According to Author, Women Like Manga of Suffering Lolis
I don’t know if you’ve been following the discussion happening on English Twitter, but there’s been a lot of controversy around LOLIS, with one side wanting to separate reality from fiction and the other saying that if you like lolis you’re automatically a “PDF” (you know what word).
Then a tweet went viral on the Japanese side of the internet, with 400,000 views, from someone saying that 15 years ago they heard from an author who drew manga of lolis in difficult situations that he received a lot of feedback from women.
He started by saying:
“This is something I heard from an adult manga artist who usually draws abusive loli manga. He said that almost all feedback he gets for sad loli erotic manga comes from women, so I really think this trend exists. I also like erotic manga where lolis go through terrible situations.”
If you didn’t understand, he’s referring to manga where lolis go through very bad situations—really heavy content—and for some reason women make up a good portion of the audience.
However, there’s an important detail: this happened 15 years ago, and he’s referring to authors receiving letters. It’s generally agreed that people who send letters to authors are almost always women, since men usually don’t send letters.
“At the time, I also wrote a lot on Twitter and blogs things like ‘this erotic manga is so exciting!!’, so there are women like that too, and artists really pay attention to it. Not everyone sees it, but they do look at it a lot.”
Apparently, it’s common knowledge that 15 years ago there was a notable number of women who enjoyed heavy loli manga. Let’s look at reactions:
Actually, that’s slightly incorrect: feedback letters almost only come from women. Whether it’s for male or female audiences, I’ve never received letters from men. Reviews, however, come from both.
So that means there are female readers of LO? (referring to Comic LO)
I think this doesn’t mean there are many women in this space, but rather that people who recognize themselves as a minority within a minority express gratitude for finding these rare works.
Men usually prefer consensual content and tend to prefer large breasts over loli body types, so female fans are more likely to gather around abuse/loli eroguro authors.
The opposite also happens: in BL works I’ve been involved with, feedback came from male readers. Demand for erotic content is far more diverse than people think.
A certain gekiga-style erotic manga is known for having many female fans.
This is also somewhat common among people with sexual trauma. For example, I—who now create eroguro—was exposed to things like “Megastore H” and tentacle fantasies through women. On X it’s often portrayed as a gender war, but most of my unusual fetishes came from women.
I write shota ero, but all readers who engage with my work (commenting) are men! Why…!?
Torture is fine, but abuse… I don’t know, not for me.
This is actually quite true. A long time ago I ran an “erotic video compilation” site, and only in the most hardcore and bizarre category did analytics show about 10–20% female users. Maybe they were there more out of curiosity than for sex itself…