A few things bother me with each wave of fujoshi discourse, so I intend to air them out here.

To start, let's just establish that a fujoshi is a female fan of BL. That's it, that's all it's ever been. I'll discuss it more in depth later on in the thread as to why this is.

I also won't be addressing the fact that fujoshi discourse is just gender critical TERF transphobe rhetoric in depth because I already have before. The TLDR on that is that fujoshi became a TERF insult for trans men, claiming that they only want to transition due to fetishism.

Now, to kick things off for real, my main issue has always been the rampant criticism of female sexuality. Often I'll see fujoshi being paraded as being just as bad as men who fetishize lesbians, and yet... I don't see any of the people claiming this ever actually attempt to

"correct" straight men on their behavior as they do to women (proclaimed fujoshi or not) who enjoy any MLM media, sometimes without sex even being a part of the story being told. There aren't as many people commenting vicious and hateful messages on men's posts about lesbians as

TW: Suibaiting, Rape Threat, Ableism |
opposed to women's post on MLM content.
Look at the wording on these anti-fujoshi posts. Look at how they all just viscerally degrade women, mock and shame them, while claiming that the act of enjoying MLM content is inherently fetishizing.

While there is criticism of straight men who fetishize lesbians, very rarely is it ever directed at them. And even rarer with such degrading language. There is clearly a disconnect of punishments for fetishism between men and women.

I feel it's worthy to note here that fetishizing is the backbone of a majority of anti-fujo discourse, which aside from the transphobic connotations, generally shows a misunderstanding of fetishism. For those unaware, most of this discourse is ultimately centered around fictional

pairings, between characters that don't exist. Fetishism is therefore irrelevant; the characters are not real, and therefore discussing exploitation of them is unimportant.
Fetishism is often treated as being akin to being attracted to someone/thing, or to put it bluntly, being

horny; this is false. Fetishism, as it applies to humans (as opposed to object fetishism), means stripping away their humanity, personality, interests, life, and seeing them ONLY as existing to get you off. So, to use MLM as an example, this would be interacting with a real MLM

saying how hot it is that he's gay*, asking about his sex life without respecting boundaries, etc.
And this does happen. I'm not going to say it doesn't. And it's revolting that it does.

But fujoshi is not the word to best describe that. Creepy homophobe fits better.

*I specify gay as frequently homophobes who treat MLM as a taboo sexual fetish are often not involved enough in LGBTQ+ spaces to understand things such as bi/pansexuality.

Why am I so defensive against people misusing the term Fujoshi? Because ultimately, it's not fair for America-Centric discourse to remove a word from it's original Japanese context (a misogynistic slur no less) and decide that it means a fetishizing homophobe.

You'll often see

anti-fujoshi point to the literal translation of fujoshi: 腐女子, 腐 fū means rotten and 女子 means woman. Ergo, fujoshi means, in the most literal sense, rotten woman. It's easy to see how this can cause confusion and bring about the assumption that they are homophobic. After

all, homophobes are "rotten", surely that's what the original context intended, right?

No. The original context was that it was a pun on 婦女子, which is pronounced the same and yet means a respectable woman. The pun originates from homophobic and misogynistic men on 2chan, who

used it to degrade women who enjoy or produce MLM content (no matter the contents) as unrespectable, disgusting, and rotten. They decided this as a push back against women portraying their favorite male characters as potentionally gay, because of COURSE this character isn't GAY

because I like this character and I don't want him to be G A Y.

It's just a classic case of homophobia. And then female fans of MLM content reclaimed it, and they expanded on it too. They added fudanshi (men who like MLM content) and fujin (nb/chose not to identify fans of MLM)

to the mix.

This context is IMPORTANT. It is essential to understand that fujoshi is not a word meant for Americans (or really anyone outside of Japan for that matter) to redefine to mean homophobic women who strip real life MLM of their humanity in order to fetishize them.

And I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not condoning the actions of homophobes, no matter whose humanity they are denying. People who disregard other people as nothing but sexual fantasy fodder should be told off.

But I don't see the comments of men's tweets on

lesbian sex flooded with "ugh, himedanshi are so disgusting! Go ch*ke! I hope you get b*at!"

I don't see these men getting anonymous messages asking why they wanna abuse women so bad.

So why to woman who post about fictional pairings gets these messages? Why do women who don't

even identify as fujoshi get treated as though they are filthy perverts who want to hurt MLM for posting fictional characters kissing?

All this, and I haven't even touched on how fujoshi are also decried as morally depraved for fictional scenarios involving MLM characters in

sexual situations that are less than savory.

Nevermind that both written and visual art have always depicted dark and forbidden things as erotic or tantalizing, and that NSFW MLM content does not in fact show anything worse than heterosexual or WLW content. MLM content is just

treated as inherently dirtier and more corrupt, because the content doesn't appeal directly to straight men.

TL;DR version? Fujoshi doesn't mean fetishizer, just call fetishizers homophobes, and please don't redefine a word from another language to suit your needs.

Oh, and let's not forget that the MLM animes most often praised for good representation - Yuri on Ice, Given, and Banana Fish - are all written by women.

Women who enjoy MLM content.

AKA, Fujoshi.

Quick addition because I typed all this up at 3am and forgot:

I deliberately didn't link being fujoshi to being straight because it's not indicative of actual sexuality. Yes, fujoshi can be straight, but it means ANY women who enjoy MLM content. Meaning at lesbians, bi women,

Queer women... any of them can be fujoshi. The term was created by homophobes; they didn't care what type of woman is hurt by it, they just wanted to hurt women.