I'm genuinely wondering why are there so many mangas about lesbian prostitution, it can't be such a common practice can it? Maybe it's a case of mangakas copying each other to death?
I've been following the genre for a while now, and I think this trend has really picked up around 2020, with Asumi-chan being a big trend setter. There have been standout works long before that, like Shuninta's Not for Sale, but the sheer volume has grown a lot in the 2020s. I cannot prove a definitive link, but I also believe Nagata Kabi's debut in 2016 has broken a lot of walls around this topic (among others), too.
As for why, I think it doesn't have a single cause. What I can say is that 20 years ago, School life often seemed like the only major setting in the yuri genre, and it makes sense that as the audience who liked that back then grew older, they'd want more yuri featuring grown-ups. Hence the contemporaneous growth of Office lady yuri and, to a lesser degree, Idol yuri.
Getting into more speculative topics, while we in the West tend to focus on sexuality and romance, yuri as a genre has always had a strong undercurrent of female solidarity and empowerment, and I have read arguments that the latter have been the entire point from the start. The so-called "oldest profession", meanwhile, has always been a predominantly patriarchal institute, so reclaiming it entirely for women, if only in romance fiction, would align with the genre's origins and overall trajectory.
last edited at Sep 6, 2026 10:13AM