What’s so great about anime and manga? And isn’t most of it sexist and objectifying of women, anyhow?

I am not an anime expert, but I do know about vile attitudes towards women, and in general, I find more in anime and manga that’s empowering towards women than vile. While it’s true that some anime is objectifying, misogynistic and even violent towards women, the same could be said of other genres as well.

Look at the reduction of Megan Fox to a living blow-up doll in the Transformers films, the violence towards women in some horror (the Hostel and Saw films are the tip of the iceberg), and even the way in which women are generally portrayed as caring about little other than men and fashion in most rom-coms. Objectivism of women in our society is a rampant problem in entertainment generally, but anime offers stronger female role models to our daughters than much of what’s they see on mainstream television or at the multiplex.

I greatly enjoy the anime I watch and the manga I read, and love attending cons with my daughter. I have been watching anime off and on for roughly 14 years now, since my ex-husband introduced me to his passion for it by showing me tapes of Sailor Moon, Gunbusterand Urusei Yatsura when we first started dating. Now that I have a 13-year-old daughter who is a serious anime fan, and three younger siblings coming up behind her who are also into anime, my interest in the genre has been renewed. I find anime in general to be more empowering to women and girls than deragatory, offering strong role models who are tough and smart and can hold their own with the guys. At the same time, anime offers an educational and healthy social outlet for kids who seek something different than football games, scouting and soccer.

Westerners who are not anime buffs are probably most familiar with the genre through either kids’ television shows like Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z and the like, or the films of Miyazaki. And I love Miyazaki for his imaginative storylines and brilliant imagination, but I also love that he creates strong female hero characters — tough, brave, smart, independent girls who are great role models. I’m particularly fond of Howl’s Moving Castle‘s Sophie and Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service. But while Miyazaki is a great introduction for any budding young anime fan, the world of anime doesn’t start and end with is works, awesome though they may be.

Sailor Moon is still quite popular, and was one of my own early introductions to kick-ass anime chicks, and I have a particular fondness for Urusei Yatsura, which is about a sex-crazed boy (sex-crazed boys whose sexual obsession tends to get them into trouble and smart, sensible girls who try to get them out of it is a common anime theme) who finds himself inadvertantly engaged to a sexy alien girl who becomes obsessed with him and follows him everywhere, much to the consternation of his pretty, smart, girlfriend.

Anime can also be a springboard into more educational pursuits; get your kid started watching anime, introduce manga from their favorite series, and watch as those reading skills take off without pain or prodding. My own kids started out with Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and Miyazaki, but their interests have expanded greatly now. My younger kids are particularly into Naruto at the moment, and all of us greatly enjoy Full Metal Alchemist, while my teenager is passionate about Ouran High Schol Host Club, Black Cat, Loveless, Death Note and the like. She’s also been writing some remarkably well-written fan fiction.

One thing I like about anime, especially for my daughters, is that the female characters, while they might be frequently scantily clad, are also generally pretty tough and kick-ass. Weakness of character — cowardice, whining, betraying of friends — tend to be overemphasized and portrayed as negative. Smart girls, tough girls, girls who can wield swords, guns and other phallic weaponry that tends in general to belong to the boys, girls who can do martial arts with ease, girls who can take out a bad guy (or a good guy — anime fans seem to cosplay the evil characters at least as much as they do the good ones), are held in high esteem.

As a feminist, of course, I’m aware that a lot of other feminists take issue with the way in which girls and women are portrayed in anime — or, more specifically, with how they are clothed (or not) and how their … assets tend to be exagerrated. Large breasts, round, peachy buttocks and costumes that reveal and enhance as much of the female anatomy as possible tend to be the order of the day in a lot of anime, and there are certainly plenty of series in which sexism and misogny run rampant. Much has been studied and written on this, in particular the relationship between the insurgence of feminism in Japan and whether the mostly male writers and artists who create anime and manga use those genres to express their repressed anger over women stepping outside of traditional roles of wife and mother within Japanese society.

This is probably true to some extent, just as it’s probably true that a lot of what we see in the portrayal of women in American films has similar psychological and societal origins. However, the existence of some misogynistic anime, or even the existence of hentai (pornographic anime) does not take away from the positive messages exhibited by artists creating anime and manga that send more empowering messages for and about women.

Honestly, as the mom of a teenage daughter who is completely obsessed with manga and anime, I’m not worried about this. In fact, I worry a lot less that my kids’ perception of women will be warped by anime than I was (and am) over the message dolls they’d get by Barbie andBratz dolls. My teenage daughter tends to gravitate away from any anime or manga series that portray women in negative ways and those featuring empowered female characters.

I also like that homoesexuality and homoeroticism tend to be prevalent themes and very accepted within the cosplay community. There’s even a whole subset of female-oriented anime called Yaoi that involves such relationships between two male (usually androgynous and pretty) characters, and a legion of “Yaoi Fangirls” who devour stories about them. I also find it interesting that the acceptance of homosexuality in anime exists at all, and wonder if it, like the sexualization and individualization in anime generally, is a means for repressed individuality to vent itself within a conformist culture. Crossplay (girls cosplaying boy characters and vice versa) and crossdressing are popular at conventions and within the cosplay community, although I would venture to say that it’s more common to see a girl playing a guy character than the other way around.

There’s also some great storytelling in anime and manga; the serial nature of the genre lends itself well to story and character arcs that develop over time. Sure, there are anime like Pokemon and Dragon Ball that are aimed at a bit more juvenile an audience, but there are also anime and manga like Death Note, Loveless, Black Cat, and Full Metal Alchemist, that are packed with interesting characters — many of them female — and complex, intelligent plot lines that draw you in and keep you coming back for more. The villains in the better anime are as well-developed and interesting as the good guys, which, much like the development of D&d characters, allows cosplayers to get in touch with multiple facets of their own personalities as they decide — and shift, depending on their mood — with whom they identify.

I find it interesting that the generally repressive and conformist Japanese culture spawned anime to begin with, and I’m even more fascinated with how much anime and manga and the entire subculture surrounding them has grown increasingly popular in America. While cosplay (elaborate roleplaying of characters from anime television series, movies, manga, video games and other sources) is prevalent in Japan, it’s still rather frowned upon by the mainstream as a frivolous and even rebellious pursuit.

Oddly, here in America, where indivduality is supposedly prized, you would think that cosplaying would be widely accepted as a means of expressing one’s individuality; we Americans like our conformity as much as anyone else, though, and the “normal” folks, I expect, don’t understand the compulsion to role-play a character any more than their counterparts in Japan.

Thus anime and cosplaying, in two completely different cultures, have become a means for those who identify outside the mainstream to both express themselves and find like-minded friends with whom to form a supportive community. Anime, manga and cosplaying, as they increasingly cross lines between two very different cultures, reveal more about our similarities than our differences.

– by Kim Voynar

April 9 , 2010

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