Posts Tagged “walmart”

[via Digg]
According to Consumerist, Wal-Mart and Target had listings on their websites today for volumes 1 and 3 of the “Yaoi Hentai” series. (Consumerist is part of the snarky Gawker Media family of blogs.) When the blog asked Wal-Mart about it, the response was that the titles “erroneously appeared [on the site] due to an isolated system filtering issue”. Unfortunately for their PR team, the blog later found more explicit titles for sale.

This doesn’t make me roll my eyes as much as hearing a mother complain about suggestive manga in libraries but it still makes me a little uneasy about the current perception of yaoi/yuri/erotic manga among ordinary Americans. Personally, I’m fine with it being sold in stores as long as they are not sold to minors - even the covers of Yaoi Hentai clearly say “Absolutely Not For Children”. These would definitely be wrapped in any brick-and-mortar bookstore and it seems very unlikely that manga of this ilk is actually on  shelves at “big box” stores. Still, if it’s possible for a teenager to use a gift card and purchase yaoi manga through an online retailer, it should be a concern and the retailers should somehow, upon checkout, verify the purchasers’ ages or simply not stock explicit material at all.

As of this post, the story has been dugg 1,578 times and one commenter was smart enough to point out that the title of the story - “Walmart.com and Target.com Sell Anime Porn” - is misleading as the products in question are manga (i.e. non-moving pictures). Wal-Mart’s image of a family-friendly store may be affected by this a little bit but not a lot if this story stays out of the mainstream press. Anyway, I doubt that Kevin and Alex will discuss this on Diggnation but if it does happen to come up, I’ll be sure to post a clip with added commentary.