Female-characters-in-anime-and-manga
The combined efforts of women who have gone down in history and anonymous heroines whose names we will never know have contributed to reducing the gap that separated us in more ways than one from men. Although I can congratulate myself because I now “enjoy” many of the rights that were systematically denied to my fellow human beings, that does not mean that I am not aware of the long and turbulent road that we still have to travel.
We have conquered the right to education, but school desertion is higher in girls and adolescent women. We have achieved labor rights, but the salary difference for the same job and the same number of hours, as well as the difficulty in obtaining positions and promotions are a burden that we have been dragging for years. The number of sexual abuses does not decrease and the social scorn is suffered by the victim, not the abuser. Women who don't want children are still considered circus freaks, let alone abortion.
Believe it or not, violence, discrimination, prejudice and a long etcetera are the daily companions of millions of women around the world, so it is not surprising that the media and entertainment have also been infected by laziness to the problem of women and instead propagate stereotypes and perpetuate the notion of women as objects.
The appointment that brings us together on this particular date brings up an aspect related to the above. Obviously I manage a space dedicated to anime and manga because I like them like few things in life. I enjoy art, narrative, culture and, of course, its actors. However, it is this last point where my strongest criticism of Japanese productions is concentrated. Not so much because of the characters as a whole, but because of how women are presented and represented.
It is undeniable that the Japanese animation industry and publishing houses share the vision of the rest of the world in terms of producing content to please the male audience since they consider them to be their main consumers. As it is also undeniable that gender roles excessively influence how the characters of a certain work are projected. Let me explain what I am referring to.
As I grew older (and educated myself a little more about it) I began to realize that the large group of female characters that paraded in front of our eyes had been limited to playing certain roles, generally pigeonholed in opposite extremes: the virgin and the whore .
Extrapolating a situation from our reality, in the anime a woman could not enjoy her sexuality as a man did without being pointed out for it. Nor could he function freely in a high command position or at the top of power because he was automatically accused of being "cold", "calculating", "despotic" and "heartless". Abandoning naivety meant becoming a sex symbol. Casting aside purity was the equivalent of embodying pettiness. There were no nuances or intermediate points. At least not for the female characters.
It can be argued that anime and manga, like other productions, resort to clichés to build their cast, but the truth is that male characters have a much wider range of personalities to taste. There are no generalized opposite extremes: 'the alpha male' and 'the little man', for example. I am more than sure that you will be able to rescue from all the animes you have seen and the manga you have read, complex male characters, simple, physically strong, mentally weak, very attractive according to some canons, less attractive according to others, developing in all the professions there have been and for having and of all sizes and shapes.
Yes there are female characters who escape the norm, of course there are, to say otherwise would be lying. But the number that manages to get away with it or already outright escape from these disastrous representations is negligible if we compare them. And whether intended for one or the other, problems abound.
Let's start with the works aimed at a predominantly female audience. (Shoujo and josei, some people will be thinking, but no. Let's forget for a moment the demographics and the prejudices associated with them -because that will be the subject of another post- because the problem is not something concrete or specific, but global, present in all genres, without exception.)
Women don't like action. Women don't like science fiction. Women don't like suspense. That's for men. For women, romance. We have heard or read comments like these many times and they are absurd because our gender does not determine our tastes. What happens then? Love is not socially related to the masculine, but to the concept of femininity. I can't blame anyone for associating romance with women because that's how it's been established, that's the norm, and anime and manga perpetuate the canon by producing romance works just for us because that's the way it is. I have nothing against romance; what's more, I like it, so my problem is not with the romance itself, but with how it is built and what is promoted.
The vast majority of these stories -if not all- have a woman as the protagonist, usually a teenager. And among so many male characters swarming around the scene, this would be appreciated if it weren't for the fact that practically the general rule is that the objective of the protagonists is to hunt down the best boyfriend prospect to make him the center of their universe. I confess that it has hurt my soul to watch over and over again young women suffering the unspeakable because they have fallen in love with a complete jerk who does not respect them in the least and when they finally get rid of him, oh, cruel world, they suffer and they lament because “without him I am nothing”.
The central idea of many anime, such as Okami Shoujo to Kuro Oji or Itazura na Kiss, is to present the martyr for love, the woman who constantly suffers rudeness, humiliation, broken hearts, misunderstandings and breakups to conquer her Prince Charming. I do not approve because these stories are aimed at a fundamentally young audience and I find it unfortunate that women are being inculcated precisely from childhood that their only priority should be to focus on finding a partner, normalizing in the process toxic behaviors and attitudes in a relationship, under the premise that this way they can be happy.
And on the other side of the pond?
Usually in anime focused on men, the male characters are presented as the protagonists of the story while the female characters serve as a complement, as their complement. Here the women are the goals, the incentives and the expiations of the male characters. His romantic interest, his motive for revenge, the victim to be rescued… You choose. They have no goal or objective other than to faithfully remain by the side of their partner – romantic or friendly – playing a static role while being exploited for the visual pleasure of both the protagonist and the spectators. Fanservice, some say. I prefer the term hypersexualization.
I am not referring to big boobs and asses because yes, they exist (another thing is disproportionate boobs and asses compared to the rest of the body because they are excessively large), but to how the sexual value of women is emphasized above any other stuff. There is a line between sensuality (what is socially considered sexy, of course) and denigration, but that line has long been blurred.
To finish I would like to remind you that anime and manga are not the only platforms that are infested with this plague. Most productions, say television or cinema, say literature or music, are suffering from the same thing and the only solution to a problem that reflects the situation of women in society is to begin to understand and detect what is wrong, what are the harmful ideas, beliefs and attitudes that converge for their perpetuity in order to begin to remove them from the root.
