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A woman who consumes and enjoys boys' love publications might describe herself as a fujoshi (腐女子), literally "rotten girl". There is an equivalent term for men: fudanshi (腐男子).

Does an equivalent term for men or women who enjoy yuri publications exist? (In other words, is there a term someone can use as a shorthand to say that she likes reading yuri manga?) My internet research suggests there is not, but I would like to see something more authoritative, particularly since my lack of knowledge might be linked to my lack of active involvement in yuri fan circles.

If there is no such term, is there any reason for its lack of existence?

Maroon
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There is the term 姫男子 hime-danshi lit. "princess-boy" for a male person who enjoys lesbian/yuri media. I think this is a relatively recent coining - the Nicopedia article on this term dates to 2012, and the earliest clear attestation on Twitter I've found is this one from Feb 2011 (though, I don't know if Twitter was popular enough in Japan prior to 2011 to be reliable for gathering attestations). This term does not appear to have very much purchase (certainly much less than fujoshi or fudanshi), but it does exist.

As you might expect, it has a counterpart 姫女子 hime-joshi lit. "princess-girl" for a female person who enjoys lesbian/yuri media.

The term 百合好き yuri-zuki lit. "yuri-liker" exists and would be well-understood, but it's compositional in meaning and doesn't feel like a distinct "word" to me.


I speculatively submit the following as a possible reason why there are no clear analogues to the term fujoshi: a woman consuming media about male homosexuality is somehow more "scandalous" or otherwise unusual than a man consuming media about female homosexuality. It is well-documented that men, on average, are really into lesbian porn (see e.g. "Why Straight Men Gaze at Gay Women"); I imagine the same extends to non-pornographic media.

This may explain why there is a well-accepted name for fujoshi (they're a weird outgroup, gotta call them something) but not so much for hime-danshi ("you're not into lesbians? what are you, gay?").

[Note, indeed, that fujoshi was, at least originally, a term of derision ("rotten"), while the nascent term hime-danshi isn't derisive, at least not to the same degree. While researching this answer, I came upon a number of tweets observing (humorously or otherwise) the latent sexism here.]

Similarly, there's a strong segregation between BL media and "everything else". If a male homosexual relationship shows up in something targeted at general audiences, it's generally not well-received (cf. Shinsekai yori, which barely depicted any male homosexuality and still got people up in arms). If a female homosexual relationship shows up, though... who's going to complain about that? And so, we have "media for fujoshi" on the one hand, and "media for 'regular' people" on the other, and the latter bucket includes media about female homosexuality, so why would we need a name for people who like that stuff? They're just "regular" people, right?

senshin
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Yuriko (百合 子) means children of the lily. It's the official name given to Latin American fans of yuri. I know that fans from other countries also call themselves this way, but I'm not sure it's accepted by their yuri community. Some places in Japan use that term too. Yuriko is rather new, having been acquired in 2014.

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The manga Yuri-Danshi had a better name it was in deliberate contrast to fudanshi. So yuri-danshi and yuri-joshi, why not?

Aki Tanaka
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