Non-Western Sexuality Comes to the U.S.

CONTEMPORARY
SEXUALITY
March 2005
Vol. 39, No. 3
The International Resource for Educators, Researchers and Therapists
Non-Western
Sexuality
Comes to the
U.S.: A Crash
Course in
Manga and
Anime for
Sexologists
by Martha
Cornog, MA, MS
and Timothy
Perper, PhD
Indeed, manga comprise about 35-40 percent of
Japan's total print output and are drawn and
widely read by men and women of all ages
(Gravett, 2004, ch. 1). Translations began migrating into this
country
throughout the
1990s, but the
U.S. market
soared in the
past five years,
with consumers
approaching
50 percent
female (Reid,
Manga seem
2004). Tbis
similar to
startlingly
American
rapid rise in
comics but are
American
rooted in
sales has
Japanese art
Haruka, also known as Sailor Uranus, is dual gendered. From
prompted
and history.
Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon, vol. 8, p. 73, (c) 2000 Mixx
favorable
Aesthetic,
Entertainment. Reprinted courtesy of TOKYOPOP,
articles in
www.tokyopop.com.
sexual, and
Time and tbe
gender-ideological premises differ markedly from what
New York Times (Arnold, 2004; Walker, 2004).
Americans may think is natural or universal — or
But simultaneously manga and its animated
even Japanese. Much manga deals openly witb sexcounterpart ("anime") have been attacked for
uality in romantic comedy tbrough serious drama,
reputed misogyny and violence (Allison. 1996;
and although manga for children exist, manga are
KristotT, 1995). So Bob's question is of
not perceived in Japan as "kiddie kartoons."
considerable interest.
In the late 1990s, our sexologist colleague Bob
Francoeur dropped some Japanese comics
("manga") on our kitchen table. His daughter had
married a comics shop owner, and Bob asked us
what we
thought of Oh
My Goddess!
and Ogenki
Clinic. And
thereby bangs
quite a tale
(Perper &
Cornog, 2002,
2004).
continued on page 4
Inside
Executive Director's Notes
President's Column
Quick Hits: Sex in the News
News of Members
AASECT's Offices Have Moved!
2
3
7
10
Our new address: AASECT, P.O. Box 1960,
Ashland, VA 23005-1960
Oitr new phone number: (804) 752-0026
Our new fax number: (804) 752-0056
NonWestern
sexuality
comes to
the U.S.
continued
from page 1
From the outset, our media-derived expectations of
mayhem and misogyny were confounded. Oh My
Goddess! turned out to be a warmly funny love comedy about three beautiful, powerful goddesses
and a young man who loves one of them, whereas
Ogenki Clinic is an explicit and wildly funny
send-up of sex therapy. Criticisms of manga
seemed misplaced, leaving a serious gap in our
professional knowledge of this medium.
Eascinated, we bought more titles and now own
over 400 series comprising some 150,000 pages.
Darien are explicitly lovers — and when she marries him at the end. she is pregnant.
So manga and anime are hardly irrelevant to us as
sexuality professionals. Young Americans are
seeing portrayals of sex and gender that are quite
different from what their parents probably saw.
Indeed, the appeal of manga and anime, sexual and
nonsexual, lies to a large extent in their "otherness." Here are the major departures from U.S.—
largely Christian — sexual traditions.
An especially famous success
in America has been Sailor
Moon, a worldwide cultural
icon for young women
grounded in a manga and
anime series from artist Naoko
Takeuchi. Sailor Moon is a
high school girl who discovers, initially to her dismay and
later to her gleeful enjoyment,
that she is a superpowered
heroine destined to save the
universe — assisted by her
Sailor Scout girlfriends and
boyfriend Darien. When
Takeuchi created Sailor Moon
in 1992, she did not expect it
to become so popular, but the
series won millions of fans for
This girl-dragon romance is an erotic retelling of a legend that the
its portrayal of a young
Chinese emperor Kao Tsu (a.k.a. Liu Pang and, in Japanese, Ryo Ho)
superheroine team. What stood was born from a love affair between a mortal woman and a dragon.
out was Sailor Moon > strongArtwork (c) 1996 Hiroyuki Utatane; reproduced from the Eros Comix
"MangErotJca" graphic novel edition Countdown: Sex-Bombs (1996)
ly plotted action, with fight
sequences, rescues, an empha- with permission from Eros Comix, www.eroscomix.com.
sis on feelings and relationships, some sexy romance, all woven around Sailor
1. Romance, love, nudity (often nonsexual), and
Moon's growing awareness of her life's mission.
sex-related content can be found in many manga,
Moreover, the graphics are vivid,
although explicit sexual depictions are reserved
colorful, and lush.
for manga for adults. Sometimes sex is portrayed
At first. Sailor Moon's world seems recognizably
heteronormative. She has a distinctly male
boyfriend, and there are some cute guys in the
story. Yet nearly all the heroes and villains are
female. The plot includes several lesbian relationships, characters who convert between female and
male (see illustration, page 1), crossdressing, and
(in the anime) female nudity. None of the episodes
are explicitly sexual, and neither nipples nor pubic
hair ever appear. But by volume 18 of the manga,
when Sailor Moon is about 20 years old, she and
Contemporary Sexuality www.aasect.org
as situationally undesirable, but because Japan
lacks the Eurocentric Christian notion of sex as
polluting or dangerous, most manga present sex
as physically and emotionally desirable for men
and especially for women. Sexual depictions may
concern just about any activity you might imagine: garden-variety intercourse, oral sex. anal
sex, male-male sex, woman-woman sex, sex parties, adultery, incest, bestiality, and
personified penises.
There are also forms of sex you probably haven't
imagined: quasi-mystical virtual union in cyberspace,
sex with dragons (see illustration, previous page) or
prematurely ejaculating demons, sex with mermaids.,
itinerant sex workers in Meiji Japan, and sex between
fairies and insects {Ghost in (he Shell, "Ryu Ho" in
Countdown: Sex-Bombs, Misty Girl Extreme #4, Itazura
na Kanajo, Femme Kabuki, Bondage Fairies). "Tentacle
sex" has become infamous, in which demons with
multiple penises ravish women (Urotsukidoji).
Sometimes these women wreak considerable retributional damage on the demons {Demon Beast Invasion), but
tentacle sex is not always unwelcome — nor new. In
"The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife," Katsushika
Hokusai (1760-1849) painted a woman enraptured by
the loving caresses of two octopi.
2. Likewise, much gender-bending occurs in manga and
anime. Both may feature shii meni: biological women
with penises, not pre-operative male-to-female
transsexuals {Ogenki Clinic, "Sex Party" in Hot Tails
#2, Stainless Nighi). in another plot device, a male
unexpectedly falls under a magic spell that turns him
into a female {Cheeky Angel, Fulaha-kun Change!,
"Miss Keiichi" in Oh My Goddess!, Ranma 1/2, Your
and My Secret). Sometimes female characters can
convert into males {Sailor Moon anime) or pass as
males as part of the plot {Basara, Girl Got Game. Sailor
Moon manga). Men and women may both crossdress
{Cardcaptor Sahira, You're Under Arrest!). These
gender variations are deeply embedded in Japanese
traditions (Robertson, 1998).
A fascinating example of gender-bending is the
phenomenon variously termed "yaoi," "bishonen," and
"shonen-ai" (McHarry, 2003; Solomon, 2004). These
are stories of male-male love and (sometimes explicit)
sex, written by women for women readers — yaoi is not
written by gay men for other gay men. A nontrivial
market in Japan, yaoi has crossed into the U.S. (see
www.yaoicon.com). The closest U.S. equivalent is noncommercial "slash" fiction written by female fans about
homosexual romances between known characters, like
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (Salmon & Symons,
2004). However, yaoi exists in both fan and commercial
forms {Fake. Gravitation).
Manga and anime about female-female love drawn by
women for women are termed "yuri." The most famous
is probably Chiho Saito and Kunihiko Ikuhara's anime
film Revohilionaty Girl Vtena but others include
Stainless Night and Miyuki-chan in Wonderland (see
www.shoujo-ai.com).
Are these stories similar to American pornography,
cheaply made and exploitative? Herein lies a striking
feature of manga and anime. At their best, manga
portrayals of sexuality are powerful, vivid, and deeply
emotional. The sine qua non of pornography — which
we take as depersonalization of the individual and
reduction of personhood to genitalia — is strikingly
absent in much manga, especially translated manga.
Some romantic/erotic stories are drawn with great skill
and beauty, earning them a high place in the world's
erotic art (works by Hiroyuki Utatane., Toshiki Yui,
Iruka Banto, and Senno Knife). Throughout nearly all
the manga we have seen, sexuality is contextualized by
inventive narrative, strong characterization, and emotion. Manga are thus connected to Japanese aesthetic
traditions that accept sexuality as normal, and are not
connected to Western ideas of pornography.
3. What of rape and sexual assauU against women?
Some commentators on manga have claimed that manga
glorifies and condones rape, but in our collection, the
opposite is true. Rape and assault are nearly always
followed by tenible revenge on the rapists {Akira.
Drakuun, Twin Spark Girls. Lone Wolf and Cub). When
we eounted depictions of rape in our collection in 200!
(then 110 titles and 53,000 pages), we found that 92
percent featured violent resistance and/or revenge
against the rapists (Perper & Comog, 2002). These
stories model an unfrightened woman's power to fight
back, but are not for the faint-hearted and certainly not
for children. Revenge can rangefi^omthe woman
literally ripping the rapist's head off ("Dead Angela" in
Verotik 2) to stabbing him in the eye with a knife
{Mehyo). Genuine hatred for rape motivates these
stories.
4. Sex makes babies. A truism, of course, but offspring
rarely appear in Western erotic or romance plots.
However, romantic and erotic manga and anime ean
end with pregnancy and children {Maison Ikkoku,
Outlanders, Drakuun, Sailor Moon, Wicked City. Itazura
na Kanajo).
5. Sex can be funny. American stereotypes of Japan may
feature humorless geeky office workers ("salarymen")
and equally humorless servile women, but manga paints
a far more interesting picture. For an explicit vision of
sex therapy run satirically amok, Ogenki Clinic cannot
be surpassed. Romantic comedies like Oh My Goddess!,
Lum*Unisei Yalsura, Love Hina. and even the more
serious Maison Ikkoku abound in appealingly silly, farfetched situations — for example. Misty's total disgust
with the prematurely ejaculating demon she summoned
continued on page 6
Contemporary Sexuality Vol. 39, No. 3 March 2005
NonWestern
sexuality
comes to
the U.S.
continued
from page 5
one dark night (Misty Girl Extreme M). Even in
talking animal manga, sex can be funny and just a
bit out of control: when Michael the cat goes to a
feline hostess bar. he is swindled out of all his
money (What's Michael).
References
Allison, A. (1996). Permitted and prohibited
desires: Mothers, comics, and censorship in Japan.
Boulder, CO: Westview/HarperCollins.
What's the bottom line? First, anime and manga
represent living evidence of what nonwestem.
erotophilic, and female-positive sexuality can look
like. We sexologists can learn from manga and
anime to broaden our awareness and challenge our
assumptions.
Amold, A. (2004, Feb. 16). Drawing in the gals:
The explosion of Japanese comics for girls. 77mf,
p. 97.
Second, manga and anime provide ways to connect
with young people and initiate conversations about
sexuality. In class, assigned readings for younger
students could include selections from Cardcapior
Sakura. Saint Tail, and Sailor Moon. For older
students (18+). consider Dance Till Tomorrow,
Happy Mania. Paradise Kiss. Peach Girl, and
Futaba-kun Change! especially the episode where
Futaba — now a boy in girl form — learns that
"she" is menstruating. Stories that will appeal to
young adults include the bittersweet and more
realistic tales of Erica Sakurazawa and of Reiko
Momochi (Confidential Confessions), the
picaresque battle romances of Johji Manabe. and
the Jane-Austen-esque romantic drama Maison
Ikkoku. For sexology graduate students, manga
could make up a SAR between covers., beginning
with nonsexual crossdressing in Cardcaptor
Sakura. consensual intercourse in Sexcapades,
through the gritty realism of The Sex-Philes. and
ending with fairy/insect sex in Bondage Fairies.
Kristoff, N. D. (1995, Nov. 5). In Japan, brutal
comics for women. New York Times, Section 4, pp.
1.6.
Gravett. P. (2004). Manga: Sixty years of Japanese
comics. New York: Harper Design/HarperCollins.
McCarthy, H., & Clements. J. (1998). The erotic
anime movie guide. Woodstock, NY: Overlook
Press.
McHarry. M. (2003. November). Yaoi: Redrawing
male love. The Guide, www.guidemag.com.
Perper, T. & Comog, M. (2002). Eroticism for the
masses: Japanese manga comics and their assimilation into the U.S. Sexuality & Culture. 6, 3-126,
Winter.
Perper, T., & Comog, M. (2004). Sex, love, and
women in Japanese comics. In R.T. Francoeur &
R.J. Noonan (Eds.). The Continuum complete
international encyclopedia of sexuality (pp. 663671). New York: Continuum.
Finally, manga and anime are not boring! By
getting acquainted with them, you will broaden
your own perspective and ensure that you and your
students sample good stories — sometimes even
great art! — while enhancing their sexuality
education.
Reid, C. (2004, February 9). U.S. manga sales
pegged at $100 million. Publishers Weekly, p. 16.
Where to Find Manga and Anime
Salmon. C , & Symons. D. (2004). Slash fiction
and human mating psychology. Journal of Sex
Research. 41,94-100.
To locate a comics shop near you, check
http://csls.diamondcomics.com. For online
ordering, we recommend viAvw.animecastle.com
and www.animenation.com and. for Japanese language material, www.jlist.com. See McCarthy and
Clements (1998) for an overview of some older
erotic anime.
Contemporary Sexuality www.aasect.org
Robertson, J. (1998). Takarazuka: Sexual politics
and popular culture in modern Japan. Berkeley.
CA: University of California Press.
Solomon. C. (2004, June 30). Young men in love.
Los Angeles Times, p. E3.
Walker, R. (2004, May 30). Comics trip. New York
Times Magazine, p. 24.