Tuesday, October 16, 2007


its the new fall season - and yes, there are a couple shows i like (and a couple shows others would probably like, considering the impending hollywood writers strike is going to kill an awful lot of domestic content here in a couple weeks)... but that's not what i'm posting about.

Today the manhunt is on for a pedophile in southeast asia who learned that the twirl function was not a good method of masking one's identity... Yesterday they arrest this guy in nevada who had sex with a 2 yr old girl - and videotaped it. Beyond screwed up. ok. put me in a room with that one and only one of us will come out (sorry, the pain some of my loved ones have suffered on that front may never go away). well, this season in japan there's a series called Kodomo no Jikan (Nymphet for those of you playing along - link to synopsis w/ picture). Lets go through the short version... 23 yr old male teacher's first day on the job, is told by young 3rd grade girl (ah yes, the 8's too late joke rears its ugly head) that since he doesnt have a girlfriend that she'll be his girlfriend... gratuitous fingersucking... gratuitous skirt lifting to expose panties as reward for saving the nice kitty... you get the idea. Now - even the Japanese think this one crosses some boundaries - and they have censored the living hell out of it... and in japan they show it at something like 4 am or somesuch... and even then 2 stations dropped it. But you still get the theme - loli taken over the line and censored back to what must be considered the very edge of socially acceptable storytelling.

This is NOT Nabokov here - though i wonder, would we allow that sort of expression in today's America - have we moved so far in the other direction from the freedoms of expression we shared in 1955 w/ Lolita...at what age does Phoebe Caulfield lose her innocence? are we allowed to have someone, through cartoons or games, explore socially unacceptable behaviors involving sex rather than violence? For anyone who's played a Rockstar game it does beg the question - did you really need to shoot the hooker afterwards to get your money back... or climb over the counter and splatter the guys hiding in the back of the burger joint just because? SAW is about as close to 'socially worthless' and thus 'pornographic' as anything i can imagine - no wonder so many family-values-centric cultures have such a problem with the export of western culture to their wasteland hideaways. Then again the japanese have a whole genre of odd dating/sex games - some of them certainly seemingly portraying youngish characters (though a technically 'of age' japanese girl can be drawn tiny because, honestly, they ARE tiny - something Konota pointed out rather repeatedly in Lucky Star). So where's the line? Is a game over the top? How about the places in japan where you can go to have sex with a sexdoll dressed as a child? That creeps me out... but on cable i've seen the 'vice guide to travel' detailing the howto and whereto (including an amusing if not pathetic sequence of the main host simply unable to bring himself to do anything to his doll). How do we apply local standards (since those are the ones the supreme court has dropped on us for pornography) to materials drawn from international locales? If we make the rule 'you cannot sexualize an underage character' well hell - better lock Britney up for that first video... Gordon Ramsey would have been unacceptable 20 years ago - but now it's fine so long as you censor the cursing a little.

Kodomo no Jikan isnt my thing... it seems its more the scene of the 16 hour a day sleeper... the loner who spends all his time on porn, tv, comics, porn, and porn... the greasy guys with that ogle-look in their eye and the faint hint of spittle on their lip who dont quite know what to do with a girl other than breathe heavily (i'd call that an unfair generalization but, well, it isnt)... but it IS interesting in that it forces you to consider where do we draw the lines between what's acceptable in literature or art and what's acceptable for a sleazebag with a 2 yr old and a video camera. The true otaku basement dweller is a very sad individual - but is his odd loli obsession with cartoon 3rd graders something that must be stopped? I know the domestic licenseholder for the manga dropped the book out of concern that there would be domestic backlash. Do we say games dont hurt anyone - does anything go? And why do we seem so hung up on sex crimes as where we draw the line... you can murder a 2 yr old on tv... hell, cook her grind her up and eat her in an r-rated film, but if there's anything sexual then everyone's goin to jail. Yes - i have a personal and extremely negative reaction to sex-crime - but i wonder, should we be less concerned with the sexualization of extreme unrealistic cartoon characters or more concerned with the gratuitous violence we depict on much more realistic characters for visual gratification in full view of our children. Or as Jake asked yesterday - in how many states is it illegal to buy a dildo?

Loli is twisted and creepy... but doesn't it stop there?

2 comments:

fearlessvk said...

this is an extremely tough topic even to write about... i'm not a free speech absolutist, because i'm not an absolutist about anything. i reject all fundamentalisms. but that doesn't mean i think we should censor or rebuke anything that hints at illicit juvenile sexuality. first we'd need to get honest about a few things...

...that young people are sexual beings...
...that our culture relentlessly sexualizes and eroticizes youth and adolescence (and even younger, at times) and then treats pedophiles as the Most Evil Creatures in Existence...
...that childhood may not equal pure innocence...
...that there's actually a pretty standard trope within gay male culture of a young gay teenager being "initiated" by an older gay male...
etc etc etc....

i just don't know if we're at the point that we can have an honest conversation about this stuff. and that's without even considering the cross-cultural issues, japan vs. america, etc etc.

GreatGoblin said...

yep. and coming up on halloween i expect to see lots of adult women in gingham skirts - pushing the whole acceptable 'young schoolgirl as sex object' thing downstream...

culturally we need to deal with this shit - because right now you're seeing some wildly inappropriate application of 'sex offense' laws - getting underage kids who do nothing more than what MOST of us were doing at 15 and 16 onto 'sex offender' lists that will seriously screw them the rest of their lives.

And of course - what's funny about this is exactly what you say - what politician is willing to stand up and say 'we need to talk about what's going on with kids today, the trends involving oral and anal willingness of very young girls, the sexually active ages creeping down out of the teens, etc' Well - other than Mitt Romney... he'll talk about it till the cows come home.

at some point this is going to be a real problem. in the mean time, the japanese are busy building stalker simulation software (man didnt THAT light a fire in Iceland when someone brought a copy into the country... hell... if republicans knew what kind of crazy screwed up shit was out there they'd FREAK (and quietly reserve copies for Vitter and Craig))

then again - this is america... when every time someone raises a red flag on some new Bush-inspired atrocity, it's followed up by 'but clinton got a blow job...'
... and it sticks.