And the problem of moe fascism
“Fiat ars—pereat mundus,” says fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l’art. Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
Even among the Japanese anime and mystery novels produced in the 2010s, there are many works that ambitiously respond to our new era. But the number of critical works that discuss their significance is far too limited—not even just a few, but next to none. Novels can of course be read in any way one wishes, and the same goes for visual works. Readers are free to read them politically or to read them otherwise. But it is problematic that there are so few critical interventions which grasp the political and social elements inherent in such works.
Kiyoshi Kasai, Theories on Culture Post-3/11
What we need is not likely to be the otaku-ification of politics, but rather the politicisation of the otaku subject. Put another way, we need to further develop theories of otaku dissociation—to politicise the twisted desires of otaku (the meta-real) without erasing them. And for us to acquire the drive to aim for a structural transformation to address the environment that pulls otaku towards vicious addiction cycles.
Shunsuke Sugita, Recrossing 00s Criticism
It perhaps seems ridiculous to posit video games, animation, comic books, etc. as spaces where the political left-wing has suffered major defeats in the 21th century. But in fact, we need to approach this idea with particular seriousness and gravity exactly because this type of defeat—by which I mean one that does not even register as a defeat—is so characteristic of the current crises of the left. Among these, the situation with so-called “otaku culture” stands out as particularly symptomatic. As a representative fixture of extreme youth culture, the otaku landscape used to be definitionally opposed to the basic tenets of conservative morality. And yet, over the course of recent decades, its aesthetics have been seamlessly integrated into the present global right-wing populist movement—and its gradual loss continues to be singularly disregarded as unimportant by its former cohabitants on the left.
The questions that stand before us are deceptively large in scope. And this deceptiveness is itself half the battle. Since every conversation about otaku culture begins from the presupposition that there is nothing at stake, the importance of the phenomenon necessarily remains concealed. On the contrary, it is assumed to be unimportant from the outset. We will break with this tendency. In fact, as we will demonstrate, the development of an “otaku fascism” or a “moe fascism” intersects with such a large and complex range of political phenomena that we will have to make do with a merely preliminary description. Put another way, we must leave a lot unsaid, and will only ever be able to make our case in its broadest terms.
Under such constraints, we will not be able to approach the necessary scope for a ‘systematic’ account of the otaku phenomenon. (Perhaps one day we will; the following notes came about in the process of preparing to do exactly that.) Nonetheless, if we embrace these limitations, they offer a strangely freeing opportunity. In line with Susan Sontag’s aphorism that “taste has no system and no proofs,”1 we will attempt to describe the otaku as something which can be grasped intuitively. To that end, we will leave the attempt at systematisation to the side—for a later date—and stick to “the form of jottings, rather than an essay.”2
(1) To be an otaku is not just to be an “anime fan,” nor is it as simple as appreciating experiences that are similarly otaku-coded like manga or video games. An otaku is someone who interfaces the world in a manner where the brazen “artificiality” of such art makes a special kind of sense.
(2) The perception that there is something inescapably Japanese about the otaku sensibility hints at a history that we must take into account. Nonetheless, we also must remain wary of the temptation to exoticise the concept. It is quite possible to be an otaku for things as quintessentially American, for instance, as film noir or superhero comics.
(3) The historical connection between anime and otaku is not coincidental, but it also is not intrinsic. Marc Steinberg convincingly argues that anime embodies a unique aesthetic sensibility and affective style. He offers the conclusion that “anime [is] an intermedia—a medium composed of an assemblage of discrete media, a medium composed of other media forms.”3 Anime’s stylistic specificity developed out of its context in a particular commercialised multimedia market. The post-war media ecosystem of Japan was, in a phrase, cheap and lean. In the institutional chaos that followed the American occupation, Japanese art was highly commercialised as a matter of necessity, but it lacked room for the luxury and excess which characterised the American Hollywood system or the European cinematic avant-garde. The otaku sensibility that was discovered in correspondence with this history, and which expressed itself in part through the stylisation of post-war anime, sought to prove that the aesthetics of the commodity are nonetheless capable of artistic expression in the truest sense.
(4) It is impossible to understand the uniquely otaku forms of artistic expression without first grasping the centrality of character to otaku subculture. Obviously, characters are close to universal as an element of narrative art in general; the varieties of storytelling that allow for a total lack of human agency are rare and necessarily exceptional. Nonetheless, we can roughly identify the history of otaku art with the incremental evolution of a new approach to the issue of character over the course of the transition from the 20th century to the 21st. Most saliently, otaku-style characters are distinct in that they fully embrace the kind of gaze that “only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images.”4 This free-floating form of character is the central index for the whole otaku worldview.
(5) The psychoanalyst Tamaki Saitō offers the following list of characteristic otaku objects: “Anime, video games, young-adult novels, voice actor idols, special effects, C-class idols, fan magazines (dōjinshi), yaoi, fighting girls.”5 And in opposition to this, he offers the following list of distinctly non-otaku forms of obsession and mania: “Philately [stamp-collecting], bibliomania, audio, cameras, astronomy, bird-watching, insect collecting, all forms of music, and all other forms of collecting.”6 The core distinction between these lists is a matter of anthropomorphism—that is, making something inhuman feel human. The items in the first list have a fictive or artificial sense of humanity. The contrary list has no such pretense. There is nothing uniquely otaku about an obsession with horse racing, for instance. However, the same essential behaviour transforms into an otaku fixation once it is filtered through Uma Musume (“horse girls”).
(6) The anthropomorphism of the otaku gaze depends on its ability to separate human character from the historical specificity of human experience. The highest aspiration of characterisation in older narrative forms, such as the modern novel, was to produce a fully psychologised individual who could be explained with reference to their personal history as it appears in a fully autonomous literary text; “the novel in general has interested itself much more than any other literary form in the development of its characters in the course of time.”7 The otaku form rejects this concern at a foundational level: “anime’s movement of return is based not on the relative self-enclosure of a text onto itself … but rather on its constitutive openness to other media and commodity forms.”8 This instinct against autonomy can be traced back to Walter Benjamin’s prognosis that 20th century mass media reflected the destruction of authenticity as an artistic value. The conditions of mass media facilitated the “[emancipation of] the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. From a photographic plate, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.”9 This purpose of “ritual,” given our current topic, can be analogised to the art-object’s rootedness in history—to its historicity. To the degree that art carries authenticity as an original specimen, its identity is tied to the unique historical origins of its physical presence. The challenge is that in the 20th century, where art chiefly appeared as a copy, or at least as an object which can be copied, it lost this sense of oneness and historicity.
(7) Otaku-like anthropomorphism, as with Benjaminian dehistoricisation, follows as the logical culmination of the productive forces developed under capitalism, which are required for the mass reproducibility of art in the first place. When otaku encounter “a particular social relation among people that assumes, for these people themselves, the phantasmagoric form of a relation among things,”10 they take the phantasmagoria of the transformation seriously on its own terms, in accordance with their gaze that “only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images.”11
(8) As quoted just above, Fredric Jameson formulates the basic elements of our “postmodern” era in a related manner. He alleges that postmodernity is “an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place,” and that mass culture “only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images.”12 This description unavoidably brings to mind certain Baudrillardian notions of postmodernity: Firstly, that of the simulacrum as the “truth that hides the fact that there is none:”13 And secondly, of hyperreality as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality. … The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.”14 The point in any case is that change itself, and its absence of an inherent reference to historicity, lacks authenticity as an original. Pure change is self-referential. This is as close as postmodernism comes to its much maligned “relativism.” In this light, Hiroki Azuma’s claim that “the essence of our era (postmodernity) is extremely well disclosed in the structure of otaku culture”15 is hardly surprising. In otaku works, the stripping away of historicity extends so deeply into the work that its fictive reality itself takes on an extra layer of internal postmodern logic. Azuma refers to this as a “game-like realism” that depicts the otaku “meta-real.”16
(9) One interesting thing to note is that, for all of the insights that Benjamin and Jameson can offer on these phenomena as they appeared in their own times, history was and remains far from over. Most critical efforts to detect the postmodern tendencies of late capitalist art rest on their manifestation in the comparatively restrained mainstream of culture. However, in other (less mainstream) contexts, where such tendencies retain the breathing room to mature and ferment, we can catch a glimpse of the postmodern in its most extreme form. That is, in a mode that is at least distinct in quantity, if not precisely quality. This is the essence of the difference between the otaku style as next to other sensibilities that are merely postmodern.
(10) The otaku tendency towards anthropomorphism is a symptom that arises from the transformative properties of the commodity form, and in this sense it is technically little more than a coincidence of historical forces. It is not as though otaku prefer anime to bird-watching solely because anime contains a human element. Anime imbues something inhuman with the appearance of humanity—quite directly life-making in the sense of the Latin anima. The otaku sensibility is fascinated with this transformative fetishism itself—specifically in the traditional sense of the fetish, where an inanimate object is ritually filled with a spiritual essence. Real, living humans in their concrete historicity are old hat, and of no special interest to the otaku gaze.
(11) A very representative otaku habit is the ability to transform brand mascots into serious characters. They do this exactly because mascots are hyper-fictional; there is no basis or reason behind their existence except selling a brand. And so, treating a mascot sincerely is the apex of the fetishistic style. The otaku fascination with dolls, figures, and models are all similar in overall structure. In fact, otaku approach characters in general with the kind of attention towards fictionality that is implied by the structure of a mascot or doll. It is as though they want to imagine people first and foremost as mascots for their personal brands.
(12) This kind of “difference in level of fictional context”17 is further what separates otaku from camp. Camp is a sensibility of taste that queries the legitimacy of socially-rooted artifice. In this sense, it is decidedly queer: “camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s sex.”18 According to the understanding that queerness responds to the purely social limits on sex and gender expression, the otaku viewpoint is therefore not precisely queer. Camp takes pleasure in the play and performance of artifice insomuch as doing so eludes the heteronormative constraints of mainstream taste, but the otaku fascination with artifice is not nearly so conditional. Camp is amused by dressing in drag because it is not permitted according to the “good taste” of respectable gender; otaku are amused by cosplay because it performs something which is not permitted according to the distinction between fact and fiction—it is only strictly ‘queer’ towards the limitations of physical reality.
(13) This, however, does not mean that the otaku phenomenon is anything less than erotic. On the contrary, both camp and otaku are, in the final analysis, erotic to their core. The characteristic otaku emotive gesture is to moe: a pun on the Japanese verbs “to burn” and “to sprout”—that is, taken seriously, sexual arousal. This does not mean that every otaku must consciously or always see otaku objects as sex objects. Nonetheless, an otaku understanding of character implies at least some ability to comprehend and translate the eroticism of the commodity fetish. It means that one has the capacity to see the sexual potential of a purely symbolic instance of character that has no historicity or world-rootedness. “To put it very crudely, what distinguishes an otaku from a non-otaku is whether he is able to ‘get release’ with an anime character. … you can tell an otaku by whether he is able to use the image of a female anime character as an aid to masturbation.”19 In reality, the phenomenon is more complex and less gendered. But the essential point remains that the otaku sensibility sees the transformational structure of the commodity fetish as a process that fills object-things with an equivalent (or even superior) sexual potential as next to real, historistic human beings.
(14) The ability to eroticise fiction for its very fictionality is a crucial reason as to why otaku stubbornly persist in their fascination with paraphilia which are generally purged from even the most expansive definitions of ‘queerness’. I am here referring to extreme fetishes such as ‘furry’ (anthropomorphic bestiality), ‘lolita complex’ (fictional paedophilia), guro (gore fetishism), and vorarephilia (cannibalism). It is of course true that all fetishes play with the unbreachable gap between desire and reality. It is moreover correct, even if it is polite to leave it unsaid, that the core desires implied these particular fetishes lurk in the social underbelly, reaching far beyond their comparatively open expression in otaku contexts. But the otaku sensibility is distinct in that it prefers, all else being equal, unobtainable desires over obtainable ones.
(15) The interplay between the heteronormative and the queer is generally most concerned with the forms of sexual expression that are socially repressed. The intervention of otaku sexuality into this balance is to latch onto those erotic desires which, repressed or otherwise, are self-consciously known to be impossible. The peril of lolita complex is not just that it expresses a morally repugnant desire, but, moreover, that it attempts to enclose itself within the precarious concept of compulsory fictionality by recognising the impossibility of its own desires. It is a kind of phantasmagoric rape play that (often) imagines the possibility of consensual desire in an arena where it is both literally impossible and socially inadmissible. An equivalent dynamic is similarly pronounced in imaginary sex acts that involve murder and the like.
(16) A phrase that is so wrong that it is almost right is to say that otaku is a gender. The otaku desire for fiction has no reason to stop at the boundaries of the self. And therefore, the otaku sensibility accommodates a simultaneous mode of identity that is destabilising to all varieties of socio-political interpellation—gendered or otherwise. Saitō calls this the capacity for “multiple orientation”20 in otaku identity. The widely conjectured connection between transness and the otaku sensibility often hinges on baseless stereotyping. Nonetheless, a proper inquiry into otaku—as well as fandom more broadly—from the perspective of gender would be fruitful. There is every reason to think that the forms of gender expression that are prominent in otaku subculture would differ in degree and in kind from both cisnormative and queer conventions. One element that already stands out is the ease with which otaku embody virtual identities and avatars online. These personas very often differ in presentation from their user’s ‘real’ gender identity—or they lack gender expression altogether. Otaku are, at the least, notably comfortable with being unconstrained by bodily limits.
(17) The assumption that otaku eroticism is automatically destructive or perverse can be misleading. The high fictionality of otaku objects is comparatively well suited to the extremism of violent or depraved sexual taste. But there is also an equivalent tendency towards utopian playfulness. This division shows up clearly in the harem romance subgenre, where a fantasy that is inherently rooted in misogynistic desire intersects with an authentically emancipatory scepticism towards the anti-social elements of heteronormative monogamy. A manga such as The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You by Rikito Nakamura and Yukiko Nozawa is implicitly pornographic in conceit, and yet radically progressive in its applied assumptions. We can also turn to the example of Saki by Ritz Kobayashi, which consciously normalises homosexual reproduction and the transcendence of the biological limits of sex, but does so primarily as a vehicle to fetishise lesbianism. In UQ Holder! by Ken Akamatsu, the genderfluid Kurōmaru Tokisaka is simultaneously treated as both a validly feminine and a validly masculine sex object for the audience’s gaze, and thereby lands on a kind of perverted affirmation of even the most radical gender identities. These kinds of paradoxically utopian impulses are typical of otaku works.
(18) A decisive feature of otaku taste is its capacity to “switch freely between levels of fictional context. … Otaku do not just command a great deal of information, they must also be able to identify instantaneously these different standards of fictionality and shift to the appropriate level on which to appreciate them. This means not just falling in love and losing oneself in the world of a single work, but somehow staying sober while still indulging one’s feverish enthusiasm.”21 This follows naturally from their hyper-postmodern gaze. And it leads, just as naturally, towards a certain level of cynical distance from their own aesthetic posture. For Slavoj Žižek, the insidiousness of late capitalist ideology lies in how it allows for people who “know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it.”22 The otaku sensibility has a strangely equivocal—or perhaps dialectical—position within this formulation: On one hand, the otaku capacity for self-alienation is the purest possible consummation of Žižek’s diagnosis. However, the otaku sensibility also stands out as a highly effective toolset for seeing past the fetishistic structure of contemporary ideology by “switch[ing] freely”23 between its ideological codes. As argued earlier, otaku “take the phantasmagoria of the [commodity] transformation seriously on its own terms;” this has radical potential. Settling whether otaku taste remains as nothing more than the zenith of capitalist consumption, or, whether it instead becomes a radically politicisable contradiction within that system, is a battle that the left is on the brink of losing without a fight.
(19) The politicisation of otaku became a pressing subject in Japan around the time of the “third generation” under Azuma’s chronology—that is, in the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s. In contrast to the relatively immobile political dynamics of Japan during the booming 1980s economy, the Lost Decade recession of the 1990s brought the contradictions of post-war capitalism to the surface of political consciousness. The crises of the 1990s—including economic stagnation, natural disasters, and terrorism—threatened to awaken a generation of deracinated, alienated youth who were equipped with the tools of otaku-like critique. However, during the 21st century, the most dramatic shifts in the balance of Japanese politics have centred on resurgent nationalism among net uyoku (the online far right), Article 9 revisionism, and revitalised social conservatism in the Liberal Democratic Party governing regime. Whatever possibilities the otaku sensibility offered to critique the status quo in Japan, its practical manifestation has tended towards escapism and nostalgia in place of a truly radical alternative political vision.
(20) The political history of otaku in Japan prefigures of the evolving nature of the current populist right-wing movement across the globe. Japan happened to face economic decline, environmental decay, and political terrorism all at once at the immediate outset of the post-Soviet era. But the inevitable consequences of capitalist contradictions and climate change, as well as the blowback to American imperial policy, have rolled out unevenly over several decades, like a wave, in the rest of the West. Nonetheless, the Japanese example remains highly salient. The ground is falling out beneath the feet of the youthful, otaku-ified masses, who interface with late capitalism as a strictly virtual and dehistoricised phenomenon; for the generations which have been denied political terrain suited to the conditions they exist within, their “self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”24
(21) The usefulness of otaku-like alienation to the political right is analogous to the most repugnant erotic tendencies of the otaku sensibility. (This is unsurprising, given the libidinal elements of political orientation more broadly.) Just as some otaku can stay “sober while still indulging one’s feverish enthusiasm”25 in the context of the inherent rape fantasy of a lolita complex, fascism offers young people the opportunity to interface with a fantasy of extermination and domination at a similarly self-alienated distance. They experience their own desires as a kind of utopian fiction, or as pornography. Affectively, they root for Auschwitz at a distance, like it is nothing more than a controversial movie villain. The apparent depthlessness and insincerity of the new fascism of young people in the 21st century—which could be called “moe fascism”—can only begin to be grasped once it is seen in this light. The relationship of moe fascists to their own ideology is, quite seriously, two-dimensional—hyperflat, rootless.
(22) “Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.”26
(23) The metastasis of this moe fascism can also be understood through an example that is a little closer to home for English-speakers: The then-unpoliticised generations which developed an otaku sensibility towards the American media climate in the early 2000s were uprooted by the 2008 economic crisis. They then witnessed the monopolisation of the system by the ownership classes during the bailout era, and were thereby made highly politicisable. The later mobilisation of these otaku as reactionaries during the “Gamergate” phenomenon—which protected their “right” to fictional expression as though it were a scarce commodity—follows naturally from the failure of radical politics to offer a solution for them in the abortive “fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.”27 As in the past, “this unique and ‘unforeseen’ historical pause, … led in the capitalist countries to fascism or the pre-fascist reaction: … The extermination of bourgeois democracy by fascism [was] produced by … the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history.”28
(24) Trumpism is, for now, a rather suitable outlet for the sensibility of these same people. Trump himself is first and foremost an entertainment figure who is in the habit of playing himself as a TV character; his fluency in the “kayfabe” of professional wrestling places him in a political terrain that an otaku can effortlessly map onto and appreciate. Whether or not the relatively erratic and brittle kind of threat posed by Trumpism in its present form will turn out to be the worst of the damage caused by the moe fascists is an open question, and its weight rests on our shoulders right now. There is no answer to these people which purely speaks, in a liberal manner, to the fact that fascism is “utopian” or “based on fantasy” or “not real”—they know this very well, that is the point of the whole project. They want to “make anime real”—as in, make reality anime.
(25) Such is the otaku-ification of politics, as practiced by moe fascism. We must reply by politicising otaku.
References
- Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp” ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Marc Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan ↩︎
- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism ↩︎
- Tamaki Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding ↩︎
- Marc Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan ↩︎
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility ↩︎
- Karl Marx, Capital: Critique Of Political Economy (Volume 1) ↩︎
- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Animalising Postmodernism volume 1) ↩︎
- Cf. Hiroki Azuma, The Birth of Game-like Realism (Animalising Postmodernism volume 2) ↩︎
- Tamaki Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl ↩︎
- Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp” ↩︎
- Tamaki Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology ↩︎
- Tamaki Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl ↩︎
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility ↩︎
- Tamaki Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl ↩︎
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility ↩︎
- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History ↩︎
- Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? ↩︎
I did not fully understand this article, but I want to make a comment on one aspect of it:
I found it strange how, while the concept of gender was discussed in various ways, women themselves were not discussed. In other words, we have a subculture that is well known for being very based around commodifying exaggerated images of women and girls, yet this did not appear to feature in your analysis other than briefly in the case of the “me and my 100 girlfriends” book you mention–which you actually *praise* as a piece of art that has progressive potential.
I think this is showing a mistake many have made. In the west, some appear to be surprised that many otaku are racists who enjoy dominating and subjugating women. Yet these same people will promote ‘queer’ representations of women which…also feature them dominated and subjugated. If this is the great response ‘progressive’ otaku have, or if it’s a manifestation of the ‘politicization of otaku’ that you advocate, then i dont see it having much success. I actually believe it has been feeding the problem.
So in general I think that you overestimate the degree to which video games and anime have been sites of “defeat” for the left. You can’t lose something you never had. What did these spaces hold for the left in the first place, that was supposedly “lost?”
While there’s some validity to what you’re saying, and while some of the people I’m quoting and engaging with throughout the post definitely operate from the assumption that otaku are generally men, I have problems with that assumption. I think I tried to speak about it in a more balanced way than many do. Therefore, I can’t agree with what you’re saying, at least to the degree that it seems to come from a similar place of treating otaku as masculine. Outside of the most vocal cesspits of toxicity online, women have been making a large impact in video games, anime, manga, etc. for decades now. And not just as some kind of “counterbalance” to the horniness of stereotypical otaku taste. Much of that stereotype was itself shaped by women’s own ideas about their gender. Women used to be and continue to be fans of this stuff.
I’d recommend “Otaku Research and Anxiety About Failed Men” by Patrick Galbraith for some detailed history showing how women were drivers of otaku culture in anime and manga throughout the 1970s and 1980s—and how popular perceptions of the space as woman-ly persisted beyond that. This is the era when many of the conventions of the otaku style were established. And even today, women continue to make and enjoy art in this space. One of the manga I cited (Saki) was drawn and written by a woman, as just a minor example.
I feel that many of the approaches to otaku culture that treat its sexuality as automatically masculine and automatically exploitative are disconnected from the actual experience of many women in the space. The right-wing reaction we’ve seen since the early 2010s is itself rooted in the fact that women have had this role, and have been willing to speak up about how they want to be sexual without being demeaned. And even leaving aside sexuality, Gamergate occurred in the context that women were making and enjoying “nerd” games, and weren’t willing to go back to acting like “one of the dudes” just to blend in with conventional stereotypes.
At the end of the day, I think any take that seems to equate otaku sexuality so closely with “dominating and subjugating women” is removed from the actual history of how this art has been made and received, and from the actual content of many of the works. It imposes a vision of acceptable femininity on women rather than just critiquing masculinity. It comes close to saying that a woman who wants to make or play bishoujo-ge dating sims would just be a dupe of masculinity, and therefore not acting like a woman “should.” I don’t see the sexuality present in such art as somehow proof that it was always right-wing or patriarchal.
Edit: For what it is worth, I do acknowledge the criticism that the differences between men and women in the space is something I’ve kinda dodged in the post itself. I often speak of it in a gender neutral way without developing the idea further. I’d like to think this was just an effort to keep the post focused, but it was probably not done as well as it could’ve been. I’ve received similar feedback that I gloss over the issue of asexual otaku in a comparable way. I hope I will deal with these issues in other posts where it is needed. I tried to say something critical about masculinity in my recent post about Cross†Channel, at least.
I agree that women play a role in the otaku/video game spaces. I don’t believe that has much of an impact on what I’m saying though.
My connection to these spaces has been very limited for some time now, so my level of knowledge is not that high. But just taking an example like Sailor Moon. This is a manga written by a woman, seemingly written primarily for girls. But would this mean that I would call Sailor Moon a ‘progressive’ work of some kind? Not really; for one thing, most of the characters are teen girls who wear skimpy outfits and have adult male love interests. I don’t doubt that this is a genuine work of self-expression for the author, and it is nice for women and girls to have avenues of self-expression in this way, limited though it may be. I also personally happened to enjoy this manga. But it is not something I would have ever expected to produce any kind of challenge to patriarchy, nor to capitalism, nor to fascism. Nor have I (in my very limited experience) seen anything that has.
Gamergate stands in contrast to this, being a reaction against an actual challenge (albeit a feeble one) that was posed against the regressive norms that existed within the space. Anita Sarkeesian’s videos directly criticized beloved games like Bayonetta and No Mo Heroes for featuring highly sexualized female characters and/or lavish violence against women. This was way beyond the pale, and why? Because of course the expectations were very clearly set long before: in nerd culture, women are objects you get to collect and own and they do what you want.
If you are a boy or man who does not feel like you live up to masculine expectations under capitalism, there is a great place for you: video games and other nerd spaces. Here, you do not have to feel like a failure of a man. You can escape all of that, you can feel like a ‘man,’ you can own, objectify, and demean women all you want, and it’s actually encouraged.
It’s an oversimplification, of course. I don’t mean to suggest that women never existed in video game/otaku spaces. But I think it’s reasonable to talk about the predominant culture here.
I see Gamergate as essentially a revelation of where ‘gamer culture’ was always heading–or where it arguably already had been for a long time. Several years before Gamergate, there was also the ‘dickwolves controversy.’ This was when Penny Arcade made an inappropriate joke about rape, and after being criticized by a feminist blogger, there was a firestorm over that which lasted quite a while. Because even just criticizing men for making cruel and demeaning jokes about women was beyond the limits of acceptability.
So again I don’t see any of these developments as terribly surprising. I also don’t think anyone is really going to have an answer for ‘politicizing nerds’ in some positive direction. I think we are seeing the futility of this right now during the whole ‘nsfw games’ controversy that is happening right now. To my understanding, a conservative Christian group is trying to get various sexually lewd games removed from Steam/itch.io, and there will possibly be some kind of age restrictions for viewing porn online? Of course, it’s obvious that the conservatives pushing these changes are not to be trusted and this could possibly result in greater ability of the state to surveil its population. But I have to say, the response to all of this from ‘progressive’ gamers has been just absolutely disgraceful. What I’ve seen has largely been a mix of outright defense of pornography, insulting people who have legitimate grievances with porn, and pitiful wishy-washy statements lamenting that ‘we unfortunately simply have no choice but to defend this stuff [even if some of it depicts minors or rape scenes] because of the difficult circumstances.’
Where are the vicious, uncompromising, front-and-center attacks against pornography companies themselves? Where is the vision for women’s and LGBT liberation that could actually stand as an alternative to–in fact, a condemnation of–the false solutions of the far right? Nowhere that I can see, at least. And so I have to say that I don’t things will improve. Not while the main ‘progressive’ forces in the west prioritize personal consumption and self-expression as some kind of strategy for making political gains.
My point in emphasising the role of women in the space is to make sure we don’t confuse the obvious fact that there is no consensus as to what constitutes “progressive” expression with the idea that the space is deeply and foundationally dominated by men. The second option is at odds with so much of the history of otaku art, and is closer to a widely held online stereotype. You can look at any number of the sources I’ve used to confirm this historically, and then look at demographic data to confirm that the story remains complex today.
I’ll address some of the specific things you said, but first I want to make a bit of a conceptual point. Maybe this is pushing things a little, but I’m sensing an unbridgeable difference in how prescriptive we’re willing to be with this: I am not willing to dictate the aesthetics of what “progressive” femininity looks like outside of the specific critique of a power relation.
Certainly, it is key to the essay that otaku aesthetics embrace capitalism—it is about making art that is consciously rooted in its capitalist reality in a very foundational sense. And the link between capitalism and patriarchy is an historical fact. Capitalism privileges men, and rewards those forms of femininity that men find agreeable or ripe for objectification. Capitalism can integrate sex positive feminism, for an example that is relevant here.
But I’m not willing to turn around and make an aesthetic judgement which claims that such affirmative sexuality or self-objectification is regressive or conservative on its own terms. Jumping to that step seems confused to me. In order to do this, you have to make a judgement about what you think a validly progressive form of femininity looks like, and then impose that prescription. I would ask serious questions about what it is that roots any positive description of “progress”—even when it is so far from being a settled question amongst women, let alone anyone else. At that point you’re straying from identifying “progress” with superseding the current system of power relations, and are just applying a certain set of moral intuitions to people and calling that politics.
What is the connection between capitalism and sexualising women? It is that women can be easily objectified and commodified because they are comparatively politically subjugated; the political power that men have gives them the agency to determine how women are viewed in the dominant culture. As a result, the concept of women’s sexuality can be valorised into a profitable product more easily. But it is not as though male sexuality is immune from commodification. The changing evolution of boy bands and k-pop groups are pretty useful here, because in recent decades they’ve shown a willingness to step away from selling male sexual charisma to a male gaze (imposing muscular dudes being the only valid of form of a “hot dude,” affirming traditional masculinity) to a more varied market of “hot guys” that appeal to different sub-groups of women. The point is not to compare these and do some cringe incel “men are oppressed too” bit. It is that capitalism reifies and commodifies whatever kind of sexuality sells. The problem with capitalism is that it coerces people to express their gender in the terms that match with this market preference; the criticism lies in the power relations inherent to commodity production as a means of survival. It is not the case that capitalism has some special power to recognise whichever form of sexual expression makes women less happy, and then surgically enforces those. Capitalism would fill sexual expression with exploitation even if that expression was exactly what people would prefer after capitalism anyway.
With that background, when I look at the things you said there’s assumptions baked in there I just can’t accept. When talking about Sailor Moon, you jump straight from the way that the characters are sexualised to this meaning it is less than progressive. I personally don’t hold Sailor Moon as an affirmatively progressive work exactly, but what’s backing up the supposition that it is less than that? Sailor Moon was written in a capitalist patriarchy that prescribes the acceptable forms of female sexuality, sure. That’s the general condition of all female sexual expression in our society. But it is less clear why exactly Sailor Moon’s presentation is contrary to the wishes of women in general or matches with a gaze that’s exclusively masculine. Sure, Sailor Moon is not questioning the major hierarchies of society all that much—I don’t think it would no matter how it expressed sexuality, it’s not that kind of manga. But you’ve taken the fact that a work—for and by women incidentally—wants to present women as sexually desirable as a mark of it being specifically not progressive. That’s an aesthetic you’ve brought to the work from somewhere else. It’s not a criticism of the power relations that lie behind the fact art like this exists.
You’re correct to a degree about Gamergate in the specific sense that the history of Western “gamer culture” is very different to the much more egalitarian history of otaku culture that I mentioned. Gaming really did have a massive demographic discrepancy which influenced its cultural outlook; anime and manga, by contrast, has gone through long stretches of a majority female fandom. But your telling misses a key fact: even if Sarkeesian et al. were simply wrong about the issue of sexualisation in video games, the central issue would still be the harassment campaign that was meant to enforce a consensus view in favour of men. What Sarkeesian thought of Bayonetta is entirely unimportant next to the revealed misogyny of that harassment campaign. If we’re going to talk about predominant culture, sure it is fine to say that the harassment campaign revealed a predominant male chauvinism in Western gaming spaces. But as it so happens, both Bayonetta and No More Heroes are Japanese games. They were produced in a largely unrelated context, and I don’t think Gamergate had much of anything to do with the context behind those games existing. You’d be better off reading the source I mentioned about the historical background of otaku culture, as well as the books in the reference list to the actual essay. I still insist that your picture of it is a stereotype.
(Edit: And to be clear, this is just a minor quibble not some major point. I am not a fan of “gamer culture” of that era. Your Gamergate point is the one I am in most agreement on.)
But maybe none of this matters, because based on your description of the Collective Shout incident, this is deeply irreconcilable either way. Let’s be clear about what happened: private companies at the heart of the infrastructure of capitalism took it upon themselves to ban free expression that was being made largely by hobbyists—not some porn company that funds human trafficking. If your response to this is that you’re worried it made the porn game creators look good, or that they weren’t enthusiastic enough about pointing fingers and playing informant to help a private company take unilateral control of expression, you won’t have any credibility to go around putting “progressive” in quotation marks. That’s not even a liberal position—it’s a conservative one. It’s conservative to think that the goal isn’t to emancipate people from a structure like a multinational credit card company, but just to enforce the moral guidelines you happen to like. The goal isn’t to use force to make women appear however prudishly happens to align with your personal moral standards, it’s to carry out emancipatory politics that frees them from the structures that prevent them from doing whatever they themselves wish with their bodies.
I’m sorry if I didn’t properly address any of your points since this was fairly sprawling. I was somewhat divided between making fairly abstract points and actually addressing your concerns. But I also won’t be replying further because I think it should be plain to anyone reading that we have a major difference in terms of what progress even means, so I can’t really deal in detail with the kinds of issues raised by the original essay in a way that would satisfy you. To my lights, it seems as though you would be against things that I see as progress to begin with.
I do at least share your concern that not enough people are against the major porn companies. But I don’t find your suggestion as to why this is to be credible. And I suspect your reasons for hating them are also unrelated.
I think you’re reading past what I’m saying a bit, and ascribing to it the views some faction or other that you’ve encountered elsewhere on the internet (possibly “radfems”). So I want to start with the pornography part since this is where I’ve left the most gaps that you’ve filled in with things that I don’t believe.
To be clear, I haven’t read a whole ton about the “collective shout” thing, but I’ve seen snippets of it here and there from people I used to follow on twitter. So I’m very open to the possibility that I’m missing important details. In any case, based on what I’ve seen, here is my opinion:
The response from ‘progressive’ people in gaming/otaku spaces has been embarrassingly weak and obviously ineffective. I lament the fact that they have no chance at all of achieving a positive outcome in this situation.
What they *should* do, in my opinion, is loudly and ruthlessly attack pornography companies themselves on the basis of the porn industry’s horrific exploitation of women and lgbt people alike. This should be front-and-center. Only then is it effective for them to point out that organizations such as Collective Shout are clearly not actually interested in women’s liberation (including destroying pornography). Over and over again, progressives should tie these organizations in every way possible to the MAGA evangelicals who clearly and openly support the exploitation and subjugation of women and chiefly use “pornography” as a stand-in for actual, legitimate forms of sexual and gender expression. Again and again the point should be made that there are only two alternatives for people who reject the systematic commodification of women’s bodies: the MAGA evangelicals on one hand, and the actual progressive forces which oppose these MAGA fascists. Of the two, only one of them would be putting forth a positive vision for the future which *actually* includes a final defeat of women’s subjugation, including the horrible pornography industry. The other aims to perpetuate these conditions forever. It is a pretty easy choice.
That is what I believe would be an effective strategy for the left in this situation. This would be something to actually build from. But, as I’m sure you notice, what I’ve written is a fantasy. There’s almost no basis in reality for it at all…because online nerds appear to predominantly support pornography. Some of them even claim it is progressive in some way. At best, they may experience some occasional embarrassment at being associated with the large companies which drive and profit massively off of this industry. In any case, it’s unfortunately pretty laughable to imagine that they would stand up and take a principled anti-porn stance here. The strategy I’ve described was simple never on the table.
And well, what I’m saying is, this leaves them with nothing. The best they can muster is “hey, we support personal self-expression of individuals, including forms of self-expression that most people find repugnant.” And sure, they do point out that the anti-porn right are complete frauds, but who cares? People who oppose the concept of structural dominance over women are looking for somewhere to go. It’s no surprise if such people join the far right when the far right is the only faction that’s at least *saying* that it opposes pornography. It is a shame, but this will continue. I have great confidence that the left can win, but I do not think “mobilizing otaku” will be any remote part of that. Marginalizing them as much as possible is probably smarter.
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Back to the Sailor Moon bit. Here I think you’ve also projected the ideas of others onto me. I intentionally avoided making the point that Sailor Moon is ‘regressive’ or that I personally find something objectionable within its depiction of women. I’ll say now that I definitely do find the ‘adult men kissing teenage girls’ parts of the manga objectionable, but that’s kind of an aside–my point here very much is not that “affirmative sexuality or self-objectification is regressive.” What I’m pointing out is an *absence* of something. It’s my understanding of your article that you believe the left has “lost” something in the the world of otaku culture. Essentially, I am asking you what it is that we had, that we then somehow lost. I do not feel that the examples you described as being “progressive” (100 girlfriends etc) really qualify as such. But, since I have not read them, it’s kind of unfair of me to pretend that I have some definitive opinion on them, so I produced a different example that I am familiar with in order to make the general point that I simply don’t think that “women expressing their sexuality in authentic ways that are nonetheless well within the confines of what is accepted and even encouraged within patriarchal society” is something “emancipatory,” as you seem to believe. Or let’s at least say that I’m very skeptical of their “emancipatory” potential and would need to see something concrete that explains why. Does this imply that I dislike these kinds of works or think they are all automatically bad? No. It just means that I think we’re looking in the wrong place if we believe that this is some site of potential for the left.
I will leave it there. You’ve said that you’ll stop replying, so assuming that is the case, have a good rest of your day.
I apologise if you feel misunderstood, that isn’t helpful. But I do think I was cutting through to the root of some of the difference rather than ascribing a stereotype to you. In the way you talk about pornography, all sorts of pornography are put in the same bucket regardless of whether they’re being pushed by a large corporation or whether it is art being made by individuals. My point was that the reasons for this conflation are more than likely an unbridgeable difference in judgement about the political content of the latter group. That difference makes it impossible to even begin talking about the issue you raise at the end of your reply about utilising this space politically.
An easy to see example is your description of “women expressing their sexuality in authentic ways that are nonetheless well within the confines of what is accepted and even encouraged within patriarchal society.” I believe this is grossly narrow compared to the kinds of sexuality we’re talking about in these works. Patriarchy is not nearly so comfortable with the way that sex appears in any number of these works. It’s hard to talk about this specifically if you say your experience with them is limited. In principle, I’d be happy to talk about the content of Cross Channel, Ayakashi Triangle, Cross Days, Saki, UQ Holder, Kyou Kara Yonshimai, Onimai, Yume Miru Kusuri, Ookami Shounen, Subahibi, or any number of examples. But I still feel that the difference is conceptual in a way that doesn’t even get to the specifics of the content.
Now, is that discomfort I’m citing going to lead automatically to this art becoming some kind of centrepiece of political revolution? Of course not. The itch.io games were never going to become praxis. But otaku spaces specifically turned from a gender equal space that was willing to push that boundary to something that was much more conservatively tethered to the needs to a male audience. People in fandom spaces increasingly reject any pull to become political aware in favour of telling “tourists” to leave their space alone. The point of the original essay was that you need people advocating for the progressive elements of art with these spaces and trying to transform that into political mobilisation, or else you’re ceding ground to something that can be easily used by fascists. Your scepticism that this was ever happening was based on a judgement of this art which I think is disconnected from how it is interpreted by the left within this space. It felt to me like you were generalising from something like the Gamergate example in a way that wasn’t factual. So I attempted to get to the heart of why we see progress as different
I just wanted to say this to clarify that my goal wasn’t to strawman you or make you feel misunderstood, rather than leaving it on a point where you felt that way. But I still don’t think it would productive to argue endlessly, so I will stop and leave now.