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NEWS: MSNBC Reports on Sex in Otaku Culture

The MSNBC news network has posted an article about sex in otaku culture and how that has affected mainstream culture in America. Brian Alexander, the author of the book America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction, interviewed Lawrence Eng (a researcher who wrote his doctoral thesis on how otaku interact with technology), Patrick Macias (the editor-in-chief of Otaku USA magazine), and Sharon Kinsella (a British sociologist who wrote a book on adult manga).

Anybody who doubts the rapidly growing influence of Japan's erotic cultural imports in the U.S. only has to spend a little time playing with a Hello Kitty vibrator while reading a fan-created pornographic Pokemon comic

When anime conventions started in the U.S. back in the mid-1990s, the main demographic was mostly Asian college-age male students,

Within the adult realm of otaku culture, cuteness is fetishized (hence the Hello Kitty sex toys)

Women are penetrated by octopi and young women in short school-girl skirts save the world.

But sexually-suggestive and explicit anime like "Gurren Lagann" and "Legend of the Overfiend," is finding an eager audience of adult Americans who are drawn to the post-modern, almost post-human mash-up of playful, blurry morality found in the genre.

The appeal may rest in blooming eroticism, some theorize. Or, as British sociologist Sharon Kinsella suggests, the Lolita-complex anime culture appeals because it's rebellious. “Depictions of sexual deviance and uncontained energy projected onto girls in stories in boy’s comics ... contain an antiauthoritarian impulse that gains intense vicarious pleasure from viewing scenes of social chaos, misbehaviour and sensual liberation,” she has written.

That may be the biggest Japanese influence on American sex. In otaku culture, gender is increasingly fluid and interchangeable. Play and fantasy are more important than actually having sex with a real person.

For example, on a Lolicon chat board recently, someone posted a Japanese DVD cover showing real schoolgirls, around 8 years old, dressed in uniforms, showing their panties, smiling, giggling. The community was outraged and urged harsh punishment for the makers of the DVD, arguing that there is a vast and important difference between “2-D” and “3-D.”

Macias agrees and has little doubt that otaku will influence attitudes about sexual expression here. “When you see a kid sitting in Borders reading a manga, he’s not just reading a comic book,” Macias said. “There is something really powerful going on there.”

Gurren Lagann is explicit sexually?