Mune - 1
“A blonde girl sits on a bed, wearing an oversized pink t-shirt and engrossed in a pornographic magazine.”
[TW: Sexual Assault]
So, Ben-To. If I didn’t believe it before, the show’s fourth episode demonstrates this show to be equal parts deeply sexist and an immensely good time. The anime trades heavily on tired high school tropes and features all kinds of misogyny and casual misandry (I’m starting to buy Noah Brand’s thesis that our narratives about sex-crazed men are ALSO demeaning) along with a strong dose of sexual assualt.
Episode four introduces Ayame Shaga, presents some nasty examples of the most subtle part of rape culture. Sure, she self-objectifies (she offer herself to You as a prize twice within the same episode) and she’s brutally perverted, as Oshoi finds out the hard way. When Shaga meets the diminutive megane, she reacts in the manner of all female nymphomaniacs in anime, she gropes the girl’s chest. At length.
It’s a pretty common occurrence that a lusty anime woman’s obsession with sex leads her to an obsession with another girl’s chest. Cue bath/shower/street scene that has her fondling a helpless victim’s breasts for the amusement of the audience. Unlike the situations where men do the groping, the visual signifiers paint the victim as uncomfortable, but on the verge of enjoying it and three out of four times, the scene itself is played for hilarity.
These interactions perpetuate a toxic cocktail of messages about rape and female sexuality. The first and most obvious is that “women like it, even if they say they don’t.” While I doubt the mash-up of flustered arousal with vehement cries of “no” has inspired many rapes in and of itself, it’s not doing much to help when many victims of this kind of sexual assault in anime look pleasantly ravished rather than horrifically violated after the fact. No, what I would argue is more insidious is the fact that this scene is funny because the attacker is always a deviant.
The fact that these women have comically overactive libidos perpetuates the idea that rape and sexual assault are something that only obviously deranged, sick people do. While the Predator Theory indicates that many rapists really are serial and violent, their modus operandi is at odds with the narrative of being overcome by their own desire.
The result is a kind of othering through caricature. Sure, rapists are deplorable people and horribly violent, but they might not be so apparently out-of-whack as they appear in these shows. Saying, “yeah, but she’s a deviant” does nothing to help us identify actual rapists.
Now, of course, this post seems like borrowing trouble. Why would I go pointing out and decrying something that is on its surface meant all in good fun and happens between two fictional, animated characters? Context. There is a context here and it (as well as some of the additional consequences of this behavior) will be the subject of the next post.
