Shiuko Kano, 2008, Deux Press
I was deeply confused by this three-book series, but in a good way. Mostly. I avoided Kiss All the Boys for a while, despite my love for Shiuko Kano, because – I don’t know. I’m up for many forms of kink. Kink me, I usually say. But I was worried about many things. The picture on the back cover of the first volume, for one.
I’m all for cross dressing, but I never developed a taste for young boys in girls’ school uniforms. Maybe it’s those baggy socks. But the big, adult-looking hand lifting up the skirt is really kind of the last straw of squick here.
And then there’s, oh, the plot. (Spoilers ho; if you’re sensitive about being spoiled, you’ll want to hop off the bus now. Bye! Be sure to get some breakfast – it’s the most important meal of the day!) Here is my short, concise, and entirely to-the-point synopsis. Pornographer’s gay son comes to live with him, displaying a truly alarming level of sexual precociousness; pornographer is unpleasantly homophobic and also battling impotence, which is played for laughs in a way I don’t quite know how to deal with; pornographer’s son brings home his crush object, his cute’n’clueless best friend; pornographer snipes mercilessly at son; pornographer accidentally winds up jerking off a male stranger in a movie theater (and, you know, somehow that has never happened to me); the stranger falls in love with the pornographer AND winds up being his new neighbor; the pornographer has sex with his new neighbor and gets caught by his son; the son hits on his friend and sends said friend running, screaming, into the street (that’s never happened to me, either, but I’ve come a lot closer to this than the other scenario); the pornographer chases down the friend and accidentally comforts him; the pornographer finds out that his friend and editor who is also the son’s uncle is in love with the pornographer, sending the pornographer running, screaming, into the street; the pornographer finally cruelly dumps his neighbor, who surprisingly and for no obvious reason winds up with the best friend, who I was sure was going to wind up with the pornographer; the son winds up not with the clueless object of crush, which I also thought was a sure thing, but instead with the pornographer’s kind of skeevy replacement editor, who shows up after the pornographer’s best friend quits after the pornographer runs screaming into the street after he finds out his friend loves him; as a bonus surprise, the son turns out not to be alarmingly sexually precocious at all but actually a virgin, which the skeevy new editor cures him of, so we don’t get total relief on the whole kind of disturbing underage sex front; and, just to prove that, the pornographer winds up with the son’s dorky, innocent, underage crush.
I’m going to give you all a few moments to catch your breath; I know I’m feeling a little winded.
OK. If you made it all the way through that plot summary, you now understand two things. Thing one: There is a certain amount of dubious sexual content in these books. Not dubious as in dubious consent – although there’s a sprinkling of that, too – but dubious as in “I don’t know, that might not be hot so much as kind of gross.”
Thing two: Oh my God! It’s like Kano took everything she had left in her refrigerator, then raided her neighbors’ houses and took everything they had in their refrigerators, and diced it all up into a huge bowl, and then had to go find a bigger bowl because the first bowl wasn’t big enough, and then had to divide it up into both bowls because otherwise she couldn’t add the salad dressing, and then she threw both bowls up into the air at the same time, creating a whirling salad storm that was so all-encompassing, all you can do is roll around in the salad and laugh uncontrollably.
Or maybe that’s just me. It’s kind of a salad day here in Chicago, hot and humid, and I could really use some lunch.
Anyway. This series is funny and squicky and messy, and the squicky and messy are there on purpose to add bite to the funny. And let’s not forget the sex (as if you could; Kano creates some, shall we say, vivid scenarios). There’s lots of it, and despite my initial reservations (and the invisi-penis syndrome) ( and step right this way for a discussion on yaoi conventions re. the handling of the penis), I finished the series happy and not permanently damaged by anything I’d seen. That might not sound like a ringing endorsement, but it is. This series is sort of like watching clips of Bam Margera skateboarding . You think, oh, he’s kind of nasty, but he does have that adorable relationship with Ville Valo from HIM, and Ville Valo is surreally hot, and Bam is kind of amazing on the skateboard, and it’s a little bit satisfying watching him wipe out, too, and overall, well – yeah.
You will have no doubt noted that I have invoked both salad gone wild and Bam Margera in my attempt to describe these books. All I can say is, if that doesn’t make you want to read them, I don’t know what would. I’ve done my best.
Yaoi is a very popular and, I believe, entirely aesthetically legitimate form which receives hardly any critical attention beyond anthropological quasi-condescension. Kinukitty writes about it wittily and knowledgeably.
Or, you know, because:
"I'm all for cross dressing, but I never developed a taste for young boys in girls' school uniforms. Maybe it's those baggy socks."
If you don't find that funny, I can't help you.
I was completely happy with book one, where it looked like pornographer-guy was going to end up with dorky-neighbor guy. I was OK with book two, where it looked like pornographer-guy was going to end up with editor guy. I was TOTALLY squicked by the actual ending, where *both* of the innocent 15-year-olds get hooked up with 30-somethings. I have a very limited tolerance for big age gaps under the best of circumstances, and these were very much not the best of circumstances. And pornographer guy turned out to be more of a jerk than I was willing to go along with. Overall, I really hated this series.
A lot of people object to Star Trek trivia too, but here I'm tolerated. I appreciate that sort of safe haven.
But after all, what's to be argued about? You knew the place was gay friendly, and that includes gay semi-porny Japanese comics.
Uland, fuck off. Really, if you don't want to read it, don't read it. It's clearly labeled. You know what it's going to be about. There's lots of other stuff on the site, or, indeed, on the Internet. If you want to go on about your discomfort with whatever, there are lots of places on the Internet to do that, too.
I deleted your last comment after reading the first sentence, and I will continue to delete your comments on this thread, or shut it down if you insist.
Actually, on second thought, and given past experience, better just shut it down for the moment anyway….
All right, I've opened this up again. Uland, I will continue to delete your posts unread on this thread. Everybody else, please don't feed, etc.
The fight with Uland aside … I've looked that picture over and I'm against it too. Leaving out Oberlin, gayness, gender identity and the fact that Kinukitty herself doesn't seem to like the picture too much, I find it extremely unpleasant to see a kid that age being sexualized.
Plot synopsis is one thing. Seeing the image is something else.
If you had shown a picture of a smallpox victim or a photo of human feces, I'd be saying the same thing. Maybe my sensibility's too delicate, but it's the one I've got.
Tom, It's been my experience in discussions about this (and I've had quite a few meta ones about yaoi) that the squick is often highly gay porn as viewed by women dependent. Not always, but often.
Sometimes it's helpful to remove things to a different context. Do you have a similar squick over, say, Hannah Montana's latest pole dance?
This is *not* accusatory. I have sometimes had/have Not allowed! reactions to seeing boys portrayed in ways that elicit Oooh Hot! reactions if they are girls. Maybe you aren't having this split reaction, but I feel it's worth asking or examining.
I suppose I'm not ready to accept that this picture is smallpox like because of age; one of the reasons is that there exists an entire genre of hot schoolgirls gone wild porn for guys.
Noah, thank you for the compliment, and for liking the baggy socks joke.
JRB, I'm really pretty much with you. I didn't want the pornographer to get together with the dorky neighbor either, though, because the dorky neighbor seemed kind of nice and I didn't feel like he deserved to be saddled with this flaming asshole. So I was sort of hoping he'd dodge the bullet. I was rooting for the pornographer to end up with the editor in book two, although I kept asking myself why; there had been some character development with the pornographer at that point, but he still wasn't very likable. The unrequited love scenario is just a winner, I guess. And book three blew me away, not in an altogether good way. I was really, really surprised, and that's why I basically (but not unreservedly) liked the series overall. But I do sympathize with the position of hating the series overall. It's problematic.
I wondered, as I sometimes do, how much of the WTF is cultural. Sexuality doesn't seem to play out the same way in Japan as it does in the US (not the only country that matters by any means, but the country with which I'm most familiar with the playing out of sexuality), and I wonder how shocking this is in Japan. It was a surprise ending no matter what, but I don't think it was as bizarre and disturbing there. I read so many manga in which students hook up with their teachers, and it's usually played as just romantic. Doesn't quite translate here, obviously.
Tom, that thought leads me to more thinking about that picture. I included that because I wanted to be very clear about what's going in in this series, and that picture really conveys a powerful synopsis. I bought the first volume of the series quite a while ago, from Amazon, and when I saw that image on the back cover, I almost just got rid of the book. I do that sometimes — abort, abort, fail. It's not my thing. I held onto it because I like the mangaka and I thought I'd flip through it at some point to see what the hell was going on. I finally dug it out recently as part of my effort to read everything Deux has published before they potentially go out of business, and I thought I saw something interesting in what this series was doing. I still hate that image, though, and I'm still disturbed by pretty much all the plot points. (Having said that, though, I feel like I should also say that I don't think anybody who was into the plot points or that image is a horrible person. This stuff is complicated.)
The boy is about 15, by the way. That's very borderline territory for porn, in my opinion, but 15 year olds are aggressively sexualized in the US, too. And if my high school experience is anything to go by, 15 year olds are very sexual creatures, and I'm not going to deny them their sexuality. So I think it's something that needs to be approached with caution, but isn't necessarily wrong, no matter what.
As I've said, I found this series disturbing and had some trouble dealing with it. That's actually part of why I liked it, in the end. It was complicated, and surprising, and the humor was based on shock. Whether or not I approve of the ending (or much of anything leading to the ending), I appreciate the craft.
And Tom, I also agree with your comment about this being a place where people are tolerated. Tolerance is a wonderful quality.
Vom Marlowe, I just missed you in my enormous omnibus comment. I agree that sometimes things are perceived as icky just because they're gay — that's kind of where I was going with the comment about all the romantic stories about students getting together with teachers. It's at least as big in straight stories as it is in yaoi.
Sexuality works in lots of different ways, and I hate to see people beaten down by the kink police. (Now I'm worried that I've said too many times that I didn't like the underage thing — I really see it as basically a personal preference when we're dealing with a 15 or 16 year old.)
I was disturbed by the pole dance, by the way. Was her mother off having drinks with Lindsey Lohan's mom, or what?
And Tom, I hasten to add that I'm not questioning your reaction; I had a similar reaction. The picture bothered me, and I understand why it would bother you.
Overall, it's an interesting discussion, I think.
I just realized that there might be something of a contradiction in that last comment, VM, and I wanted to mention it because it's kind of important too, I think. That would be the difference between porn and real life. There is one, I really think there is, but at the same time, the line is grayed out and hard to find at times. I'm a fan of porn, and a fan of people being able to get the kind of porn they want, without harming actual minors in the production, etc. Which is interesting re. the little Cyrus girl. Seeing an actual 15-year pole dance, I said to myself, holy shit, why don't they just take off her clothes and hand her a bag of coke and call it a day? Real life — messy.
Tolerance is good…though, obviously, as this thread demonstrates, my tolerance, at least, is not all encompassing. (Let's give fascism a chance, as Dirk has been known to say.)
I think sexualizing minors, male or female, is obviously problematic. So are photos of human feces, or (to pick an equivalent image) pictures of people being violently and bloodily dismembered. All have been used, to one degree or another, in entertainment — played for laughs or shock value or what have you. I think it is totally fair with that sort of thing to say, "you know, this is not for me, and is even rather evil" and walk away from it.
On the other hand…taboos are also important and meaningful in a lot of ways, and I artwork which pushes up against them can often be meaningful…though, like any other kind of artwork, it can also be dreck. At least for me, there's not a lot of things I categorically rule out as deal-breakers in terms of art — though, even for me there are some limits.
The Cyrus freaked me out, which is partly why I picked it. The pic of the boy, on the other hand, didn't bother me (it didn't rev my engine, but it didn't bug me). I wouldn't buy the manga, because the age difference bugs me, but I didn't have a visceral reaction.
For me, there's the difference between pretend and real life. Of the people I know, most found the Cyrus hot or unexceptional (except to disapprove of her as Disney spokeswoman). I wanted to get her a jacket.
The comparison to the smallpox/feces comes awfully close to the insults thrown at me before, so I've probably overreacted.
Noah, there aren't many universal truths, but Obama-Biden slash being an abomination is close. I don't know; the term "eldritch horror" comes to mind.
One of the things about yaoi is that it sits at the intersection of art and porn. I have no problem with the much-discussed image of the boy in the girl's school uniform on an artistic level (except for the adult's hand being kind of freakishly large, although I get the point of that). But when you're looking at porn, you're looking for something that pushes your buttons in the right way. Seeing something instead that pushes your buttons in the wrong way can create an intense reaction — the "not allowed!" reaction Vom Morlowe mentioned.
And I guess, like most people, I'm all for fascism, when the fascists agree with me.
VM, I don't think you overreacted. It's a good idea to examine one's reactions, and people have certainly disapproved of me (stridently) for writing about kinks they didn't like. Or kinks period. But that's a subject for another long tirade, and I've probably commented more than I should have, anyway.
There's a pretty great article by Jason Thompson about Japanese fetishization of underage girls which you all might be interested in….
Reading this thread, I see a lot of split feelings, ambivalence, but also a real effort to maintain an open, polite discussion. Thanks to all for the good will.
Something I'd like to check on. VM, how angry did you get over my comment? I ask because of this:
"The comparison to the smallpox/feces comes awfully close to the insults thrown at me before, so I've probably overreacted."
In your first comment addressed to me, you took pains to say you weren't being accusatory. But later on you talk about my remarks being almost like insults.