Male Abuse Stuff

What is MAS*?

Recently, over at Boys On Boys on Film, the monthly round of reviews were posted of new manga releases, and one of the reviewers notes, correctly, that Amazon touts BeBeautiful’s release of Midaresomenishi: A Legend of Samurai Love as something like a ‘great starter for yaoi manga readers’. 0_0. I couldn’t disagree more, and neither could the reviewer! While Midare is one of my FAVORITE works by Kodaka, it’s certainly not something you want to give a reader that’s never read BL. 0_o. There are themes in Japanese BL and American m/m erotica that aren’t easily defined as ‘BDSM-kink’. Sure, each genre has its own audience for strict BDSM and rape-fiction/manga, but when the actual pull of the work is the ‘abusive relationship’ that includes the physical scenes and continued exploration of each character involved, than that’s what many of us like to consider, MAS, or Male Abuse Stuff.

Once active online, MAS-zine, defined their magazines works as, Men loving men fiction with dark elements in various genres: fantasy, science fiction, historical, contemporary, yaoi and original slash. No, it’s not outright rape manga, and NCS [non-consensual sex] fiction. There’s got to be plot in there, something more than fleeting series of NON-CON or BDSM scenes. It’s easy to toss in most MAS themes with bondage manga and NCS [rape] works; but MAS is more than just scene-of-the-abuse. It’s the actual cycle of abuse that’s dramatized, it’s impact on victims, the thrill it gives perps, and what makes those perps do what they do, and victims suffering after the fact. It’s all delicious angst.

Some great examples of MAS themes in film, are works like Brett C. Leonard’s Jailbait, or Justin Davies and Dean Francis’s short film Boys Grammar [Amazon]. For fans of Oz, the entire Beecher/Keller plotline [mainly Seasons 3 & 4] was heavenly MAS; while David Jacobson’s film Dahmer was just a fluid example of pure-power psychological MAS. One of the hottest MAS television exploits came from writer Linda LaPlaca, and was depicted in Prime Suspect 3; male abuse victims, dead male hustlers, troubled trannies…its MAS overload, simmered to perfection.

In BL from Japan, titles touting MAS whilst avoiding straight out Kink, include Motoni Moduru’s Rika the Breeder, or Tori Maia’s legendary Sadistic Boy [her No Tachi series is about BDSM, and I tend to discount it here for that reason, despite one of it’s relationships being very MASish]. Recently licensed titles like Kodaka’s Midare Someneshi and Minami Megumi’s Pleasure Dome collection, are cool examples of MASish manga, as is, to a less sexual degree, The Judged by Akira Honma. There’s many more that don’t cross the line into flat out abuse for the sake of seeing the abused scene, those books that display what I call MAS, tend to fall into Aestheticism’s June Cat Project under Sick and Twisted Relationships. My own works not withstanding [Iris Print chose to publish Only Words, rather than other things I’ve submitted, though many fen come to expect my stories to revolve around, disturbing relationships…>.> ] in the original menslove scene, my favorite author will always be Juxian Tang, the undisputed master of original MAS!

Remember, MAS themes aren’t for everyone; sometimes it’s easier to just read the hack/slash rape some publishers like to extol as ‘hot yaoi’, but that’s not MAS…there’s nothing there going beyond the physical scene played out before you—there’s no plot in place exploring the psychological aspects of victim or victimizer, no showcase of haunting emotions and sexual or abusive crimes being perpetrated —those scenes are there, sure, required only to set up the illicit angst MAS fans actually long for. It’s the aspects and dynamics within a cycle of an ‘abusive situation’, which make MAS a cut above and slightly to the left, of flat out rape and or BDSM.

*My opinion only BTW – some of you Crat-criticalmass-honey’s [and you know who you are] are welcomed to OD on how wrong you think I am, in your own LJ’s, forums, and Mini-coms; without interference from me. ~shizzat.