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Hey, Answerman! - Fallout: New Vilification

We're forced to make excuses for them if a friend glimpses the DVD art, as if our flowery descriptions of excellent writing and memorable characters can erase the images they just saw. Heck, some of the DVD covers on the new Revolutionary Girl Utena discs would cause half the people I know to question my tastes if they saw them out of context!

I think there's a pretty big disconnect between pointing out that the characters in a fanservice shows aren't seen as representations of people and then concluding they can affect our perception of people. It's the well-developed female characters who are utterly dependent on males that can affect perceptions. But the boob-delivery platforms? I doubt it.

Why is there always so much talk about how women are portrayed in fanservice anime/manga but never any talk about how men are portrayed in reverse harem or yaoi anime/manga?

Seriously. I have yet to see a topic where a male reader or viewer rants about how he doesn't like being portrayed as a sadistic perve (but yet with a good heart!) or rants that men with long hair are often portrayed in the uke position in all the yaoi stuff he's seen, and any other trope that fits in these genres. And I have to ask myself the question - "Why?". Why haven't men taken a stand, accusing us women of being pervy pigs when we degrade them just as much as they do to us.

Sure, you can point out that anime and manga aimed towards women (usually) don't feature men stripping every other scene. But then again, that doesn't appeal to the majority of women. Women tend to enjoy the story leading up to it, the emotional foreplay and the double entendres. Mangaka like Aya Shouto make a killing drawing multiple incredibly attractive men in compromising positions with the same woman in a story...and yet, the male audience isn't vocal about being portrayed as a creature who's sole purpose is to protect the one female while defeating the other men who are all lusting after her, thus securing his alpha male mating privileges?

Seems a bit one sided if you ask me.

I don't find fanservice offensive because they're not real people. And it's not like there hasn't been fanservice male characters in anime. See, I don't check out live-action fanservice because I DON'T KNOW THAT PERSON. They're some total stranger that has never met me so I don't feel comfortable staring at her exposed body the same way I wouldn't feel comfortable if somehow a fanservice image was created of me and there were unknown people seeing that image. But an anime character? They don't exist, they don't have feelings, they can't be offended, etc. So I feel no guilt enjoying fanservice from anime at all.

And if people actually let their viewing of fanservice anime warp their mindset of how real women (or men) are, then guess what? It's that person's fault, not the anime. Get out into the real world, make some friends of that gender, and you'll quickly realize how people are in real life and not in some fictional anime. Fiction is always created by someone besides you (minus your own work, of course), unless you are honestly naive enough to have your views on reality be dependent on some total stranger's interpretation then this really shouldn't be an issue. If it is a problem, then the issue is the human mind, not the fiction that the human mind takes too literally.

This gets to the heart of many people's real objections about fanservice. It isn't that it bothers them that much, it is about what others think of them.

Why is there always so much talk about how women are portrayed in fanservice anime/manga but never any talk about how men are portrayed in reverse harem or yaoi anime/manga?

Complaints about fanservice for women is rare because it's far less common and intense. To try to treat the two as equal is to create a false equivalence. The two things exist, but exploitation of women for the titillation of men is far more common than exploitation of men for the titillation of women. The fanservice for men also seems to go to greater and wider lengths. It is a two way street, but the male side of a six-lane highway lined with strip clubs and Hooter's restaurants while the female side is a sleepy back alley with a few seedy looking gas stations and a worn-down Curves franchise. Just because two things are abstractly the same doesn't make them equivalent.
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Cutiebunny wrote:

Why is there always so much talk about how women are portrayed in fanservice anime/manga but never any talk about how men are portrayed in reverse harem or yaoi anime/manga?

Most people who complain about fanservice and portrayals of women, at least in my experience, tend to be guys, ironically.

Most girls I know either like the shows or don't care enough to talk about them, but it's usually the guys who take the soapbox approach about it for whatever reason.

Complaints about fanservice for women is rare because it's far less common and intense. To try to treat the two as equal is to create a false equivalence. The two things exist, but exploitation of women for the titillation of men is far more common than exploitation of men for the titillation of women. The fanservice for men also seems to go to greater and wider lengths. It is a two way street, but the male side of a six-lane highway lined with strip clubs and Hooter's restaurants while the female side is a sleepy back alley with a few seedy looking gas stations and a worn-down Curves franchise. Just because two things are abstractly the same doesn't make them equivalent.

And I hate that kind of argument because it does nothing to actually support anything, it just stomps, pouts and shouts, "you too!" as though something is right, good, desirable or has to be accepted just because an analog of it exists, not because it actually is any of those things.

And keep in mind that almost nobody wants 'fanservice' utterly gone, only that it be mitigated by at least a bore modicum of taste and restraint.

Feel free to draw one for yourself (and yourself only), and please do everyone a favor by just not watching anything that strays onto the wrong side of your line.