It’s no mystery that a majority of M/M romance readers and writers seem to be women. For some reason I found myself thinking about this today as I was toodling around on Twitter.

My gateway drug? Manga – specifically yaoi and boys’ love manga. I don’t read it as much as I used to, but I still have some favorite mangaka whose work I follow in scanlation and whose books I buy when they are released in licensed English-language versions – Yaya Sakuragi, Hyouta Fujiyama, and Hinako Takanaga are all in my top 5. At one point I was even proofreading and editing for a yaoi scanlation site – I was working from home and had some down-time during the day. Also, the clumsy grammar and incorrect use of homophones in many of the translations was driving me nuts – I had to do my bit!

Just like here in the US, boys’ love and yaoi in Japan are mainly read by women. I don’t know why so many people find this strange – no one bats an eye about men getting off on lesbian porn. Boooo double standards!

Anyway, if anyone out there is interested in dipping their toe in the manga waters – yaoi, boys’ love, straight romance, or giant robots – here’s a great place to start: http://www.mangaupdates.com/releases.html. You can set up search criteria, and when new manga matching your choices shows up on the daily releases list it will be highlighted. You can even keep track of which chapters you’ve read. If you enjoy something, you can go to that mangaka’s author page and find a list of their other titles, and those that match your search criteria will be highlighted there as well!