Japanese Adult Videos in Taiwan

Heung-Wah Wong, Hoi-yan Yau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138481749
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317817871
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the debate between those who argue that globalisation is leading to worldwide cultural homogeneity, with American cultural good predominating, and those who argue that cultural goods are always adapted and contextualised in the particular setting in which they are used. Based on extensive original research on how Japanese adult videos are consumed in Taiwan, it presents a rich picture of how Japanese adult videos are transformed into something Taiwanese, and how they are incorporated into both male and female Taiwanese sexual culture.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315818771-1

On a sunny day in the spring of 2003, we (one of the authors of this book) were invited by one of our key informants, Lori, to join a barbecue gathering in Zhongli, Taipei Prefecture, Taiwan. The barbecue was hosted by Michael at his house. Lori and Michael along with the other fifteen attendees were all substitute soldiers (tidaiyi)¹ and they did not know each other until they became comrades during the one-month training at Chenggong Ling² in Taichung in late 2002.

When we arrived there, we at once noticed that there were another five women attending the barbecue. Obviously, we did not share their lives as tidaiyi, but we were purposely invited to participate in the Taiwanese youth culture of arranged dating, lianyi (literally, ‘collection of friendship’). The barbecue started at roughly 11 o’clock in the morning, and these ‘hungry’ men started to feast on the food prepared by Michael’s girlfriend, Jen, who is a junior chef at a local hotel. By the afternoon, everyone was sitting there with a full stomach. While some men, including Lori and Michael, played mahjong,³ others took this opportunity to strike up relationships or at least to test out the possibilities with the women they found attractive.

This get-together eventually reached a point when one man suddenly took out a dozen VCDs⁴ to give away to every man. This man seemed to us to be slightly higher in status than the others. We were told that he had been given a certain amount of power by the banzhang (‘class monitor’) during their one-month training to allocate foodstuffs for his unit and could command the unit when the banzhang was away or absent. This is why he was nicknamed as laoda (‘big brother’). The VCDs seemed to us nothing out of the ordinary, but at their appearance, the men there excitedly formed a scrum around laoda.

They immediately attempted to line up for the VCDs according to the number they had been assigned during training. Since the gathering was held a few months after the training, their attempts to form a queue proved futile. Yet laoda immediately acted as the temporary ‘commander’, instructing these rowdy men to form an ordered line. The women, however, were completely excluded, and forced to witness the VCD-giving; they were not even asked whether they wanted one copy.

We were curious about what these VCDs were and why the men there were so excited. We asked one of the men who had just received some of the VCDs from laoda why they were so excited to receive the VCDs. This young man replied without any hesitation:

Of course, the VCDs are nice things to men; they are ‘A-pian’ (literally ‘adult movies’, a general local term for pornography) laoda burned for us. He downloaded the files from a Japanese website yesterday. The website is very famous among Taiwanese men because the adult movies there always feature beautiful, pure, cute Japanese young girls! We of course are very excited about these A-pians.

We cannot stand local A-pians because of their poor quality. Neither can we take American A-pians because the American porn girls are too aggressive. They are not our cup of tea! We were very puzzled about the terms this young man used here: ‘A-pian’, ‘local A-pian’, and ‘American A-pian’. It took us hours to figure out that Japanese bishōjo (‘beautiful young woman’) adult videos are so popular in Taiwan to the extent that this single genre is conflated with and thus amounts to the Japanese adult video as a whole. More surprisingly, Japanese adult video, due to its dominant status in the pornography market in Taiwan, is further conflated with A-pian, a general term to refer to the pornography in Taiwan. Therefore, when Taiwanese people mention Japanese adult videos, they would use ‘A-pian’; however, when they talk about American or local pornography, they will add adjectives such as ‘American’ or ‘local’ before the term ‘A-pian’ to avoid confusion. Obviously, adult videos in Japan are symbolically transformed into A-pianin Taiwan.

On a relaxing weekend of 2003 in Taipei, we were watching the TV news which reported that a famous Japanese adult video girl was invited to attend a big furniture show in Taipei as a VIP. Her attendance caused a huge sensation in Taiwan. It was reported that many young Taiwanese people queued up to get the girl’s poster and have their picture taken with her. It seemed to us that her attendance had made the furniture show very successful. The organizer of the show was interviewed by the TV news reporter; he explained that he had invited the Japanese adult video girl to Taiwan in order to use her fame in the local pornography market as a gimmick to promote the show. As he said to the reporter: ‘The Japanese girl is a big porn star among local viewers. She has commercial value for us. We can sell her to promote our show!’ (Chang 2003).

These two episodes are very important to this study because they point to the multi-faceted nature of Japanese adult video (AV) in Taiwan. Japanese AV is not just a pornographic movie made in Japan; it is also a cultural product; and finally it is a commodity. We argue that this multi-faceted nature of Japanese AVs should be taken seriously. We choose to treat Japanese AV in Taiwan not only as a pornographic text but also as a cultural product and commodity, which constitute three major analytical themes of this book. These three major analytical themes require that Japanese AVs in Taiwan should be understood from the perspective of porn studies, cross-cultural migration of cultural goods, and the production/consumption of commodities.

Taking all these together, this book is a study of how Japanese pornographic AVs spread to Taiwan as a cultural product, how they are reproduced as a commodity, and how they are circulated and consumed as pornographic text in Taiwan. Our main concern has been to understand the range of relationships local people established with Japanese AVs when the latter migrated to the Chinese society of Taiwan, which was a Japanese colony until the mid-1940s — a crucial historical background which will have a profound impact on how Japanese AVs are received in Taiwan. However, this ethnography also provides an opportunity to review the current theories in the study of the cross-cultural migrations of cultural goods, pornography, and the production/consumption of commodities. Finally, the study speaks to fundamental questions concerning the relationship between global and local, centre and periphery, media text and audience, production and consumption, and individual and society. Our analysis has led us to conclude that anthropology as a discipline can not only contribute much to the study of pornography by overcoming the cultural and individual determinisms inherent in audience studies and pornography effects research respectively, but also broaden the analytical themes and conceptual schemes of porn studies.

Analytical themes

Pornography studies have long been preoccupied by the ‘porn wars’ or ‘sex wars’ (Rubin [1984] 1993: 3; Duggan 1995: 5; Chancer 2000: 77), which refer to the acrimonious debates within the feminist movement and lesbian community in the late 1970s through the 1980s around the issues of feminist strategies regarding pornography alongside other sex issues. The porn wars have led to a division between two major camps: anti-pornography and anti-‘anti-pornography’. The divisions between them have been well-documented by others (Wilson 1989; Duggan 1995; Segal and McIntosh 1992; Wingfield and Scanlon 1992), and we will only briefly rehearse them here.

The anti-pornography stance is represented by prominent American feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Brownmiller, and Gloria Steinem (Ciclitira 2004: 282). They argue that pornography is degrading to women and complicit in violence against women both in its production (where, they charge, exploitation and abuse of women performing in pornography is rampant) and in its consumption (where, they charge, pornography eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, and reinforces sexual attitudes that are complicit in rape or sexual harassment) (Dworkin 1981: 20). Beginning in the late 1970s, these feminists founded the campaign group ‘Women Against Pornography’ (WAP) that organized educational events to raise awareness of the content of pornography and the sexual subculture in pornography shops and sex shows (Ciclitira 2004: 282). In brief, this stance seeks to limit the sale and production of pornography both by legal and direct action initiatives.

The other side of the debate is represented by prostitute-rights advocates, and many liberal and anti-authoritarian feminists for whom free speech, sexual freedom, and advocacy of women’s agency are central concerns. Known as the ‘sex-positive’ or ‘pro-sex’ feminists (Willis 1992: 3), Ellen Willis, Pat Califia, Gayle Rubin, Avedon Carol, and Wendy McElroy oppose legal or social efforts to control sexual activities between consenting adults. They hold that feminist anti-pornography campaigns are misdirected and threaten rights of free speech and sexual freedoms in a way that would be ultimately detrimental toward women, gay people, and sexual minorities (Ciclitira 2004: 283). They further accuse the anti-pornography feminists of selective handling of evidence, of being intolerant of sexual difference, of their censorship stance, and of complicity with conservative defences of the sexual status quo (Rubin [1984] 1993: 28–29). To counteract the WAP, they organized the ‘Feminists Against Censorship’ (FAC) with an agenda of arguing against censorship of sexual materials and to defend individual sexual expression.

Briefly, the issue that has divided these two feminists’ camps was whether pornography is the cause of women’s oppression or whether it is just another expression of this oppression (Luff 2001: 80). In other words, anti-pornography feminists have tended to see pornography as an essential constituent of oppression, whereas anti-‘anti-pornography’ feminists have tended to see it as reflective of oppression. To show that pornography is a constituent of female subordination, anti-pornography feminists have traditionally turned to psychological laboratory researches alongside surveys and testimonies for empirical support (Hardy 1998: 27; Boyle 2000: 187). These psychological researches centre on questions such as ‘whether viewing pornography causes men to be more sexually aggressive against women, whether it affects women and men differently, and whether the circulation of pornography is linked to the incidence of sexual crimes’ (Ciclitira 2004: 286). One can see that these researches aim to find out whether pornography has negative effects on viewers, in particular on the lives of women, and if it has, what are these effects?

Malamuth (1978) first pointed to the possibility that aggressive-cum-pornographic stimuli might facilitate aggression against women. His study showed that those who were exposed to the aggressive pictorials in Penthouse magazines and received disinhibiting communication showed a far higher level of aggression against women than those who were exposed to non-aggressive pictorials (Malamuth 1978: 7). Check and Malamuth (1985: 419) reported that exposure to portrayals of women enjoying rape and other kinds of sexual violence can increase the acceptance of rape myths in both men and women. Continual exposure to sexually violent materials against women can even cause viewers to become desensitized to female victims of actual violence (Donnerstein et al. 1987; Linz et al. 1988). Zillmann and Bryant (1982: 11–15) also reported varied negative effects of degrading pornography on viewers, including changes in attitudes and values towards sex and women, victim desensitization, and a perpetual shift of sexual practices from uncommon to common. In examining the effects of ‘massive exposure’ to pornography, Zillmann and Bryant (1984: 117, 132) have shown that ‘heavy exposure to common nonviolent pornography [not only] trivialised rape as a criminal offence’, but also enhanced callous male sexual attitudes towards women. More crucially, exposure to pornography can also increase the acceptance of male dominance in romantic relationships (Zillmann and Bryant 1984: 121). McKenzie-Mohr and Zanna (1990: 301–305) have shown that exposure to nonviolent pornography can cause some men to view and treat women as sex objects.

The laboratory findings of the effects research mentioned above led Dworkin and MacKinnon to advocate laws that would define pornography as a civil rights violation against women, and allow women who had been harmed by pornography to sue the pornographers and distributors in civil court for damages (Duggan 1995: 46). In 1983, they successfully pressed through the Minneapolis Ordinances, which brought into American law a ‘feminist’ definition of pornography. Pornography was defined as a ‘form of discrimination on the basis of sex’ (Duggan 1995: 65) in which:

women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or physically bruised or physically hurt; women are presented in postures of sexual submission, servility or display; women’s body parts are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; women are presented as whores by nature; women are presented as being penetrated by objects or animals; women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.

(Dworkin and MacKinnon 1988: 36)

A number of problems with the effects model have been documented by various scholars (Senn 1993; Hardy 1998; O’Toole 1999; Boyle 2000; Ciclitira 2004), and here we would simply like to draw attention to three major problems of the effects model which are related to the current study of Japanese AVs in Taiwan.

First, the agency of the viewer is denied in effects research. Pornography is assumed in effects research to have direct and unmediated effects on the viewing subject. While the degree of effects varies from one to another, sexually explicit images ultimately affect viewers who can only react uniformly to the sexual stimuli as if they have no agency at all. As Boyle (2000: 189) correctly points out, ‘[t]o see pornography as the “cause” of yet-to-be-determined effects, is to position pornography as the active agent and deny the agency … and, crucially, the responsibility, of the individual men’. As a feminist, Boyle rightly stresses the responsibility of ‘men’; but she also points out that this denies the agency of viewers as if they were sitting ducks waiting to be affected by the images. This study will demonstrate that our Taiwanese informants are not passive dupes waiting to be sexually aroused by Japanese AVs. Quite the contrary, each of them manages to establish a unique relation with pornography. Our research will further show that their biographical experiences including their family, love, and sex all allow them to relate themselves with Japanese AVs uniquely.

Second, the logic behind the effects model is that sexual behaviour is seen as genetically innate and thus motivated solely by sexual desire, for exposure to sexually explicit materials can induce involuntary sexual-cum- aggressive desires in viewers, which in turn are expressed in their masturbatory acts, aggression to, or even rape of, women. Seen in this way, pornography use, as one form of sexual behaviour, is also motivated by sexual desire and thus the gratification of this desire. Yet our research in Taipei shows that Japanese AVs can be motivated to satisfy sexual as much as nonsexual needs. As we shall try to show in this book, our Taiwanese informants’ uses of Japanese AVs are not purely initiated by an innate sexual desire, but also a sense of desperation to deal with their immediate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Chinese translation
• Note on Japanese translation
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Adult videos as Japanese cultural product and Japanese pornography
• 3 Japanese adult videos coming to Taiwan
• 4 From Japanese AVs to Taiwanese A-pian The (re)production of Japanese AVs in Taiwan
• 5 From Japanese AVs to Chinese gifts The circulation of Japanese AVs in Taiwan
• 6 The taste of Taiwanese men and women for pornography
• 7 The instrumental interests of Japanese AVs to individual Taiwanese men
• 8 The instrumental interests of pornography to individual Taiwanese women
• 9 Conclusion
• Chinese glossary
• Japanese glossary
• References
• Index