Friday, February 29, 2008
Special Bonus Leap Day Post!
Thought of the day: Do you think there are Japanese equivalents of groups like When Fangirls Attack and Girl-Wonder.org that campaign for less sexist portrayals of women in shonen manga? I mean, I'm a heterosexual guy and find images of scantily-clad women appealing, but even I'm distracted by all the blatant fanservice that gets shoved into shonen manga:
I seem to remember reading that a large proportion of Shonen Jump's readership in Japan is female (I want to say at least 50%, but I can't find any figures to back that up; all I could find was a quote from Shaenon K. Garrity stating "SJ has a huge female readership, and in a recent survey it was the most popular manga magazine for girls, beating out all the shojo magazines" but that doesn't necessarily mean anything about the relative size of the female audience reading shonen); given that many female readers are being subjected to repeated images like the one above, do they grumble about the sexism or do they just accept it as something that comes with reading material specifically marketed toward another demographic? (After writing this post, I realize I really have no idea what feminism in Japan looks like, or what cultural attitudes are towards material frequently labeled as offensive in the U.S.)
Thought of the day: Do you think there are Japanese equivalents of groups like When Fangirls Attack and Girl-Wonder.org that campaign for less sexist portrayals of women in shonen manga? I mean, I'm a heterosexual guy and find images of scantily-clad women appealing, but even I'm distracted by all the blatant fanservice that gets shoved into shonen manga:
I seem to remember reading that a large proportion of Shonen Jump's readership in Japan is female (I want to say at least 50%, but I can't find any figures to back that up; all I could find was a quote from Shaenon K. Garrity stating "SJ has a huge female readership, and in a recent survey it was the most popular manga magazine for girls, beating out all the shojo magazines" but that doesn't necessarily mean anything about the relative size of the female audience reading shonen); given that many female readers are being subjected to repeated images like the one above, do they grumble about the sexism or do they just accept it as something that comes with reading material specifically marketed toward another demographic? (After writing this post, I realize I really have no idea what feminism in Japan looks like, or what cultural attitudes are towards material frequently labeled as offensive in the U.S.)
Labels: Manga, The Double-Edged Sword of Fanservice, When Female Otaku Attack
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