenced a lot of how homoaffective and homoerotic relationships are portrayed in shoujo manga. Point is, most books that depict such things, and there are quite a few, tend to focus entirely on the pederast of which they usually tend to view with good eyes, because they were usually written by one, as was common because while a dirty secret, the notion of the "initiatory same-sex relationship" continued well past the Christianization of Europe and was extremely common in the medieval period and down to around, more or less, the early 20th century, when these things were increasingly pathologized. You may understand it as a deep-seated remain of very ancient Indo-European practices in our culture.

I don't think such novels, then, can be really compared with Kaze to Ki no Uta and specially not Loveless, with the former you still have an aesthetic argument: the matter of fact is, these novels from the early down to the mid 20th century were extremely influential in shaping it, but rather than portraying a positive pederastic relationship, it is the chaster relationship between boys which is seen as good, and that of Auguste and Gilbert is not even pederastic but pedophilic, incestuous and extremely destructive to Gilbert. Although it is certainly eroticized, this is not anything any such novels portrayed.

The successors of Kaze to Ki no Uta, in the magazine JUNE (I translated a story from it! check my pinned!), featured almost exclusively older dandies with beautiful boy, bishounen, and while erotic, it is also fundamentally a deviants' magazine: stories frequently have sadism, murder, even necrophilia is oddly recurring. It is a magazine of aestheticist decadence that takes after the late 19th century decadentist literature, not something interested in dynamics necessarily.

As for Loveless, this has to be understood: it is fundamentally a story from the POV of a child who has already been groomed by his brother and is now having that continue by an adult who does not even know he is doing it because he's that fucked in the head. It is not a manga not really about relationships between older men and younger boys as much as it is about CSA, loss of innocence, trauma, broken homes, parentification, perceptions of sexual experience and its correlation with maturity (hence the famous kitty ears), etc. Part of the point is that although Ritsuka is never raped, unlike Gilbert, the things Seimei does very much count as molestation and this is felt in his psyche. It is all experienced from Ritsuka's pov, who nonetheless despite his gloomy 2000s emo looks, continues on trying to do his best and getting friends his own age, which contrast with his dysfunctional relationships with adults and his brother. In short, a novel that handles themes of CSA as extensively and sensitively as Loveless while also not being solely about it, I am not aware.

As for fiction which portrays such relationships in its appropriate historical context, see Mary Renault's The Persian Boy (and many others of hers), Eromenos - A Novel of Antinous and Hadrian by Melanie McDonald, the self-published Another Way of Being by Sion Liscannor, and for a specially critical, non-romanticized one see the very recent Sporus duology by S.P. Somtow, about the infamous case of Sporus', emperor Neros' castrated and horrifically force-feminized literal boywife who was turned into his emperatrix because he happened to look like Neros' wife.

A little aside, while Sporus is indeed the most infamous case of an emperor's eromenos, it was disruptive for other reasons: making his eromenos imperatrix made it that he had immense power, and thus immense power over many "real men" which did not take kindly being subjected to the power of a pretty boy turned empress. Two other disruptive eromenos relationships were that of Antinous with Hadrian, this one due to the latter's excessive grief at the early death of the former, and the very obscure Earinus, Domitian's beloved boy, where the issue was that Domitian quite simply respected him too much lol: he valued his counsel, which now meant that an eunuch was above both general, politician and poet, all the manly occupations of Rome; Poets had to write praise poetry on Earinus' commission, who wanted to commemorate his relationship with the emperor, which could've only felt like an emasculation to men like Martial and Statius, who wrote those poems from which we know of Earinus. Domitian listened to his counsel, treated him as an equal and reportedly even Domitian's wife liked the boy. Eventually Domitian gave him the status of a freedman, and he may have a formed his own family due to this close romantic friendship with Domitian. Hilariously, Domitian, who famously tried to create a cult of personality around himself as a ruthlessly moralistic censor, had banned all castration of slaves and all child prοstιtμtiοn. One of the verses in a poem of Statius amounts to "you were just the slightest bit too late, Apollo willed it that you would be beautiful". This is actually the most disruptive one of them all, rivaling Sporus, because the extreme respect shown to his eunuch boy by Domitian had the side-effect of, well, making an eunuch de facto more elevated than all the manly men in the land. About Earinus there is no fiction at all, though if you ask me this is a shame, he is an exceedingly interesting character.

I am not too deep into following the international affairs of the UN and UNICEF but it is very naive to think that such bodies genuinely actually care, for their own sake, about dubious depictions of drawn children. These are political bodies that work for political goals. The truth is almost certainly much closer to being tied with things like soft power - Japanese media means a lot of soft power overseas, the so called "Cool Japan" phenomenon. This soft power struggle has been going on in Yankeeland in the 90s since the rise of Pokemon and has been intermittently taken up multiple times lol - a good historical example is the strange hostility that JRPGs got from a lot of game reviewers in the 2000s, specifically for being Japanese, a reflection of the fear that Japanese entertainment would prevail and thus America would lose a slice of its global cultural influence pie. It is frankly better to not credit such institutions when they speak of their ostensibly non-political goals.

well idk what you mean by "similar" to Kaze to Ki no Uta anon, do you mean its aesthetic qualities, its tragic character, what? If you are looking for some high-minded, tragic yuri, look up anything from the primeval yuri ooze of more explicit Class S tragedies from the 70s, like Shiroi Heya no Futari by Ryoko Yamagishi. If you mean its high minded aestheticism, check out Paros no Ken from 1986 by Kaoru Kurimoto (yes, the Guin saga lady). If you refer to its erotic side (for many people seem to miss the erotic element of Kaze to Ki even though it's so overt), Ryouko Yamagishi has a lot of yuri one shots which I think are a sort of "female equivalent" to a lot of what happens in Kaze to Ki, like the Hatsheput one shots or the Medusa oneshot. But these are all short, and if you want a yuri manga of that epic scope, with that beautiful an artstyle, with that engaging a romance, then I can give you no directions besides maybe to dig through the Lillylicious scan archive lmao.

I will be honest anon, my favorite yuri, short of Utena which imo is less yuri and more Class S than anything, are mostly weird manwha webtoons that happened to grab my attention with how incredibly unorthodox and freaky they got with the usual schoolgirl bullying Oneesama E premise, like White Angels Have No Wings. I could argue it shares a kinship with Kaze to Ki certainly - themes of bullying, a catholic school setting, etc - but it is subjective enough that it's up to you to make that call. It's my favorite yuri though. Other yuri I like is just really raw disgusting shit honestly, like Murcielago or Kill Me Now, which I would not at all compare with Kaze to Ki.

Oh goodness, there's so many to choose from...

Perhaps William Blake? His mythopoeic works are the first of that sort, and in that sense are an extremely early precursor to the sort of fantasy myth-making that Tolkien engages in. He also writes psychedelic, incomprehensible epics of which I am rather fond of even if they barely count as poetry: they do count as art though, all the typographic versions of his work miss the point that they were all meant to be PAINTINGS and ILLUSTRATIONS.

Novalis too, can count, for I am a lover of his Hymns to the Night, Hymnen an die Nacht, which I feel best express the sentiment of German Romanticism.

Of the British romantics proper, Lord Byron comes to mind because, quite simply, I really like epics and narrative poetry lmao and even if it's not always the smoothest read due to pseudo-archaisms, his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage retains some beautiful descriptions of European environments and I've often thought of what the equivalent of such an epic from other cultures might be like to read, cultures with different environments and poetic meters and standards...

John Keats too for his Pre-Raphaelite-like engagement with aesthetics, and Percy Shelley has many beautiful poems like Hymn to Apollo and Ozymandias, as well as his long works... that said, as my mind has congealed with time and lost the ability to write poetry, I find myself going back more to either prose writers like the Brontes, or the Gothics if you count them, like Poe, because they meet my moody disposition best.

I truthfully don't have many thoughts about Alexander the Great until I return to my study of the primary sources of ancient Greek history, where he presents a problem since most everything about him comes from quite a while after he died. Needless to say that I am fascinated by his relationship with Bagoas but frankly there are Roman emperors whose relationships with their eromenos were very disruptive and so much more interesting, either due to excessive respect as with Domitian and Earinus or due to a mix of feminization and extremely high power, as with Sporus and Nero. Both of these are more fascinating imo not to mention well known ones like Antinous.

As for Alexander in popular consciousness, it is interesting to note how he is an example of how someone, in the epic and romance-traditions of the bards and myth-making scribes, can become a fantastical heroic figure despite being 100% also a historical figure, much like we know that Alexandros ("Alaksandu") of Troy (Wilusa) was a real historical character that took part in a real Trojan war against either Mycenaeans or their Luwian proxies, yet as he appears to us in the Greek record no doubt has nothing of this historical person, much like Alexander's submarine has nothing to do with the man himself. But it does bring up interesting questions of legendary characters which in their behavior seem historical, such as Agamemnon, or Achilles, or Empress Jingu, does it not?