Sexual Harassment and Rape in the Land of Anime: The Follow-up

Wow, so I guess you guys found that sexual agression and anime post really interesting… and, as it so happens, quite a few of you raised some points that I feel require further exploration.

From the above picture, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could guess that one of those points regarded female-to-male sexual harassment. I will not be touching on female-to-male rape as I have yet to encounter it in the general venues of the anime fan, e.g. anime, manga, or visual novels. I think it is important for people to be aware of the fact that female-to-male rape, although rare, does occur. If this is confusing to you, the best way to explain how it happens is to tell you that Viagra and date-rape drug cocktails have been administered to unfortunate souls on occasion.

Anyway, I digress.

If male-to-female and homosexual sexual harassment is often played for laughs in anime, female-to-male sexual harssment is even more so. The screencap heading this post is from Kanokon, an anime that has become familiar to many anime fans by virtue of its over-the-top fanservice. In it, the female leads attempt to seduce the shota male lead, often in a manner that is ultimately an act of sexual harassment. In the end, the shota ends up with Chizuru, the bustier and more aggressive of the two. The constant sexual harassment was her way of showing how much she cared about him, and, damn, sayeth the audience, ain’t that shota kid lucky? It sure was funny how much it all freaked him out, though!

This formula is far from uncommon. In fact, many of the fanservice-laden harem-type series utilize this set-up – by which I mean, a severely reluctant male lead getting his face smashed in my boobs on a daily basis. Rinse and repeat!

Clearly, there is an audience for this type of show. And this audience usually sees the male lead as “lucky”. However, I challenge the audience members to say that they would enjoy the attentions of a female in whom they are not interested in. I am positive that there will be choruses of “But they’re hot!” or “But they’re so moe!” about the females of these shows. Yet, this really doesn’t matter – if a girl is hot, but you just aren’t interested in her, and she keeps molesting you, are you going to feel very lucky? Probably not. And, to males who disbelieve this, I ask if you’ve ever had an instance where a girl liked you, and it was very obvious, but you didn’t feel the same – I’m guessing it was a bit uncomfortable, huh? And chances are she wasn’t dropping her boobs on your head every three seconds (of course, the intended audience of these kinds of shows probably haven’t had much experience with females and, as such, isn’t going the understand).

This in and of itself brings up another point – and in this we find ourselves in the world of shoujo. One of the common tropes of romance-flavored shoujo is the unexpected kiss, or, more crudely, forced kiss. The heroine blushes as the bishounen guy suddenly kisses her, and the audience sighs and swoons – its so romantic! I will admit guilt to reacting this way myself on occasion. However, lets spin this thing on its head – what if the guy in question isn’t the bishounen? What if, in fact, he’s the loser guy with crappy social skills who picks his nose in the back of the classroom? Would we still feel it was so “romantic”? Or do we now see it as “creepy” and deem it as sexual harassment?

A great example of this comes in Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne. Maron, our heroine, is kissed by her rival in kaitou activities, a guy who goes by ‘Kaitou Sinbad’, and whom the audience immediately recognizes as the bishounen male classmate of Maron, Chiaki. Maron blushes – she’s absolutely shocked! And, yes, she does eventually shove him away, but not before the audience has gotten its fill and is delighted by it all. And while she’s irritated, its more over his request (that she stop being a kaitou) than she is about the kiss.

Now, contrast this with her reaction to the aggressive overtures of her somewhat dorky classmate, Yamato. Yamato, possessed by a demon, corners Maron a few times and almost kisses her. Almost, but not quite. Maron has no interest, and the attempts come as a surprise to her, but the affect is entirely different. The audience is left to feel disgusted by the behavior, and creeped out. Yet, the boy doesn’t even kiss her. But when the handsome guy does surprise kiss her, its supposed to be “romantic”. The obvious conclusion of which is that the good-looking guy can get away with such an act simply by dint of being attractive in appearance.

While, off the top of my head, I cannot think of a scenario involving a girl who was unattractive sexually harassing a guy in an anime, I do believe we would witness similar results. The hot girl is hot… so it’s entertaining even if the guy is flipping out. The unattractive girl? Yeah, she’s just creepy and desperate, the weirdo.

While I would not normally pull something in from the non-anime world to illustrate a point, this video immediately came to mind when I started thinking about the shoujo surprise kiss.

So, anime teaches us that a. it’s ok for a guy to be sexually harassed, and b. guys can surprise kiss girls if they’re physically attractive. Good thing we got that cleared up. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go smoosh my boobies into my crush’s face.

If you’re looking for the original sexual harassment post, click here.

Related Round-Robin Posts:

• Mechanics of Rape Fantasies
• Rape Fantasies
• The Mechanics of Rape Fantasies
• Blurb on “Rape” Fantasies

Other Topic Round-Robin Posts:

• Shoujo cliché, the other man
• Between the Asshole and the Ideal
• Good Boy vs. Bad Boy
• The Other Guy in Shojo
• Shoujo Cliché: The OTHER Man – What About Him?