Mune - 2
[A pink-haired girl keels in a Japanese bath, looking into the camera, picture provided by cassiesheepgirl]
[TW: references to sexual assault]
Now, we come to the second half of the problem with breasts: The idea that women are obsessed with them. While the scene referenced above has all the assault-y overtones of the one referenced in my earlier post it’s also upsetting because it’s part of a larger trope that’s so common an unimaginative as to proceed in the same manner each time.
[Girl A walks into the bath]
Girl B: Your skin is so smooth!
Girl A: …
Girl B: And your chest/breasts/those are so big! Let me touch them!
Girl A: No./Please Don’t/[Quiet Look of Horror]
Girl B: [Touches them]
This happens so frequently in anime that I’d stopped noticing it. If there’s a bath scene, much of it is spent on conversations about skin and chests and legs and hair. And, if you’re watching high school anime, there will be one of these scenes. Setting aside the issues we discussed last time, this trope perpetuates a bunch of damaging ideas IN ADDITION to educating guys wrongly about what goes on when women are naked in front of each other.
First and most obviously, it continues to reinforce the idea that women’s bodies are public property. It’s one thing for a deviant pervert (see: Tori from Horizon to the Middle of Nowhere) to grope or ogle women (and it’s not good, see the previous post), but when “average” girls do it, it normalizes the behavior. As a guy, it justifies your obsession with breasts because it shows that girls are equally obsessed with them.
Secondly (and I’m going out on a limb here), it contributes to the background noise that women hear about their bodies. These anime characters can’t shut up about whether their chest is to large or too small and their friends all chitter about it, too. Therefore, YOU should be concerned with those parts of your body. Of course, the self-deprecating tone and dance of insult-yourself-compliment-others makes this interaction particularly troubling. These girls generally demean themselves and their bodies en route to admiring one of their friends, and while it seems like reflex, I can’t imagine that modeling that behavior wouldn’t make me feel worse about myself. Of course, this isn’t terribly original, but again as a guy when I see this, it normalizes for me the idea that girls are constantly concerned with their appearance.
What’s more is that the whole thing is male-gazey. We see the girls/women splashing around in a large bath indulging in the novelty nakedness, when—let’s be honest—it’s really not all that novel to them. Their delight at seeing naked girls is really our (assumed male audience) delight at seeing naked girls, which of course feeds right into the idea that all female characters in anime eventually exist to serve as eye candy.
Yeesh.
