Bells said:
Wow, you're still talking about me?
Well, you know, it's part of the whole thing. The indefensible always want to be on offense.
And I do sometimes wonder if the whole thing about men trying to justify rape culture is a matter of jealousy. Remember, when they're imagining people hitting on them relentlessly, they're not imagining a bunch of dudes trying to penetrate them.
I actually had a conversation today in which I recalled an old Sciforums discussion, when one of our associates and I disputed something about how the world sees men and women, and he had some trouble comprehending how the difference between penetrating and being penetrated could possibly be relevant to anything.
And you know that role reversal video Trippy posted? Yeah, a friend sent me that link earlier today; that's what dredged up the memory. Because as I was watching it all I could think was, "Well, they'll miss the point, anyway." Because, you know, why would the difference between putting your dick into someone and having someone put their dick into you be relevant to anything having to do with men, women, and sexual exploitation?
And that is the comfort of bullying people who aren't like oneself. I think back to juvenile locker room talk, stuff about fucking a woman 'til she can't walk, and all that. Most of those guys will never experience someone trying to fuck them until they can't walk. And this sort of talk was generally considered inappropriate because it used profane language, and, you know, you're not supposed to kiss and tell, and all that. The idea, even into the 1990s, that it was inappropriate to want to fuck a woman to incapacity? That part was just fine, apparently.
And, you know, I can't speak specifically on Japanese psychoanthropology, but in the U.S., there is a clear consumption disparity between shōnen and shōjo. (The most prominent shōnen in the U.S., as far as I can tell, is
Bleach in which some of the best fighters in the world just happen to be tall, blonde Japanese women with breasts larger than their heads.) The difference in terminology, generally speaking, is that shōnen is aimed at a young male audience, while shōjo targets young females.
The next step up seems to be
ecchi, which is just weird to Western eyes. The basic pretense is to push as far as you can, and load up on juvenile sex jokes. It's kind of hard to understand, but perhaps it is best to simply offer the detail that a female character is often defined by her panties. I forget the exact code, but it has to do with plain white, dots or flowers, stripes, and solid colors. And ecchi also combines with an apparent subgenre designated
harem ecchi, in which some hapless dude ends up with a number of powerful, sexy women clamoring for his affection. And it's hard to explain the scenes in which Minato's sekirei "wives" argue over primacy, especially when Kusano (#108, the child) demands to be the one allowed to sleep in his bed. (And, yes, #6 is male; that was unexpected, though it probably shouldn't be; his lack of an Ashikabi was literally killing him, and why would his heart not move in that circumstance for the one who wasn't going to exploit him?)
There does exist a female version of ecchi, creatively designated
reverse ecchi. As with shōjo, it doesn't match the sales of its male-targeting primary genre.
I have no idea if there is a reverse hentai, or if the one genre is all-encompassing; I do not wish to find out. Hentai is only interesting insofar as we might wonder who would want to spend that much time depicting a giant monster raping women with its tentacles, and so on—I've never seen a guy buggered by a crossbreed of a Power Ranger, Transformer, and Cthulhu, or abandoned a scene in which he's about to take five dogs in the ass. My critical opinion is that hentai is best left to itself in hopes that it leaves everyone else alone. It is possible to do good ecchi, and I admit the scene in
Mahoromatic when Mahoro gets inexplicably jealous and delivers a powerful, cybernetic uppercut to Saori's left exponentially outsized left breast caught me by surprise, and quite literally had me "rotfl". (Note: Ecchi is best consumed in concert with one's body weight in fine hashish.)
It is unclear how much we might read into the disparity by observing the suggestion that
FLCL qualifies as reverse ecchi; Minamori has every appearance of rivalry, loathing Mamimi and standing off in one scene against Haruko, and emerging in the end as the last girl standing, the next in line to attempt to control Naota with her feminine wiles. (Although I just accidentally learned something about the plot structure by launching the third episode in the wrong player; the background interview subtitles came up, and yes, there is a harem ecchi aspect to the narrative insofar as the first three episodes deal with Haruko, Mamimi, and Minamori respectively. And episode three always stood out as unusual for its focus on Minamori, but is also possibly the best of the six.)
And all of this useless detail about the genres is only to eventually suggest there is a reason for the consumption disparity. To wit, the best line Stephen King ever wrote came in
Pet Sematary, when he described an erect penis as looking like "Bozo the Clown on a pogo stick". That was one of his attempts to view things from a female perspective.
But it seems nearly undeniable that, generally speaking, men and women view sexual issues differently. Women are a statistical majority; if all about sex and sexuality were equal, shōjo and reverse ecchi should outsell their masculine-oriented counterparts. And while it's true that there are a small handful of shōjo studios in Japan, their market presence in the U.S. is next to nothing.
In life, I admit, even the most frequently aroused women I knew were ... um ... well, I have yet to meet a woman who isn't a porn star with so voracious a sexual appetite.
And it seems that this difference in how men and women view sexual issues is lacking from the justifications and defenses of street harassment. And by lacking, I don't mean the guys just don't seem to comprehend it; rather, they seem unable to acknowledge that it exists.
And it often seems consistent. No male IPA, for instance, is ever going to have to fend off that many rape attempts in his life. Nor will he have to face so much harassment everywhere he goes. So while we run around clueless about the magnitude and frequency of sexual harassment, it seems many are unable to acknowledge even the mere possibility that women just don't see these things the same way.
Then again, it's not clear that they would care even if they were capable of recognizing the differences.
