Forum - View topicAnswerman - Is Japan Or America More Prudish About Sexual Content?
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Rise Of The Research Hero
Posts: 19 |
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Lately it's not so much what our cultures accept that define us, but what collections of things we'll pretend matter that news week that define us as dictated by our official information providers. If those things are trendy enough for the outrage engine mind you. Not every creation is cool enough to be trendy.
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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It's a real mixed bag. Violence (ironically, since it's the one you'd least enjoy encountering in real life) is almost universally accepted now, and has to go really graphic to get an R solely for that reason. Profanity is allowed in some places but not others for seemingly no reason; two F-bombs is still an automatic R in most cases, and major TV networks still have to bleep out a few specific words, but not others, with little correlation to how offensive they are. Sexual content rules have changed, but only in the details, it seems. In the early days, the innuendo-ban was so strict that you couldn't show a fully-clothed man and woman sleeping in the same bed. For a while, though, exposed breasts weren't a big deal; at some point that was moved to the forbidden zone (but only for women, a double-standard further complicated by the transgender movement). There obviously needs to be restrictions of some sort, because no one wants uncensored porn ads on Disney Channel, but we can't seem to decide on standards that make sense. The profanity rules are still the weirdest ones to me; do adults not realize that kids learn all those words by like third grade, and then overuse them without fully understanding the meaning because the forbidden fruit factor makes them cool? Sexual stuff is a more complicated issue, but trying to restrict it too much runs into similar problems. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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The details around that always seemed really weird to me; the closest you could get was a husband and wife fully clothed and with one of them having one foot on the floor next to the bed. I was pretty incredulous when my parents talked about a scene in the M*A*S*H movie being scandalous because a fully clothed man and woman (who weren't married to each other) were both sitting fully in bed, but that's what the standards of the time were like. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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Interesting topic! I'd love to hear more insight in erotica aimed at straight men, straight women, and LGBTQ folks. The Sex Positive movement, in which desire, pleasure, and consent are emphasized without shame or moral panic, has been picking up steam in the U.S. It's definitely made a mark on indie comics publishers like Iron Circus (NSFW). Has this movement made an impact in Japan at all? Rokudensha's experience and the relatively artistically tame sex scenes in josei (compared to hentai, at least) make me think that female genitalia and pleasure are still slightly more taboo there than male pleasure (that impression is reinforced by by-women-for-women yaoi. It makes me think that perhaps it's less taboo for women to imagine themselves as guys, as much as it's also about doubling the hot guys) but it's hard to gage.
But let's keep the sex talk relegated to adults and older teens:
I know you're talking about teens, but exposing younger children (before puberty) to porn is considered child abuse for a reason: it can be extremely traumatizing. The reasons to protect young children (under 12/13) from pornographic imagery is psychologically sound. That does not mean they can't be taught concepts about sex/reproduction in age appropriate ways, but graphic media usually isn't age appropriate or instructive, and in the worst cases can cause symptoms of actual sex abuse in children. So let's not paint all parents as prudish or religious for protecting their children. |
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doc-watson42
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 1708 |
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I recommend it too, though it is flawed by the lack of an index, which makes finding specific things in it difficult.
Technically, but legally "prostitution" = coitus for money—see the Prostitution Prevention Law article at Wikipedia. Any other exchange of money for sexual activity is legal, as long as (IIRC) the recipient is over the age of eighteen and no one is making a living as a pimp (though both are ignored, especially the latter). See also the Wikipedia article "Prostitution in Japan", Peter Constantine's Japan's Sex Trade, and Joan Sinclair's Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs. Edits: Added material. |
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Luke's Yu-Gi-Oh! Channel
 Posts: 159 Location: Australia |
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I play YGO and the American sensor every card possible that is lewd or has sex appeal in general.
They also take away the cleavage from girls in the anime and make their skirts a lot longer. Plenty more but I don't want to be here all day. |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14761 |
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In Japan, it's all about honne and tatemae facade - as long as it puts on a good facade in relation to their society (even when everybody knows it's just a facade falsehood), then it's all good (like see no evil, hear no evil - close my eyes, cup my ears, pretend I don't see nor hear anything, don't talk about it)
In America, if the subject being portrayed relates to minors of non-legal age, the mindset is typically quite protective and restrictive. But once the subject being portrayed relates to adults of legal age, then the mindset becomes "you're an adult; you're free to do whatever the law doesn't prohibit" (go dress like a ho, twerk, whatever, have at it)
Soon not anymore the major chains |
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valoon
Posts: 172 |
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That's why I'm proud of my home country. Not only we have porn uncensored legally, but we also have legal prostitution (instead of the japanese illegal one), so better conditions for the prostitutes. I hope the world will improve to the same in the long term.
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RegSuzaku
Posts: 267 Location: Ikebukuro |
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Nothing is a "movement" in Japan, but everything is practiced to some extent, just not by people who call it a movement. Which is probably healthier, because when you label it a "movement", then everything you do has an undercurrent of anger and focus on the people who don't like it, as opposed to just focusing on yourself and the fact that you do like it. You don't have to use all that political language to do things.
What makes you say that? What exactly would make, for instance, a painting of sex-positive people enjoying themselves displayed on a wall, traumatizing for young children? Who performed this study, and what guarantees do you have that they aren't biased? Because, human beings being what they are, any researcher who weren't biased towards that conclusion would be an instant victim of torches and pitchforks. The fear of sex, and the thought that it's something children need to be "protected" from, comes from the fear that adults have of themselves - they want to shame those deviant people over there, for having sex other than for procreation, but really, they want to shame themselves, because they know they want all the same things. They want to shelter their children from knowing about sex until the children have been "properly" shamed into only wanting monogamous, hetero sex (with a hetero partner that they don't even see as a person, just a ticket to social status). They won't let their children think about sex before then, because they don't want their children developing their own ideas about it. I think it's entirely possible to have a society with absolutely no restrictions on artistic depictions of sex, where erotic public art is common, etc. It would have to be a society with absolutely no shame around sex, where all forms of sex are enjoyed openly and considered beautiful art. There would also have to be no gender distinctions, and no concept of being only attracted to men or women and not both. Sex wouldn't even be thought of as a separate category of things. There would be no boundary between sex and everything else, because why should there be? ..... I think that until the world reaches that point, it's just a wasteland that's not worth caring about. |
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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I would note that most historians would call this a gross misunderstanding of both Puritanism and the influence of Puritanism in early American culture, and generally comes from significantly later depictions that are roughly equivalent to how an edgy teenager describes his parents. Overall, the major influences are that America emphasizes consistent identity and liberty while Japan emphasized public persona and doesn't really care about things done out of sight or anonymously and the different ways the rules were written/worded. For the first element, it means that even things done where someone can't see you are still subject to concern in the US but not Japan (such that the Japanese are kind of infamous for how they turn into Mr. Hyde the second they have the relative anonymity of being in a car to drive), and the second just means that the things that will get you penalized are different even if they had the same intent, as they were written with enforceability, limitations of language, and efforts to maintain sensitivity and specificity in mind. |
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Northlander
 Posts: 901 |
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I noticed a few years ago while visiting Outland in Oslo that they had set up a BL section in the manga shelves. So we have that here, although I can't really comment on whether the selection is good or not, not being the target audience and all. But we have it.
Hilariously, while the BL section has been there for a couple of years, last summer I also noticed an "ecchi" section, where I was directed to after asking for the first volume of "The Elder Sister-like One" after doing my damnedest to find it in the "everything else" section. (Where the more salacious manga would be found earlier.) Of course, given that anime and manga is pretty niche here still, you will probably not find much in the way of anime and manga except in our biggest cities... probably. (I'd welcome anyone correcting me on this.) |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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The age of Federal sexual majority in the US used to be 16 (and lower historically) until 1984, where it was raised to 18 along with the drinking age to 21. We were treated as adults in high school back in my day and I remember TV shows and films up until the late 1990's treated high schoolers as the young adults they were. After all, no matter how much you change societal laws, you won't change nature's laws. And regarding adult sex, this too has been viewed in a more restrictive way. Despite its consumption, sex has always been taboo and never accepted as part of mainstream culture in America and has been treated as a vice. The opposite is occurred in Japan, where sex was part of mainstream culture (e.g. mixed gender bathing up until the Meiji period where Japan adopted Western/English customs, e.g. legal prostitution up until the end of the Meiji period, etc) I'd say western society is entering a regressive phase where sexuality has to be viewed only through certain safe perspectives to remove perceived offensiveness, objectification, in addition to "protecting the children" (who as I mentioned includes biological adults) |
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Rise Of The Research Hero
Posts: 19 |
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Heads up: I remember reading this book written in the 40's that talked about the pervasiveness of the then somewhat recent puritanical nonsense being used by political candidates to get elected. The entire concept of demonizing sex in America is a very recent phenomenon. You can find stories about those raucous sexy barbarians of Americans acting like the Romans in the 1850's. MONEY is why they demonized sex. Parents didn't want to have to raise their own children's children. So they pretended God would get made if they had sex. God has frequently been used as "bad cop" in America to screw us over.
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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It goes back and forth quite frequently. Revolutionary America was quite libertine, while Civil War America was quite puritanical. While the dominance of religion in public consciousness and the comparative pulls of personal liberty versus the collective good and morality in the zeitgeist are certainly factors, I think the strongest correlation is the age and economic lifestyle of the largest cohort. Young people often like immediate pleasure, aristocracy likes to do whatever is wants, and the poor are too desperate for morality while the middle-aged middle-class are more worried about the state and future of "society," which can meet a lot of things but generally includes the historic morals of the society. |
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gridsleep
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The Japanese government just forbade 7/11 in Japan from selling adult or pornographic material, magazines, etc. Not clear whether they were carrying only Japanese adult material or also American adult material, as you see here in plastic bags behind cardboard modesty panels.
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