Originating in Japan, Yaoi - or boys love - is a genre by women for women depicting romantic and sexual relationships between men. It has garnered a reputation within internet culture as overtly pandering and often degenerate, but many would be surprised to find out that its roots can be traced back to the world's oldest novel.

The roots of the genre originates in the eleventh century to what many consider the first ever novel, Genji Monogatari, by Murasaki Shikibu - a female attendant in the Japanese aristocracy during the Heian period.

Genji Monogatari would define romance in Japanese culture, and provided deep insight and criticism into social relations specifically of the Japanese nobility. The story follows the titular character Genji and his many romantic escapades. While focusing mainly on his noble affairs and mistresses, there is an instance of Genji preferring a young man in company. As the first novel, it was the first instance of prose being used to explore emotional and interpersonal relationships with such depth, cementing its influence as the center of the romance genre for the following millennia.

While being a story that focuses primarily on heterosexual relationships, its connection to modern yaoi comes from its interaction with its female audiences. Shikibu would share chapters at a time with her circle, who would then copy and pass them along further. This method of distribution allowed for the story to evolve amidst feedback and dialogue from its audiences, allowing it to pertain more and more to female experiences and desires.

In Japan, before Western religious influences, homosocial and homosexual relationships were not known to be uncommon. Japan's strong military culture all the way up to the end of World War two meant that women and men typically did not interact until marriage, incentivizing same sex relations. These relationships would become a norm during intense political shifts, which is historically common amidst periods of cultural transitions where norms tend to loosen.

The term Shudo describes relations between an older aristocrat and a younger male which were prevalent in samurai culture from the medieval period to the end of the nineteenth century. This was a mentorship-like relationship that also included sex. These traditions were not stigmatized in the way they are in Western civilizations but ended in modern-day Japan with the Meiji restoration when Japanese leaders were determined to be seen as "civilized" to Western culture and avoid colonization.

In the seventies, a group of all-female manga artists named Year 24 came onto the scene and laid the groundwork for modern yaoi with work that did not center around, but featured male-on-male relationships. The group is heavily credited with bringing shojo manga (a term to describe manga marketed at young women) into an age of more complexity and ambition, delving far more deeply into social and sexual dynamics than what young women had been sold at the time.

This golden age in the culture led to many self-published fan works known as "doujinshi". Through these works that often featured homosexual relationships, the term yaoi would be coined to refer to boys' love, and yuri for girls' love. In recent years with rising cultures of excess - a new term, "fujoshi" has arisen to refer to female fanatics of yaoi and has become widely associated with fetishization (some fujoshi's have been known to go as far as to harass men publicly associated with other men, such as K-idols and youtubers). While this more problematic dialogue does occur in many groups (as it does in all groups to a degree) with the additional oddity of the premise of yaoi as male homosexuality pandered to the female gaze, I believe that the phenomenon is deserving of a deeper look into what these dynamics may entail for women.

Due to limited social roles for women in the east, romantic stories that feature two male leads allow for deeper exploration of romantic dynamics without the usual social constrictions. While romance in general is seen as more wholesome, sexual and romantic relationships between women and men have historically been transactional with women expected to carry most of the sexual burden. A relationship between two men is exempt from the traditional burden of these transactions, engaging in a much more fluid approach to sexuality as a whole, rather than one that fulfills a societal function, such as childbirth and marriage. It is male vulnerability at its most authentic, not touching upon any of the mistreatment that female audiences have experienced in their daily life and within other forms of media, thus making these fictional relationships a safer space for feminine imagination and projection.