Feminist Cyberethics in Asia

Religious Discourses on Human Connectivity

Agnes M. Brazal, K. Abraham, Agnes M. Brazal, K. Abraham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137401649
• eBook ISBN: 9781137395863
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This anthology hopes to contribute, in particular, to the analysis of the mutually constitutive interaction of the use of cyberspace and Asian cultures, with particular attention to ethical, feminist, and religious perspectives especially within Catholic Christianity.

PART I

EXCLUSION, INCLUSION, AND COLLUSION

CHAPTER 1

RESISTANCE/COLLUSION WITH MASCULINIST-CAPITALIST FANTASIES? JAPANESE AND FILIPINO WOMEN IN THE CYBER-TERRAIN

Jeane C. Peracullo

This chapter focuses on women’s bodies as produced, reproduced, and re-colonized in cyberspace.¹ Violence as manifested in geographical space is present even in cyberspace inasmuch as the stakeholders, players, perpetrators and victims are humans. Violence takes many forms and its definitions range in breadth.² While traditional conceptions of violence emphasize war or armed violence and direct violence normally results in visible victims and survivors, the manifestation of violence in cyberspace is much more subtle and to some extent sublime.

Specifically, this essay spotlights the case of Japanese and Filipino women. Both share a similarity that binds them together in their female embodiment. Both groups are considered to be geographically Asian and consequently suffer from the same cultural stereotypes ascribed to Asian women—passive, demure, shy, desirous of monogamy and family-oriented while being also sexually voracious but with an aim to please men. I employed content and discourse analysis of top ten websites that emerged after I “googled” Japanese Women, Japanese Girls, Filipino Women, Filipino Girls, Filipina, and Pinay, which is a local term for Filipino women. I used Google and Yahoo, which are the most popular search engines in the world.

Violence against women in cyberspace ironically is an attempt to em-body them; to “bring them back to their state of embodied-ness”; andto perpetuate their connection with nature. In the case of women and girls, they are naturalized, and condemned by their association with the body.³ The woman-body/nature connection is problematic insofar as it ties down women to their essentialized role of sexual service providers, nurturers and care-givers. However, a postcolonial awareness is also evident/manifested in the way Filipinas and Japanese women defy/resist/subvert this act of “em-bodying” in cyberspace. The whole project of this article is thus two-fold: recognition of women’s resistance in micro-ways and collusion to masculinist-capitalist fantasies in macro-ways.

THE CASE OF JAPANESE WOMEN: HYPERSEXUALITY IN ANIME, MANGA AND VISUAL NOVELS

Anime is a popular Japanese animation featuring different characters with unusual powers and identities that revolve around themes such as adventure, action, romance, sexy, erotica, and violence. As a country noted for its manga (comics) and anime (animated cartoons), Japan offers itself up for an in-depth study on how these popular media impact on its women. In an informal poll in the internet (http://www.geekosystem.com/women-datingstimulators/) Japanese women feel inadequate next to dating simulators that have proliferated online. In the so-called interviews conducted, the women thought they cannot compete with their virtual counterparts when it comes to “cuteness,” “perfection,” “nice personalities,” and their “ultimate passivity” because “our boyfriends can do whatever they want with them.” It is quite difficult to ascertain whether such remarks are due to their heightened awareness and subsequent frustrations over their status in Japanese society. We cannot rely on the above informal poll as its methodology is questionable. Nonetheless, what is undeniable is the cultural impact of manga and anime that spills over to intimate human relationships.

Popular media in Japan portray women as frail, delicate or dainty. These perceived qualities are also present in the ways women are represented in virtual games that are really nothing more than anime but designed to be interactive. All the characters (mature women, housewives, teachers, and office ladies; teenagers, students, part-time workers; and Lolitas or Lolis, elementary students) follow a template, known as Bishojo, a Japanese term that literally translates to “beautiful girl.” What is considered to be bishojo is subjective to its artist and audience; such characters can have but are not limited to:

• Large, endearing eyes to convey her emotions—a characteristic of the anime-art style
• An ideal female body shape—the hourglass figure
• An emphasis on the breasts by making them large, giving her sex appeal
• A wide array of hairstyles, even those that seem impossible in real life
• A wardrobe that includes skirts, blouses, and dresses

The most endearing qualities these women have are beauty and sexiness. Whether they are manga or anime, Japanese women are represented as objects of male sexual fantasies. In http://www.gamesofdesires.com/, one can download flash games about fulfilling one’s sexual fantasies through playing ordinary games. The main prize will be animated nude and willing Japanese girls. Although it is classified as an “adult website,” which renders it self-censoring, the large amount of hentai⁴ stuff can easily be found and the games are downloadable by anyone. The self-censorship of the site projects is belied by its contents. The site is extremely popular because it is one of the top websites in the world. Although the United States emerges as the top consumer of the site, Asian countries, combined together, make up for the largest consumer base.

Hypersexuality of Female Images in Anime

There have been some studies done on the impact of manga and its derivatives like anime and visual novels on Japanese women’s cultural and sexual identity. Sean Boden’s introductory work notes the basic difference between US American animations and cartoons and their Japanese counterparts.⁵ The former cater mostly to young boys while the Japanese ones cut across both sexes and are consumed by wider age groups. The extreme popularity of manga in Japan and now in the rest of the world because of internet foregrounds women’s secondary status in Japanese society. Eri Azawa observed in her article that,

[There is] a growing pervasiveness of sexual themes in manga—all types of manga. This has gotten worse in recent years. Female nudity is everywhere in manga and anime, even children’s manga, and it’s expected (and even encouraged) that boys will drool at and try to look at naked girls . . . . Recently, with the introduction of Western comics . . . physical exaggeration is more prevalent than ever before—women with voluptuous figures, men with ridiculously huge muscles . . . . some manga depict women in sexually-tinged embarrassing situations.⁶

I am making a strong argument contra Boden who in turn claims that some conservative reactions from the West to the Japanese animation demonstrate ignorance of Japanese culture because the representations of women in contemporary manga such as Ranma ½ and Love Hina offer a cast of characters that serve to put women on equal grounding with men. While we see the adoption of empowered images of Japanese women as career professionals and socio-political leaders in contemporary manga, but such examples are few to fully establish that indeed Japanese women are treated better than what is shown in manga.

Violence in Representation

The United Nation defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”⁷ In the case of virtual women or girls in manga and anime, however, the consumer does not actually inflict harm either bodily or psychologically to a woman. In the real world, our actions and behavior are governed by taboos that are very pervasive and even deemed to be natural. In cyber games, the player is not constrained by such rules; he is not even bound by physicality.

A sub-category of manga and anime specifically catering to adults is Visual Novels also known as EROGES or erotic games. Before the advent of internet, adult manga and anime could be very hard to find; one might have to go to some seedy side streets of Japan to be able to get hold of them. Now, “friendly” internet servers and torrent portals make them readily available to everyone. While popular anime or manga have already been studied and analyzed, this particular sub-category remains largely unchartered. Maybe the reason is that it is for adults and it does not raise a lot of alarms from conservatives. It could also be that it is more of a novel than a game. Our concern, however, is the representation of Japanese women in this genre, and how this representation is a form of violence against women. Girls and/or women get beaten into submission and are raped; women and girls are gang-raped violently. In eroges, these occurrences seem to be a matter, of course. An eroge fan—college-age kid—shrugged while giving me this information. But he hastened to point out that they were not what drove him to patronize visual novels but the fact that they were beautifully-written stories with top-notch graphics.

One such popular game is Hitomi, My Stepsister.⁸ The protagonist mistakenly thinks his sister, Hitomi, is seducing him when in fact she is just acting in a normal and ordinary way. Because she has a beautiful body, he thinks she is being seductive. When he cannot stand the temptation anymore, he forcibly rapes her. As an interactive simulation (SIM) game, the protagonist is the player and the menu offers several ways Hitomi can be raped with choices that range from vaginal penetrative sex, anal sex, oral sex, masturbation and Bukake, a Japanese term for ejaculation, specifically ejaculating on her face. Graphicswise, it is very realistic in its depictions of rape, domination, and the submission of women.

Hitomi is an adult game and there are warnings of high and explicit sexual and violent content. However, it is very accessible because it is distributed freely and circulated widely which means that minors all over the world can get hold of it without much fuss. According to several patrons of these eroge games, the self-censorship as practiced by the hosting sites of this game is merely lip-service. A Filipino male gamer who has spent 168 hours playing eroge attests to their wide patronage and distribution base. Hitomi reinforces, as one gamer reveals, his general cluelessness when it comes to reading females’ actuation and often misunderstands it as seduction or flirtation or an “attempt to lead him on.” Hitomi’s protagonist and narrator misreads his stepsister’s actions and when he is rebuffed, he blames her and justifies his action as a “righting of a wrong.” And, according to this particular gamer, it is just because men can do whatever they can do to women. The game sends the message across to all men in the world that while the woman suffers, the man gets away from the violence scot-free and with no accountability.

Power and Resistance or Acquiescence to Masculinist Fantasies?

Japanese feminists have responded to the hypersexuality of female bodies in manga. In the 1970s up to the mid-1990s, Japanese feminists had criticized mainstream media’s lack of gender sensitivity as evident in pornography and rampant hypersexualization of girls and women on broadcast and in the print industry. Vera Mackie notes that feminists organized forums and study groups for women of all ages and occupations, suggesting that a wide range of women were concerned about these issues. They linked pornography with what they saw as pervasive attitude of violence against women in Japanese society.⁹

For Mackie who had been documenting modern Japanese feminism, the paradox in Japanese media’s representation of women is dramatized in one photo taken by Matsumoto Michiko. It was a photograph of a group of naked women—in the first women’s liberation weekend—enjoying the environment of Japan Alps at the height of summer. The lower part of each woman’s body is blacked out due to the regulations that prevent the display of pubic hair in photographs. The caption reads: “feeling free, everyone suddenly, spontaneously felt like running naked through the fields like in primitive days. Unfortunately, because of the Japanese ‘obscenity laws,’ they are not allowed to be so liberated in this pamphlet.”¹⁰

If culture inscribes bodies, it is the hypersexuality of virtual bodies that leaves the clearest mark on women’s bodies. It reinforces the homogenizing cultural representation of female body as passive sexual object. On the other hand, virtual bodies in anime and manga, being fantastical, ought to be able to escape the stereotype of the actual female as passive. Anime and manga particularly manifest their infinite pliability and plasticity because they can morph into bodies culturally read as masculine—powerful, strong, and dominant—such as in the case of androgynous anime characters. Some characters are girls who can make other girls fall in love with them because they are masculine. Other androgynous characters are boys who look like girls to make other boys fall in love with them. This very popular sub-genre in manga is called BL or Boy’s Love.¹¹ It is also known as yaoi.

Yaoi: Female Pleasure as Discursive Space

Yaoide serves an extended treatment because it seems to be the only platform where Japanese women, and increasingly, women from other parts of the world, who now access it through cyberspace play out their subversion and resistance against the hypersexuality of women in manga and its derivatives.¹² As a medium of culture, yaoi highlights the agency Japanese women have, which is evident in its gender-bending/destabilizing/transgressing premise. Specially designed by women for female consumers (99 percent of producers and consumers are women), these virtual bodies seem to suggest that when men appropriate women’s bodies in exclusively homoerotic relationships, women are effectively represented as agents of their own sexuality and desire—something that is denied to them by the patriarchal Japanese society. Sexual love as manifested in these works is taken to be purer, almost transcend...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Exclusion, Inclusion, and Collusion
• Part II: Women, Work, and Family
• Part III: Religion and Cyberspace
• Part IV: Spirituality in the Digital Age
• Index