Hunh, my understanding of the love-trap (though I may have it confused with something else) is that predominantly, in Asian countries (especially Japan) the woman is expected to do all the work of 'catching' (trapping) the boy: she's expected to confess, expected to be available, expected to go the extra distance to make him inclined to marry her, stops short of proposing but sure overworks herself to get to that point. Even after proposal the rest of it's all up to her as well: the wedding, the afterwards, the kids, the raising of, etc. The amount of weight on a woman, even in modern Japan, is phenomenal when it comes to the burden she bears to gain/achieve a relationship, compared to what men are expected to carry. (No wonder Japanese women don't mind the notion of playing the dead fish in bed: for once, they're not the ones doing all the work!)
Reminds me of something CP said the other day, that a recent survey had shown that the amount of time a Japanese man spends, weekly, doing any kind of work/chores around the house had gone up by 300% in the past ten years. I said, well, how much work was the average Japanese man doing ten years ago?
CP: Apparently about one minute. Me: Wow. Up to a whopping three minutes. CP: Yeah. Probably consists of emptying the ashtray.
female readers can project themselves into a relationship where love isn't bought at the price of independence
Which is to say: yaoi, like western m/m fiction, really isn't all about the ghey. It's really about women, even if they're never named in the story. As Casey observed, it's kind of sad that to experience such freedom, even in fiction, we have to deny our own gender to get it.
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Date: 4 Dec 2009 05:28 am (UTC)Reminds me of something CP said the other day, that a recent survey had shown that the amount of time a Japanese man spends, weekly, doing any kind of work/chores around the house had gone up by 300% in the past ten years. I said, well, how much work was the average Japanese man doing ten years ago?
CP: Apparently about one minute.
Me: Wow. Up to a whopping three minutes.
CP: Yeah. Probably consists of emptying the ashtray.
female readers can project themselves into a relationship where love isn't bought at the price of independence
Which is to say: yaoi, like western m/m fiction, really isn't all about the ghey. It's really about women, even if they're never named in the story. As Casey observed, it's kind of sad that to experience such freedom, even in fiction, we have to deny our own gender to get it.