Tits and Ass(es)

Chewing The Cud, Part One

Herbivorous men. Grass eaters. I’ve touched on this before, and I promised (to myself if no-one else) that I’d come back to it later. So here we are.

In all honesty I’m not sure quite where to go with this, I just hit upon a very clever (and I do mean very clever) little opening conceit, and thought I’d run with it a bit. Of course, having now taken it for a little jog I’ve realised that it’d be better as an opening to part two, so you’ll just have to wait until then. It’s definitely worth waiting for though; as I said, it is very clever.

So in the meantime please join me on a directionless thrash through gender politics and social ossification in early 21^st Century Japan. Don’t pretend like you’ve got anything better to do.

Let’s try to agree on some basics. Cute=Childish=Feminine. Are we happy with that? No? Fair enough. Let’s try to work backwards to that point.

Hello, er,  ladies?

If ‘pretty’ is beautiful without the sophistication, then ‘cute’ is one step down from that again. It’s all been described in more detail before, by people far smarter than me. It’s not so much that Cute=Childish, but that cute contains aspects of vulnerability that ‘pretty’ mostly avoids, and ‘beautiful’ eschews altogether. Beauty is Truth, Truth is Strength, and other sub-Wildean aphorisms. Cute is beauty without poise, self-assurance or confidence. Cute wants to be taken care of. This will be important later.

So if we take Vulnerability as the defining aspect of ‘cute’, it’s not much of a stretch to see that Cute=Childish. What defines a child if not an inability to look after itself? We rightly bemoan children ‘growing up too fast’ or ‘losing their childhood’ if they have to take on too much responsibility too soon, and the words 'independent' and 'adult' are synonymous in a large number of cultures and situations. The human child is born massively early compared to other species (heads and brains, pelvises and walking, risk and reward, you know the kind of thing), and so this is really, literally true. At least for the first few years.

Cute=Feminine might take more explaining, especially to those of us who grew up in the Anglophone West after the Sexual Revolution. Many of you would rightly take issue with me if I were to claim that women, or more specifically ‘femininity’ was inherently childish. It’s really not. Adults, adult women, are completely different from children.

They're taller, for one.

This is why I’m always slightly confused by people who claim that the current trend for total pubic depilation is because ‘men want women to look like little girls’ (again, this will be relevant later, please believe me). I mean, I can understand why women feel that’s what it looks like, but most men don’t have the same frame of reference. By which I mean that most normal men have never seen a girl that young naked. Even if you’ve got a sister or two, if you're old enough to remember all the details you're probably also well past the age you'd feel comfortable bathing together. Unless you work in the medical profession, there really are no other legitimate reasons for having that knowledge first hand.

Equally, porn stars are often held up as both the cause and result of this trend. Porn stars who are also typically famous for all manner of other surgical enhancements which don’t really tick the ‘little girl’ boxes. As secondary sexual characteristics go, tits the size of barrage balloons and hip-to-waist ratios which would be more suitable on a wineglass are pretty unambiguous indicators of adulthood. That’s the appeal of the completely bare look as well, I reckon. It’s not about how it looks so much as it’s a clear indicator that a woman thinks about sex and thinks of herself as a sexual being, and most right-thinking adults find that a massive turn-on. Plus, fewer choking hazards.

(For what it’s worth, my own personal view – formed through many hours of purely scientific study – is that a completely shaved muff is like a tattoo. When it works it looks phenomenal, but that’s only in a very small minority of cases. All the other times it just looks a little odd.)

It’s not so much that feminine=childish, so much that feminine=vulnerable (and childish also=vulnerable). In the Post-Sexual Revolution West, with all our talk of empowerment and fish and bicycles, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that most of the rest of the world still holds on to gender relationships which are more, shall we say, ‘traditional’. Bluntly – from an evolutionarily perspective – human partnerships are primarily economic transactions where women and men trade exclusivity for protection, to mutually improve their chances of successful reproduction. For all that we really should be moving beyond the paradigm of the bare-foot and pregnant mother and the strutting male provider, these roles are hardwired in a way which makes them difficult to break out of.

You’ll be noticing the assumptions that I’m making. Gender equality. Female independence. Sisters doing it for themselves. I’m taking it as read that all these are good and necessary things, and that you feel the same.

And they are good. I’m not about to turn into an apologist for cultural relativity all of a sudden; but it’s important to realize that for all that it’s correct, it is actually something of a minority view, globally speaking.

Japan largely conforms to the majority view, in that respect. There are endless examples of this. My wife’s maternity provisions are incredibly generous whereas my paternity provisions are non-existent. Divorced fathers will often cut off all contact with their children. Many female TV presenters disappear completely from the screens once they get married. You can fill in the rest yourself. Women take care of the kids, and the men ‘take care’ of the women.

In that context, it’s completely understandable that women should choose to play up their ‘vulnerable’ aspects, in lieu of more aggressively sexual qualities. I hope you realize why I say ‘aggressively’ instead of ‘obviously’.

Not that they're mutually exclusive,
of course

If not though, it’s because this is an environment in which women are still largely dependent upon men for protection and provision (both through necessity and choice). More specifically, it’s an environment in which many/most women feel that they are largely dependent upon men for their protection and provision, and the men feel it’s their role to provide the same. Which is why the ‘vulnerability’ thing is a sexual quality. ‘Take me in your big man arms and protect me’ (This is something we have in the West too, it’s just here it’s been pushed to a point where it looks like something totally different, to flog that horse again).

Witness the passivity of the women in most Japanese porn. The endless yelping and moans of ‘iyada’. ‘Don’t’. That’s if they’re saying anything at all, beyond yelping like a puppy’s rubber toy with a broken squeaker. ‘Maguro’, it’s called, ‘tuna’. Lying there like a dead fish. Hubba hubba. Compare that to the more vocal, participatory female sexuality in most western porn (you’ll have to search for links yourself. My browser history is incriminating enough as it is).

So instead, here's a picture of a pretty flower.

It’s not that I’m obsessed with porn, honestly, but pornography is explicitly sexual (the only reason you come here is for searing insights like that, don’t deny it). That’s why I’m using it to explain why vulnerability is an obviously sexual quality in Japan. Porn is a business like any other, and they don’t make stuff that doesn’t appeal to their customers. If the overriding theme of Japanese porn is overt female vulnerability – and it is – then it’s a fair conclusion that female vulnerability is sexually attractive to Japanese men.

I know there are many, many holes you could pick in these ideas, and I would encourage you wholeheartedly to do so, but then I did say this would be a directionless thrash, didn’t I? Western porn stars may not look like little girls, but they do look like dolls and you can extrapolate from that yourselves regarding concepts of ownership and objectification. So by that measure you’d hardly argue that we’ve got a better or healthier attitude towards female sexuality overall. It’s just screwed up in different ways. Crucially, many people seem to realize that it’s screwed up, unlike in Japan.

That’s not really fair, either. I hate to keep harping on about AKB48, but I was genuinely shocked when I first saw the video for Heavy Rotation. I mentioned it to a few Japanese acquaintances, and they had no idea because they’d never seen it. For all that AKB are the current dominant pop culture behemoths, they’re still not really mainstream. The clever people explain it better over at Neojaponism. And whilst I'm sharing frankly too much about what floats my boat then, yeah, there's definitely something to the AKB girls, but there's also something off about them too. I imagine that sleeping with one of them would be like getting a rim-job from a Care Bear.

And maybe a reach-around too.

You can follow that rather disturbing train of thought as you like. Here's something else to help you on your way. I’m not going to get into it any further here, because I’m meant to be talking about Herbivores (remember?) and this is far more than I hoped I’d ever write about pornography. Other places have covered the darker stuff and I have no interest in doing so here. But it’s important to try and establish why ‘cute’ is the overriding expression of female sexuality in Japan. The next step is working out why it seems to apply to more and more men as well…

Part 2 here.

 Credit where it is due.