Mind the Gap

I’ve made the odd post on how I’m annoyed when the entirety of a country’s popular culture gets dismissed as being horribly sexist, or when we even exclaim over one single film, manga or video game. Actually, this goes for any assumptions about the sexism, or lack thereof, of anything in particular.  Here are a couple of examples.

Around this time last year, I wrote a post on the female characters in Akira, and one commenter said she thought that the attempted rape of Kaori in the movie seemed like ‘some kind of horrible fan service’. At the time, I protested that this was making some pretty uncharitable assumptions about the fans. But really, how can either of us possibly know? Similarly, when Nintendo puts out a particularly ‘sexist’ game, like Cooking Mama for instance. Feminists over here took offence, but tons of Japanese games involve cooking, fishing, gardening, and so on, done by men and women. The recent Atlus RPG Contact (okay, not too recent in gaming terms) had a trendy, quite macho young teenager learning how to cook as though it was the coolest thing ever. Warioware is full of cooking-related minigames.  

It’s probably pointless to come up with anymore examples at the moment. Although a different one might be the way feminists in the UK have embraced Miyazaki so whole-heartedly. And I’m a fan too, I’ve just read five volumes of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (volume 6 is out of print and costs £8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, drat!), and I’m incredibly impressed by the depth of the female characters. But it might be sexist in ways I can’t even distinguish. We can probably assume that the Rapeman anime isn’t particularly feminist – thinking in two-dimensional terms of sexist vs feminist for the sake of this particular point – but even then we can’t know. After all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is often considered feminist, and what does she do? She constantly has to kick the crap out of creatures who are all about sex, then they bite you and become your father. Could be seen as feminist, could also be seen as incredibly neurotic. Then again, accurate portrayal of this kind of neurosis could be seen as feminist. And on one count, the female characters in Rapeman meet some feminist criteria – they’re strong women, they’re as big as their attacker, with massive biceps, and they defend themselves. Also, the hero is portrayed in the same way as some feminists tend to portray rapists: he’s single-minded and predatory. But, does the narrative condemn what he does? Does it accept it as natural? Is it humourous? It’s hard to say.  

For a start, the Japanese language alone is completely different from European languages. Sure, there are words adopted from English, but that means nothing. The structure of the language is so different it’s incredibly hard to translate – there might be hidden depths in the handful of manga I’ve read, and there might not. Possibly not, as they’re kind of visual. Still, Japanese is gendered in ways you probably hadn’t even thought of – and then un-gendered in the ways you’d expect it to be gendered. And that’s just the language. Next to that, there’s all the other stuff. It’s possible to piss each other off with incorrect idiom and body language even within one country. So imagine the stuff you can’t possibly even notice when watching cartoon characters speak a completely alien language all the way across the world. What you take to be horribly sexist, or wonderfully empowering, could be meant completely differently. It should also be taken into account that, when something is sexist or violent, different things about violence or sexism will be emphasized, so it will seem more shocking to us.  

What this means is that, of course, you can interpret these films, books, and games however you want to. They can be whatever you want them to be. So what we say about them quite often reflects our prejudice about the country where they originate. And actually, I have quite often read quite categorical assertions on feminist blogs that sexist bastards are at it in Japan again, and those guys are always sniffing panties for fun. But it’s not only Japan, and it’s not always negative stereotypes. Think of the adoption of Buddhism by Hollywood stars, for instance. For one, the religious texts are in a language which is going to be alien to them even if they can read it a bit. Then there’s all the cultural stuff besides the language that you’re not going to get. So in the end, Buddhism can be whatever you want it to be. Like for Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, the central principle of Buddhism is ‘Every man for himself’. That’s a caricature out of a not-terribly-subtle comedy, of course, but it’s still striking how easily a complex philosophy that takes years of study can be turned into a tourist brochure, a sales pitch for silk prayer cushions, or a blockbuster movie poster. Let’s face it, we fuck up with feminism, according to the Feminist Majority Foundation being a feminist means being whoever you are – oh yeah, and A is A, guys, and that smoke coming out of the tip of your cigarette really shows how hard you’re thinking*. So imagine what being a Buddhist means, to the spiritual equivalent of the Feminist Majority Foundation? It probably also means being whoever you are. And collecting little statues of cross-legged fat dudes to grow your plants out of. And having great tonsisticity** in your day to day relationships.  

Sure, there is a good argument against cultural relativism, when people are actually hurt by it. We shouldn’t abandon women who are getting hurt, locked up or killed or harmed in any way just because ‘it’s their culture’, because that’s deeply racist. But that really has absolutely fuck all to do with anything when you’re reviewing video games. Doesn’t it say something that the further removed from us a culture is, the less we’re able to tell the difference between designing computer games and killing people? It’s like these people and countries don’t exist outside of our fantasies, in certain cases even when we’ve actually been there. After all, colonialism was a vast exercise in dehumanising whole races just to justify some convenient prejudices about them, so they could be exploited as being less than human.  

As the descendents of those colonial powers, we still tend to think that way. We also have a certain sense of entitlement that means when we think ‘oh, that’s terrible!’, we instantly jump to ‘that’s objectively bad!’. With that comes the assumption that we know everything, or at least what we do know is the important bit. It’s like the book described in the recent Zoe Williams article, about French women  (one of the rare cases of a Zoe Williams article not causing much Marge Simpson grumbling from me). It’s irrelevant that the author of the book doesn’t know all French women, she can make generalisations because she knows the important ones, the ones who matter. And she also knows what matters about them, since she’s such a connoisseur. This is similar to the attitude of feminists bashing women of colour for supporting Obama over Clinton, or saying that in general gender trumps colour in terms of oppression. What they’re basically saying is that their oppression is the relevant one, and what they know about it is all there is to know.  

[And on a side note, Hilary Clinton isn’t a feminist in any shape or form, unless you think a feminist is a woman who became successful in a patriarchal society. Which amounts to trying to sell the bootstrap argument to all the women who haven’t. Which is pretty anti-feminist if you ask me.]

 I realise that I’ve reinvented the wheel somewhat in this post, but given the largely blindingly white, middle-class nature of the UK blogosphere, all this is well worth bearing in mind.      

*Ayn Rand really thought that smoking was deeply symbolic of being a great intellectual, and was pretty pissed off to get lung cancer as a result of being such a great mind 

**made-up word