ICv2 has a bit more on the yaoi-at-Wal-Mart story (they were selling Yaoi Hentai on their website but yanked it as soon as they realized it), including this:
The folks at the Consumerist Website seemed more interested in catching Wal-Mart, which promotes a squeaky clean image and even forced record companies to produce bowdlerized disks in order to get distribution in its mega-retail empire, in a hypocritical act rather than in fighting pornography, and their report, which was entitled “Wal-Mart and Target Sell Anime Porn,” was wrong on several levels — the items cited were not anime, but OEL manga titles written and published in the U.S.
This explains why the fact that Target was also selling the book didn’t attract as much attention. I just checked Wal-Mart’s books page, and their top seller was a book on the New Testament. On the other hand, they have a “Gay & Lesbian” category, which makes me suspect that the issue with Yaoi Hentai was more the hentai part than the yaoi. Not that Wal-Mart would be the first place I would go to find hot man-sex. A search for “yaoi” netted me the first three volumes of Claymore, a book on home decor, a physics book, and Degenerate Differential Equations in Banach Spaces, which sounds promising until you read the second word of the title. I checked for a couple of yaoi titles, and the only one I found was Gravitation, which might have slipped by because they thought it was another physics book.
Anyway, ICv2 wonders for the umpteenth time whether this will be the beginning of the yaoi backlash and adds
Unfortunately if this story does make it to the national press, yaoi will undoubtedly be crudely characterized as “homosexual porn,” and no notice will be taken of the fact that the audience for these books is not gay men, but rather straight young women.
What difference is that supposed to make? I doubt Wal-Mart would put Yaoi Hentai back on their website if they realized more women than men were buying it. I think ICv2 is trying to point out that yaoi has what they used to call redeeming artistic value—it’s literary porn—which is fine, but Wal-Mart isn’t going to knowingly sell pictures of buttsex no matter what the context, so the point is lost on them.
