Drink #004: The Pink Lady,
Invasion of the Beautiful Boys
Various people start watching the latest show for manly men who live and fight for manly things. They notice the men in this show for guys are pretty handsome. Some of them are even gorgeous. Parts of audience cheers with delight, most of them continue to watch without batting an eye, and the rest run to their computers to rant at the injustice perpetrated against them.
In this episode we begin to examine this phenomenon. Is there anything wrong with throwing some service to the females watching a show theoretically for guys? Also what makes the male fans go nuts over this phenomenon in the first place?
(Listen)
And now your helpful bartenders at The Speakeasy present your drink
The Pink Lady
*1 1/2 oz gin
*1 tsp grenadine syrup
*1 tsp light cream
*1 egg white
Shake ingredients with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and serve.
Reverse Thieves 
Interesting to go back and listen to this, since now that some time has passed since you decided to single out this topic and its detractor[s] for discussion (*cough*), we now are in the midst of actually seeing what the actual effect upon anime and manga has been as a result. Close as I can tell, it’s something like this:
What was nearly universally praised as a move towards readership diversification has resulted in the opposite effect with regards to titles produced. Turns out that the effects of “throwing some service to the females watching a show theoretically for guys” go in two directions, not one.
Go check in with all the smart people and they’ll all tell you the same thing: shojo and josei are in dire straits right now. They’re not looked upon with much critical regard, innovation has been impaired, and they don’t sell the figures they used to. The big-name creators have all moved over to try their hands at shonen and seinen. But just as you can’t go too full-on with the shonen insanity without risking alienation of that coveted female audience, so too can you not go full-bore with the female fanservice in a show for guys lest you lose those guys. Nothing can really rock the boat too far in either direction, so stuff ends up being engineered for the “average.”
It doesn’t necessarily make the resulting titles bad, but creativity is limited at the far endpoints. Now, if you want to see those dudes totally do it as the author clearly intended, then head on over to Comiket and buy the doujinshi. More and more of that stuff is coming from the authors themselves, as if to say “here’s the direction I want to take this in but they won’t let me publish.”