Loving the love of boys: Motives for consuming yaoi media

Aug 20, 2026

The study investigates why individuals consume yaoi, a Japanese media subgenre centered on romantic love between two men, often with explicit sexual content. Using an online survey of 724 yaoi consumers, the research applies the Yaoi Consumption Motives Questionnaire (YCMQ) and compares confirmatory factor models. Results show a nine-motive bi-factor structure fits better than competing ten- and second-order alternatives. The 31-item YCMQ demonstrates strong psychometric qualities including factor structure, internal consistency, and measurement invariance, supporting its use for assessing motives.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Method and Measures

Results and Psychometric Evaluation

Discussion and Implications

OPEN ACCESS Citation: Zsila ÂA, Pagliassotti D, UrbÂan R, Orosz G, KirÂaly O, Demetrovics Z (2018) Loving the love of boys: Motives for consuming yaoi media. PLoSONE 13(6): e0198895 . [https://doi.org/10.1371/](https://doi.org/10.1371/)[ ](https://doi.org/10.1371/)[journal.pone.0198895](journal.pone.0198895) Editor: Francesca Chiesi, University of Florence, ITALY Received: September 15, 2017 Accepted: May 28, 2018 Published: June 14, 2018 Copyright: © 2018 Zsila et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Data from this study are available upon request due to ethical restrictions. More specifically, participants of this study had been informed that the research team provides confidentiality and does not reveal data to third parties. Furthermore, the dataset contains sensitive information about participants (e.g., experience of sexual harassment, sexual behaviors, psychoactive substance use) . Due to these reasons, the Ethics Committee of EoÈtvoÈs LorÂand University, Faculty of Education and Psychology, was unable to approve sharing collected data publicly. Interested researchers can contact RESEARCH ARTICLE Loving the love of boys: Motives for consuming yaoi media ÂAgnes Zsila1,2 *, Dru Pagliassotti3, RÂobert UrbÂan1, GÂabor Orosz1,4, Orsolya KirÂaly1, Zsolt Demetrovics1 1 Institute of Psychology, ELTE EÈotvÈos LorÂand University, Budapest, Hungary, 2 Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE EÈotvÈos LorÂand University, Budapest, Hungary, 3 California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, California, United States of America, 4 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary * [zsila.agnes@ppk.elte.hu](zsila.agnes@ppk.elte.hu) Abstract In recent years, yaoi has been increasingly popular among youth interested in Japanese media such as anime and manga. Yaoi is defined as commercial and fan-created media that thematically focus on the romantic love between two men, often in a sexually explicit way. Despite the widespread popularity of this Japanese subgenre, there is a lack of empirical studies on the motives for consuming yaoi media that analyze the full range of motives using reliable research methods. The present study aimed to explore and operationalize the motives for yaoi media consumption based on previous qualitative research (Pagliassotti, 2008) . Using an online survey, 724 yaoi consumers (58% male; Mage = 30.1 years, SD = 10.4) completed the Yaoi Consumption Motives Questionnaire (YCMQ) . According to confirmatory factor analyses, the bi-factor model of nine motives yielded closer fit to the data than the theoretically proposed, first-order ten-factor model and a second-order nine-factor model. The nine-factor YCMQ demonstrated strong psychometric properties in terms of factor structure, internal consistency, and measurement invariance. These results indicate that the 31-item YCMQ is an appropriate instrument to assess individuals' motives for consuming yaoi media. Introduction Japanese media (e.g., anime, manga) have been increasingly popular over the past two decades in the United States and several European countries [ 1] . Corresponding with this expansion, yaoi materials have attracted increasingly widespread interest among young women. Yaoi and boys' love (BL) are umbrella terms for commercial and fan-created Japanese media (e.g., anime, comics, short stories, and artwork) that portray the romantic and erotic love between two men [ 1, 2] . Although yaoi is primarily targeted at young, heterosexual women, previous studies have found that bisexual and homosexual male and female enthusiasts also account fora considerable proportion of yaoi viewers/readers [3] . Yaoi viewers and

FAQs

What is the main goal of the study?

To explore and operationalize motives for consuming yaoi media using empirical methods based on prior qualitative work.

How was participants’ motive structure assessed?

Through an online survey of 724 yaoi consumers using the Yaoi Consumption Motives Questionnaire (YCMQ), followed by confirmatory factor analyses.

What did the study conclude about the YCMQ?

The nine-motive model fit best, and the 31-item YCMQ showed strong psychometric properties, including internal consistency and measurement invariance.

Aug 20, 2026

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