A Brief History Of The Yaoi Paddle
Although I routinely visit the hentai porn mines to return with spanking artwork for this audience, I am not otherwise well-plugged-in to greater anime fandom and culture. That’s the only explanation I can offer for how I missed the entire Yaoi paddle phenomenon, back in the aughts when it was a thing. (In truth, I didn’t quite miss it entirely; there’s one post with a photo from a con, and my readers explained what was going on. But, mysteriously, I never followed up.)
Yaoi, apparently, is pronounced “Yowie!” which seems fitting enough. On one level, it’s the name of an entire genre of female-gaze male/male romance manga. How it came to be wood-burned on paddles that sold like hotcakes at anime conventions? That’s a somewhat complex and murky story, but the video above includes footage of people lining up to get spanked with the things. So much so, apparently, that before long the cons had to ban yaoi paddles, due to attendees with a primitive (or entirely missing) notion of consent having taken to smacking cosplaying strangers who were not into it. And that, boys and girls, is why we can’t have nice things, you understand?
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I skimmed through this video but simply don’t have enough interest in Hentai or these conventions to watch it from beginning to end. It was interesting to finally find out where the Yaoi paddles came from (oddly enough, I always pronounced it “Yowie!” in my mind thinking it was a good joke, not knowing that’s how it was actually pronounced! (Or that it had homosexual connotations). Honestly, I always considered the Yaoi paddles to be a nuisance that interfered with my search for good real-life paddling videos – I can’t tell you how many times a search would turn up endless nonsense with these things instead of good solid swats with “regulation” fraternity/sorority paddles.
The design was another annoyance to me: the guy who made the first Yaoi paddle used a canoe paddle instead of a fraternity/sorority paddle for his model apparently out of ignorance, and this was a big mistake as the Yaoi/canoe paddle is too long, too heavy, and too awkward to function as a good spanking paddle. I’m glad these things are pretty much history now as they really contributed practically nothing to the spanko world and simply got in the way when doing internet searches.
I hear what you’re saying, but quite apart from my spanking interests I have a bit of an interest in cultural history and its preservation, especially ephemeral stuff like fads and crazes. So for me, this was interesting notwithstanding that its spanking-fetish contribution might be kinda minimal.
“yowie” isn’t quite right.
I’m simplifying a bit (and it’s been a long time since I took Japanese classes) but basically Japanese phonetics is composed of a set of syllables, each of which is either a vowel or a consonant-vowel (or a syllable-length “n” consonant).
There’s also a small “tsu” っ indicating a glottal stop and a small “ya” ゃ, “yu”ゅ and “yo” ょappended to other syllables, mostly the ones ending in “i” to make a single-syllable dipthong (e.g. the Japanese word for meow, “nya” is a “ni” followed by a small “ya” – different from a “ni” followed by a full-sized “ya” which would be two syllables, “niya” instead of a single-syllable “nya”)
Double vowels (or o followed by u) indicate the same sound but for a longer duration, e.g ooki (kanji 大き, hiragana おおき) is actually two “o” syllables (pronounced like “oh”) followed by a “ki” syllable (pronounced like “key”). So rather than sounding like “ooh key” it’s more like “ohh key”.
With all that out of the way, back to yaoi. (やおい)
Yaoi = “ya” や “o” お “i” い where the “ya” is kind of close to “yah”, the “o” is pronounced like “oh”, and the “i” is pronounced like “ee”. Yah-oh-ee, but said all together fairly quickly.
If you say it really fast, maybe it kind of sounds like “yowie” ^_^