Now this whole gendering thing has gotten ridiculous...

Courtesy of Sociological Images, Cupcakes For Men.

I thought gendering socks was ridiculous, but food? And cupcakes of all things?

The most hilarious part is that the very idea of "Cupcakes For Men" implies that cupcakes are inherently feminine. Last time I checked they were food, an inanimate object. The most feminine thing about them is the egg that comes from female chickens.

I'll just be in the corner with Captain Picard.

(Incidentally one commeter on the linked post reminded me of the Men's Pocky my mother and I discovered a few years ago. It's actually quite good, though the idea still cracks me up.)

Yuri-service in Anime: Delivering The Goods

Yuri-service. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with anime probably knows what I’m talking about. If not, picture this: Two girls, staring at each other passionately, fingers intertwined with flowers blowing around them. This is an increasingly common sight in a variety of genres, but rarely does it go beyond that and turns into an actual lesbian relationship. Real life lesbians like myself tend to gnash our teeth at this, but practically since anime was first becoming known in the United States this has been a major component, but there’s a growing sense of discontent among fans of Yuri that can be summed up in one sentence:

Stop teasing us.

The problem with most of the subtext these days is that it’s just that: subtext. It exists purely to titillate and make fans think about characters being in a relationship, but it rarely if ever delivers. One blogger I follow recently proclaimed that shows should “stop being half-assed about the lesbian aspect”, and this seems to be a growing opinion among those of us who like our girls love.

This is hardly new phenomenon in anime. In 2001 Noir became the newest of these shows imported to the United States and the first major exposure I had to anime as a whole. In my opinion, it was a great series that kept you on the edge of your seat and had an interesting and complex story, but the main draw was the relationship between the leads, Kirika and Mirielle, and how they grew to care for each other in the end. We could debate until the cows come home about whether it really was a Yuri series since there was never definitive "proof" that they were lesbians, and indeed people have been fighting about that even though it’s been over 7 years since the show was on the air. But even if you think there was no romance to speak of between the female leads you have to agree that they loved each other in a very deep and emotional way.

But what made Noir different from the Yuri-service shows these days was that the girls and their feelings were not just fanservice, they had an actual impact on the plot and real, visible consequences. In fact, you could even read it as being one of the driving forces behind the plot. These girls had real emotional investment in one another and were willing to fight and die for it, and there’s a strong indication at the end of the show that this relationship is going to continue and grow into something more, be it romantic or not.

Revolutionary Girl Utena was a 1997 series that similarly used the not-necessarily romantic but certainly passionate relationship between its female leads to drive the plot and question the very meaning of gender and relationships, but trying to summarize Utena like that is leaving out about 90% of everything else that went on in it, and we don’t have all day. The point is that the reason these shows are so loved is that the Yuri was not just service, it was a major component of the story and was given just as much attention and thought as any other part of the plot.

Nowadays? Not so much. There are a few examples that stand out like Aoi Hana, but they're mostly for niche audiences and rarely get much attention outside of these circles. In mainstream works these characters are mostly limited to side roles and don’t have much of an impact on the story itself. And there’s the classic “bait and switch” tactic which consists of setting up a girl/girl pairing and then having one or both end up with men in the end. This infuriates fans for two reasons, first it means that all the hints and subtext was just a tease, and second it sends the rather homophobic message of “look but don’t touch” or that a girl/girl relationship is okay when you’re young, but “real” women grow up and have husbands and families.

Granted, we are talking about shows that come from Japan, a country that has very different social values from our own, so what we see as an unfriendly message may in fact be perfectly acceptable to them, and the above message is considered acceptable by most Japanese viewers at this point in time. But putting that aside, in the United States there’s another part of this that seems to be irritating an increasing number of people.

Mainly, the fanservice aspect, which depending on the show can range from mildly annoying to downright disrespectful. By “downright disrespectful” I mean “these characters exist only in the show to provide breast and butt shots” and have no character or purpose besides their connection to another girl and the risqué situations that result in them being in the same room. While certainly not free of subtext, Noir and Utena generally stayed away from this, and in the case of Utena much of the sexual content that would be fanservice in any other series was intended to be and managed to be quite disturbing given the circumstances. The movie of Utena is another story, and is best left to its own post, but even it contained the suggestion that sex is not all its cracked up to be no matter who is doing it.

Nowadays the Yuri fanservice is generally played completely straight. Given that most of the viewers of these shows tend to be young males this might not be surprising, as someone else pointed out that to a lot of men the appeal of seeing a pair of lesbians can be summed up as “1 + 1 = 2”. But there's only so much teasing a person can take before they start to get fed up and want the real thing, and the fact that even the men these shows are supposed to appeal to are getting tired of it might indicate that a sea change might be needed if these fans want to be retained.

I predict that in the future these feelings will also crop up in Japan, though probably at least several years from now. The Americans watching, on the other hand, may turn to their own country’s works in the meantime as long as the teasing continues to be just that: teasing.

Hannah Montana and Metaphorical Closets

Like most people over the age of 14 I can best describe my opinion of Hannah Montana as tepid, if not outright negative, but I've been able to ignore it for the most part. I did watch it once while at a relative's house with my younger cousins, and I found it to be fairly bland sitcom fair full of the usual cliches. The music grates on my nerves and musical sensibilities, but it seems fairly harmless compared to other things out there at the moment. I'm sure there are elements from my early adolescence that appeared the same back then, but one blog I follow brought up an issue with the new movie that made me raise an eyebrow.

The Sinister Hidden Message of Hannah Montana by Mark Blankenship, while obviously mostly in a tongue and cheek tone, did bring up an aspect of the movie that I find troubling as a gay American. I gather that the basic premise of the show is that Miley Stewart leads a double life as the pop start Hannah Montana, and in the movie she starts to tire of it and considers showing her fans who she really is. At the climax of the newly released movie, after Miley manages to save her hometown with a benefit concert put on by her alter-ego, she takes off her wig to reveal her true self, but the residents of the town tell her to put in back on and be Hannah again.

"Put on the wig, or you'll never have a normal life!" one person calls, and they all promise not to reveal her identity to the rest of the world so she can be "happy" and so her fans won't "lose their dreams" and find out that Hannah isn't real. To my gay ears that sounds uncomfortably close to telling someone that they should stay in the closet rather than come out, but I know I have a tendency to read too much into things like this. But even outside that, is that really what we want our kids to learn, that it's better to live a double life than be true to yourself and risk being rejected? Considering that the latter was largely a message in the media of my childhood this strikes me as rather backwards looking.

To quote Blankenship:

As written, the conclusion tells viewers that being yourself is acceptable when you're with a very intimate circle, but otherwise, it's preferable and even honorable to lie about who you are. Hannah Montana: The Movie suggests that we can make people happy by always being who they want us to be, so we should maintain a performance at all costs. What's a little personal integrity when the entire world will be placated by our perpetual public disguise?

I know I'm disturbed by the implications of this and what it's telling our kids, and it certainly seems like a screwed up moral to say that lying about yourself is okay, whether you're gay or not.

Dora the Explorer, Tomboyism and Gender Policing

A minor event that caught my attention this week was the unveiling of at “Tween” version of everyone’s favorite bilingual elementary schooler Dora the Explorer, and the resulting kerfluffle started by parents over it. But besides allegations of turning her into a mini street walker, a thing I didn’t see people focusing on were some of the wider implications of this new look and what it tells our young girls. It’s being touted that she’s now 10 and “grown out of” being a shorts-wearing tomboy and is now obsessed with fashion, friends, and all the things girls are supposed to obsess over at that age. I grew up in the late 1990s, and was by most accounts a tomboy myself, and even back then I noticed that once I hit middle school it suddenly became unacceptable for a girl to be a tomboy, we had to “grow up” and start acting like “real women.”

A necessary disclaimer at this point is that I am not, for the most part never have been, and do not try to be what’s considered a “proper” girl or woman, in part because I happen to be dating another very wonderful girl at the moment, and that tends to put a bit of a crowbar between me and conventional definitions of femininity by default. I’m also what would usually be classified as butch, though I do have my feminine aspects and am not afraid to embrace those. I think I’m a healthy distance from the usual expectations as a result, so I tend to look at these things with a sociologist’s eye and try to figure out just what function they serve in society. Back when I was 10 to 12, however, I tried to fall into what was being touted as correct for my gender and tried to get into fashion and makeup, or to quote a friend of mine, “Let the programming begin!”

Now of course if you refuse to go along with it the insults begin, and at about the same time I realized that being a tomboy at that age was culturally unacceptable I had my first experience of homophobia. In retrospect the girls who first introduced me to the term “lesbo” were absolutely right, but we didn’t know that at the time and it doesn’t change the fact that they were using the term as a slur, a way of categorizing an outsider and a deviant.

Girls who refuse to conform to the expectations of femininity and continue being tomboys after the acceptable age often find themselves accused of being lesbians, and by extension defective women. This is what’s referred to by sociologists as “boundary policing”, and this sort of behavior extends beyond gender and racial definitions into all sort of groups that seek to define themselves against others and decide who’s in and who’s out. This in itself isn’t bad, but this behavior can very often be used to reinforce existing norms of behavior and allow them to go unquestioned, even if they’re in drastic need of a reevaluation.

So what does this have to do with Dora? The media is possibly the largest source of boundary policing in our culture, and it plays a huge role in shaping what we think we “should” look like, feel like and act like. The extent of the reaction against the image projected by this new Dora doll shows how many parents rely on this character to help their children through childhood, so there’s little doubt that Dora’s influence is huge. I’m not disturbed by the feminizing that Dora has been subjected to in and of itself, but rather it’s the idea that a little girl not unlike what I used to be like might be given this doll and start to doubt herself and her puddle hopping and frog collecting hobbies and trade them in for makeup and fashion not because she wants to, but because she thinks she has to.

I eventually said “screw this” to what was expected of me and chopped all my hair off when I was 15, but in my middle school years I felt that I had to become obsessed with makeup, fashion and boys, and when I found that I didn’t really care for any of those I started thinking something was wrong with me, which no doubt contributed to the depression I was already struggling with.

So my main questions about this “new” Dora are about what it’s really trying to accomplish, and if the little tomboy girls who have followed this character are about to find themselves pushed into a box that they don’t necessarily fit into, and if parents really want to enforce such a strict definition of femininity.