eBay recently announced a series of new restrictions prohibiting the sale of sexually explicit adult content, and the new policy specifically targets anime and manga. The list of newly prohibited items includes "sexually explicit anime, comics, books, animation, manga, hentai, [and] yaoi." The specific mention of yaoi could be a particular cause for concern, as the history of online censorship shows that gay content is often targeted more harshly than straight content.
SuBLime, Viz Media's yaoi and Boys Love imprint, has tweeted about the news disapprovingly. Older otaku have been reminiscing about how, in the early 2000s, eBay was one of the easiest ways to officially acquire doujinshi in the West. Likewise, many people are being reminded of Tumblr's adult content purge in 2018, which was widely viewed as disproportionately hurting the site's LGBTQ+ community.
Curiously, eBay's new rules do not specifically list yuri, the lesbian equivalent of yaoi, as restricted. The more charitable read of this discrepancy is the difference in how these labels are commonly used; yuri is used to refer to a wide range of lesbian manga from all-ages romance to pornography, while some distinguish between "yaoi" as more explicitly sexual adult content and "Boys Love" as a broader category. The less charitable read is that this statement reflects an all-too-common double-standard of homophobes, wherein gay men are treated as dangerous, but lesbians are treated like they don't even exist.
eBay's policy does make an exception for certain adult magazines and books "that generally do not contain sexually explicit content," which can be sold on eBay so long as there isn't nudity shown in the listing. Playboy is given as an example of the type of adult magazine which is still allowed on eBay. Magazines aimed at gay men such as Playguy and BUTT are also counted under this exception, so there's at least some attempt to avoid homophobic double standards.
However, it's unclear whether a yaoi manga with a similar balance of eroticism and literary value would be approved for eBay or not. So even if there's not an explicitly homophobic double standard, there seems to be a double standard against anime and manga based on the way the rules are written. It would be an outrage if books labeled "yaoi" that aren't even pornographic start getting blanket-banned.
Enforcement of the new policy begins on June 15, so if by chance there's any rare yaoi on eBay that you can't find anywhere else and have to purchase, you should probably make your bids now before such items risk being taken down. If you were regularly shopping for yaoi and/or hentai on eBay, you're going to have to look for other sites you can use. While some stuff might sneak by the new censorship standards (plenty snuck by on Tumblr as well), it's still not a hospitable environment to that market.
American culture's relationship with sexual content is as fraught as ever. Today, sites like OnlyFans are mainstreaming pornographic material, but tech companies are growing ever more restrictive in terms of sexually explicit content. At the same time as eBay is announcing its new rules, Apple and Epic Games are in court fighting over the fate of adult games on itch.io. Censorship standards are always revealing of cultural biases and prejudices. While one can't precisely say what was meant by eBay specifically banning yaoi from its marketplace, it's not hard to draw many negative conclusions.
