I wrote this some years back for a sex toy website. I don’t think they ever published it…so I thought I’d finally run it here.
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“You think they [comic books] are mostly about floppy-eared bunnies, attractive little mice and chipmunks? Go take a look.”
—cover flap of Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent
Erotic comics first surfaced in the dim dawn of pre-history among cave-dwelling ungulate-fetishists who, in animistic rituals, drew upon the stone walls choice mammoths with whom they wished to have congress. Some time thereafter, in the early 1800s, the Japanese developed…SHUNGA! Which is pretty much what it sounds like.
Perhaps the most famous shunga illustration is Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which, coincidentally, also features a rape-by-mammoth. Ha ha. No, of course it doesn’t. It actually features a rape-by-octopi.
Lascivious, decadent Europeans, inspired by such hot-and-heavy Japanese print-making, erected sophisticated fantastic visions of their own. Here, for example, turn-of-the-century Brit Aubrey Beardsley makes a subtle phallic reference.
Can We Get More Animation Down There, Please?
If you studied the pictures above very closely, you probably need to stop and take a deep breath. If you examined them somewhat more cursorily, you probably noticed that they’re not actually comics — just influential genital progenitors, as it were. Comics as we know them coalesced as a form in the early 1900s. At first, of course, they were mostly aimed at kids, so sexual content tended to be muted. Winsor McCay drew the occasional picture of a woman in bed with a warthog, but that was about as racy as it got.
No form can escape filth forever, though. By the 1920s, cutesy childhood icons were frolicking like hardened whores across the pages of crude 4″ x 6″ pamphlets known as Tijuana Bibles. Violating propriety and copyright with equal vigor, these eight-page narratives featured such familiar faces as Popeye, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon and the eternally underage Little Orphan Annie demonstrating the use of heretofore unillustrated appendages.
Tijuana Bibles were most popular during the Great Depression, when most people were too poor to afford orgasms. During the late 50s, though, men’s magazines began to publish real photographic evidence that anatomy existed, stimulating the poor Tijuana Bibles right out of existence.
Balling with Gags
Luckily, the girly mags were a fickle bunch; photos may have been their true love, but they inevitably had a passel of mistresses on the side. These included gag cartoons. From Eldon Didini to Jack Cole (of Plastic Man fame) to Dan DeCarlo (of Archie fame), some of the biggest names in comicdom set their work atop clever captions like “The job is yours, Miss Bigelow, providing you fit just as well on my partner’s lap!” and “Two aphrodisiacs please!” Not that anyone was looking at the captions, exactly.
The pinnacle of men’s magazine cartooning is generally considered to be Little Annie Fanny, a strip cartoon which ran sporadically in Playboy from 1962 to 1988. Written by Mad-magazine alum Harvey Kurtzman and lavishly painted by Will Elder the titular character (in various senses) was an empty-headed naif who kept stumbling into preposterous situations, upon pop cultural tropes ripe for satire, and out of her clothes. Mostly that last one.
Under Where?
Men’s magazine illustrations were aimed at a broad, mainstream audience, and so were fairly tame by earlier illustrational standards; visible penises were a no no, much less octopus rape. With the late sixties underground comix movement, though, more idiosyncratic perversions became available from a head-shop near you. S. Clay Wilson’s raunchy fornicating bikers, satyrs, and pirates led the way, but even more influential was R. Crumb, whose comics indulged his fetish for large, powerful women and their hindquarters.
In Europe, one of the most influential underground cartoonists was Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. His well-endowed, pumped-up, and frequently pumping leather-clad, uniform-sporting men were hugely popular through the 60s and 70s, and remain widely recognized and (ahem) utilized today. Laaksonen was even an important influence on the visual style of the Village People. Eat your heart out, Jack Kirby.
The undergrounds opened the way for independent comics in general, and for more sexual and personal material in particular. At the extreme is Johnny Ryan, whose supremely and surreally filthy comics have at various points featured disembodied invisible anuses, severed butt-cracks, quarts of Dracula piss, and sex with midget Hitler. Much more literal is David Heatley’s “My Sexual History” which, like the title says, is a chronicle of every sexual encounter the author has ever had. Other autobio creators, from Jeff Brown, to Julie Doucet, to (my favorite) Ariel Schrag, have also chronicled their sexual lives in detail that veers between the arousing and the more-information-than-I-really-want-to-know-thanks.
One of the most acclaimed independent adult titles is Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s 80s series, Omaha the Cat Dancer, a sexually explicit soap-opera with funny animals (the title character is actually a feline…more or less.) Equally idiosyncratic is Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s 2006 Lost Girls, which features Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Alice from Alice in Wonderland musing on matters philosophical while engaging in a marathon of sexual trysts.
Porn actually played a vital part in the survival of one of the most respected independent comics publishers. Fantagraphics — whose catalog includes Dan Clowes and Los Bros Hernandez — was poised to go out of business in the early 90s. It was saved in part by the launch of its adult-oriented Eros line. It’s kind of funny to think that there would be no Chris Ware as we know him without concupiscence and gushing bodily fluids (though that’s true for all of us, I suppose.)
Foreign Trollops
Influential European comics with sexual themes began to appear in the early 1960s. Guido Crepax’s character Valentina started her erotic run in the Italian comics magazine Linus in 1963; Crepax would go on to work on graphic adaptations of porn classics like Histoire d’O and Justine.
Another Italian, Milo Manera, is perhaps Crepax’s most famous heir. Both artists have had work appear in Heavy Metal, an American offshoot of the early 70s French magazine Métal Hurlant. Heavy Metal’s Europulp-fantasy-smut remains a touchstone in American comics, from Frank Thorne’s Lann to Michael Manning’s ongoing fetish, gender-bending, humidly romantic, paranoid cyberpunk opus In A Metal Web.
The real top in recent foreign-on-American porn, though, has been Japan. Manga, or Japanese comic books have penetrated…er…pushed their way into…um…stickily saturated? Anyway, they’re very popular in America, and porn manga is no exception. For those who want to be taken seriously by your local otaku, Japanese porn is usually referred to as hentai. Hentai can refer to any number of fetishes, some of which (giant breasts) are fairly mainstream, others of which (girls-with-penises, tentacle rape, or sex with underage-appearing girls, known as lolicon) are less so.
From a western perspective the most unusual hentai genre,is probably yaoi. Yaoi depicts homosexual relationships between beautiful men, but it is created by and marketed mostly to women. In contrast to gay porn for gay men, yaoi tends to feature complex characters and intricate relationships — it is, in other words, a romance with lots of gay sex added. Pundits often like to claim that girls like yaoi because identifying with boys is more distant and somehow safer. Probably the real appeal is more straightforward (ahem) — if you like to look at pictures of hot guys having sex, surely two is better than one? In any case, yaoi has proved quite popular with het- (and not-so-het) female readers in the U.S. Among the most popular titles featuring boy-romance are Maki Murikami’s Gravitation and Sanami Matoh’s Fake. More consistently explicit fare includes Youka Nitta’s Embracing Love and Fumi Yoshinaga’s Gerard and Jacques.
In the Future, There Will Be Only Virtual Sex
Paper publishing is currently in the middle of a death-spiral, and porn comics have certainly taken a hit as well. Yes, a wide array continue to be available for all tastes, from furry-friendly-fare like Richard Moore’s Short Strokes to trans fetish fare like Roberto Baldazzini’s Bayba: The 110 BJ’s and Christian Zanier’s Banana Games to always-popular vampire erotica like Frans Mensink’s Kristina Queen of Vampires . But it seems likely that in the near future most explicitly pornographic comics will be online — like current Indian semi-sensation Savita Bhabi series. Dirty drawings never die…they just digitize.
Liza Moon tried to comment but capcha ate it apparently…so here’s what she said:
“”our DareDoll Dilemmas would make fine viewing for fans of this article. shamelessly beautiful superheroines protected by custom made uselessly protective spandex uniforms routinely on patrol looking for those Evildoers, the Peepers. in the high camp style of 1966 PG-13 TV Batman, with everyone fully clothed at all times, we still got lifetime banned from youtube for making you think about sex.””
“A lady walked into a bar and asked the bartender for a double entendre. So he gave it to her.”
Years old it may be “underage-appearing girls, known as lolicon” remains a peculiar apologia. Lolicon is in the vast majority of cases perfectly open with being straight paedophilia. The “appearing” only becomes relevant when a Japanese media company wants to cater to the paedophile audience and simultaneously establish mainstream credibility, giving rise to common absurdities like vampires or dragons that are a thousand years old yet trapped in the bodies (and very often the minds and mannerisms) of prepubescent girls.
For a recent example from a perfectly mainstream and highly popular Nintendo game:
http://serenesforest.net/fe13/img/hq/m/Nowi.jpg
Well…it’s obviously a fairly light-hearted survey, and like many folks who write light-hearted surveys in a journalistic context, I can’t claim to be an expert about many of the things I touch on. So…I bow to your superior knowledge.
How coy of you. I’ll admit to being touchy on the subject, but it is a common bone of contention around many parts of the Internet.
In the broader perspective I consider the rise of that particular aesthetic in Japan to be a sign of a pretty fundamental social collapse at the most intimate, familiar level, in the face of brutal capitalist alienation. Part of the mute work to destroy one of the few remaining bastions against totalising consumptionism. The spread of such an aesthetic to other parts of world then becomes a very alarming prospect.
Isn’t a lot of yaoi pedophiliac, too? I don’t read the stuff, but even that cover above looks like it contains a 13 or 14 year old at the oldest. I mean, saying they’re men when they look like boys is pretty much the same as saying they’re 1000 year old dragons when they look like girls.
There’s a certain amount of interest in young boys in yaoi, I think. Gerard and Jacques are both men, though. All of manga has stylized big eyes/big heads pretty much…not sure that that means they’re all young…
Heart of Thomas, though, for example, is definitely set in a boys’ boarding school.
Anti, your take on this sounds kind of fascinating. You wouldn’t want to write a piece on it for us, would you? Let me know if so; my email is noahberlatsky at gmail.
The manga above is adult-adult. It can be difficult when you first look at manga, because to American eyes, the style has all the hallmarks of what we call child-like (big eyes, simplified limbs, etc). Pretty much everyone in manga looks young because of that–it’s just that the age differentiators are somewhat different, culturally and artistically speaking. You have to keep in mind, for example, that most yaoi is aimed at women, and that one of the main ways they signal the dominant partner is height (and often coloring–darker) and breadth of shoulders. Like a man would be taller and broader of shoulder than a woman, basically, in a Disney movie (think Sleeping Beauty).
Shota or shotacon (pedophilia about young boys) looks different from the above. It can run the gamut of mildly suggestive to really really porn (we’re talking tentacles and what looked to me like a goddamn baby). I ran across the latter by buying a compilation of manga shorts in Japanese from Kinukuniya. (I would not have bought it if I’d known, and yes, it was fucking creepy. One of the few books I have every thrown in the trash.)
Hmm, I just bought The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame, but no one in that looks like he’s 12. I’m skeptical that the Japanese just see the world in a neotenic style. I suspect it makes characters cute and innocent and youthful looking to them the same way it does to us. It’s an aesthetic choice, in other words. When I see a manga girl with really large boobs, it strikes me as a touch of pedophilia, not as a different way another culture sees adults. Adding adult features to children doesn’t get rid of the pedophilia aspect, just turns it into a unrealistic fantasy. (There’s a film by Mario Bava called Shock, which deals with this very issue: the ghost of a dead husband comes to possess his pre-teen son, which causes a lot of problems for the wife who loves both of them.) You can tell adults from children based on their looks in live action Japanese movies, after all. It doesn’t require an adjustment in perceptual codes. (And we biologically don’t differ in our perceptual apparatus, which makes the socially constructed view of perception even more questionable.) Nevertheless, none of this as creepy as some novels by Samuel Delaney that I can think of.
Matt Thorn’s piece about whether manga characters look white seems fairly relevant.
Illustrations are iconography, and iconography is cultural, it seems like to me. The fact that different cultures can have different iconographies at the same time doesn’t necessarily change the fact that looking at things from outside the particular set of cultural cues can distort things somewhat.
I think the fact that shojo in particular, and manga in general, is neotenic is worth thinking about. Seeing it as mainly about pedophelia seems like a stretch, though — especially since, as Vom says, there are in fact comics that cater to those tastes which look somewhat different.
There’s definitely an eroticization of kawaii in Japan…or a de-eroticization of erotics, depending on how you look at it. It’s certainly not limited to yaoi, though.
I didn’t say it was mainly about pedophilia, just that there seems to be a pedophiliac aspect to it. A bit of a charge, you could say.
I read that Thorn piece before. Not sure it’s particularly relevant here, except that he assumes the social construction of a perception, which is, as I suggested above, highly dubious. Who sees the smiley face as looking more European than Asian? Asians and Europeans do physically look different with a statistical regularity. It’s not something we just learn to see that way.
Yeah…I think it’s pretty relevant. Thorn’s point is that drawings don’t look like either Asian or white people. They’re drawings. You give them racial characteristics through cultural iconography, not through some sort of biological programming which tells you what drawings look like.
So, the Japanese just as often wonder why Superman looks so Japanese?
They may well. I wrote a piece about that a while back….here it is.
You pick the Superman with features most closely resembling actual Japanese features to make the point that, what, we have to be trained to see that resemblance? Regardless of the reason why so many anime and manga characters don’t look Japanese, they don’t look like real Japanese people. That the old Superman actually does look more Japanese than most anime characters is an argument against Thorn’s essay. I’m guessing that the Japanese see anime characters as stylized versions of themselves, but wouldn’t see Superman as a particularly Asian looking character, but they’d probably agree with us that the early Superman is more Asian looking than the modern day version.
The way to settle the issue of “whiteness” for these cartoon characters is measure a sample of their facial features and compare it to Caucasian and Japanese samples of real faces (there are plenty of facial recognition tests that make this possible … if anyone would fund it, that is). The one it comes closest to is what these characters tend to look like. No need for fancy theorizing about it. (This wouldn’t solve the issue for the rabid social constructionist, though. But I doubt anything could.)
Anyway, what does this have to do with giving child-like features to supposedly adult characters? The Japanese can tell it’s stylized just as well as we can. It’s not like they all see actual 11 year old girls as having really big tits.
I’m not exactly sure what having someone write an algorithm and then proclaiming that to be truth would tell us about much. And you really don’t have to be rabidly socially constructivist to think that drawings are iconic rather than some sort of biological truth.
The point about Superman isn’t that he looks Japanese in some absolute sense. It’s that from our reference he should be Japanese…except that he isn’t because there are other iconographic cues. I really don’t know what Japanese folks would think of the Siegel/Shuster Superman (I think in the thread some folks suggest that squinty eyes in manga often equal bad guys; so they might think he’s supposed to be a villain rather than a Japanese person.)
The people in Japanese prints don’t always look particularly Japanese either, I don’t think.
And it relates to our discussion because you’re saying that the characters in question are represented as children…which is an iconographic argument, and not one that I think is necessarily especially convincing in context.
But he clearly looks more Asian than the modern Superman. That’s not socially constructed, but a perceptual link between this character’s features and what we know Asians to statistically look like.
One last thing: that argument of Thorn’s is really confused. People are saying the characters don’t look Japanese, while he’s arguing about whether the Japanese believe the characters to be representations of them. The problem can be seen in his smiley face example: the Japanese might more readily believe it represents a Japanese face than an American face and Americans might believe vice versa, but that’s not the same thing as saying either population actually believes the representation actually looks like a particular group of humans. So he doesn’t really address the question of his essay: why do these cartoon characters look white? He simply argues the Japanese believe they represent Japanese people. I might believe Jessica Rabbit is a representation of a woman, but that’s not the same as believing she actually resembles an actual woman. More confusion of the map with the mapped.
So to bring it back to the Asian Superman, we know that Superman is supposed to be Caucasian looking, since that’s what he passes for on Earth in Smallville. However, one doesn’t have to be trained to see what you saw, that the Golden-Age Superman looks more Asian than the modern one. That is, we know he’s supposed to represent an “all-American” figure, but physically we’re able to see he actually resembles an Asian to some degree (a degree that’s greater than the modern version). That is, independent of the representative, ideational aspects, the physical resemblance suggests something else.
So, you should be able to see that you’re arguing representation (the map), when I’m saying the cartoon characters physically resemble children (the mapped) with adult accoutrements. Call it the materiality of signifier.
If you still can’t see that you’re not arguing about the same thing: consider my Bava example. If a boy actor is having sex on screen with an adult woman, but he’s supposed to an adult (think Tin Drum, as well), then there’s something else going on than simply adult sex. Simply calling a character an adult, even giving the character a bunch of adult characteristics, when it looks like a child doesn’t magically free you from the perceptual resemblance that gives it an air of pedophilia.
Well…it might or it might not. In the comments, you’ll see that some people don’t see him as Asian, despite my arguments. And the points I honed in on — the slanted eyes, the dark hair — are iconographic representations. Asians don’t actually have eyes that are a single line any more than westerners do. You react to the iconographic shorthand (which in this case suggests Asian though it’s not necessarily supposed to.)
The map and the mapped generally get confused, it seems like…especially when you’re talking about iconographic representations.
You know about the cases where anthropologists showed photographs to people from low-tech cultures, and they couldn’t see what was there as a representation, right? Even with photographs, you need to learn the iconographic signs to have it mean anything to you. Trying to put art on a graph just tells you that, aesthetically, you’re into graphs. It doesn’t get you closer to reality.
I’m curious as to why the intentionality of the viewer in an iconographic context is not determinative, but when you’re talking about symbols with a specific historical referent, they can mean whatever you want them to?
The actor example doesn’t work, I don’t think. Unless you’re positing a culture where the norm is age-blind performance…? Japan might do that if anyone would…but I don’t think they have.
There’s pretty much no natural response when it comes to art, I don’t think. It’s all codes and context. Which is why you could have boy actors playing Juliet without its necessarily being a theme or even something that was commented on, it seems like.
What I’m saying is that the actor physically resembles a child regardless of whatever representational qualities you’re using him for. The cartoon images look more like children than they do adults. A physical image doesn’t look like anything your parents or culture might want it to look like. Thus, an image of a whale is going to look more like a whale than a deer even if you’re told it represents a deer your whole life and you’re just seeing a whale for the first time. That Superman looks more Asian because of the folds over his eyes. That’s not to say there aren’t Westerners with that feature or that all Asians have it, but statistically speaking, it’ll make a character look more Asian when he has them, which is rooted in a generalization from a perceptual similarity. (The only objection I read to your suggestion was based on the goofy assumption that Asians can’t have a spit curl.) You don’t have to be taught how to group things perceptually. Pattern recognition has been one of the main ways we’ve been able to survive.
If you’re still skeptical of this, then tell me where you learned that the Golden Age Superman looks more Asian than the modern one. Who taught you to say this, since it has nothing to do with physically rendered cues within the art resembling physical reality in any way?
I’m not sure what anthropological study you’re talking about. But if you’re saying that they thought the photographs were really happening, then that would only support what I’ve been saying (even if I’m skeptical of the conclusion that the ignorant savages just can’t figure out a photograph from reality, like the train that was coming out of the film frame for early audiences).
No; they didn’t think the photographs were happening. They couldn’t see them as images. They weren’t able to parse them as pictures. They just looked like weird squares with patterns on them, is my understanding. Without training in the iconographical way that pictures represent, they weren’t pictures.
As I said before, the images of Superman key into representations of Asians in our culture, I’d say. They look the way Asians are sometimes iconographically represented. But lines on paper are lines on paper; they relate to the real because we assign them a relationship to the real.
I mean…why would you assume that my seeing Shuster’s Superman as Asian occurs in a context outside iconography? I’m not a naive viewer who has never seen an iconographic image of an Asian.
“Thus, an image of a whale is going to look more like a whale than a deer even if you’re told it represents a deer your whole life and you’re just seeing a whale for the first time.”
I’m just not convinced this is true. Again, images really are not the things they represent; we’re not dolphins where the perceptual image of the thing is the same as the perception of the thing. It seems like there is some connection between the image and the thing, and probably in most cases you’d be able to tell a deer from a whale. But deers and whales look a lot less like each other than two arbitrarily defined races of humans look like each other…or than adult humans look like children, for that matter.
It seems reasonable to talk about the neoteny in Japanese manga. But I think it seems important to also take seriously the fact that they apparently really do not see the folks who you see as children as particularly childlike. That doesn’t mean that they’re victims of false consciousness; it just means that they don’t see the world the same way you do.
This is one of the problems with authenticity claims, incidentally. You get abstract, fairly arbitrary claims about what the world really is and what it looks like, and people who don’t agree are either willfully deceptive or helplessly deceived.
Not that relativism doesn’t have problems as well, of course (says the relativist.)
Superman looks East-Asian when he’s squinting?
Do all “White” folk look East-Asian when they’re squinting?
On a side note, to me, East-Asian eyes don’t look so much narrow as angled. Maybe almond-shaped but not actually slit-like. Unless they’re squinting.
In anticipation of the “iconography” argument, I’ll say that narrowness of eyes isn’t sufficient to signify “Japanese” – they would have to be angled, otherwise they’re just narrowed eyes.
I could go into more detail but this is quite glib enough already.
Anyway, what this thread really needs is True Chubbo.
“But I think it seems important to also take seriously the fact that they apparently really do not see the folks who you see as children as particularly childlike. That doesn’t mean that they’re victims of false consciousness; it just means that they don’t see the world the same way you do.”
No, it means that they’re just as perceptually adept as you. They can see artwork as stylized just like Westerners. What a thought. Asians are humans, just like us. Once again, why are they capable of drawing very adult like characters in their manga if they can’t tell the difference between children and adults in their comics? You have to explain away the gay manga I just bought in order to support your theory. They consciously use neoteny. It’s not like they really see the world like that. I can’t believe I’m having to argue this.
According to the wikipedia entry for shotacon, neotenic features are used in Japan the same way they’re used here:
“It [shotacon] can also apply to postpubescent (adolescent or adult) characters with youthful neotenic features that would make them appear to be younger than they are.”
Does someone have to learn that the character featured in the link is supposed to be a youthful looking boy in Japan. If no one taught them that, someone might mistake him for a man?
But, of course, I don’t think I’m more perceptually adept than they are. Because I don’t think that my iconographic system defines what it means to be human.
Noah,
I would love to see some support for the old story that “people from low-tech cultures, [when showed photographs] couldn’t see what was there as a representations” — “couldn’t see them as images,” but only as “weird squares with patterns on them.”
This story is about as old as Eskimos with their 300 (or 1000) words for snow, but I have found no evidence to support it. Indeed, I cannot even find the original anthropological anecdotes.
The stories have been presented and repeated by such luminaries and smart writers as Gombrich, Arnheim, Oliver Sacks, and half the teachers at my grad school. (I cannot recall if W.J.T. Mitchell ever said as much.) But I have found scant support for such stories. Even the people who did seminal work in the field of cross-cultural perceptual psychology (Segall, Herskovitz, etc.) seems to shy away from these tales, or relate them second- or third-hand.
There seems to be a significant evidence that picture recognition has roots in innate perceptual abilities. Pre-linguistic infants (and even some animals) seems to be able to recognize photographs, or at least discriminate between different types of visual representation (e.g., infants can differentiate/discriminate between images of faces and abstract or jumble collections of the same formal features).
The idea that primitive people would only be able to see “blobs” — which seem to have emerged in the 1960s — seems linked to allied concepts about infant perception, namely that babies couldn’t see things either, living in that Jamesian world of blooming buzzing confusion. (And therefore “primitive” people would be occupying that quasi-infant space.) Of course, these stories seem also to fit into a bevy of “modern primitive” stories about country rubes or the “first Parisian filmgoers” to couldn’t distinguish between movies and the real thing — between films of trains and big metal machines actually rushing towards you.
My point, I suppose, is not that your “it’s always already culture” answer lacks evidence; it’s that such hyper-relativist approaches don’t seem to require evidence at all. The answer is already provided: culture, which comes from culture, which comes from culture. Turtles all the way down.
Such an approach also seems like a non-starter when it comes to further questioning or investigation. In this world *nothing* looking like a Japanese person — or even a person. All representations are equally unlike the things they supposedly represent. A photograph of a dog looks (to a hypothetical innocent/primitive eye) no more like a “real” dog than a photograph of a tree or a drawing of a circle — or, I suppose, than the typed signifier “D-O-G.”
Indeed, it seems to solve the puzzle of representation — how can one thing “look like” another thing? — by making it disappear entirely: nothing looks like anything, and thus everything, through the magic of culture, can look equally like anything.
This is an interesting and thought-provoking claim, but I’m not sure how one would even begin to support it, or what one could do with it. (Although Mark Tansey has a suggestion.)
The Eskimo’s multiple words for snow started with Franz Boaz, but was theorized by Benjamin Whorf, who was behind what would come to be known as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity/determinism. I think the actual numbers of 300 or 1000 were popularizations of Boaz’s work.
“Because I don’t think that my iconographic system defines what it means to be human.”
But you’re claiming that they can’t distinguish their iconographic system from the world — that it determines how they see the world. Thus, “they apparently really do not see the folks who you see as children as particularly childlike[.]” They just don’t understand that manga is stylized.
Peter, you might like to read about the color naming research if you haven’t encountered it.
If you’re curious about the whole “Eskimo snow words” thing, start with this:
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf
And then check out this, for a more recent discussion:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4419
Charles,
Yep, you are right. I was mainly just using the snow story as an example of a debunked bit of folk-relativism, told and retold. I suspected that stories of the pre-modern person’s “inability to recognize photographed objects” — like the screaming viewers of the Lumière brothers’L’Arrivée d’un train (i.e., primitives who recognize the object, but not the photography) — may have its own dubious origins.
That said, I should note that I have a lot of sympathy for Noah’s way of looking at things. I just think there’s a point where the “culture” answer, when pushed far enough, actually make it impossible to talk about (1) what culture actually does and (2) how culture actually accomplishes these effects. (Which I think is your point too.)
You want to argue that some forms of representation are more truly (naturally?) iconic than others. Noah wants to argue that all representations are equally arbitrary and that their so-called iconography or resemblance is an illusion of acculturation — to the point where even a photo or drawing of a whale no more “really” resembles a whale than it does a wheelbarrow.
This allows you to distinguish between the world and images in a way that Noah can no longer do (“they see the world differently” –> they draw the world differently). It also, I feel, allows you to talk about image and pattern “recognition” and having its foundation in some basic, evolutionarily plausible mechanism and substructure. It makes your point of view open to empirical examination.
But of course it doesn’t do away with the fact that the effects of culture are profound and sometimes unpredictable, and that the borders of the “natural” and the “cultural” are extremely porous. You seem ready to argue that our recognition and reaction to neotenic images has a strong cross-cultural base (cf. S. J. Gould). But I assume you would not apply that argument to “Japanese”/manga representations of lust (nosebleeds).
Exactly.
Thanks for the color stuff, Charles. I’ve been looking at it a bit, as part of my love/hate relationship with the work of neo-Whorfians like Lera Boroditsky (more love) and Guy Deutscher (more hate).
It also reminds me of the push and pull of debates over whether facial expressions and their recognition — which are forms of representation, right? — have a natural basis. I thought that Darwin and Paul Ekman had won that fight, but no good argument is every completely over.
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/19/7241
One change I should make in my characterization of Noah’s full-blooded relativism.
The arrow in this comment — (“they see the world differently” –> they draw the world differently) — should go both ways, and perhaps more often backwards than forwards. Indeed, it becomes almost, in principle, impossible to distinguish between perception and representation. My purpose was to note the exchangeability of these statements (in Noah’s system), not to attribute a chain of causality.
I really should be doing other things but you lured me in your trap yet again, I’ve got a lot to say, some of it a bit off-topic…
Did any of you read that semi recent TCJ article where Tezuka said Superman and Lois Lane looked japanese?
Charles, I’ve had that Shock soundtrack by Libra (including two or more members of Goblin) for a couple of years and I think it is one of the best soundtracks ever. I actually only saw the film two days ago and it was pretty good.
I’m a kind of a Bava fan but I never wanted to see the film because the trailer didnt interest me apart from the music, so I bought the soundtrack instead. But I’m glad I saw the film now.
I read some of your blog about the Possession soundtrack. I was really overjoyed when I saw that in the shops as I never thought I’d see it, especially not in an actual shop. It is a rare pleasure to see something that excites you that much in a shop.
You said that you dont rate Zulawski as a director at all, but Possession is in my top 5 films ever, but almost everything else of his did little or nothing for me. Devil, Szamanka and On The Silver Globe all had strong moments and elements but none really satisfied. Tim Lucas was evangelical about The Most Important Thing Is To Love but it made me feel nothing.
As you may have gathered from my other posts, I’m often very paranoid. A few years ago there was a lot of hubub about obscenity laws in the UK relating to sexual imagery (South Korea recently is said to have had oppressive and scary law changes that really threatened a lot of artists with serious jail sentences) that really terrified me. It seems like I neednt have worried. A lot of people in the s&m scene were also being threatened but things seems to be fine right now (at the time I was worried, a friend told me he knew several gay men in the s&m scene who were given hefty jail sentences in the 80s, he said it ruined a lot of families over something that really shouldnt have been seen as a crime). But I’m still concerned about internet surveilance. Back when I had first got the internet I used to go to an erotic grotesque board to find horror art and I saw some of the weirdest things ever; since this stuff stayed on the internet, I naively assumed that all this art was legally okay and that you could safely get away with anything now, that we were finally living in the era of freedom of speech.
Since all that hubub erupted, I’ve often wondered if surveillance could get me into trouble for my favorite artists like Suehiro Maruo and Stu Mead (neither of whom I like has anything to do with sexual arousal) or any other curiosity I often bump into. Also worried that someone might interpret any characters I draw as being too young.
I wondered if I’d have to explain myself for certain sites I’d went to. Because you frequently bump into things you didnt want to see and sometimes specific “works” have things you do like mixed with fetishes you wish were not mixed in. I see a lot of Shota stuff crossing over into my territory when I didnt want it to. But after seeing enough of it, I think the motivations for it are different (just like interracial porn motvies can be so various, some is blatantly about racist feelings of degradation, some is about class divisions ((blacks being used the same way rednecks and english geezers would be used)), some is about skin color contrast). There is a trend in european arthouse films which is common enought to be a trope: young boys having a formative sexual experience with a sexy older woman; I think a lot of Shota stuff works that way, that you place your younger self in that overwhelming place of intense newness and discovery. The comic artists often give the boys exaggerated adult genitals because more realistic genitals of a character that age would be too disturbing to the tastes of the artist, they skimp on the details of the younger body and lavish fully rendered attention on the older womans body. The idea of being that young is more important and the reality of what that body would look like is pushed into the distance. I saw some stuff from Fantagraphics/Eros in this style, I’m surprised they published it, in the dialogue, the boy characters said they were 18, but they looked far younger but with adult genitals.
I doubt most lawkeepers would care about these kind of distinctions. If someone wanted to make me look like a pedo, I doubt many would care that all the stuff I saw that involved underage characters either included stylish art, giant breasts or giant penises (my motives for looking).
I bought a Bastien Vives comic a while ago from france but canceled it because I was really scared of customs seeing it (apparently amazon doesnt get the blame for selling it, the buyer gets blamed), it has Shota stuff in it, but I bought it for his drawings of women. I managed to find it from a UK seller. Vives is popular with the “indy” romance crowd but he also has a wild sexual imagination that is said to alienate some fans of his main work. He also happens to be one of the best looking guys I’ve ever seen and for some reason he met up with a favorite nude model of mine for some comic he did. Lucky guy.
As for the outer limits of drawn pornography I’ve seen…
Oddest: Sequences of people growing older rapidly and getting younger rapidly. The actual bodily changes or destinations were not being fetishized, I dont think. It was the aging or de-aging process that was supposedly the turn-on. I’ve seen a lot of things I found disgusting or weird that I dont know how people could find them sexy, but this example for me is the most incomprehensible.
Funniest: When looking for huge boob art, you see a lot of inflation fetish stuff. Once I saw Warner Bros cartoons in this inflation community context. Anyone must remember slapstick scenes of characters being inflated and then flying away like a deflated baloon. The idea of people getting off on that is hilarious to me.
Most disturbing: (1)image of a young boy who has a hundred little penises from his neck to his groin ejaculating. (2)One image of a girl with a huge scary tentacled vagina from her neck to her feet. (3)Images of cartoon characters being swallowed (4) An antrho donkey walking on all fours with a huge hanging belly (5) young children being lured by adults pretending to be friendly. Yuck shudder.
Some of what I have to say crosses over with what Noah had written in that linked article about girls having weird fantasies…
When there was controversy about SmashWords and Amazon limiting what kind of taboos they would allow in ebooks, some writers felt this was another symptom of misogyny, that it was an effort to censor female sexual fantasies. I thought this was really interesting but I wasnt so sure.
But sometimes I do think there is an unconcious effort to deny women being as weirdly widely sexual as men. That Louis CK quote is similar to something Stephen Fry said about women underestimating how horny men were (as if women were out of their depth in this area).
When I was young(er) I feel like I got the impression from tv, film etc… that women were all demure, a bit aloof and likely to sneer at you or slap you if you even did so much as call them “beautiful”, thinking you were shallow.
But gradually finding out about women often enjoying the same relationship/sex things that men liked was sometimes a relevation and a bit of a relief. My sister once said that she liked Porkys better than American Pie style teen films because in the former, girls are sexual and fun as the boys and in the latter, girls lean more towards demure and aloof.
Reading erotica and opinions about sex by women on the internet frequently surprises me( sometimes that some womens fantasies are the same as mens fantasies), but why should I be surprised?
I think it might be because some women are dogmatic about what they think girls are into or should be into. When I was reading a lot reviews or Catherine Breillat films there were quite a few outraged women writing “a young girl would never have sick fantasies like that!”, as if men can be as crazy and various as possible (although people often say “men are all the same”) but women should pigeonhole themselves into “decency”.
I have spent a foolish amount of time reading Literotica in the past 3 weeks, including a lot of stuff by women (but there is a lot of men posing as women, but I’m not sure how often and how cynical I should be about that, especially as I said above when a womans sexual fantasy seems indistinguishable from a male one). A lot of women writing rape fantasies, sometimes about stereotypical dirty old men. I really dont know how to feel about that. Some really weird ones about women being transformed into farm animals and raped by farmers and used for milk.
I’m wondering if any of this subject matter is too far for this blog? I know being nasty to other people is prohibited but are any subjects?
“Noah wants to argue that all representations are equally arbitrary”
Actually, if you’ll read up the thread, I said I thought that whale vs. deer was probably one of those things where it made a lot more sense to think about perceptions linking with reality than separating racial distinctions. Races are really socially constructed anyway — even talking about “Asian” is kind of nonsensical; it’s a pretty recent catch-all term that is largely meaningless in a biological sense.
As for the photographs…it did sound too pat to be true, I guess. Another anthropological anecdote shot to shit.
Re distinguishing between the map and the mapped; strong authenticity claims don’t so much distinguish between them as simply erase the former, it often seems like. But, as I said, it seems to me that you can suggest that there is not in fact a biological basis for recognizing racial characteristics in cartooning without having to argue that no representation has a referent.
“Some time thereafter, in the early 1800s, the Japanese developed…SHUNGA!”
Shunga didn’t develop in the 1800s. Ukiyo-e shunga dates to the genre’s origins in the 1600s, and pornographic images that could be labeled “shunga” go back centuries further. And “The Fisherman’s Wife” isn’t rape porn—in the text in the background, the woman and the larger octupus have a dialogue about how horny they are for each other.
Good to know! Relieved that the octopus sex is consensual….