Discussion Series Topic #12: What's with the "genderized" genres?

[Floating_Sakura]

How effective is "genderized" genres? Why divide genres by gender, even?

We here, at MJ spend hours arguing among ourselves in the staff what a specific genre is for a series (of course, Neosam always wins). As you may know, the genre in the Japanese manga industry divides their series by target audience, such as shounen (for boys), shoujo (for girls), seinen (for young men) and josei (for women). Each manga magazine is then defined to which targeted audience it aims for. Isn't that a bit overtly stereotyping on which gender will like what?

The debate in the staff started a few days ago, when anitra saw the press release for Sweatdrops Studio (the one about anthology for boys = blue, girls = pink), and was a little unhappy (angry, even?) that they have to make a point to distinguish manga for gender (even for OEL titles). I agree with her. For example, I love seinen manga! My favorite manga magazines are Cheese, Yuri-hime, Comic High, Young Jump and Afternoon (See the trend there!? Beside Cheese and Yuri-hime, which are aim toward female, the other three are seinen magazines!). Am I the only exception? At least anitra has agreed that she loves seinen manga also!

In fact, if you recalled something we reported back in April on girl's favorite manga magazine, the #1 manga magazine for girls is actually Shounen Jump! Is it just us female who are getting more feminist and repelling the traditional shoujo genre? Apparently not! I woke up this morning to find Pata in Irresponsible Picture complaining about the same thing that we've been debating heatedly about over at MJ staff forum the last few days! I quote from his post, titled "My Penis Invalidates My Enjoyment of Nodame Cantabile":

Most English-speakers are used to the idea of "genre" being based on what a story is about, not who it's for, and so when they encounter the Japanese words for BOY, GIRL, MAN, WOMAN being used to refer to entire subsets of comics, they mistake it for the kind of labels that they're used to (adventure, comedy, drama, horror, historical, mystery, etc.) and ... well ... it makes them stupid. I know it made me stupid for a while until I figured my shit out.

Personally, I find the target-audience system rather insulting to my tastes because Japan's idea of What Males Will Like doesn't always match what I actually like, and I am often enjoying stories from the What Females Will Like section. What kind of implied message is this that "Oh, so-and-so manga is not for you because you have a penis," or vice versa? Tell me what's in the story, not who it's for, and I will let my brain decide if I like it, not my sexual organ.

Take another example, the other heated debate around the area recently is the yuri topic over at ANN's forum, and what does yuri mean. I would like to point out that yuri are not targeted just for girls, we have magazines like Yuri-hime, which is targeted for girls, and Shoujo Sect, targeted for young men. While Yuri-hime specialized on very cute shoujo-ai series, Shoujo Sect specialized on erotic yuri series (think your typical lesbian porn, where the ultimate goal of each character is to fuck each other; check out chapter 1 and 2 scanlation at otenba).

So now, my question to you, how effective is this "targeted audience" system? How do you think the Japanese formulate these "shounen," shoujo," "seinen," or "josei" genre? Why bother doing that, even? Does the genre the Japanese describe always suits your taste? Which one does and does not? For those that don't fit in, why did you think that happened?

Edited: AshM informed me that Shoujo Sect is not a magazine, but a title serializes in Comic Megastore (a erotic manga magazine). Uh, don't know if this matters or change the discussion, but keep going... XD