Why GL dramas are less popular than BL ? Because girls like to watch BL or any other reason?
GAP the series, the very first full length GL in existence, outperformed literally all BLs in terms of views (yes really), so I wouldn't say GL is less popular.
To check this for yourself, go to the YouTube channels of Idolfactory, GMMTV, MeMindY and Mandee Channel, then sort their videos from most to least popular, and you'll see GAP stick out far above literally everything else. Add the channel NineStarStudios to the list, and you'll see that the GL 'Blank the series' rivals even the most popular of BLs, meaning, GAP wasn't a freak accident. That level of success is reproducible.
GAP aired in late 2022, early 2023. Full length GL dramas are a very new phenomenon. GL audiences haven't found their way to MyDramaList yet, so on MDL GL gets less engagement than BL. New GL dramas still have to rely on the YouTube algorithm to find their audience, while new BL dramas can count on BL fans checking MDL, twitter and whatever else to find out about new BL dramas. That's why BL has a consistent audience for every release, while GL audiences show up more sporadically. For now.
It is true that there are fewer online authors writing f/f ships than m/m ships. The previous commenter said sexuality was the difference, meaning, there's fewer lesbians than straight women. That's not the reason, given the statistics we have about m/m shippers on the main shipping website in the west, AO3 (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkD0m38E1Wg).
In sheer numbers, most BL fans are bisexual women, then asexual women, then straight women only in third place, then everyone else, e.g. lesbians, queer men, trans people of all varieties. Obviously, neither bisexual women nor asexual women have a sexuality-based reason to prefer men over women. Also, far more lesbians than you'd expect are into BL.
The YouTube video I linked above is a video essay (which I recommend watching) about why fewer f/f ships get written than m/m ships. There's actually a lot that goes into it. Misogyny and the avoidance thereof plays a big role, in several ways.
The people who prefer f/f ships over m/m ships seem to prefer video over written media. I have theories as to why, but they're only theories, so I'll keep them to myself.
This year has a lot of LGBT Thai dramas. Is it because same-sex marriage was legalized in Thailand?
No this isn't new. The rise of GL is new, but this volume has been the norm for BL since 2020.
The reason GL has been popping off this year is because Thai companies started mass producing GL after the gigantic success of https://mydramalist.com/707221-gap in late 2022. Full series production takes a long time, so the GL wave is only now just starting to really hit. Far more GL has been announced for 2025 than 2024.
GL is snowballing much faster than BL because the BL industry is an easy template for GL to follow. All the infrastructure is already there. All they needed to do was add some female stars to the mix. Also, GAP was a much larger success than Sotus or Love Sick, in terms of views, so the financial incentives for Thai production companies to jump on the bandwagon are much larger.
I think I'd switch cause and effect. It's more likely that the volume and popularity of gay media in Thailand contributed to its legalization of gay marriage. But then again, the gay media was probably only possible because there was already a high degree of acceptance, so it's a positive feedback loop.
OMG please let this be a GL. If it it then it would probably be a first for Korea, unless there are Korean GL…
I don't think there's any full length full budget Korean GL dramas (and if this 'The Two Women' Drama Special ends up being GL, it's also only 60 minutes long), but there are some shorter indie GL dramas:
It seems to me that you are putting a lot of effort into finding reasons why you don't need to take my words seriously. I haven't been responding to it much, because responding to ad hominems is usually a waste of time, but in this case there really is a pattern I think you should become aware of.
First you assumed I was a conservative who'd never travelled, especially not to Europe, while in reality I've spent 29 of my 30 years on Earth in progressive social bubbles in Amsterdam (and am very thankful for that), and studied at Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China) for the other year, befriending fellow students from every continent.
Then you assumed I'd never been to university, so I couldn't be trusted to find good data, while in reality I was a straight A student from kindergarten all the way through my master's degree (and there's the explanation for my dedication to data, has nothing to do with my gender).
Now you're assuming I can't understand women's issues and don’t care about feminism, because I must be a man, while in reality I am nonbinary transgender, I was raised female, and I've been fairly involved in feminism for the past decade. None of the women's issues you raise in this post are news to me, and I agree with you that they are important.
But you've already predicted that you were probably barking up the wrong tree there too, so the next strategy is not just to find a reason to not have to take me personally seriously, but to find a reason to also throw out all data that does not conform to your confirmation bias, so that you can instead work off of personal intuition and anecdotal experience. I am sure your university must have taught you about sampling bias and the inadmissibility of anecdotal evidence.
So, I am aware that purity culture is a thing in a lot of (sub)cultures (not all, thankfully). However, in these cultures, expectations of abstinence on women are often paired with an opposite expectation on men, who gain social status through 'sexual conquest' (I hate that terminology). These are complementary because women have to be expected to resist sexual advances before men's 'conquest' can be considered an achievement. So if women are likely to under-report their sexual experience, men are likely to balance that out by over-reporting it.
In data I've seen, there is a slight discrepancy, with boys reporting slightly more and earlier sexual experiences than girls, but it is on the scale of decimal points, not whole years, which leads me to conclude that the data is actually fairly accurate.
I think it is important to trust that experts on this topic know how to weed out bad data. I think being anti-science, anti-data, and conspiratorial about ‘government backed science’ is a bad thing (unless of course there’s actual proof of conspiracy). I think it is deeply unreasonable to say that a significant number of studies on the topic have been edited or suppressed by governments across the world, and that this phenomenon has somehow not once been brought to light by whistle-blowers.
So let's look at the source you've provided me with. Censis surveyed a representative sample of 1000 Italians between the ages of 12 and 24. 56% of those had not had sex yet. They asked the 44% who had already had sex at which age they first had sex, which averaged out to 17,1.
Let's say I (hypothetically) go survey a thousand 12 year olds, and 10% of them say they've had sex. I then take that 10% and ask them at which age they had their first sexual encounter. Their average is probably going to be around 11 years old, but that says nothing about the actual average age at which the full population has their first sexual encounters. Using this method, I can make this number go as low as I want it to go.
Back to the real survey, 5% of respondents aged 12-14 had had sex before, 17% of respondents aged 15-17 had had sex before, 62% of respondents aged 18-21 had had sex before, and 79% of respondents aged 22-24 had had sex before. By far, the largest jump there is from the 15-17 group to the 18-21 group, so from this survey we can conclude that most young Italians have their first sexual encounter between 18 and 21 years old. This corresponds to all other data I have found on Italy. I see no reason to doubt its validity. The source you provided me with agrees with me.
So, women’s issues, sex-negativity and purity culture. I do care about that, quite a lot. Misogyny affects me. At the same time, I also care about queer issues and ace issues and disability and etc, and I do understand how they all have their roots in the same structures and how they keep capitalism running.
I am not on board with oppression Olympics. In sheer numbers, yes, there are more women who are harmed by sex-negativity and purity culture than there are asexual people who are harmed by allonormativity and compulsory sexuality, because asexuals are a minority. Purity culture causes more total harm, and it needs to be dismantled. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be done blindly, to the exclusion of other issues, or without examining the movement’s internal faults. If we go by ‘I have it worse, so we don’t need to talk about your issues’, then there are many people on this planet who have it worse than you (an Italian university student who presumably has a home, no daily fear of being bombed, and enough to eat every day), but that doesn’t mean your issues shouldn’t be addressed.
Sex-positive feminism is at this point 60 years old already. I think the movement has brought about important and necessary changes to many (sub)cultures (including mine), and I think it still has a long way to go in others, but, crucially, no movement is perfect, and this one is no exception.
When a group of marginalized people first starts fighting an oppressive hierarchical system, often their first instinct is to flip the hierarchy upside down, rather than getting rid of hierarchy entirely (never universal, always a subgroup in the movement). For example, instead of the ‘pure’ virgin being considered good and the promiscuous girl being considered bad, some (not all!) sex-positive feminists started asserting that not having a lot of sex was actually a sign of internalized misogyny, repression, immaturity and being a boring person, in short it was bad, and everyone should be having a lot of sex, the more the better. They would consider themselves to be more adventurous, mature, interesting, sociable, progressive, fun, worthwhile, and just overall better people, for having more sex.
In my opinion, everyone is an equally worthwhile person, regardless of how much sex they do or don’t choose to have. We don’t need there to be so much judgement based on how much sex you have, in either direction. Kink and promiscuity are fine, and so is celibacy. There should not be a hierarchy.
I understand why people initially feel the need to flip hierarchies to put themselves on top instead of the bottom. I’ve probably done it before at some point. It’s a logical trauma response. But it’s not a good form of activism. It’s something to grow out of.
I do see this type of hierarchy-flipping in your words, for example when you say things like ‘Italians do it better’ because you believe them to have sex earlier than youth in other countries, or when you would prefer to erase those who don’t have sex (at all or early enough for your tastes) from discussions regarding sex, or when you suggest that Asian teens grow up slower because they don’t have sex as early as European ones, and that this is not what ‘we’ would like best. I hope this ‘we’ excludes me, because I certainly don’t have a preference for how much sex teenagers should have. I guess my preference is that they do it when they want to, when they feel ready, and they do it in safe and consensual ways.
In progressive subcultures (where I spend my time), an issue has cropped up where some women now feel pressured to be more promiscuous and kinky than they actually want to be, in order to be considered an interesting, worthwhile and progressive person. Among these women, there is now a rising narrative that hook-up culture actually really hasn’t served women in the way we hoped it would, but that men sure get a whole lot of out of it. I don’t think I need to tell you about the orgasm gap. I’m sure you can imagine the dangers wrought by this pressure to engage in kink and hook-ups, especially early in life when people don’t yet know where exactly their boundaries lie, how to communicate them, or how to respect them in others.
Obviously this is an issue for a sub-section of women, not all women. Two things can be true at once. Women in one subculture can be pressured to stay virgins, while the opposite is true in another subculture. But honestly, both pressures are often present in a woman’s life at the same time, which makes it even more impossible to ‘win’ at being considered a good person.
I believe you when you say that in your subculture the pressure to be a virgin is much larger than the pressure to be progressive and sexually adventurous. But I don’t think you can extrapolate your experience to the entire globe, and I don’t think this allows you to be callous about other people having the opposite issue.
I understand that you have the best intentions, and a desire to make a positive difference in the world, and I’m absolutely not here to call you a terrible person. Everyone makes mistakes. I’m sure I held some shit beliefs and said some shit things when I was your age (which is what, 20? 22?), and I probably still do now, and when the opportunity comes, I’ll learn about those and become a better person in time, hopefully.
It’s not great to extrapolate your experiences to the rest of the world. It’s not great to speak for people who can very much speak for themselves, especially when you have not yet listened to what they have to say.
I speak Mandarin, so I went and Googled for discussions surrounding this show. Most of the discussion is happening here, 400+ discussion threads: https://www.douban.com/group/741691/#topics There is nothing about people being upset at the age restrictions. So I specifically added a number of words used for age restrictions onto my search query, still nothing. I tried Baidu too, not really necessary since that’s for mainland China, but yeah, same result. Taiwanese people are not upset at this rating. And you bet there are Taiwanese feminists gushing about the show. The rating is apparently just not important to them.
One thing about activism that is very important to remember is that it’s best to focus your activism on things that are within your sphere of influence, that you have a stake in, or that you have expertise in. For issues that fall outside of that scope, the best strategy is allyship instead, which means you listen, learn, boost voices of people more directly involved, and you possibly fund their efforts or lend your time to their cause in ways that are asked for.
It’s quite presumptuous and ‘white man’s burden-y’ to go ‘help’ people who didn’t ask. ‘Help’ is very likely to be counterproductive when you are unfamiliar with the local context. It is not the west’s job to teach marginalized people in other countries to be liberated and emancipated. We can support local efforts, but we can’t lead them. It would be arrogant to do so. Past efforts that failed to cooperate with people directly affected have proven to be more likely to cause additional harm than to do any good.
Moreover, it is not okay to use horrific forms of oppression that are not a part of your experience (such as female genital mutilation or being stoned to death) in service of one-upping and dismissing another type of struggle (asexuality), especially when the topic at hand is as inconsequential as a rating increase for a tv show. These people are not a prop to throw around. Their struggles are not a card for you to play. This does nothing to help them.
Of course these issues are very important and should be addressed, but not in such an appropriative and instrumental way, and not without any input from people who actually come into contact with these forms of oppression. From what I’ve heard, women in majority Muslim countries don’t necessarily appreciate their culture being painted as barbaric in a broad brush. They don’t necessarily appreciate their local feminist liberation struggles being erased (“feminism is just a word read in some forbidden magazine”, not a movement). And they don’t necessarily appreciate being portrayed as powerless and in need of saving by outside actors. There are feminists in every country, fighting their local fights. Effectively addressing their struggles requires a bit more tact, expertise and nuance than you have shown so far.
Lastly, I think you are working with an incorrect understanding of what ‘asexuality’ and ‘hypersexuality’ are. A person can actually be asexual and hypersexual at the same time, and not just theoretically, I actually know of people like this.
Hypersexuality according to Mayo Clinic: Compulsive sexual behavior is sometimes called hypersexuality or sexual addiction. It's an intense focus on sexual fantasies, urges or behaviors that can't be controlled. This causes distress and problems for your health, job, relationships or other parts of your life.
You can’t be diagnosed with ‘hypersexuality’ unless it is distressing and has a significant negative impact on your ability to live your life. Just being very sexual, having a high libido, being promiscuous, kinky, etc, is not the same as being hypersexual.
Asexuality is usually defined as a person who cannot be sexually attracted to others or cannot desire partnered sex, in the same way that a lesbian generally can’t be attracted to men or desire sex with them. Some asexual people can have sex for their partner’s sake, but others can’t bring themselves to do so. Asexuality does not have anything to do with libido or hormones. Asexuality is not the same as virginity or celibacy. These Korean soap characters are not asexual.
So it’s possible to be unable to be sexually attracted to people, but still have a libido or sexual compulsions that cause issues, so hypersexual and asexual at the same time. They’re not opposites. If you did know what these words meant, then it’s not really cool to compare an orientation with a disorder.
I know you don’t care about asexual issues, so this is probably an exercise in futility, but: Do you perhaps care about conversion therapy? Asexuals experience that at higher rates than any other orientation, usually in healthcare settings. Do you want evidence of prejudice and discrimination? Here you go: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1368430212442419 Do you care about ‘corrective rape’? Asexuals face that too. And rates of unwanted sexual contact (often reluctantly agreed to out of a sense of obligation) between an allosexual and an asexual partner are really heart-breaking. Financial consequences of being asexual and or aromantic? Google ‘singlism’ or ‘financial costs of being single’. Pathologization? Asexuality is still in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, minus an ineffective caveat, and that's the manual most psychologists around the world use. 25% of aces who disclosed their orientation to healthcare professionals (not only therapists) reported it having negative results on the healthcare they got, higher than any other orientation. Political pressure or hate speech? Just look at what notoriously queerphobic conservative darling Matt Walsh says about how asexuality is even worse than homosexuality, or look at what US vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has to say about childless cat ladies. Conservatives are very displeased with women who refuse to provide men with sex and offspring, and it really doesn’t matter if such women are lesbians or asexuals. They consider asexuality, sexlessness and childlessness unnatural and ‘frigid’, they fearmonger about it causing (white) societal/population collapse, and they’d like it to no longer be allowed.
I’m sure being a teenage asexual girl within purity culture is fairly comfortable. It does not stay comfortable after you reach an age where expectations of marriage and childrearing are placed upon you.
I guess I’m just sad at how quickly you dismissed an entire demographic as insignificant, without putting any effort into learning about it. About 1% of the population is asexual. That means there are more asexuals than transgender people, and at the moment it doesn’t seem like anyone feels that transgender people are too small a minority to deserve any attention.
In conclusion, I think you mean well, but are going about things in an imperfect way. I think you could really grow as a person if you put effort into finding out, rather than assuming you already know, what’s going on in the lives of people halfway across the world; if you treated conversations like these as an opportunity to put your preconceptions to a serious test, rather than coming up with reasons why you don’t have to; and if you put more effort into listening to perspectives and experiences outside of your own, rather than flippantly using them as tools for your own purposes.
Ethology sounds really fun though. Excellent choice :)
Just googled 'average age loss of virginity by country' and you're pretty far off. It's over 18 almost everywhere.…
Yeah, I think we agree on a lot.
With 'normal' I meant something along the lines of 'shouldn't be rejected, stigmatized or pathologized by society', and not something along the lines of 'average, common', and I think we agree there :).
Asexuality is often dehumanized, erased and pathologized, especially viciously by some sex-positive progressives with religious trauma, with sentiments like "all human beings want sex, it's simple biology and human nature, and if you don't have that sexual desire, you need to go get your hormones fixed, or you just need to stop lying to yourself, prude". But I can now see that that's not what you meant at all.
In English, the word 'anomaly' has strong negative connotations, especially when it's said about human beings, kind of like 'freak'. That's what threw me off. But you didn't mean for those negative connotations to be there. 'Exception' and 'atypical' are better word choices.
'Have a nice life' also has strong negative connotations. That phrase generally means 'fuck off and I hope I never see you again'. But I think you meant something along the lines of 'have a nice day'.
Also it's spelled 'hypersexuality', not 'ipersexuality', but I got what you meant because that is how that would be pronounced in French or Spanish.
According to the Dutch centre of expertise for sexuality, Rutgers, in 2024 the average age in the Netherlands is 18,7, and it is rising. I can't search in Italian, but I get this https://www.statista.com/statistics/784002/first-sexual-intercourse-by-age-in-italy/, which does not average out to 16,4, not even close. I can't find your Nurses of Bologna source, and I would like a link. It's okay if it's all in Italian, you're right that I can read that fairly well.
I'll admit that I initially used an easy to find source with not great credibility to quickly see averages by country all over the world, because I didn't feel like putting hours into scouring Google Scholar for every country individually (and I don't think you did that either). I used multiple such sources, and they all came up with similar numbers, generally over 18. Here's an example: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-age-to-lose-virginity-by-country. From what I've found, it's only the Nordic countries in which the average age hovers around 16. It's certainly not the same all over the globe.
But I guess if you count masturbation as well, then the 16,4 number would make sense to me. Most teens probably do do that, probably much earlier than 16 actually. I didn't count masturbation, and neither did all the stats and data I was working off of.
I agree that the rating of this show and the banning of queer books from school libraries have the same root cause (and I am with you in being upset at the cause), but they don't have the same material effects/consequences. I have a limited amount of 'upset energy', and I prefer spending it on things that actually have significant material consequences.
I didn't pick Latin back in high school sorry. Many regrets :( But yeah I could probably get the gist of your Italian.
Just googled 'average age loss of virginity by country' and you're pretty far off. It's over 18 almost everywhere.…
I'm sorry for not understanding what you wrote. I did my best. I don't speak Italian. If only it had been French or Spanish.
To be honest, I think if we managed to communicate, we might actually be in agreement. I think we both agree that it's fine for 16 year olds to watch this series, and we both agree that purity culture and censorship are bad. And I think we also probably both agree that it's also fine and normal for (some) teens and adults to not have sex at all, right?
So I think I won't agree to disagree, because I'm not sure we actually disagree all that much.
I don't know if you were being sarcastic with your 'best wishes and have a nice life', but I'll wish you the same, but in a genuine way.
Just googled 'average age loss of virginity by country' and you're pretty far off. It's over 18 almost everywhere.…
So your source is... traveling the world? You didn't even bother to look into any statistics at all?
I was born and raised in Amsterdam (the epitome of what sexually repressed conservatives like to fearmonger about), so your assumption that I haven't been to Europe is really quite funny to me.
Obviously I know that a lot of 15 and 16 year olds have sex, and I'm not at all opposed to them watching media like this when they want to. I just don't see why you have to phrase it like it's *all* of them, when according to all data we have, it's not even close to the majority.
I'm not sure if you meant 'anomaly' in a derogatory way, but it is coming across like that, especially when you say that you would prefer asexuality to not be discussed at all. It sure doesn't sound like you accept everything that exists to me.
And no I can't imagine getting upset at a rating like this. I get upset at queer books being banned in school libraries, because that's likely to actually restrict queer minors' awareness of and access to queer media, and impact their self-esteem and rates of bullying. But a 16 year old with internet access can manage to watch this series regardless of what its rating is.
Rating this 18+ is ridicolous! I would understand a 15/16+, definitely not an 18+, when all teenagers around the…
Just googled 'average age loss of virginity by country' and you're pretty far off. It's over 18 almost everywhere. The lowest I found was Brazil, 17.3. In Taiwan it's apparently 21.9.
I'm not sure why you're so upset. It's not like a 16 year old who wants to watch this couldn't manage to do it. Does the rating matter?
And I'm not a fan of this 'biology has its course in all human beings' thing. Asexual people exist and are also human beings.
but I legit am starting to feel that Khen is the one who is dead and not the other way around.. 😔
I just came here to say the same thing. My new theory is that they all died in the car accident and joined the ghosts already in the house, each continuously reliving their own worlds.
I agree that this series is shit and that Chinese BL has a tendency towards being shit, but at least get your…
That's fair. I'm tagging them as incest not because that's what it would be if it were real life, but because the taboo is the reason the authors made them family. The fact that it is taboo is part of the appeal/stakes/angst.
Same goes for the abuse/rape/power dynamics/age gaps common in BL and other 'romance' stories. The taboo is the point. "I want it but it's wrong, I want it but I can't have it" raises the stakes and the desire, and is therefore an effective storytelling device. It's about wanting to be wanted by the love interest so intensely that he'll do crazy shit and break social norms to have you. That's the fantasy that's being fulfilled here.
I'm not even really knocking it. Taboo stuff exactly like this has always been popular within queer writing on tumblr and AO3 as well (e.g. wincest and whatever they did with the onceler), and beyond queer writing too. I mean, 50 shades and 365 days were massively popular. I've heard quite a bit of fearmongering about the 'dark romance' genre lately too. It's not new and it's not unique to BL or to China.
Women have sexual fantasies, and sexual fantasies have a tendency towards the taboo. They don't generally map onto reality. Contrapoints has an excellent video essay on this, which pretends to be about Twilight, but it's so much more than that. I couldn't recommend it enough.
Women deal with so much misogyny, objectification, domination and hypersexualization, that I really can't begrudge them privately taking all of that, and putting it into their own narratives where they get to decide what to add and leave out to make it feel exciting and safe for them. It's safe because they get to control how the story goes, and in the story everything turns out fine in the end. (Also, not having a female character in your romance story is a very effective way of not having to deal with misogyny in your sexual fantasies).
There's this societal idea that women aren't supposed to want sex, because they should be pure and whatnot, so protagonists in these stories often resist the super hot love interest and get forced anyway, because that way they can have the hot guy without the 'indecency' of having to express their own desire. Hence rape fantasies and romanticization of abuse in stories.
A quote I really like is 'in the end everyone wants to feel desired and safe, we just have different ways of getting there'.
So yeah I think there is a place for these stories to exist, but I don't think that what happens in them should be mainstreamed/normalized. Not that I think there's much risk of that happening anyways. Age gaps, abuse and fucked up power dynamics are outside of social norms for a good reason, they harm people. Besides, if (in some screwed up world) they stopped being taboo, they'd also stop being appealing for their taboo-ness. Nobody wants this. People who have these fantasies do not actually want them to become reality.
I'm confused as to why Taiwan has to have these taboo plots but it's honestly draining. And I feel like the only…
I agree that this series is shit and that Chinese BL has a tendency towards being shit, but at least get your facts straight. Do you honestly think the CCP has censorship power over Taiwanese production companies? That's a whole 'nother country.
Uncle Unknown is actually mainland Chinese (obvious from accents, set and embedded Chinese subs in simplified characters). It's just pretending to be Taiwanese on paper to get around censorship, because it absolutely would not have gotten through CCP censorship. It has (fake) kissing, no way that would get through. 'Stay With Me' got through because it doesn't have that.
If you look at how the law banning gay online content was written, and then the weibo policy that followed it, it's obvious that no, they're not going to allow gay content that is perverted just to give gay people a bad reputation. Perverted content is exactly what they're trying to ban with this law. The law exists to prevent young women from becoming 'rotten girls'. Official Chinese communication mentions 腐女 fujoshis, 耽美 BL, and the 本子 smut they draw by name, all in slang that you'd only know about if you were specifically targeting the fujoshi demographic. Gay people in China are still allowed to be openly gay on social media. What's not allowed is BL. (And large scale organizing of any kind is also not allowed, whether queer or otherwise.)
The BL content that early Chinese fujoshis wrote was pretty rapey and abusive and taboo, and if you look at for example the stuff MAME wrote at that time, that issue wasn't exclusive to China. The explosive popularity of the first 'Addicted' show in 2016 was why the law banning gay webseries got made. It wasn't allowed to finish airing. 2016 Addicted is rapey as hell (if you want to see for yourself, watch episode 11). If the CCP wanted to portray gay people as perverted and dangerous, they could've just let that finish airing.
The real question is, why did Thai BL become so much more progressive over the years while Chinese BL stayed stuck at romanticizing abuse and incest? And the answer is that BL was mainstreamed in Thailand, while it remained niche and illegal in China. Thai BL had to become palatable to a wider audience, while Chinese BL stayed within a very specific niche that knew they were already breaking the law by writing BL at all, so eh, might as well break all social norms while we're at it I guess.
As for why Taiwanese BL series have a bunch of incest (unknown, crossing the line, the on1y one, close to you) and age-gaps (kiseki: dear to me, make our days count, right or wrong), I'm sure Taiwanese BL writers also read mainland Chinese BL and get influenced like that.
I have a genuine question.. I'm not a native Thai speaker so I completely rely on english subtitles when watching…
I don't officially speak Thai, but I do understand 80% of what they're saying, and I know for sure that the part that sounds like 'nad' is the part being translated to 'appoint'. In Thai it's spelled นัด, and I'm pretty sure it's the first part of the transitive verb นัดหมาย (nad hmay), or 'to make an appointment'. นัด (nad) can according to Google translate mean 'assign' and หมาย (hmay) means 'an expectation' 'note' 'warrant' 'intent'. So yeah, 'nad hmay', shortened to 'nad', broadly means setting up/organizing an appointment/commitment/agreement/date.
I've heard 'nad' used in quite a few Thai sentences by now, and I think it should've been translated to 'arrange', as in 'arrange a meeting with Kim for me'.
In thai grammar it's a very short construction, much shorter than in English. Like 'please nad Kim' = 'please arrange an appointment with Kim', 'nad tonight' = 'arrange it for tonight' and 'alright where do I nad that, your condo?'
I know it likely wasn't their intention, but some of the replies to my previous comment about how I personally…
As a fellow autistic, yeah, that's what I saw too. I wrote it down in my own review too, since episode 1 in fact haha. I didn't think a lot of other people would see it, so this comment came as a pleasant surprise. Thank you :)
1
To check this for yourself, go to the YouTube channels of Idolfactory, GMMTV, MeMindY and Mandee Channel, then sort their videos from most to least popular, and you'll see GAP stick out far above literally everything else. Add the channel NineStarStudios to the list, and you'll see that the GL 'Blank the series' rivals even the most popular of BLs, meaning, GAP wasn't a freak accident. That level of success is reproducible.
GAP aired in late 2022, early 2023. Full length GL dramas are a very new phenomenon. GL audiences haven't found their way to MyDramaList yet, so on MDL GL gets less engagement than BL. New GL dramas still have to rely on the YouTube algorithm to find their audience, while new BL dramas can count on BL fans checking MDL, twitter and whatever else to find out about new BL dramas. That's why BL has a consistent audience for every release, while GL audiences show up more sporadically. For now.
It is true that there are fewer online authors writing f/f ships than m/m ships. The previous commenter said sexuality was the difference, meaning, there's fewer lesbians than straight women. That's not the reason, given the statistics we have about m/m shippers on the main shipping website in the west, AO3 (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkD0m38E1Wg).
In sheer numbers, most BL fans are bisexual women, then asexual women, then straight women only in third place, then everyone else, e.g. lesbians, queer men, trans people of all varieties. Obviously, neither bisexual women nor asexual women have a sexuality-based reason to prefer men over women. Also, far more lesbians than you'd expect are into BL.
The YouTube video I linked above is a video essay (which I recommend watching) about why fewer f/f ships get written than m/m ships. There's actually a lot that goes into it. Misogyny and the avoidance thereof plays a big role, in several ways.
The people who prefer f/f ships over m/m ships seem to prefer video over written media. I have theories as to why, but they're only theories, so I'll keep them to myself.
The reason GL has been popping off this year is because Thai companies started mass producing GL after the gigantic success of https://mydramalist.com/707221-gap in late 2022. Full series production takes a long time, so the GL wave is only now just starting to really hit. Far more GL has been announced for 2025 than 2024.
BL took 6 years from a breakout success in 2014 https://mydramalist.com/10872-love-sick-the-series to hit current volume in 2020, though I suppose you could start counting at the first international breakout success in 2016 https://mydramalist.com/16667-sotus-the-series, which would make it 4 years. Here's a fun link for nerds like me: https://www.reddit.com/r/boyslove/comments/10ugk4r/updated_family_tree_of_thai_bl_now_more_like_a/
GL is snowballing much faster than BL because the BL industry is an easy template for GL to follow. All the infrastructure is already there. All they needed to do was add some female stars to the mix. Also, GAP was a much larger success than Sotus or Love Sick, in terms of views, so the financial incentives for Thai production companies to jump on the bandwagon are much larger.
I think I'd switch cause and effect. It's more likely that the volume and popularity of gay media in Thailand contributed to its legalization of gay marriage. But then again, the gay media was probably only possible because there was already a high degree of acceptance, so it's a positive feedback loop.
https://mydramalist.com/743001-our-relationship-ended-before-it-began (<-my favorite of the bunch)
https://mydramalist.com/54253-afraid-of
https://mydramalist.com/736435-girlfriend-project-day-1
https://mydramalist.com/52951-out-of-breath
https://mydramalist.com/741249-she-makes-my-heart-flutter
https://mydramalist.com/750245-welcome-to-the-lesbian-bar
https://mydramalist.com/768075-lonely-girls
https://mydramalist.com/745697-2pm-campus
https://mydramalist.com/32089-am-i-the-only-one-with-butterflies
https://mydramalist.com/770395-mayfly-angel
https://mydramalist.com/778222-tendering-resignation
https://mydramalist.com/768727-to-the-x-who-hated-me
https://mydramalist.com/775867-red-whisper
'The Handmaiden' is about lesbians but doesn't follow GL conventions. I wouldn't call it GL.
The makers of 'The Painter of the Wind' insist that it isn't gay, but I don't think anyone believes them.
So, the nurses of Bologna are a secondary source, reporting on a survey from Censis, which can be downloaded in full here: https://www.asnas.it/index.php/notizie/98-ricerca-censis-sulla-sessualita-dei-millennial-e-dei-giovanissimi
Generally, when using secondary sources, it's a good idea to go find the primary source to see if it was reported on correctly, which in this case it wasn't, but I'll get to that in a bit.
It seems to me that you are putting a lot of effort into finding reasons why you don't need to take my words seriously. I haven't been responding to it much, because responding to ad hominems is usually a waste of time, but in this case there really is a pattern I think you should become aware of.
First you assumed I was a conservative who'd never travelled, especially not to Europe, while in reality I've spent 29 of my 30 years on Earth in progressive social bubbles in Amsterdam (and am very thankful for that), and studied at Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China) for the other year, befriending fellow students from every continent.
Then you assumed I'd never been to university, so I couldn't be trusted to find good data, while in reality I was a straight A student from kindergarten all the way through my master's degree (and there's the explanation for my dedication to data, has nothing to do with my gender).
Now you're assuming I can't understand women's issues and don’t care about feminism, because I must be a man, while in reality I am nonbinary transgender, I was raised female, and I've been fairly involved in feminism for the past decade. None of the women's issues you raise in this post are news to me, and I agree with you that they are important.
But you've already predicted that you were probably barking up the wrong tree there too, so the next strategy is not just to find a reason to not have to take me personally seriously, but to find a reason to also throw out all data that does not conform to your confirmation bias, so that you can instead work off of personal intuition and anecdotal experience. I am sure your university must have taught you about sampling bias and the inadmissibility of anecdotal evidence.
So, I am aware that purity culture is a thing in a lot of (sub)cultures (not all, thankfully). However, in these cultures, expectations of abstinence on women are often paired with an opposite expectation on men, who gain social status through 'sexual conquest' (I hate that terminology). These are complementary because women have to be expected to resist sexual advances before men's 'conquest' can be considered an achievement. So if women are likely to under-report their sexual experience, men are likely to balance that out by over-reporting it.
In data I've seen, there is a slight discrepancy, with boys reporting slightly more and earlier sexual experiences than girls, but it is on the scale of decimal points, not whole years, which leads me to conclude that the data is actually fairly accurate.
I think it is important to trust that experts on this topic know how to weed out bad data. I think being anti-science, anti-data, and conspiratorial about ‘government backed science’ is a bad thing (unless of course there’s actual proof of conspiracy). I think it is deeply unreasonable to say that a significant number of studies on the topic have been edited or suppressed by governments across the world, and that this phenomenon has somehow not once been brought to light by whistle-blowers.
So let's look at the source you've provided me with. Censis surveyed a representative sample of 1000 Italians between the ages of 12 and 24. 56% of those had not had sex yet. They asked the 44% who had already had sex at which age they first had sex, which averaged out to 17,1.
Let's say I (hypothetically) go survey a thousand 12 year olds, and 10% of them say they've had sex. I then take that 10% and ask them at which age they had their first sexual encounter. Their average is probably going to be around 11 years old, but that says nothing about the actual average age at which the full population has their first sexual encounters. Using this method, I can make this number go as low as I want it to go.
Back to the real survey, 5% of respondents aged 12-14 had had sex before, 17% of respondents aged 15-17 had had sex before, 62% of respondents aged 18-21 had had sex before, and 79% of respondents aged 22-24 had had sex before. By far, the largest jump there is from the 15-17 group to the 18-21 group, so from this survey we can conclude that most young Italians have their first sexual encounter between 18 and 21 years old. This corresponds to all other data I have found on Italy. I see no reason to doubt its validity. The source you provided me with agrees with me.
So, women’s issues, sex-negativity and purity culture. I do care about that, quite a lot. Misogyny affects me. At the same time, I also care about queer issues and ace issues and disability and etc, and I do understand how they all have their roots in the same structures and how they keep capitalism running.
I am not on board with oppression Olympics. In sheer numbers, yes, there are more women who are harmed by sex-negativity and purity culture than there are asexual people who are harmed by allonormativity and compulsory sexuality, because asexuals are a minority. Purity culture causes more total harm, and it needs to be dismantled. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be done blindly, to the exclusion of other issues, or without examining the movement’s internal faults. If we go by ‘I have it worse, so we don’t need to talk about your issues’, then there are many people on this planet who have it worse than you (an Italian university student who presumably has a home, no daily fear of being bombed, and enough to eat every day), but that doesn’t mean your issues shouldn’t be addressed.
Sex-positive feminism is at this point 60 years old already. I think the movement has brought about important and necessary changes to many (sub)cultures (including mine), and I think it still has a long way to go in others, but, crucially, no movement is perfect, and this one is no exception.
When a group of marginalized people first starts fighting an oppressive hierarchical system, often their first instinct is to flip the hierarchy upside down, rather than getting rid of hierarchy entirely (never universal, always a subgroup in the movement). For example, instead of the ‘pure’ virgin being considered good and the promiscuous girl being considered bad, some (not all!) sex-positive feminists started asserting that not having a lot of sex was actually a sign of internalized misogyny, repression, immaturity and being a boring person, in short it was bad, and everyone should be having a lot of sex, the more the better. They would consider themselves to be more adventurous, mature, interesting, sociable, progressive, fun, worthwhile, and just overall better people, for having more sex.
In my opinion, everyone is an equally worthwhile person, regardless of how much sex they do or don’t choose to have. We don’t need there to be so much judgement based on how much sex you have, in either direction. Kink and promiscuity are fine, and so is celibacy. There should not be a hierarchy.
I understand why people initially feel the need to flip hierarchies to put themselves on top instead of the bottom. I’ve probably done it before at some point. It’s a logical trauma response. But it’s not a good form of activism. It’s something to grow out of.
I do see this type of hierarchy-flipping in your words, for example when you say things like ‘Italians do it better’ because you believe them to have sex earlier than youth in other countries, or when you would prefer to erase those who don’t have sex (at all or early enough for your tastes) from discussions regarding sex, or when you suggest that Asian teens grow up slower because they don’t have sex as early as European ones, and that this is not what ‘we’ would like best. I hope this ‘we’ excludes me, because I certainly don’t have a preference for how much sex teenagers should have. I guess my preference is that they do it when they want to, when they feel ready, and they do it in safe and consensual ways.
In progressive subcultures (where I spend my time), an issue has cropped up where some women now feel pressured to be more promiscuous and kinky than they actually want to be, in order to be considered an interesting, worthwhile and progressive person. Among these women, there is now a rising narrative that hook-up culture actually really hasn’t served women in the way we hoped it would, but that men sure get a whole lot of out of it. I don’t think I need to tell you about the orgasm gap. I’m sure you can imagine the dangers wrought by this pressure to engage in kink and hook-ups, especially early in life when people don’t yet know where exactly their boundaries lie, how to communicate them, or how to respect them in others.
Obviously this is an issue for a sub-section of women, not all women. Two things can be true at once. Women in one subculture can be pressured to stay virgins, while the opposite is true in another subculture. But honestly, both pressures are often present in a woman’s life at the same time, which makes it even more impossible to ‘win’ at being considered a good person.
I believe you when you say that in your subculture the pressure to be a virgin is much larger than the pressure to be progressive and sexually adventurous. But I don’t think you can extrapolate your experience to the entire globe, and I don’t think this allows you to be callous about other people having the opposite issue.
I understand that you have the best intentions, and a desire to make a positive difference in the world, and I’m absolutely not here to call you a terrible person. Everyone makes mistakes. I’m sure I held some shit beliefs and said some shit things when I was your age (which is what, 20? 22?), and I probably still do now, and when the opportunity comes, I’ll learn about those and become a better person in time, hopefully.
It’s not great to extrapolate your experiences to the rest of the world. It’s not great to speak for people who can very much speak for themselves, especially when you have not yet listened to what they have to say.
I speak Mandarin, so I went and Googled for discussions surrounding this show. Most of the discussion is happening here, 400+ discussion threads: https://www.douban.com/group/741691/#topics
There is nothing about people being upset at the age restrictions. So I specifically added a number of words used for age restrictions onto my search query, still nothing. I tried Baidu too, not really necessary since that’s for mainland China, but yeah, same result. Taiwanese people are not upset at this rating. And you bet there are Taiwanese feminists gushing about the show. The rating is apparently just not important to them.
One thing about activism that is very important to remember is that it’s best to focus your activism on things that are within your sphere of influence, that you have a stake in, or that you have expertise in. For issues that fall outside of that scope, the best strategy is allyship instead, which means you listen, learn, boost voices of people more directly involved, and you possibly fund their efforts or lend your time to their cause in ways that are asked for.
It’s quite presumptuous and ‘white man’s burden-y’ to go ‘help’ people who didn’t ask. ‘Help’ is very likely to be counterproductive when you are unfamiliar with the local context. It is not the west’s job to teach marginalized people in other countries to be liberated and emancipated. We can support local efforts, but we can’t lead them. It would be arrogant to do so. Past efforts that failed to cooperate with people directly affected have proven to be more likely to cause additional harm than to do any good.
Moreover, it is not okay to use horrific forms of oppression that are not a part of your experience (such as female genital mutilation or being stoned to death) in service of one-upping and dismissing another type of struggle (asexuality), especially when the topic at hand is as inconsequential as a rating increase for a tv show. These people are not a prop to throw around. Their struggles are not a card for you to play. This does nothing to help them.
Of course these issues are very important and should be addressed, but not in such an appropriative and instrumental way, and not without any input from people who actually come into contact with these forms of oppression. From what I’ve heard, women in majority Muslim countries don’t necessarily appreciate their culture being painted as barbaric in a broad brush. They don’t necessarily appreciate their local feminist liberation struggles being erased (“feminism is just a word read in some forbidden magazine”, not a movement). And they don’t necessarily appreciate being portrayed as powerless and in need of saving by outside actors. There are feminists in every country, fighting their local fights. Effectively addressing their struggles requires a bit more tact, expertise and nuance than you have shown so far.
Lastly, I think you are working with an incorrect understanding of what ‘asexuality’ and ‘hypersexuality’ are. A person can actually be asexual and hypersexual at the same time, and not just theoretically, I actually know of people like this.
Hypersexuality according to Mayo Clinic: Compulsive sexual behavior is sometimes called hypersexuality or sexual addiction. It's an intense focus on sexual fantasies, urges or behaviors that can't be controlled. This causes distress and problems for your health, job, relationships or other parts of your life.
You can’t be diagnosed with ‘hypersexuality’ unless it is distressing and has a significant negative impact on your ability to live your life. Just being very sexual, having a high libido, being promiscuous, kinky, etc, is not the same as being hypersexual.
Asexuality is usually defined as a person who cannot be sexually attracted to others or cannot desire partnered sex, in the same way that a lesbian generally can’t be attracted to men or desire sex with them. Some asexual people can have sex for their partner’s sake, but others can’t bring themselves to do so. Asexuality does not have anything to do with libido or hormones. Asexuality is not the same as virginity or celibacy. These Korean soap characters are not asexual.
So it’s possible to be unable to be sexually attracted to people, but still have a libido or sexual compulsions that cause issues, so hypersexual and asexual at the same time. They’re not opposites. If you did know what these words meant, then it’s not really cool to compare an orientation with a disorder.
I know you don’t care about asexual issues, so this is probably an exercise in futility, but:
Do you perhaps care about conversion therapy? Asexuals experience that at higher rates than any other orientation, usually in healthcare settings.
Do you want evidence of prejudice and discrimination? Here you go: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1368430212442419
Do you care about ‘corrective rape’? Asexuals face that too. And rates of unwanted sexual contact (often reluctantly agreed to out of a sense of obligation) between an allosexual and an asexual partner are really heart-breaking.
Financial consequences of being asexual and or aromantic? Google ‘singlism’ or ‘financial costs of being single’.
Pathologization? Asexuality is still in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, minus an ineffective caveat, and that's the manual most psychologists around the world use. 25% of aces who disclosed their orientation to healthcare professionals (not only therapists) reported it having negative results on the healthcare they got, higher than any other orientation.
Political pressure or hate speech? Just look at what notoriously queerphobic conservative darling Matt Walsh says about how asexuality is even worse than homosexuality, or look at what US vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has to say about childless cat ladies.
Conservatives are very displeased with women who refuse to provide men with sex and offspring, and it really doesn’t matter if such women are lesbians or asexuals. They consider asexuality, sexlessness and childlessness unnatural and ‘frigid’, they fearmonger about it causing (white) societal/population collapse, and they’d like it to no longer be allowed.
I’m sure being a teenage asexual girl within purity culture is fairly comfortable. It does not stay comfortable after you reach an age where expectations of marriage and childrearing are placed upon you.
I guess I’m just sad at how quickly you dismissed an entire demographic as insignificant, without putting any effort into learning about it. About 1% of the population is asexual. That means there are more asexuals than transgender people, and at the moment it doesn’t seem like anyone feels that transgender people are too small a minority to deserve any attention.
In conclusion, I think you mean well, but are going about things in an imperfect way. I think you could really grow as a person if you put effort into finding out, rather than assuming you already know, what’s going on in the lives of people halfway across the world; if you treated conversations like these as an opportunity to put your preconceptions to a serious test, rather than coming up with reasons why you don’t have to; and if you put more effort into listening to perspectives and experiences outside of your own, rather than flippantly using them as tools for your own purposes.
Ethology sounds really fun though. Excellent choice :)
With 'normal' I meant something along the lines of 'shouldn't be rejected, stigmatized or pathologized by society', and not something along the lines of 'average, common', and I think we agree there :).
Asexuality is often dehumanized, erased and pathologized, especially viciously by some sex-positive progressives with religious trauma, with sentiments like "all human beings want sex, it's simple biology and human nature, and if you don't have that sexual desire, you need to go get your hormones fixed, or you just need to stop lying to yourself, prude". But I can now see that that's not what you meant at all.
In English, the word 'anomaly' has strong negative connotations, especially when it's said about human beings, kind of like 'freak'. That's what threw me off. But you didn't mean for those negative connotations to be there. 'Exception' and 'atypical' are better word choices.
'Have a nice life' also has strong negative connotations. That phrase generally means 'fuck off and I hope I never see you again'. But I think you meant something along the lines of 'have a nice day'.
Also it's spelled 'hypersexuality', not 'ipersexuality', but I got what you meant because that is how that would be pronounced in French or Spanish.
According to the Dutch centre of expertise for sexuality, Rutgers, in 2024 the average age in the Netherlands is 18,7, and it is rising. I can't search in Italian, but I get this https://www.statista.com/statistics/784002/first-sexual-intercourse-by-age-in-italy/, which does not average out to 16,4, not even close. I can't find your Nurses of Bologna source, and I would like a link. It's okay if it's all in Italian, you're right that I can read that fairly well.
I'll admit that I initially used an easy to find source with not great credibility to quickly see averages by country all over the world, because I didn't feel like putting hours into scouring Google Scholar for every country individually (and I don't think you did that either). I used multiple such sources, and they all came up with similar numbers, generally over 18. Here's an example: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-age-to-lose-virginity-by-country. From what I've found, it's only the Nordic countries in which the average age hovers around 16. It's certainly not the same all over the globe.
But I guess if you count masturbation as well, then the 16,4 number would make sense to me. Most teens probably do do that, probably much earlier than 16 actually. I didn't count masturbation, and neither did all the stats and data I was working off of.
I agree that the rating of this show and the banning of queer books from school libraries have the same root cause (and I am with you in being upset at the cause), but they don't have the same material effects/consequences. I have a limited amount of 'upset energy', and I prefer spending it on things that actually have significant material consequences.
I didn't pick Latin back in high school sorry. Many regrets :(
But yeah I could probably get the gist of your Italian.
To be honest, I think if we managed to communicate, we might actually be in agreement. I think we both agree that it's fine for 16 year olds to watch this series, and we both agree that purity culture and censorship are bad. And I think we also probably both agree that it's also fine and normal for (some) teens and adults to not have sex at all, right?
So I think I won't agree to disagree, because I'm not sure we actually disagree all that much.
I don't know if you were being sarcastic with your 'best wishes and have a nice life', but I'll wish you the same, but in a genuine way.
I was born and raised in Amsterdam (the epitome of what sexually repressed conservatives like to fearmonger about), so your assumption that I haven't been to Europe is really quite funny to me.
Obviously I know that a lot of 15 and 16 year olds have sex, and I'm not at all opposed to them watching media like this when they want to. I just don't see why you have to phrase it like it's *all* of them, when according to all data we have, it's not even close to the majority.
I'm not sure if you meant 'anomaly' in a derogatory way, but it is coming across like that, especially when you say that you would prefer asexuality to not be discussed at all. It sure doesn't sound like you accept everything that exists to me.
And no I can't imagine getting upset at a rating like this. I get upset at queer books being banned in school libraries, because that's likely to actually restrict queer minors' awareness of and access to queer media, and impact their self-esteem and rates of bullying. But a 16 year old with internet access can manage to watch this series regardless of what its rating is.
I'm not sure why you're so upset. It's not like a 16 year old who wants to watch this couldn't manage to do it. Does the rating matter?
And I'm not a fan of this 'biology has its course in all human beings' thing. Asexual people exist and are also human beings.
Same goes for the abuse/rape/power dynamics/age gaps common in BL and other 'romance' stories. The taboo is the point. "I want it but it's wrong, I want it but I can't have it" raises the stakes and the desire, and is therefore an effective storytelling device. It's about wanting to be wanted by the love interest so intensely that he'll do crazy shit and break social norms to have you. That's the fantasy that's being fulfilled here.
I'm not even really knocking it. Taboo stuff exactly like this has always been popular within queer writing on tumblr and AO3 as well (e.g. wincest and whatever they did with the onceler), and beyond queer writing too. I mean, 50 shades and 365 days were massively popular. I've heard quite a bit of fearmongering about the 'dark romance' genre lately too. It's not new and it's not unique to BL or to China.
Women have sexual fantasies, and sexual fantasies have a tendency towards the taboo. They don't generally map onto reality. Contrapoints has an excellent video essay on this, which pretends to be about Twilight, but it's so much more than that. I couldn't recommend it enough.
Women deal with so much misogyny, objectification, domination and hypersexualization, that I really can't begrudge them privately taking all of that, and putting it into their own narratives where they get to decide what to add and leave out to make it feel exciting and safe for them. It's safe because they get to control how the story goes, and in the story everything turns out fine in the end. (Also, not having a female character in your romance story is a very effective way of not having to deal with misogyny in your sexual fantasies).
There's this societal idea that women aren't supposed to want sex, because they should be pure and whatnot, so protagonists in these stories often resist the super hot love interest and get forced anyway, because that way they can have the hot guy without the 'indecency' of having to express their own desire. Hence rape fantasies and romanticization of abuse in stories.
A quote I really like is 'in the end everyone wants to feel desired and safe, we just have different ways of getting there'.
So yeah I think there is a place for these stories to exist, but I don't think that what happens in them should be mainstreamed/normalized. Not that I think there's much risk of that happening anyways. Age gaps, abuse and fucked up power dynamics are outside of social norms for a good reason, they harm people. Besides, if (in some screwed up world) they stopped being taboo, they'd also stop being appealing for their taboo-ness. Nobody wants this. People who have these fantasies do not actually want them to become reality.
Uncle Unknown is actually mainland Chinese (obvious from accents, set and embedded Chinese subs in simplified characters). It's just pretending to be Taiwanese on paper to get around censorship, because it absolutely would not have gotten through CCP censorship. It has (fake) kissing, no way that would get through. 'Stay With Me' got through because it doesn't have that.
If you look at how the law banning gay online content was written, and then the weibo policy that followed it, it's obvious that no, they're not going to allow gay content that is perverted just to give gay people a bad reputation. Perverted content is exactly what they're trying to ban with this law. The law exists to prevent young women from becoming 'rotten girls'. Official Chinese communication mentions 腐女 fujoshis, 耽美 BL, and the 本子 smut they draw by name, all in slang that you'd only know about if you were specifically targeting the fujoshi demographic. Gay people in China are still allowed to be openly gay on social media. What's not allowed is BL. (And large scale organizing of any kind is also not allowed, whether queer or otherwise.)
The BL content that early Chinese fujoshis wrote was pretty rapey and abusive and taboo, and if you look at for example the stuff MAME wrote at that time, that issue wasn't exclusive to China. The explosive popularity of the first 'Addicted' show in 2016 was why the law banning gay webseries got made. It wasn't allowed to finish airing. 2016 Addicted is rapey as hell (if you want to see for yourself, watch episode 11). If the CCP wanted to portray gay people as perverted and dangerous, they could've just let that finish airing.
The real question is, why did Thai BL become so much more progressive over the years while Chinese BL stayed stuck at romanticizing abuse and incest? And the answer is that BL was mainstreamed in Thailand, while it remained niche and illegal in China. Thai BL had to become palatable to a wider audience, while Chinese BL stayed within a very specific niche that knew they were already breaking the law by writing BL at all, so eh, might as well break all social norms while we're at it I guess.
As for why Taiwanese BL series have a bunch of incest (unknown, crossing the line, the on1y one, close to you) and age-gaps (kiseki: dear to me, make our days count, right or wrong), I'm sure Taiwanese BL writers also read mainland Chinese BL and get influenced like that.
I've heard 'nad' used in quite a few Thai sentences by now, and I think it should've been translated to 'arrange', as in 'arrange a meeting with Kim for me'.
In thai grammar it's a very short construction, much shorter than in English. Like 'please nad Kim' = 'please arrange an appointment with Kim', 'nad tonight' = 'arrange it for tonight' and 'alright where do I nad that, your condo?'