Good ol' Mainichi notes the progress of a shaky medium, namely non-pornographic yuri, in a magazine exclusively for yuri stories. I kinda find girl-on-girl nonsuccess hard to believe, and not just because yuri means "lily" and they took the chance to "gild the lily" in one of the biggest misquotes ever--IT IS TOO. My imaginary boner for Shakespeare aside, a quick search reveals there have indeed been more girl-on-girl anthologies before Comic Yuri Hime was born, though it's the first yuri quarterly aimed at men. Says editor-in-chief Seitaro Nakamura,

"Women are said to be so into Boy's Love comics because they're stories of romance between men in relationships of equality. In this day and age where women are probably the stronger sex, I think there are a lot of guys who have doubts about society's requirement for them to be manly. I think maybe these guys get some sort of therapeutic healing from the world of yuri, where they can look into the fantasy world of equal standing love between two women.

I hate to be a sophomoric cynic, but most of the yaoi fans of my acquaintance freely admit to being into it for more than male interpersonal dynamics; Nakamura does have a point in that men can probably find emotional escape here...but honestly, I'm not sure that's why the term yuri, like its sausage-y counterpart, has acquired an almost exclusively sexual connotation amongst most Western fans, or why it's not quite so damn loud at cons. (The next person to wave a SEME/UKE yaoi paddle at me dies in a fire.) Does anyone ever even use shounen/shoujo-ai to differentiate platonic or low-key same-sex romance anymore? Or have they been drowned in a bawdy flood of girly men and nymphomaniacal dickgirls?