There is an interesting anomaly in discussions of the 2003 dating sim, Cross†Channel: On the one hand, a great deal of the narrative of Cross†Channel is plainly gendered. It is explicitly about a toxically masculine standpoint and its encounter with femininity. And the game’s heavy use of sexuality and eroticism is confronting—even overwhelming. Nonetheless, the prevalent analyses of Cross†Channel tend to frame its thematic content in universalisable or abstract terms. For example, rather than interpreting Taichi Kurosu’s failures at communication through the obvious and textual fact of his status as a man, these discourses treat Cross†Channel first and foremost as a story about a free-floating problem of social dysfunction—that is, in a sense which is inherent to contemporary human existence in general.
To be clear, I do not believe that this choice of emphasis is a failure on the part of these analyses. And Cross†Channel clearly deals, to a significant degree, with these same conceptual problems. The work warrants such a lens. But this approach also leaves conspicuous gaps behind. They demote the fact of Cross†Channel’s highly sexualised and gendered presentation to a mere side road to be explored within its wider themes of communication and sociality. Accordingly, this post will break slightly with the usual practice of visiting Cross†Channel as a work chiefly about isolation, otaku archetypes, “sekai-kei,” or the political conditions of Japan at the turn of the century. Our task today is to engage with Cross†Channel as a narrative about sex and gender. It deserves that reading, at least as a counter-balance.
I have a slight ulterior motive for approaching Cross†Channel in this way: Long-time readers are bound to have noticed that the modus operandi for this blog is to either (1) use some crusty old theory books and concepts as an excuse to talk about whatever pop culture thing I have most recently taken to, or to otherwise twist this around and (2) use some pop culture items as an excuse to talk about whatever non-fiction thing I have just finished reading. This post is shamelessly the second case: I just finished Shunsuke Sugita’s Men Have It Rough!—Theories on “weak men” in capitalist society—a very punchy and interesting little book. And it offered a compelling reason to stop putting off a discussion of Cross†Channel.
Intersection
The cornerstone of Cross†Channel’s setting is “Gunjō Academy”—a special school for neurodivergent children. There are broadly two different approaches that a work of fiction can bring to this kind of plot element: it can depict the academy as neglectful, and thereby act as a mirror of the failures and limits of our own mental health system. Or it can go the other way, and present a responsive institution which corresponds to an aspirational or hopeful lens through which to discuss neurodivergence. Cross†Channel takes an equivocal stance between these two possibilities. Gunjō comes about due to the seeming generosity of the wealthy and homely community of Kamisaka. However, its actual effectiveness is questionable. It repeatedly demonstrates a failure to empathise with or truly concern itself with its students’ needs as individuals, over simply maintaining order in the community. Its purpose is more or less to tuck its students away—to keep the issue of neurodivergence out of sight and out of mind.
This ambiguity matches the tenor with which Cross†Channel approaches the issue of community in general. In the manner of other works in the sekai-kei sub-genre, Cross†Channel deals with the disappearance of intermediating social institutions and the atomisation of contemporary existence. In fact, the absence of such sociality is made quite literal in its plot. However, Cross†Channel also never takes an absolute position on the value of these forms of social regulation. The mental states of the various members of the Gunjō Academy Broadcasting Club certainly decline, to varying degrees, during the story due to their state of extreme isolation. However, at the end of the game, as some members take steps towards improvement, this comes on the back of their experiences in the world of the time loop—and in spite of the comparatively impotent efforts of the institutions of ‘normal’ society.
We can also speak to a related ambiguity that shows up through the issue of masculinity in this kind of premise. In general, all credible descriptions of gender politics as it operates throughout world history emphasise the dominance of patriarchy. That is, the supremacy of political and social institutions which are governed by and for the benefit of men. Therefore, women rightly claim the status of a minority in the politics of intersectional struggle and civil rights today. Nonetheless, Shunsuke Sugita brings attention to the important fact that there is often a certain distance between the overall reign of patriarchy as a system and the powerlessness which is felt by individual men. Men, obviously, exercise generalised power over women as a class. And they often manage to unjustly rule over the lives of individual women. But Sugita also concerns himself with “weakness as an absolute standard, instead of a point of comparison.” [Men Have It Rough!] By doing this, he wishes to contribute towards a “sufficient theoretical basis to discuss the suffering and despair of ‘weak men’—those who, for any number of reasons, have been weighed down by poverty, dispossession, and disrespect.” [Men Have It Rough!]
Most discourses on the “crisis of masculinity” or the “male loneliness epidemic” fall into the tropes of Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), incels, the “Manosphere,” and other right-wing tendencies. The natural problem with such spaces is that they act as a gateway on the path towards reactionary defences of the patriarchy as such. And perhaps even more insidiously, they also co-opt the language of civil rights and thereby situate men as an “oppressed minority.” The use of such comparative language implies that the emancipation of women has come at the expense of men, and that men are now ruled over by a matriarchy—that is, in an equivalent position to women in feminist theory. Sugita hopes to avoid such pitfalls through his effort at an “absolute standard” of weakness. More exactly, he identifies “weak men” as “an ambiguous entity on the borderline between minority and majority.” [Men Have It Rough!] Without conceding ground on the overall position of men at the top of oppressive social structures, he specifies that some men are excluded from these patriarchal institutions of society (that is, capitalism) and thereby take up such an ambiguous position.
Of course, Sugita’s interjection only applies to a very specific subset of men. In his telling:
Even within the bucket of “weak men,” we are usually talking about people with developmental disorders, mental illnesses, learning disabilities, victims of abuse and bullying, and other similar cases. All of these problems must be tied together intersectionally.
Shunsuke Sugita (Men Have It Rough!—Theories on “weak men” in capitalist society)
Therefore, to rephrase Sugita’s position, he is speaking about the position between minority and majority that is occupied by men who are neurodivergent, disabled, economically disadvantaged, or otherwise excluded from the criteria of capitalist meritocracy. In this light, one might argue that his subject is not strictly men, but rather something like disability studies. But it is also important to remember that the experiences associated with these challenges are themselves gendered. This gendering demands a proper account of disadvantaged men as men, and thus, ”these problems must be tied together intersectionally.”
This whole approach to structuring the problem is central to our point about Cross†Channel: In a story which is so deeply about neurodivergence, and which is conspicuously told from the male standpoint, it is crucial that we do not ignore the gendering of neurodivergence. We must intersect (cross?) the two at all times, even when it goes unmentioned.
Predation
Among the students at Gunjō Academy, Taichi Kurosu stands out with an “Adjustment Coefficient” of 84%—the highest (worst) score we learn of in the text. Being a first-person narrative game, Cross†Channel is defined by the extremity of this standpoint. That is, by Taichi’s idiosyncratic internal narration and by his distinct way of seeing the world. However, in terms of the other ways that his personality manifests in the moment-to-moment experience of the game, much of Cross†Channel is also made up of a string of gags based around Taichi’s discomforting tendency towards sexual harassment. To be crude, Taichi is both a predator and an eccentric, and Cross†Channel offers a kind of tragicomedy rooted in the combination of these elements. We should drill down into how his predation is presented across serious and comedic contexts, and what it means on the whole.
Despite the fact that Taichi’s narration consistently dresses up the worst implications of his sexual abuse, as well as how he is seen within Gunjō, it just as regularly confesses to his status as a predator:
I totally get that feeling. I shouldn’t get to hang out with friends and live normally. That’s why I was sent to Gunjō: Since I’m something that hurts humans. I’m dangerous so I don’t deserve friends.
A notable feature of Taichi’s characterisation in general is the degree to which his behaviour dances between extremes, such that he cannot be encapsulated within any single moment across the narrative: he jokes, he cries, he waxes philosophical, he waxes erotical—he coldly acts on methodically homicidal intentions. He is “equipped with two settings: sexual harassment mode and kindness mode.” From the audience’s perspective, this inconstancy is a mask which delays the realisation that Taichi truly carries the capacity to be as malicious and debauched as his worst thoughts suggest.
The process behind this delayed realisation is itself a lens that we can use to place Taichi within the story. Taichi is a rootless borderline entity who cannot fix himself with a stable orientation towards the world. He holds the genuine desire for love and connection, but also cannot escape his self-perception as a predatory beast who would consume the girls around him if given the opportunity. The Misato Miyasumi route is a useful example in this light. Misato suffers from compulsive behaviour and self-destructive instincts. Taichi, who loathes his inner ‘nature’ as a predator, is attracted to Misato because she manages to look beyond this danger and offer him unconditional affection. Core to the emotional push and pull of the Misato route is the fact that both Taichi and Misato cannot forgive themselves, but freely forgive each other. To that end, they each dance around one another, trying to sneak a look beyond their respective masks.
We can also read into certain gendered concepts here. Taichi is not just self-conscious of his violent impulses, but also his erotic ones—and more fundamentally, of the overlap between the two. There is a tension between the compassion which Misato brings to the relationship and Taichi’s own perception that her compassion would fall away were he to reveal his true—predatory—desires. The largest emotional breakthrough of the route comes about precisely because Misato refutes this concern:
Taichi: “I’m not some harmless little boy.”
Misato: “Even so, you still stopped when I told you to.”
This kind of exchange also carries plain implications in the world of gender politics. According to a 2020 poll by Pew Research, the most common barrier to dating as identified by men was that it was “hard for them to approach people.” This is in contrast to women, who answered that it was “finding someone who is looking for the same type of relationship.” It is no surprise that men and women have different results in the context of a society which forces different roles and expectations on them. But it is important to highlight the extent to which men’s concerns are centred on their assumed role as the instigator of relationships. The natural flipside of this instigator role can be found in anxieties around sexual predation. Here is an excerpt from a recent Survey Center on American Life study on the subject:
Recent research has found that concerns about sexual violence have risen since the #MeToo movement, especially among single women. Women are significantly more likely than men to believe that men would be willing to take advantage of a woman sexually if given the opportunity. Twenty-seven percent of women say that “all or nearly all men” or “most men” would take advantage of a woman sexually provided the opportunity. Only 16 percent of men agree. Roughly half of men and women (46 percent and 47 percent, respectively) believe “some men” would be willing to take sexual advantage of a woman. Nearly four in 10 men (37 percent) and roughly one-quarter of women (24 percent) say “only a few men” or “very few men” would do this.
Taichi embodies this danger in a very direct sense. Despite his efforts to connect to others or to engage with them in healthy sexual relationships, he returns time and again to an understanding of himself that is rooted in the assumption that he is a predator, and that the women around him are moments away from becoming his prey. In this sense, Taichi acts as a kind of avatar for the worst elements of toxic masculinity. Yet, to be precise, he does this while maintaining the necessary self-awareness to present his own masculinity in a critical light. As the above quote suggests, the degree to which masculinity is recognised as dangerous or deserving of criticism has emerged as a major political faultline in recent decades. Cross†Channel continues to walk a fine line here: it presents Taichi as someone who is indisputably guilty of a certain kind of toxic masculinity, while nonetheless withholding the condemnation which ordinarily ought to correspond to such behaviour.
To be exact, the approach of Cross†Channel is not quite a matter of simply withholding judgement. It instead grounds itself in an intense sense of sympathy for Taichi—as well as for the brokenness of the rest of the cast. As Misato reiterates to Taichi, “that’s because I’m Gunjō.” Here, she uses Gunjō as a descriptor of their shared neurodivergence. This point cannot be emphasised enough: Cross†Channel is a story composed entirely of neurodivergent characters. In this light, we cannot accurately grasp Taichi’s viewpoint through the simple binary of toxic versus non-toxic masculinity. The essence of the problem is that Taichi is someone who wishes, aspirationally, to be something other than a “toxic man”—something other than a predator. However, in the manner typical of those at Gunjō, he fails to achieve this seemingly straightforward goal. He lives down to the worst potential of his gender. Cross†Channel examines this failure as something that deserves our sympathy in and of itself.
In this sense, Cross†Channel operates according to an “absolute” standard of weakness, and can be brought into conversation with Sugita. Cross†Channel retains the facticity of the categories of victim and perpetrator without letting them define its worldview. Taichi is the perpetrator of toxic predation, but he is also the victim of a personal history filled with abuse and neglect—not to mention his current neurodivergence. The point is not to merely weigh these against each other and establish a hierarchy of suffering according to which we could place Taichi. It is more productive to recognise that the overall result of these elements is a person who suffers in absolute terms—often under forces which are beyond his control.
The ambiguities of this dynamic are further characteristic of Gunjō as a whole, and are therefore representative of how Cross†Channel understands neurodivergence and social isolation: To be a Gunjō is to be the kind of victim of mental illness where society will nonetheless treat you as a perpetrator. Gunjō is a place that isolates and contains those people that society has labeled as a problem—those who get left behind in the ‘too hard to fix’ basket. As a neurodivergent man, Taichi is both a perpetrator—a predator—and a victim. He embodies the problem of those “ambiguous [entities] on the borderline between minority and majority” [Men Have It Rough!] who are abandoned by the demands of an individualistic society driven by capitalist productivity, but who are also too politically culpable to fit within the conventional emancipatory rhetoric of victimhood. Taichi is an extreme representation of a general kind of social position which is all too real for marginalised men in our hyper-competitive, atomised society.
Fragility
What singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness.
Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
The relationship between predator and prey is necessarily asymmetrical. As long as the former posits himself as such, the social situation of the latter is distorted by his gaze. This problem, moreover, is not even limited to those cases which are driven by uneven power dynamics. A weak predator still morphs the social space around himself. Taichi is a predator, even if he is not a very powerful person. And this has significant repercussions for all of his relationships with women, as well as for the self-understanding of those women.
It is common sense that one should not “objectify” someone. And this advice particularly applies to the objectification of women, since they are more likely to be objectified in mass culture. But not everyone realises just how closely intertwined this problem of objectification is with the predatory orientation of the male gaze. Predation is an active posture—a toxic flip-side of instigation. It therefore posits the relative passivity of its target. In this light, it is no wonder that Simone de Beauvoir regards the objectification of women as a political condition which is so deeply rooted that it modifies our basic ontological categories. Put another way, our understanding of reality itself operates from the supposition that women are passive political objects, rather than active political subjects. Men are granted the conceptual freedom to act, whereas women only appear secondarily as a reaction—as an object which men can push into motion in the world.
In his behaviour, Taichi holds to this principle as though it were self-evident. He treats those around him—especially the women—as “toys,” or as food to be consumed. One critical element of this predatory dynamic is its effect on the identities of those same women. Gunjō is filled with vulnerable people who lack the social or institutional support to live independently. Even those who perform a style of fierce independence—such as Tōko Kirihara and Kiri Sakura—are still Gunjō. Their conditions require proper social care and accommodation. A side effect of the apocalyptic scenario in Cross†Channel is that it allows Taichi to “play” with their dependency and treat them as though they lack autonomy.
Tōko’s route brings this issue of autonomy into particular focus. (Tōko: “Do you just want some toy to mess with?” Taichi: “Yes.”) As the pampered daughter of a bourgeois family, Tōko already confronts life from a baseline of high dependency. But her Gunjō further compounds the problem. Tōko is entirely dependent on others for her self-image. This trait exhibits itself through two seemingly opposed tendencies: she loses herself entirely in her relationships with others, and she pridefully refuses to let others see any of her inner weakness. For such an other-directed person, the appearance of weakness in the eyes of others would manifest that weakness in reality. She performs independence from others to conceal the unbecoming elements of her fundamental dependence on them.
In a certain sense, Tōko’s relationship with Taichi operates as a series of mirrors. Tōko looks to Taichi for the affection and care necessary to determine her own sense of self. And through Tōko’s resultant turn towards passivity and dependency, Taichi finds an affirmation of his predatory gaze. Taichi acts on his desires to objectify others, in part, because Tōko indulges in her own dark desire to be objectified. There is a toxic compatibility between their respective afflictions. This reflects an extreme form of the general political condition of women as described by de Beauvoir: Men assert their political freedom to act through a libidinal objectification of women. And insomuch as women then attempt to compromise with the male gaze and view themselves as correspondingly desirable objects, doing so reinforces the political power that men derive from this system.
However, we should not let Taichi’s comparative power over Tōko—as well as his moral culpability—strip us of the ability to place this dynamic within a social context of absolute power. Both Taichi and Tōko are marginalised in the sense of being inconvenient, heterogeneous social elements who have been cast aside and institutionalised within Gunjō. The problem is that, both in the context of the lighter social isolation of Gunjō itself and in the heavier social isolation of the time loops, they spiral towards catastrophe on account of the interconnected toxicity of their relationship. Taichi and Tōko’s absolute weaknesses (their Gunjōs) only exacerbate the hierarchical exploitation present in their relationship. Marginalised, neurodivergent men like Taichi are fully capable of victimising and abusing those around them. And in the case of someone like Tōko, they will find a neurodivergent woman whose condition only makes her especially receptive to male objectification. From a social perspective, the fact that marginalised men continue to punch down—and may, if anything, punch especially lower—only deepens the tragedy inherent in the phenomenon of absolute weakness as it appears in Cross†Channel.
Innocence
Taichi’s attitude towards Tōko’s sexuality is not compassionate. But it also is far from hateful or disdainful. Its dominant feature is its cynicism. Rather than directly caring about Tōko’s sexual desires, Taichi instrumentalises them for the sake of two goals: Firstly, his own sexual fulfillment. And secondly, to simply advance the relationship itself—which he pursues for his own selfish reasons, both in the past and in her route. In this sense, Taichi is of course continuing to objectify Tōko by treating her as a means to an end. But also, the hierarchical standpoint of male sexuality under patriarchy is alienating in and of itself.
The predatory elements of masculinity produce a sexual outlook which is masturbatory: When sex is dehumanising, only an inner-directed form of reciprocity will be met. And therefore, the kinds of sexual connections that Taichi achieves with the women that he objectifies tend to be remarkably inert and cold. For all of the breakthroughs that Cross†Channel depicts in Taichi’s quest for human communication, a feeling which is never meaningfully captured is romance. This is in large part because, at its extreme frontiers, the patriarchal context of heterosexual connection diminishes romance and love.
Taichi’s relationship with Kiri is also highly illustrative of this specific kind of anti-romantic physicality. Over the course of both the Kiri route and Kiri’s later conclusion arc, she undergoes a kind of sexual awakening. Prior to the repeating loops of the game, Kiri was highly alienated from any kind of sexual contact—she performed something of an asexual persona. She was contemptuous of any physical connection with others, and regarded men in particular as “dirty.” However, by the end of the story, she petitions Taichi about the prospects of becoming a “love slave.”
This is clearly a radical shift in Kiri’s attitude towards sex. But Taichi’s own attitude towards the same subject stands out for how little it changes. Immediately after meeting Kiri, Taichi fantasises about the possibility that her prudishness might conceal an inner potential for hypersexuality. Whether or not we read her subsequent characterisation as proving him right—as showing that he “clocked” her—the point is that Taichi then inserts himself into her life under this assumption, and he therefore expressly decides to violate her sexual boundaries. He objectifies her and sexually abuses her under the premise that this will open up the only avenue of emotional connection that he can understand.
Taichi occupies a standpoint which is cut off from sincere reciprocity, and he therefore uses sexual contact as a tool to “brute force” extreme emotional states in the women around him. This is of course related to the issues of predation and objectification which we have discussed up to now. But the other point to be made here is that Taichi falls into a strictly instrumental form of sexual connection and that, beyond the (significant) problem this represents for the women themselves, such cynicism is a source of self-loathing and alienation for Taichi.
At this juncture, I would like to make a bit of a leap in the direction of this post. Throughout, we have discussed men at a certain distance—that is, with an antagonistic tone despite our original promise of sympathy. Men are predators; men are objectifiers; men are cynics. All of these accusations extend from men’s political domination and the resultant effect this has on our basic categories of social organisation. They flow into one another as a foundational description of men’s libidinal position across from women. We needed to establish these criteria in order to understand the social position of men. But a man is not men, even if he is all of the things that men are.
Kiri’s Gunjō makes itself felt, symptomatically, as an unrelentingly binary system for categorising the world. In her past, she suffered bullying alongside Yutaka Shinkawa and classified this experience in straightforward friend-enemy terms. It was also this binary mode of thought which ensured that, when she first met Taichi, she took a remarkable step which Taichi claims that no other student had taken: she presumptively treated him as a human—as someone who has agency and responsibility over his own actions. But Kiri then suffered through her first experience of being abused by Taichi. This led to a simple reassessment: Taichi Kurosu was actually a monster—something less than human. Kiri was at war with him from that moment onwards. Human against monster, kill or be killed.
But Taichi was never a monster. Monsters do not abuse people. People do.
The central error with viewing men from an abstract distance is that these categories—predator, objectifier, cynic—do not interface with the culpability of men in the dimension of their concrete experience. To varying degrees, men participate in all of these sins. Some men, like Taichi, regularly commit them all at once. These actions are constitutive of a gendered system of political power that exists for the benefit of men. But men do not have the capacity to choose this system, even granting the plain observation that they would choose it if they could. Men do not have freedom over their own power: Men are weaker than their power. And Taichi is a very weak man.
Kiri eventually confronts a form of this mistake. Once she learns that Taichi is the product of abuse by Shinkawa, she returns to being able to see him as human. However, Kiri’s Gunjō does not allow her to situate this transformation within its proper context. If Taichi is a human, Shinkawa and herself must then take up the position of the monster on the opposite end of the binary structure. The result is a catastrophic posture of submission and abuse where she allows Taichi to fully indulge his sexual cynicism through her. Since Kiri views the world in nakedly binary terms, abandoning her critique of the monstrosity of the male subject-view only leads to taking up the standpoint of this subject and resultantly designating herself, the female object, as monstrous.
However, this affirmation of Taichi’s viewpoint does not convince the man in question of his own righteousness. The cynicism of the masculine libidinal posture is, as discussed, alienating. Taichi cannot reciprocate Kiri’s failed attempt to understand him. In fact, he had internalised her original assessment of him as a monster long before even meeting her. Taichi already believed himself to be something inhuman and incapable of “normal” things like friendship and love—and was therefore shocked and baffled when he met someone like Kiri, who thought in such binary terms that even Taichi could be considered human.
Earlier, we discussed the facts of Tōko’s dependency and self-objectification, and how they provoke Taichi’s own condition. The situation with Kiri is different from Tōko’s in important ways. However, it at least shares this basic tendency to push Taichi towards being his worst self. It is obvious how both of these relationships exemplify the capacity of toxic masculinity to produce misogyny, and we have developed this idea throughout the preceding text. But it also needs to be said that the kind of sexual cynicism that we especially see in Taichi’s relationship with Kiri is a source of self-loathing and misandry among men. The fact that Taichi is able to initiate physical connections with Tōko and Kiri without any corresponding empathy for their standpoints intensifies his reasons for thinking of himself as being in the wrong—it makes him feel all the more monstrous. In the case of the male gaze, there is a level of interdependency between its misogyny and misandry. The men who are able to instrumentalise female sexuality and alienate themselves from romantic connection will develop a degree of hatred both for the feminine object and for themselves as the masculine subject. Seeing themselves as the root of the problem does not mean that they are able to step beyond their own viewpoint and transcend their hatreds, it simply adds self-loathing to the mix.
Taichi reiterates time and again that he wishes to connect with others. And this desire is more or less genuine. The problem is that he also defaults to the “purity” of a destructive, physical connection—the kind of connection which eventually leads to his own alienation. Yōko Hasekura chastises him for this limitation, saying “Taichi holds his broken toys too close. […] Those girls are disposable toys—they won’t last. Their end’s coming. Taichi himself will make sure of that.” Yōko has ulterior motives for saying as much, since she simply wants Taichi to herself; Yōko believes that she is the only one who can tame Taichi’s alleged nature as a beast. Nonetheless, it is an apt criticism in the sense that Taichi’s sexuality takes on the form of a toxic cycle: he breaks others in order to reach them by any means necessary, despite being fully aware that in the fullness of time this effort will rebound and leave him all the more broken. Kiri makes for a particularly troubling mirror in this system. She polarises everything into absolute terms. Therefore, the toxic capacity for Taichi—as well as for masculinity in general—to produce self-loathing risks becoming absolutised into total self-alienation. Under such extremes, the worst misogyny of masculine heterosexuality—as Taichi says, “to love it, and to still want to break it”—returns inwards as the misandrist basis to live down to being a man worthy of hate: “I hate myself even more than Kiri hates me.” Nonetheless, Taichi’s efforts at connection do lead to some progress, despite these headwinds:
If you don’t need your humanity, you have the choice to be alone. But I’d rather be a human. I want to become monstrously rational, rather than a creature of mere instinct. If I could manage that, I’d become perfectly harmless. But I’m missing something crucial: Contact, touching others. […] I lost the ability to see him as a friend. Instead, I ended up seeing him as a ‘thing’. It wasn’t anything so emotional, like “I’ll never forgive him.” Speaking concretely, his value inside me just changed. Well… it didn’t ‘just change’… he lost his value altogether. I lost all interest in him. […] It happened because I’m twisted—because I have a twisted mind. I lack rationality. But to cultivate a rational mind, you need contact with others. You can’t grow without conflict. But, I hurt and drive away the friends that I need in order to complete myself. That’s… my dilemma.
Performance
Taichi’s stereotypical heterosexual masculinity does not limit itself to his relationships with women. One such defining element of his relationships with men is his moderate homophobia—especially in response to the bisexuality of Hiroshi Sakuraba. Such bigotry is commonplace enough to be unremarkable on its own terms. But in the fuller context of Taichi’s life, it reveals certain key features of how he experiences his own sense of masculinity.
Taichi was raised by the Hasekura family as a household servant in a context where he lacked a number of substantial social and political rights. In the course of this role, he was regularly forced to cross-dress and to perform a feminine persona. This experience inculcated a severe case of body dysmorphia—especially surrounding his eyes, hair, and nose—which stuck with him for the rest of his life. But while this situation was exploitative, it did not compare in severity to his subsequent abuse. Taichi served a second family—the Shinkawas—as a household servant, and they maintained the same practice of forced cross-dressing. However, Taichi was additionally sexually assaulted and raped by them on several occasions. Cross†Channel makes it clear that Taichi views himself as a predator. But it is only in light of this traumatic past that we can contextualise the degree to which Taichi views the men around him as similarly predatory.
Consider his treatment of Sakuraba: Sakuraba fell for Taichi as soon as they met. He then attempted to force himself on Taichi, resulting in Taichi permanently injuring Sakuraba in order to stop the assault. This event naturally aligns with Taichi’s preexisting view that men tend to be predators. And it is itself just as natural that an attempted sexual assault would set Taichi off, given his history. However, we should also consider how such a story flips Taichi’s usual standpoint relative to predation. Sakuraba’s sexual interest made Taichi feel objectified and stripped him of the autonomy of a masculine subject. Taichi felt victimised in a manner comparable to the women that he objectifies, and in response Taichi mocks and minimises the validity of Sakuraba’s sexuality. Seen in a certain light, Taichi’s problem with Sakuraba seems to be less that their history together involves sexual assault, which Taichi is plenty guilty of in other contexts, but that it forces Taichi to identify with the femininity that he associates with the position of a sexual assault victim. That is, through a confluence of factors Taichi has come to associate masculinity with the ability to take libidinal “control” of human relationships, and he therefore views homosexuality as a predatory threat to his masculinity. A rival top, so to speak.
This attitude is turned around in an ironic manner through Taichi’s relationship with Yutaka Shinkawa. When Taichi reunites with the amnesiac Shinkawa, they immediately click and bond over their shared penchant for sexual humour. Despite being unaware of it at the time, Taichi is able to connect with and befriend his past abuser shockingly easily. A key reason behind this outcome is the fact that they both direct their predatory gazes outwards. This reinforces the degree to which Taichi’s trauma is not rooted in the abstract phenomenon of sexual assault, but specifically in the sensation of being objectified and thereby “feminised” by other men. Where Sakuraba makes Taichi inherently uncomfortable to the extent that he serves as a reminder of Taichi’s traumatic identification with the feminine object, Taichi is instead entirely comfortable with Shinkawa’s lecherous and predatory personality as long as it is directed away from Taichi, and towards its “proper” female targets.
Beyond Taichi’s specific personal history, we can also apply this dynamic to a more generalised understanding of masculinity. Let us start with three interrelated claims: (1) there is a kernel of Taichi’s traumatic fear of objectification embedded within the standards of masculinity; (2) since the power of men depends upon competition and predation, this masculinity is also highly precarious; (3) there is something fundamentally rivalrous about the appearance of masculinity. We can put these together to say that the experience of cisheteronormative masculinity is founded on a misandristic substantiation of the predator–prey binary, where the failure to be a predator is automatically identified with the position of prey. Or, seen in another light, homosexual attention comes to be understood as inherently feminising because the only valid form of masculine sexual contact is defined as predatory objectification.
Altogether, this implies an interdependency between men as a plural phenomenon and masculinity as an individual’s gender experience. Over the course of this post, we discussed the capacity for toxic masculinity to produce both misogynistic predation and misandristic self-loathing. But there is also a social form to this misandry. The danger posed by men as a class produces a social definition of masculinity as the ability to freely act on the world and objectify others—men are constituted as subjects by their ability to be dangerous. Therefore, the right to have one’s masculinity socially recognised within conventionally gendered standards is incompatible with the decision to remain harmless.
The system which follows from this problem is cyclically corrosive to the identities of men. If men do not identify their masculinity with its most toxic features, and if men do not perform these attributes in public, they lose their social designation as men. This is because men are equated with their power, and can thereby be labelled as “less than” a man if they do not visibly exercise power. The opposite of masculinity is a purely negative concept. It is the empty space for a “second sex”—that is, a woman. Therefore, a harmless man is axiomatically equivalent to the feminine or is “acting like a girl.” However, for all the reasons explained throughout the rest of this post, the interpersonal posture adopted by men to sustain their masculine danger and sense of power leads to misandristic self-loathing. Put another way, men are forced to either perform a self-alienating persona of power or they will be socially designated as less-than a man. Masculinity is a recursive structure of accumulated misery, built on the competitive striving to outlay this same misery and place it on others. Taichi’s identity is built on a self-destructive performance of toxic masculinity which serves to recover the masculinity which was stripped from him as a child by Shinkawa and others.
However, rather than Taichi himself, I would like to close out this point by talking about someone who carries out a similar gender performance from an entirely different standpoint: Miki Yamanobe. Despite putting on an upbeat and outgoing personality, Miki suffers from Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). While her cheeriness is not an outright façade, it is nonetheless an affect that she assumes out of convenience. As a young girl who grew up in poverty, Miki has little in the way of concrete power—either physically or socio-politically. She therefore performs an exaggerated stylisation of her gender in the hopes of winning goodwill or sympathy from others.
Since Cross†Channel is told from Taichi’s perspective, the audience learns about Miki from the outside-in. This means that it takes some time to grasp the fact that there are effectively two different Mikis: There is Miki in her natural state, and there is also a separate form of Miki produced through the endless time loops. Deceptively, we learn of these in the reverse order, since the looping Miki is the one who immediately appears in the story as of the revelation of the time loop in Week 2—we only truly meet the other Miki in Week 5. The result of this subterfuge is that players begin from the mistaken impression that Miki is one of the strongest and most self-reliant characters in Cross†Channel. But she is actually plenty vulnerable. Despite her psychological barriers to trusting and caring for others, Miki is weak enough for her survival to depend on winning over others through her amiability. Miki’s upbeat personality is built upon this dependence. However, in the context of the time loops in particular, she comes to admire the independence and power of Taichi.
The Miki route is something of a stretto to the preceding routes. Following on after the catastrophic collision between Taichi and Kiri, Miki appears as the culmination of Taichi’s efforts to live up to “being human” through sheer imitation. She dictates the terms of her life from the emasculated position of an object, but without showing the trauma corresponding to Taichi’s own relationship to that standpoint. And yet, when the situation calls for it, she can also take charge and exercise force. The connection between Taichi and Miki therefore takes on a greater sense of equality compared to the exploitative sexual relationships of the prior routes. After repeated loops, Miki is fully subjectivised and takes control of her world. She emulates Taichi and learns to alienate herself from the consequences of her actions in the context of a loop which reverses them. In this sense, one of the things she learns from Taichi is the value of taking the standpoint of a man—as in the autonomous position of the dominant gender.
Nonetheless, this posture is ultimately a failure. It is exactly from a position of total control that Miki comes to the same realisation that Taichi did in the prior route: “It happened because I’m twisted—because I have a twisted mind. I lack rationality. But to cultivate a rational mind, you need contact with others. You can’t grow without conflict. But, I hurt and drive away the friends that I need in order to complete myself. That’s… my dilemma.” Masculinity is a convenient performance because it grants the agency necessary to act in a competitive, atomised world. At first, Miki was thankful for the world of the time loop, which freed her from the constraints of femininity in the sense of being able to act independently for the first time. But this liberty is not a solution to her problems—it is just a different standpoint from which to relate to them. At the conclusion of the route, Miki and Taichi both choose to surrender to the time loop rather than continue to live an alienated, self-loathing existence disconnected from others.
Weakness
Masculinity is a social identity built out of the expectation of control. It produces a corresponding orientation towards the world: A man is a subject who can freely act in the world by using the objects around him. However, the liberty of this position is in no way a path towards automatic happiness—even as it sustains a political structure which is undeniably to the comparative benefit of men. Masculinity contains a number of dark elements that can produce hatred and misery—which will generally be directed at women, men, and even the self. One of the central problems of patriarchy is the degree to which powerful men can abide by such suffering in order to maintain the one-sided power that is guaranteed to them by the status quo. However, most men do not enjoy positions of unambiguous power within the institutions of contemporary capitalism. They are at most able to act as petty tyrants within their small kingdoms. Moreover, especially in the 21st century, many men do not fit the demands of reigning social systems even to this “petty” degree. They can be categorised as downright weak. What are we to make of such weak men?
It is easy enough to naïvely hope that such men would recognise the need for solidarity and compassion exactly because of their weakness. But this result is broadly incompatible with the structure of masculinity in our society. Men overwhelmingly tend to hold onto their sense of liberty and self-reliance, even from a position of total marginalisation. It is understandable—and stereotypically masculine—for someone to not want to be defined by their weakness. But this posture leads to the creation of a kind of ambiguous class in contemporary gender politics: “The phrase ‘weak men’ refers to a group who cannot be placed into either camp in the political conflict between the common people/citizens (majorities) and the socially excluded/marginalised (minorities).” [Men Have It Rough!] One result of this ambiguity is that weak men derive some limited power by punching down and exercising control over those minority populations who are weaker than them. This is why “in this context, the word ‘weak’ has taken on connotations related to anti-feminist and anti-liberal tendencies.” [Men Have It Rough!] That is, predominantly right-wing political tendencies.
The connection between masculinity and the right is intuitive enough: patriarchy is a traditional hierarchy, and the right therefore has the language to communicate with those men who are nostalgic for an older sense of authority and power. This also means that, as long as men associate their masculine identity with hierarchical power, it will be difficult for the left to speak to even the weakest among them. Nonetheless, Sugita aspires to develop left-wing ways of speaking to weak men where they are. He imagines an “incel left” movement, for example. As he explains:
Weak men are in an unstable position due to the inherent contradictions of capitalism. This problem cannot be dealt with through the rhetoric of personal responsibility. It is ultimately a structural issue. […] We should direct our righteous anger at the world system itself, rather than hating the so-called “enemies” who appear beside us. […] Incel men should transform this sense of humiliation and hatred for their “enemies” into antagonism against the system that produces the sense of there being such “enemies” to begin with. We need the courage to stand up and fight. Don’t be hateful, be angry—angry at this society.
Shunsuke Sugita (Men Have It Rough!—Theories on “weak men” in capitalist society)
As a form of aspirational politics, this has some merit. However, it is less clear what it would take to reconfigure masculinity and reach any kind of real political practice through this approach. Sugita’s vision for masculinity seems to be one of disarmament, despite his use of martial language. The idea is that men need to embrace equality and find a place in the world that does not depend on their comparative strength. If men are able to accept becoming harmless in this sense, then:
Heterogeneous and marginalised men could take up the opportunity to uncover values apart from the hegemonic concept of “masculinity” as it operates through the terms of male privilege. That is, values separate from naked productivity, meritocracy, eugenics, and patriarchy. Put another way, they could embrace the path of radical alternatives.
If these heterogeneous and marginalised men—unloved, disrespected, underpaid, ignorant, and incompetent—still managed an honest form of happiness—one that resists the desire to attack others—this could be its own form of revolutionary practice.
Shunsuke Sugita (Men Have It Rough!—Theories on “weak men” in capitalist society)
There is something beautiful about such a radically egalitarian form of hope. But one has to admit, the concrete political potential of this programme is weak. Throughout our discussion of Cross†Channel, we have repeatedly seen how mere weakness is no barrier to the desires that lie behind abuse and exploitation. No matter how genuine Taichi’s hopes for human connection and personal growth are, his need for control and domination came about in a stew of masculine subjectification that only grew in importance in response to his social weakness and psychological trauma. Harmlessness is one of Taichi’s deepest fears, and therefore it cannot emancipate him from toxic masculinity on its own.
At the height of their shared abuse, Taichi and Yōko latched onto each other as “soulmates” and “one person in two bodies.” As Yōko sees it, Taichi’s attempts to connect with others are doomed from the outset, because she is “the only one who will ever understand Taichi.” Put another way, she believes that Taichi already has a relationship of equality and perfect reciprocity with her, and that his social outreach with the Broadcast Club is redundant and empty.
In contrast to Taichi’s readily apparent weakness according to the criteria of capitalist society, Yōko is a hyper-competent person. In the epilogue arc, she succeeds in the market economy and is on track to fulfill something directionally similar to her final promise with Taichi to become “Queen of Japan.” Nonetheless, she previously held this competence back and performed a kind of dependence on Taichi as part of their “contract” and special connection. In her route, it is revealed that the reason for this lay in the past, when she instrumentalised Taichi’s potential for violent, masculine aggression to massacre the Shinkawas and escape their servitude. Despite her extreme competence in conventionally valuable domains, Yōko felt powerless with the “enclosed” kingdom run by the Shinkawas. Her love with Taichi was fictional precisely in the sense that it papered over the reality that she used him as a tool to access a kind of power that she was unwilling to wield on her own. In the climax of the route, Taichi points to the false premises of their apparent equality, and highlights that Yōko in fact feared him for this same capacity for violence, and never truly related to him in the way that she pretended.
On the one hand, this dynamic clearly reiterates the extent to which Taichi understands his masculinity in the context of his capacity for exercising harm and power, even from a position of absolute weakness. As well as his general inability to find reciprocal connection with the women that he endeavours to love. In this sense, Taichi’s most serious psychological challenges play out in microcosm through his relationship with Yōko. But we can also add another angle to this problem: Despite fully rejecting the label of “soulmates,” Taichi still cares for and admires Yōko, because he believes that she has the skills and temperament necessary to transcend their mutual dependency and live her own life. Taichi respects those who can live independently in general. He admires her for a kind of resilience and self-sufficient happiness that he identifies as beyond reach for himself. Cross†Channel is highly concerned with the effort to live this way, and its ultimate limits for weak men like Taichi. At its conclusion, we might say that it deals with Taichi’s bittersweet attempt—and semi-failure—to live out exactly such an isolated and self-sufficient life.
It is at this point that we must bring back the term sekai-kei, after discarding it for the bulk of this post. Sekai-kei fiction refers to a trend of works that were most popular in the early 2000s, and which dealt with the motif of retreating institutional support in society. In a sekai-kei work, social dynamics disappear into the background, and the capacity of the hero to deal with the problem becomes the narrow focus as world-scale action shifts to the level of their local existence. We have previously discussed how these works are structured in greater detail. But in Cross†Channel specifically, society disappears literally: Cross†Channel deals with the experience of marginalisation and weakness when society’s abandonment is total. The question for Taichi is whether or not this total isolation is preferable to the scattershot web of abuse that he’d built up within the social architecture of Gunjō, prior to the disappearance of humanity. In the final arc of the story, he tests this proposition by sending back all of his companions and attempting to live on in a fully isolated world.
The denial of one’s social identity that is intrinsic to this effort is comparable in several important ways to the mundane “revolutionary practice” advocated by Sugita. Sekai-kei fiction has a conspicuous strain of escapism in its structure: it depicts those left behind by the social transitions of the 1990s attempting to live on without any resultant connection to wider society. Throughout Cross†Channel, Taichi repeatedly attempts to connect with others without hurting them. However, this is ultimately a failure: [Taichi] “Ordinarily, people keep the necessary distance from those that they love. But we’re a bit broken: despite our intentions, we destroy and hurt others. But we don’t do this because we want to turn away from love. It’s actually because of love—because we want to be seen.” Put succinctly and in gendered terms, Taichi cannot manage to live amongst others without participating in a toxic, harmful form of masculinity. Harmlessness is not possible for him without giving up on connection altogether.
Fundamentally, the great unanswerable question in Sugita’s prognosis concerns how to think about masculinity in a positive sense. At least for those weak men who exist within our capitalist society—that is, who are trapped before any kind of radical reconfiguration of the subjectification of gender has taken place. Sugita is right to say that weak men need to not attack others; they need to not harm those at the bottom of social hierarchies. The right-wing affirmation of toxic masculinity offers men power in return for their misery, and does not even truly deliver that power for most men. Sugita’s negative criticism of this system is well founded. However, no attempt to renounce the power of masculinity can actually make men harmless. The kind of harmless masculinity that is readily accessible to men is at best a half-solution, where they inertly soak in a self-denying sense of alienation from their socially constituted identities. Whether or not there is something aspirationally “revolutionary” about this effort at harmlessness, it cannot offer the space for men to live happily and harmoniously within capitalist society. Like Taichi, weak men either have to risk harming others, or they have to break off contact in a Sekai-kei-like manner. However, that last option is not really an option at all.
People exist socially. True isolation is impossible as both a psychological and a simple economic matter. At least on this latter point, Taichi is given a practical opportunity at true isolation through the world of the time loop, where his basic necessities reset weekly in accordance with its mechanics. Yet, this isolation proves to be impossible on its own terms. In the final week of the game, Taichi catches himself mere moments before unconsciously ending his own life after a relatively short amount of time spent in absolute isolation. Taichi’s desire for social connection was not some abstract political ideal, it is an absolute physiological necessity for human beings. Men may insist that they cannot risk the harmful nature of existence as the gender that has socially constituted power, but there is no space where they can exist otherwise. Men can improve, even if it is brutally difficult; Cross†Channel is a story of looping failure at this self-improvement, until a last instance of Taichi eventually manages to successfully connect with others, at least temporarily, only to finally separate from them. And men can also organise and agitate for society to improve. This is of course necessary if there is ever to be an ultimate solution to the problem of gender politics. But is the only alternative until that project bears fruit a retreat into escapism and harmlessness?
The boldest facet of Cross†Channel as a narrative is that it is set up such that there is no solution to this puzzle. After what is implied to be hundreds of looping weeks, Taichi fails to live with social connections without harming others. Even when he manages to successfully connect with one person for the limited span of a week, he inevitably hurts another during that same period. He therefore decides to send everyone else back home and live alone in the world of the time loop. He resolves to abandon human contact altogether—to give up on himself in order to do no harm. But he simply cannot do this. It is beyond the capacity of a human being to live a perfect, independent life. As a result, Taichi launches the radio broadcast of “Cross†Channel:” He decides that connecting with others, even in an attenuated fashion, is a necessity to live even once one has been totally abandoned by society and condemned to total isolation.
The problem with Sugita’s analysis of weak men under conditions of capitalism is that it imagines that men can aspire to live harmlessly and nonetheless attain “an honest form of happiness—one that resists the desire to attack others.” [Men Have It Rough!] Men cannot simply live harmlessly and live happily. A truly revolutionary practice of masculinity, no matter how it is mediated or structured, will risk harm and risk unhappiness. It is intrinsic to any attempt to concretely exist in a world structured by these hierarchies, rather than treating existence as a simple abstraction. The available point of departure for such revolutionary masculinity, politically speaking, is that this risk of harm and misery is no reason to simply give up and revert to the pandering and nostalgia that the right-wing offers for weak men. What is truly revolutionary is to risk living unhappily in order to weaken the stranglehold of these hierarchies, and to thereby live a life that is a little more worthy of self-love.
Maybe being weak is a necessary step on this path. Maybe weak men will still feel guilty for the ills of toxic masculinity, no matter how hard they try to live properly. However:
There’s no need to be strong to earn the right to live. You’re allowed to be weak.
#NotAllMen
#NotAllMen