Don’t panic yet

The Beat picks up on this conversation (which has grown since I linked to it yesterday) about yaoi on a Christian parents’ bulletin board, and notes that cooler heads seem to have prevailed. Here’s a snippet from one poster:

Yaoi is “hot” right now and getting a lot of press, but it’s only one subset of a bigger picture. I think if you look at the self-imposed rating system on the yaoi titles, you’re likely to find 16-up or 18-up on the covers. So…I think part of what is involved in this issue parental responsibility. You’re not likely to allow your 12/13 year old to browse the bookstore unsupervised in the romance section or the new age section or even general fiction…don’t let them browse in the manga section unsupervised.

I’m glad the conversation is so reasonable, and that someone from within the community pointed out that all manga is not porn and not every book has to be safe for children.

This thread began with a warning that has been around as long as parenthood, although the internet makes it easier to propagate: hidden dangers to your children. It usually starts with a well-meaning parent who is genuinely shocked by something and wants to warn others: “Do you know there’s porn in manga?” I’m glad that in this case, other parents followed it with a reasoned response. In the Victorville library case, the same sort of discovery turned into a crusade and resulted in a perfectly good book being pulled from an entire library system. Trust me, we don’t want that.

This conversation makes me hopeful that there won’t be a major backlash against yaoi manga, or any other mature manga. If there is, we on Team Comix need to keep in mind that Christians are not monolithic. The most visible members of the religious right may thunder on about the evils of porn and the “homosexual agenda,” but the people in the pews are more reasonable. (Certainly that’s been my experience as a Catholic.) Dismissing or insulting them will only make things worse, and possibly alienate a group that’s really on our side.

I checked out the manga reviews on the Christian anime site, Christian Anime Alliance. The people who wrote them seem to genuinely like manga, and their take was closer to “not for kids under a certain age” than “this book should be banned” or “reading this will make you go to hell.” They even had nice things to say about Love Hina! The Christian otaku certainly bucked my stereotypes, and as a semi-churchgoing soccer mom who can’t get enough of Death Note, I hope I’m bucking someone else’s stereotypes as well.