Well, if you saw Ex Machina and are looking for some low-brow humor to cleanse the palate of all that high-brow pomposity, you'd have a hard time doing better than Robot on the Road.

This gorgeously drawn short also has a robot (obviously) with low and ulterior motives, and generous amounts of gratuitous nudity. But veteran animator Hiroyuki Okiura makes no bones about writing and directing what is basically a ten-minute long dirty joke.


Being up front about what you're up to and not pretending the subject matter is more than what it is always makes for better art. Robot on the Road is funnier (on purpose) and orders of magnitude more clever than the hundred long minutes of Ex Machina.

Writing a "good" dirty joke (or, for that matter, any run-of-the-mill episode in any run-of-the-mill police procedural) takes more talent that wallowing in the manipulative angst of unlikable people and their meaningless lives.


Hiroyuki Okiura also directed the heartwarming and family friendly A Letter to Momo. I don't doubt that having a healthy respect for traditional moral values makes it easier to poke gentle fun at them.

Labels: anime, gkids, japan, movies, robots, sex, technology, thinking about writing

Maohden (my current project) is the first in the "Demon City Blues" series, published before Yashakiden. It's half the length and moves a brisker clip than the latter, which clocks in at about half a million words. Yashakiden is Kikuchi's Moby Dick, and like Melville he writes a Wikipedia entry for every parenthetical and plot tangent.

(That world building is a fantastic accomplishment, but I wish that instead of a gory, erotic vampire thriller, he'd written a novel focusing on the Chicago-style politics of Demon City's mayor.)

Once you get past the info-dumps, Kikuchi rewards the reader of his adult novels (Demon City Shinjuku is safely Y/A) with plenty of BDSM kink and rape porn. These novels were originally serialized, and in Maohden, I could swear Kikuchi's editor gave him a list of fetishes and a quota.

It's not exactly my cup of tea, so I have to wonder about the market. Because it's sure there. This is hardly unique to Japan. Consider a far more successful literary import. From Steve Sailer's review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:

I was at the local art-house cinema in 2010 when the third thriller [of the original Swedish trilogy] debuted, and it looked like Twilight for the elderly. The lobby was jammed with shuffling octogenarians. The restroom lines were moving so slowly that I fear many Larsson fans may have missed their favorite sexual-torture and sadistic-revenge scenes.

But what really caught my attention is the romance trilogy Fifty Shades (that started out as Twilight fan fiction). It's gotten gushy write-ups in the New York Post and the requisite handwringing from David Goldman in the Asia Times. To be clear, the sex scenes are garnering all this attention, certainly not the writing.

And yet if the sizzle was all that selling the steak required, then Hideyuki Kikuchi and E.L. James could have saved themselves a whole lot of work (and words). Not to mention all the competition from the near-infinite number of free offerings when it comes to sizzle-only entertainment.

I encourage everybody to go to Amazon and download the sample chapters for the first book. There's no sex in the sample. There is a by-the-numbers hypergamous romance formula on full display, "fifty cringingly cheesy pages of exposition before getting to the explicit sex scenes," as Chiara Atik describes it.

To be sure, I've got no beef with by-the-numbers (or, for that matter, sex scenes). Do a monomyth actioner right and I don't care how many times it's been done before. Scanning the sample chapters for books two and three, the plot of Fifty Shades apparently boils down to our alpha male corporate wonderboy having "issues."

Nobody in Kikuchi's novels has "issues." Or, rather, everybody's got issues, just of the zombie apocalypse sort, usually solved Buffy-style, with a stake through the heart.

But just as the readers of Fifty Shades-type fiction must want the kink cluttered up with "issues" and angst, so Kikuchi's readers want it couched in geeky science fiction and blood & gore action (with a hint of yaoi). This raises interesting questions about the necessary and sufficient conditions required for popular story creation.

Life in the real world is about aspiring to perfection but compromising with reality. We constantly negotiate how much of X we're willing to put up with to get Y. But I think something more subtle is involved with our entertainment choices. It's a threshold effect. Up to a certain point, it's not that we "put up with" X, we don't even notice it.

Given a good story, for example, I can forgive a lot of bad science in my science fiction. However, if I don't buy into the premise, it doesn't matter how golden the prose, high-minded the philosophy, or pristine the cinematography. Nor are these static standards, but shift from genre to genre and book to book, even chapter to chapter.

As Orson Scott Card puts it, "The stories and characters that endure do so for reasons having almost nothing to do with the talent of the writer."

Which is why the quality argument constantly thrown at fan fiction and self-publishing in particular misses the point. And why criticizing the literary quality of (and political and economic plot holes in) Harry Potter and The Hunger Games arouses such ire among their fans. You're messing with those thresholds.

Seth Roberts provides a good personal example. Wondering why he enjoyed reading The Hunger Games when Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings bored him silly, he concludes that

Sentence by sentence, even scene by scene, The Hunger Games is mediocre. It is not quotable. There is no vivid writing. The characters are barely interesting. It is not Jonathan Franzen, much less Vladimir Nabokov. But it does a wonderful job of supplying the four basic elements of a good story: a hero, a villain, making you care about the hero, and putting the hero in jeopardy.

Says Philip Pullman, "We need stories so much that we're willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them." At the end of the day, writing a "good" book won't satisfy your readers if what they really want is in the "bad" ones. In other words, if you want to get read a lot, write what a lot of people want to read.

Easy to say. A lot harder to actually do. I'm still working on it. But I'm sure it begins with disentangling what we wish about an audience's tastes from what they are actually looking for (which, of course, doesn't preclude providing a little something more on the side).

Related posts

Abstinence porn
Demon City libertarianism
The Business Rusch: Quality

Labels: books, movies, publishing, pullman, sex, writing, yashakiden

Any missionary who has served in Japan quickly learns the expression, "Rusu desu." It means, "Nobody's home." Japan is a nation of 128 million introverts. The novelist Hyakken Uchida summed up the near-universal sentiment when he posted a parody of an old tanka poem on his front door:

There is no greater joy
than receiving a visitor
But I don't mean you

On this side of the Pacific, it's an extrovert's world, so they get to define the terms of the debate, expressed as anything from rolled eyes to "call the men in the white coats" exasperation to unbridled rage at all those activities introverts enjoy doing that don't involve, you know, them.

In Japan, if you shut yourself in your room and don't come out for a year, okay, you're probably an "introvert." Otherwise, you're "normal," and "normal" activities have been extended and refined to introverted degrees that shock extroverted sensibilities all the more, such as the dating sim.

The dating sim evolved out of the "interactive novel," one of those technologies that has forever remained stubbornly over the horizon--except in Japan, where it has merged with the manga/anime aesthetic and narrative style and succeeded amazingly well.

One of the most popular dating sims is Love Plus (Peter Payne touches upon it here), cited in some translated 2ch responses to this by-the-numbers rant about how Japan's whole problem is the "fantasy world of comics, video games and animated pornography."

• Oh, and its OK to be obsessed with movies and books then?
• Make reality more interesting than games, please.
• Yeah, I can live on games alone.
• If everybody became obsessed with games, then we would live in a peaceful society.
• Reality does not want to deal with me, you idiot.
• The world in the monitor is reality. The world we live in is just imaginary.
• To be honest, I don't want a (real) woman.
• Love Plus IS reality.
• But the 2D world is ideal.
• My [2D] girlfriend is Aika-san. She lets me meet her whenever I want and greets me with a smile if I forget a date, and she does not cost money. Thats all I need.
• I'm 30 and earn 3.5 million yen [$40K USD]--how am I supposed to get married?
• I tried to face reality and it became Love Plus.
• A country of Neets [England] being worried about Japan?
• Girls in games won't cheat on us.
• The solution is simple: make it so that anime and manga characters can get pregnant.
• There are too many Japanese people anyway, so decreasing the population would be just right.

As the first point makes clear, as with slams of romance novels, these kinds of criticisms ultimately boil down to snobbery: my ways of wasting time are more refined than your ways of wasting time. Not to mention that wasting it in a group is always deemed more productive than wasting it alone.

That last one is an important demographic point that the "birth dearth" people utterly fail to comprehend: the Japanese are choosing to not gallop mindlessly into a Malthusian catastrophe. Just to make this point clear:

• Japan has a population of 128 million.
• And is the approximate size of California, with less arable land (and even less than that since the March tsunami and Fukushima meltdown).
• The current population of California (37 million) is about that of Japan two hundred years ago.

Even so, as stubborn contrarian Eamonn Fingleton insists, no ostensibly "dying nation" has ever done so well as Japan.

I'm not a game player, so I can't offer any opinions in that department. But Kanon and Clannad--based on dating sims--are in my top ten list. The KimiKiss manga are pretty good too (very Jack Weyland-ish). Game-play imposes a structure on the narratives that lend to solid plotting.

Here is a Love Plus trailer.

Related posts

Kanon
Clannad
Understanding Japanese women (and introverts)
Fumiko's Confession (how a dating sim is not supposed to turn out)

Labels: anime, computers, demographics, introversion, japan, manga, pop culture, sex

"Write what you know," goes the writer's mantra. Good advice, but the self as a resource has it limits, and sometimes you have to write what you don't and trust your research, your instincts, and your editor (Beth Bentley, in this case).

Still, it's always reassuring when you stumble across a real example of something you made up. In this case, a scene in The Path of Dreams that has Elly going to Planned Parenthood presaged this real-life article in the New York Times, and even strikes a similar philosophical note at the end.

From "Single, Female, Mormon, Alone" by Nicole Hardy:

And that brought me to tears, sorrowful for the ways in which we all suffer, in whatever ways we do, and grateful for the unlikely refuge [offered by Planned Parenthood]. Grateful also for the safety granted my own tears, prompted by the delicate weight of a hand on my shoulder, the warmth of her palm against my back.

How unprepared I was to experience tenderness in the place I had been warned so vehemently against. How unprepared for the flood of relief, the bud of hope, after a life devoted to keeping myself separate from my body. Here was a path, an opening; here was empathy.

From The Path of Dreams:

At the back of her mind—perhaps because of the association with female reproduction—she had made a connection between Planned Parenthood and Relief Society. The difference was, Planned Parenthood only cared about Elaine Packard, here and now. Nothing else. Her soul was her own business. And so the unexpected answer came to her in this atmosphere of nonjudgmental amity, so casually that at first she thought she was lying. But she knew she couldn't lie that glibly.

An hour ago, she couldn't have explained what she was doing there. Now she knew exactly what she was doing there, and for that she was truly and deeply grateful.

If you're not Mormon, I'd recommend reading chapter one of The Path of Dreams to put Hardy's article in context.

Labels: lds, sex, writing

Okay, time to put on your Mad Men thinking caps. This is (really, no kidding) a junk mail postcard that was sent to "current resident" (that's me!) by a venerable Utah institution. (Hey, I only wish I got more junk mail like this.)

It's a decade old by now (I stumbled across it cleaning out old archives), so keep that in mind when answering the following questions:

• Trick question: What venerable Utah institution?

• Bonus points: What's the winsome lass selling?

Before getting to the answer, some ruminating. Although men are stereotyped as the targets of "suggestive" material, especially in the (mainstream) print media, you are far more likely to find (mostly) unclad women in fashion/glamor magazines.

This particular piece of junk mail was certainly not aimed at me.

Many years ago, I was a very green missionary sitting in the venerable Fuji Bank in a Tokyo suburb getting my cash card account opened (Japanese banks don't do personal checks), casually flipping through the equivalent of Good Housekeeping while I waited.

And, bingo! There was a similar ad. Only without the demure Photoshopping (if you know what I mean).

A few months later, a Japanese businessman stopped by the missionary apartment and invited us all out to dinner (this was the Senzoku apartment, so there were six elders). He was a member and had just opened a restaurant in Salt Lake City.

After dinner, we stopped by a cozy little place not far from the church for dessert. There, on the second floor, about a dozen feet away from our table, adorning at least half of the wall, was a backlit, life-sized poster of an attractive young woman in a swing.

Wearing nothing but a smile.

Our benefactor took absolutely no note of it. So the rest of us pretended not to too. Because, you know, that would be rude. (Again, this was a perfectly respectable establishment in the perfectly respectable part of town).

And finally the answer: the venerable Utah institution is ZCMI, which used to be owned by the Mormon church. The trick in the question is that ZCMI was sold to May's a little over a decade ago (now it's Macy's). Here's the ad copy:

Experience Magic by Prescriptives, an extraordinary new concept that optically transforms the skin. Introducing the Concealing Wands--customized special effects tools that instantly retouch dark circles, breakouts, broken capillaries and other imperfections to optically airbrush the skin.

Well, ugh. I'll flip the card over and gaze at the winsome lass instead.

Labels: business, lds, pop culture, sex, utah

NHK has a fun pop-sociolinguistics show called Minna de Nihon-GO! (みんなニホンGO!). The title is a pun on Nihon (Japan) and Nihongo (Japanese), and can be read: "Japanese, Everybody!" or "Let's Go Japan/ese!"

A recent program was about the language used in "confessions" and how the terminology had changed over the past fifty years. In Japanese that specifically means confessing love, or more simply, asking somebody to go steady with you.

One linguist theorized that changes in usage and vocabulary reflect a behavioral shift from "ABC" to "HIJK." The former is a well-used acronym in Japanese, the equivalent of the "bases" in English (apparently, if you get to second base, you're already home):

A. Kissing
B. Petting.
C. Sex.

I hadn't heard of "HIJK" before. It was new to some of the older panelists too. Unlike "ABC," which only reflects an order (like "1-2-3") and isn't a true acronym, "HIJK" is an "initialism" that reflects the sport in Japan of smashing together romaji and Japanese words.

H. Ecchi (エッチ), or sex. This is a double initialism. "H" was derived from the word hentai, a general term for anything of a salacious nature. It has since evolved to mean "sex," and is written in katakana and pronounced the same as the letter in English. In CSI: Miami, David Caruso's character, Horatio, is called "H" for short. But not in the Japanese dubbed version.
I. Ai (愛), or love.
J. "Junior" (ジュニア), referring to children.
K. Kekkon (結婚), or marriage.

In other words, a guy and a girl hook up, sleep together, fall in love, she gets pregnant, and they get married. Ah, the romance!

Labels: japanese, language, pop culture, sex

Funny, fascinating article about a literary writer who moonlights writing porn. Great quote:

Books in which children are abused, women murdered and men brutalised crowd the shelves of WH Smith [and the plots of Law & Order]. Books in which consenting adults enjoy each other for the healthy entertainment of literate wankers do not.

Interestingly, what is true about yaoi in Japan--"a field dominated by women, who approach any and every kink with gusto"--appears also to be true of the same market in Great Britain.

Speaking of consenting adults enjoying each other for the entertainment of literate wankers, the small, independent film Man, Woman and the Wall is one of the more enjoyable erotic thrillers I've seen in a while. Though it ends up being more clever and comic--on purpose--than "thrilling."

Start with The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola's post-Watergate cult classic about a bunch of spies (led by Gene Hackman) planting bugs on each other. And then imagine the script getting mixed up with Revenge of the Nerds. And this is pretty much what you'd end up with.

Though the underlying theme of imagination and perception colliding with reality may be asking too much of this particular vehicle. Give it points for trying, though.

"AV" idol Aoi Sora is the object of the spying, so we can expect to literally see a lot of her. But then there are the eavesdroppers eavesdropping on the eavesdroppers. The creepiest of them gets his comeuppance--because who's doing the spying matters. Some voyeurs are way more equal than others.

As Tracy Lamb puts it, "When I reread [Twilight] more analytically, I realized that a guy sneaking into a girl's room without her knowledge could seem a little stalker-like. But the first two times I read it, it just seemed flattering."

Aoi Sora also shows up in Siren. It's more conventional erotic thriller fare, about a bunch of thieves who pull off the score of their lives, and then knock each other off one by one after a mysterious woman injects herself into the gang and reveals the disloyal darkness in each of their larcenous hearts.

Sora has that creepy "black widow" smile down ("We'll have sex and then I'll bite your head off"), but in this case she doesn't bring much to the role besides nudity. Siren struck me as an interesting idea that never made it beyond the outline stage. It needed either more substance or more sex.

The artsy-fartsy shakey cam also makes it well-nigh unwatchable. Hey, all you too-cool, art-house movie directors, please memorize this one word: "TRIPOD." Or this one: "STEADICAM." Or these two: "IMAGE STABILIZATION."

But as I observe here, the revenge drama--in which a vigilante or supernatural grim reaper deals out justice and balances the cosmic scales--is quite popular in Japan. The anime series Hell Girl is representative. Alas, the genre gets awfully repetitive. After a couple of episodes, seen one, seen them all.

Many commenters on Netflix recommending skipping the first volume of Hell Girl for exactly this reason. Maybe I'll take that advice and give it another shot.

Labels: books, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, sex, social studies, yaoi

When it comes to "abstinence porn" as a literary device, I think it'd help to more precisely define the term, at least when used in the manner than I intend. Clarifying the actual application to narrative works is a goal for the future.

1. All revved up and someplace to go.

Etymologically, the flippant use of "porn" suggests a frisson created in the absence of plot. In anime it's called "fan service," gratuitous nudity and crude visual gags censored for broadcast but not in the DVD versions.

Drag racers "burn rubber" to heat up the tires and give them more grip. But we don't go to a race just to watch drivers spin their wheels. There's a finish line out there somewhere and we expect them to get to it eventually.

But the smoke and noise and spitting flame is fun to watch.

2. Movie stars don't look good by accident.

As long as the "fan service" doesn't cannibalize the tone or plot, I say the more the merrier. In fact, it seems to me that of late that the standard Hollywood genre fare doesn't contain enough beautiful naked women.

Most mainstream romance authors, on the other hand, know better than to leave the reader begging for more than a fleeting glimpse or well-placed sheet. Plot is a scaffold. What's hanging on it had better please the mind's eye.

3. It's not about commitment (or the lack of it).

In any kind of romantic narrative, keeping the leads apart while other subplots unfold is a major challenge to the writer. Though after a while, the tangled webs woven to accomplish this can begin to strain belief.

But this is "commitment porn," not abstinence porn. It's not enough that the couple in question be abstaining, but they must have something to abstain from. A real and present temptation. Commitment precedes abstinence.

4. Neither is it about plot development.

Except to show how much the leads really like each other. Compelling dramatic externalities that would keep them apart is, again, what we call "plot." Rather, its purpose is as stated in the Harlequin writer's guidelines:

We want to see an emphasis on the physical relationship developing between the couple: fully described love scenes along with a high level of fantasy, playfulness and eroticism are needed.

Once we know that Buffy sleeping with Angel turns him into a psycho-killer, abstinence becomes logical. That there are forces conspiring to keep Romeo and Juliet apart is the whole point of the play.

The dying stuff aside, Romeo and Juliet is like two BYU students racing off to Wendover for a quickie wedding so they can satisfy their lusts "morally." Given the nature of the social constraints, it kinda makes sense.

Abstinence porn is not about the plot and it's not about making sense.

5. It's about putting out fires with gasoline.

Abstinence porn pretends to be celebrating chastity while reveling in carnality. Or as my brother puts it more bluntly, "Bella and Edward have lots of sex, just not intercourse." They have the cake and eat it too.

Twilight could be faulted for being like those anti-tobacco commercials that end up making smoking look cool. Though it took Deseret Book until volume four for some moralist in corporate to finally say, "Hey, wait a minute!"

Yet another case where DB "gets it" but for all the wrong reasons. When religions get pharisaical, the Pharisees deserve a hoisting by their own petards.

At the same time, as much as I like discussing it, I don't think much of the persuasive powers of "subtext." All the girls who read into Edward the very picture of the perfectly chivalrous boyfriend, all the power to them.

True, Bella trusts Edward the way no teenage girl should ever trust a teenage boy. Fantasy is fun for its ability to disentangle obvious causes and likely effects. That's why we say it's "made up" and call it "make-believe."

6. But a man's still got to know his limits.

For abstinence porn to produce friction and heat, prohibitions must exist. Take the foot off the brake at the wrong time and the car burning rubber will careen into a brick wall. The forces must balance out (ideally until marriage).

Yet if the external forces are too powerful, we don't end up with abstinence porn but The Scarlet Letter. There must be enough play left so that the needle cranks into the red zone before coming to a screeching halt.

If the desire is equal and balanced, then the woman drawing the line is a dog-bites-man story. Hence Meyer's brilliant stroke of having Edward draw the line and turning the standard male escapism into a female fantasy.

As my sister Kate observes, "Bella gets to say, Let's get it on! without having to worry that the male will say, Alrighty, then!

Granted, "I love you so much I won't" sounds like a sermon by Boyd K. Packer, except that Edward is hanging those stagecoach wheels right off the edge of the abyss while promising not to end up at the bottom of the gully.

Like the little warning says down at the bottom of the screen during car commercials: "Closed track and professional driver."

7. There's nothing new under the sun.

Any genre with the insatiable demand and enormous supply of romance has been there and done that a thousand times over. But Meyer pulled off something unique in Twilight, a literary feat that's probably not reproducible.

I don't think she planned it that way. She simply said, "Oh, let's pretend that when it comes to sex, men are still all chivalrous and everything like in the fairy tales." And millions of girls said, "Oh, yes, let's!"

Lucas pulled an old monomyth of the hat in Star Wars--and didn't know what he did. Joseph Campbell explaining it to him didn't help. Like Lucas, I wonder if Meyer--or anybody--can trap that light in a bottle again.

8. So you write what you know.

While Meyer's one-off can't be taken as a template, the basic principles are worth a long look. Abstinence porn typically thrives in historical settings, but the right modern religious context could work too.

I believe a big reason that Meyer made it work was because she knows whereof she speaks. The series ends the way it does because according to Meyer's world view, abstinence ends with marriage and sex. That's the whole point!

She just never came out and explained why.

The official Mormon position on the "Law of Chastity" might obviate my requirement against externalities. But the church's ecclesiastical bark is louder than its bite and modern mores bend the tree awfully far over.

To put it cynically, the tree doesn't fall in the forest if nobody hears it. Or confesses to chopping it down. To clarify, I'm not belittling such proscriptions, just pointing out that they do not incur a physical risk to life.

When it comes to contemporary American culture, Mormons are practically alone in living though the Sturm und Drang of abstinence porn. They should figure out how to take advantage of that fact.

Related posts

Abstinence porn
Selling the sizzle

Labels: BYU, criticism, deep thoughts, lds, meyer, sex, thinking about writing, twilight

I was reading this entertainingly nasty review of the Twilight series by Christine Seifert, which introduces the wonderfully precise term: "abstinence porn." And I had an epiphany.

Granted, Seifert takes the standard lit. crit. line, namely way overreacting to the horror, the horror of conservative mores invading the hallowed ground of pop culture (which has always been as reliable "real" as a Ken Burns documentary, right?), not to mention treating such frivolities so deadly serious to begin with.

I enjoy taking pop culture too seriously too—but with tongue firmly wedged in cheek. Lefty academics treating bad genre fiction as a poisoner of tender young minds and a threat to civilization is no different than the religious right getting riled up about sex education and evolution (at least the religious right is ideologically consistent about policing thought).

Besides, as Moriah Jovan points out, every time the literary critics pull on their scorn-laden boots and resolve to squish the paleo-romance genre to death once and for all, it just pops out someplace else under a new, superficially politically-correct guise (such as yaoi).

I mean, geez, people, can't you just laugh about it? Because I laugh more at critics wringing their hands about how "worrisome" and "disturbing" Twilight is, and how it's going to "undermine feminist sensibilities." Not to mention the annoying habit—again, usually expected from the right—of using "porn" to describe anything you don't like that's somehow related to sex.

Though I'll have to plead hypocrisy here too, because I rather like "abstinence porn" as a genre description, and see no problem in exploring and exploiting it the best I can. In any case, I would respectfully submit that when it comes to messing around without "crossing the line," a good Mormon like Stephenie Meyer knows what the heck she's talking about.

Unlike Seifert's aforementioned essay, in which she is surprised at "how successful this new genre is. Twilight actually convinces us that self-denial is hot." (I glean from the tone that this is a bad thing.) What's more surprising is how clueless the writer—a professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City—is. Talk about fish discovering water last.

And when are we going to finally bury this hoary, pedantic insistence that if a given demographic enjoys a given genre of entertainment, then ipso facto they must desire what's represented in that entertainment in real life? I hope nobody takes the fact that I like Bruce Willis actioners to mean that I'm longing to get shot up by a bunch of Eastern European terrorists.

As my sister Kate puts it, "I can't think of anything dumber than telling a teenage girl that she should stop adoring Edward." Twilight, after all, turns on the fantasy of the

romantic other who totally understands us and totally wants us and never wants to leave us and is always there for us and knows what is best for us . . . [In real life,] this type of relationship would get very tedious very fast, but I think it is unfair to get after women who voice it.

While Seifert's analysis turns hilarious when she notes a fan's "salient" (albeit "subconscious") "understanding of the theme Meyer has been establishing: that sex is dangerous and men must control themselves." A subconscious understanding? I'd call it FREAKING OBVIOUS! Getting teenage boys to corral their sexual impulses is what makes civilization function.

Which makes some teenage girls smarter than some college professors. You know all that fuddy-duddy stuff about chivalry and honor—Who cannot rule himself, how should he rule others?—gee, I have no idea why anybody would be attracted to stuff like that nowadays in a romance novel. Cue Meat Loaf singing "Paradise by the dashboard light."

And then (as Kate helpfully suggests), "I would do anything for love" (the same couple twenty years later).

That once married, Bella turns out to be really into rough sex is the icing on the cake. Didn't Nancy Friday cover this ground, oh, about forty years ago? It's the "hip" Meyer versus her "stuffy" critics. Her skills as a writer aside, I'm cottoning to the idea that Meyer understands women—perhaps especially Mormon women—a whole lot better than her oh-so-progressive critics.

In short, abstinence porn pretends to be celebrating chastity while reveling in carnality. But I believe that Mormon theology supports the contention—in contradiction to the Gnostic heresies—that within proper constraints, carnality deserves being reveled in. It's a fine line, but the struggle to tiptoe down those fine lines is at the heart of dramatic conflict.

To be sure, it's not the thing itself, but the contradictions inherent in the oxymoron that ultimately make the story compelling. And here I return to the point I originally intended to make, which is that Mormon culture provides one of the few contemporary American settings (aside from the Amish) where "abstinence porn" plots actually prove plausible.

Hawt Mormon romance abstinence porn—maybe that's the literary ticket to breakout publishing success!

Related posts

Defining "abstinence porn"
Selling the sizzle

Labels: criticism, deep thoughts, lds, meyer, sex, twilight, utah, writing

Another compelling entry in the "non-traditional sex/marriage models in fiction" category: the anime series Simoun. In the world of Simoun, everyone is born female. One's permanent sex is chosen at the age of seventeen in a religious ritual that looks a lot like baptism.

This puts a whole new spin on the question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

What makes this metaphor work better than the similar (but heavy-handed) Star Trek: TNG episode is that the "agency" issue is not the point of the show, but an aspect of the society. And the emphasis is on the weight of having to make a choice rather than the choice itself.

We are told that some of the "less advanced" societies on the planet do insist on the equivalent of a "prearranged marriage." However, the "freedom to choose"--or the choice to leave things to chance--can be just as overwhelming to the psyche. Freedom is good, but it's not easy.

The religious aspects of the story are similarly compelling. The "Simoun" are fighter aircraft piloted (in squadrons of twelve) by the "Simoun Sibylla," young women who haven't been "baptized." Although they know how to fly and maintain the Simoun, nobody knows what makes them "go."

Anthropologically speaking, a complex cargo cult has arisen to explain the existence of the Simoun and why only a select number of young women can fly them. The "Simoun Sibylla" are ordained as priestesses and the Simoun are treated as instruments of the divine.

The result is a theocracy with super-advanced military technology it doesn't understand at its fingertips, surrounded by and increasingly threatened by secular regimes armed with the steampunk equivalents (that they do understand), and getting stronger and more belligerent by the day.

When war breaks out, the priestesses must turn their "divine instruments" into killing machines. Some suspect that the Simoun are comprehensible mechanical devices, but this is heresy. Unable to exploit this technology, they risk being overrun and conquered, if only by sheer numbers.

Perhaps most interestingly, Simoun is ultimately a story of failure and the inability of a religious culture to adapt in the face of radical change.

Related posts

The birds, bees, and the trees
Gall Force: Eternal Story

Labels: anime reviews, religion, sex, social studies

Over at the Gene Expression blog, Razib points to a study by Benjamin Edelman (Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School) that examines subscriptions to online adult entertainment sites on a per thousand people, per thousand home Internet users, and per thousand home broadband users basis.

Utah tops every list.

There are several more variables that Edelman hints at but doesn't consider directly. First is the "private" (or "secret") nature of online subscriptions, making them easier to hide from a spouse or parents than a magazine or DVD. In other words, morality should always be considered in the context of propriety when analyzing religious behavior.

The more Mormons in one's general vicinity, the greater the incentive for a Mormon seeking out-of-the-mainstream diversions to practice discretion. I'll bet that the only Mormons who ever bought one of those glossy sex books at the Orem Barnes & Noble were from Salt Lake City (if they ever sold any).

Equally important is the extent to which local anti-porn laws are enforced. Even though these cases rarely prevail in court, the willingness to charge brick & mortar rental outfits creates a powerful economic disincentive. Greencine, for example, won't ship porn DVDs to Utah zip codes. This increases the attractiveness of online offerings.

As James Taranto notes:

Local laws and mores make retail porn less available in conservative areas--which might also account for their greater consumption of porn online, which gives at least the illusion of privacy.

And a commenter at Gene Expression observes:

I drive through Oklahoma to Texas often and have noticed that there are no porn outfits on I-35 or I-44. This contrasts Texas where porn stores on highways are relatively common. In this study, Oklahoma has higher porn subscription than Texas.

As a general rule, squeezing the balloon in one place makes it blow up elsewhere. But from Edelman's analysis, we don't know how big the total balloon (rental + cable/satellite + periodicals + live entertainment) is. Small behavioral movements among sinners seeking legal alternatives would bias the tiny sample sizes.

To start with, I'd suggest that Edelman regress Greencine's list of restricted zip codes against his data.

The fact that the Idaho ranks near the bottom in Edelman's study confirms this. Idaho is basically Utah with fewer blue laws and polygamists (but more survivalist nutjobs waiting for the coming apocalypse). And Alaska? Hardly any Mormons there, but a big retail supply and demand problem.

However, the popular perception that Edelman is onto something might explain why Mormon church leaders are so obsessed with the subject. Though this obsession has also made online porn the current "sin of choice" among Mormons, the confession of which being used (as a moral "theory of everything") to absolve all others.

Labels: lds, religion, science, sex, social studies, utah

If you've ever--you know, accidentally--happened to watch some anime porn (even of the R-rated variety: I recommend I Dream of Mimi), you might find this illustration of the moral and legal perils involved and the editorial fictions invented by importers to ameliorate them amusing.


To better understand what a "figurine" is, go here and click around (at your own NSFW peril).

Of course, there's the irony that characters somebody drew having "sex" are considered more "dangerous" to our moral health than actual human beings pretending to be underage and having sex (American Pie). You can even garner yourself an Oscar for doing so!

Regardless of what the Supreme Court said, anime importers follow the "stagecoach rule" in this regard. "First Amendment" rights are even hazier in Canada, which is also DVD region 1. And just to be safe, outfits like Greencine won't send "porn" to Utah and a couple of other states.

I once came across a hentai tape at a Hollywood Video here in Utah County (it wasn't half bad). The same store also had a copy of In the Realm of the Senses (meh), so it was probably part of the startup stock, and the owners had no idea it was there.

Until the irate parent stormed in, I suppose. Is that why Netflix doesn't ship I Dream of Mimi anymore? They do ship In the Realm of the Senses, which is about a billion times more explicit. Go figure.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for Kodomo no Jikan (haven't seen it, don't want to). The teacher/student romance typically involves a female high school student, and it is ubiquitous enough to constitute a standard girl's comics genre (and is often quite explicit).

The flipside is the "harem" genre featuring a prepubescent boy surrounded by developmentally precocious teenage (and often older) girls, such as the enormously popular Negima! and the just plain creepy Please Teacher, Happy Lesson and Mouse.

To sum up Negima! Imagine that Harry Potter as a nerdy ten-year-old and Hermione as a spunky, resourceful sixteen-year-old, and she and her coed classmates at Hogwarts have a habit of "accidentally" getting undressed around him. Oh, and they share a dorm room.

Actually, if Rowling's Hermione had been more like this Hermione, I might have stayed interested in the books. Stupid "fan service" aside, Negima! takes some interesting plot turns and is far less annoying than Ken Akamatsu's big harem hit, Love Hina.

But as I argue at length here, I've concluded that the Freudian subtext is really all about family formation (and the lack thereof).

Labels: anime, deep thoughts, moral outrage, netflix, politics, sex, utah

Over the weekend at Amazon, volume one of Ai no Kusabi bobbed back to #1 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Yaoi > Novels. And briefly this morning, it ranked as high as #55,138 in Books. I've never broken the top 100,000 for my own novels.

Granted, if there was a category for Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > Mormon Vampires Novels > Featuring Actual Mormons, I'd be number one in that too! (like those self-esteem courses that are supposed to make kids feel so special about being their unique little selves).

But having apparently offended the tender sensibilities of several readers with the "graphic sex" in The Path of Dreams and Angel Falling Softly (man, those are some really tender sensibilities), I have to say I'm amused (in a totally good way) by reader comments for Ai no Kusabi like:

Those who are looking for graphic scenes are going to be fairly disappointed. Aside from a heated, however vague, piece in the first chapter, there is virtually nothing of note in this book.

In the eye of the beholder indeed! So if Angel Falling Softly tests your limits, run away! (I can assure Ai no Kusabi readers that there are way more explicit passages in subsequent volumes.)

Get past those "obstacles" and some narrative repetition (the story was serialized, published as a single volume, expanded into a light novel series, and now a second anime series), and Rieko Yoshihara has insightful things to say about Caligulan moral decay and the rotten fruits of political idealism.

Granted, the supercomputer-running-everything motif (e.g., Appleseed) is a bit dated, but then again, it's mostly there as backstory and not an active part of the narrative.

As the series progresses, I'd swear Yoshihara is poking Swiftian fun at child-poor but dog-crazy Japan (to quote The Independent: "One in five families has a dog in Japan and they are treated not like pets, but like part of the family") and the "Lolita" subculture (the most morally disturbing parts).

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. I am wont to do that (but only because it's so much fun).

Labels: books, lds, light novel, moral outrage, sex, translations

Kaori Shoji informs us in the International Herald Tribune that "in Japan, it's the men who want to be skinny and cute."

Young males between the ages of 18 and 30 make up the slimmest segment of the population and the ideal fashion weight as decreed by the apparel industry is 57 kilograms, or about 125 pounds, for a height of 175 centimeters, or 5 feet 8 inches.

This strikes me as one of those deeply-researched MSM pieces based on a sample size of "me and my two best friends." The business about the girlfriends weighing more than their boyfriends is physically improbable. But in general I think she's onto something.

A recent episode of NHK's Cool Japan program polled Japanese women to create a composite of the "ideal man." He turned out to be the twin of popular enka crooner Kiyoshi Hikawa. According to his record label, Hikawa is 177 cm tall and weighs 62 kg (5'9.5" 136 lbs).

Those are my approximate dimensions, and I'm a beanpole. Before looking up the actual numbers, I'd assumed from watching his variety show that Hikawa was around six feet tall. But that's because his guests are usually so much shorter than he is. So we may be talking about tastes governed by situationally-relative dimensions.

To be sure, as an enka artist, Hikawa is most popular with the forty-plus crowd. Though the boy band idols on NHK's Pop Music Club (think American Bandstand) that have thousands of teenage girls screaming their lungs out every week look pretty much like teenage Hikawa clones.

Then consider yaoi and the Takarazuka theater troupe. In Takarazuka productions, all the male roles are played by women. The willowy, porcelain-skinned Takarazuka "leading man" looks exactly like the typical yaoi protagonist, and an awful lot like Kiyoshi Hikawa.

But the most annoying aspect of contemporary male fashion in Japan is long bangs. I can't abide my bangs getting into my line of sight (pragmatics, not aesthetics). Yet you see it even on suit-wearing businessmen and news anchors. It brings out the old geezer in me. I want to throw things at the screen and shout, "Cut yer darned hair!"

Labels: cool japan, eye-of-beholder, japan, nhk, romance, sex, yaoi

This is one of my favorite "old school" (pre-digital) anime feature films. Gall Force: Eternal Story is classic SF/F "high concept." That is, it takes a profound question about life, the universe, and everything, formulates a far-out theory, and then makes the explanation so entertaining you can ignore the galloping illogic.

That order is important. Crowd-pleasers like The Matrix and Independence Day enthrall their audiences (well, me) sufficiently that they (I) can ignore the deeply idiotic premises. As long as they don't push it. Unfortunately, as with The Matrix, a dumb premise dooms the sequels.

Gall Force keeps your superego from spoiling the fun for your id with plenty of gratuitous nudity (though of the Barbie Doll variety), a J-Pop power ballad at regular intervals, and a "Ten Little Indians" plot that has you wondering who will get bumped off next.

The profound, existential question it asks is where the human race came from (assuming that evolution isn't your cup of tea). And it devises an explanation that Mormons who know their Brigham Young arcana (and where Glen Larson got the idea for Battlestar Galactica) should be familiar with:

Mankind are here because they are the offspring of [Adam and Eve,] who were first brought here from another planet, and power was given them to propagate their species . . . . [Adam] was the person who brought the animals and the seeds from other planets to this world. (Journal of Discourses, vol. 7, p. 285; vol. 3, p. 319.)

In the Gall Force universe, the all-female race of the "Solnoids" and the reptilian (male) "Paranoids" have been engaged in centuries of ruinous warfare. In fact, the "gall" in the original is actually garu, a cognate of "girl," meaning "young woman." The American distributor must have thought a literal translation sounded silly.

In any case, faced with the prospect of mutual annihilation, the powers that be conspire to invent--wait for it--heterosexual mammalian reproduction! It's sort of like Lysistrata in reverse.

Actually, the original intent was to produce a race of Mr. Spock superegos to mediate between the squabbling ids and egos. But they messed up and created men instead.

The unwitting victims of this experimentation are the crew of the Star Leaf battle cruiser. The last woman standing is rewarded just as Brigham Young would have scripted it. There's a reality game show for you: the winner gets to populate a new planet!

Okay, if you want to nitpick, you could ask why the "females" have secondary sexual characteristics in the first place. But like I said, don't think about stuff like that and you'll enjoy it a lot more. There are also a bunch of Gall Force sequels and prequels, but they don't measure up to the original.

This theme pops up in other anime series. Vandread posits a future where men and women have separated into separate societies. In Tweeny Witches, this separation triggers the apocalypse. While the former rarely rises above the dumb but fun, the latter comes to some insightful conclusions.

Or as my brother Henry puts it, "In short, fish really do need bicycles."

Related posts

Simoun
The birds, bees, and the trees

Labels: anime, deep thoughts, id4, lds, personal favs, sex

In a previous post, I opined about the reluctance even in liberal Hollywood to truly address the full implications of female sexuality (and the risks and responsibilities that go with it). Steve Sailer provides an up-to-date political context in this comment about Sarah Palin:

Human beings have extremely strong emotions on the topic of [female] fertility. It's an obsession--look at the celebrity gossip columns these days. The who is sleeping with whom stuff bores people [right] now compared to the pregnancy news.

We're still addicted to the pack mentality: the desire of we lowly betas to know what the alphas are up to, because for our primordial geek ancestors studiously evolving bigger brains, the survival of the mentally fittest depended on the proper utilization of that knowledge.

The genetic software is still running in the kernel of our biological operating systems. One plausible reason for condoning patriarchy is that it gives the low man on the corporate or religious or military totem pole a pecking order and a little tribe of his own where he can be top dog.

Yes, I believe that the primary purpose of civilization is the civilizing of randy and violent young men. Just look what happens when society breaks down and anarchy breaks out. A feminist utopia it ain't. It's all primordial Big Man rule.

Nineteen-year-old Mormon missionaries are experts at spotting a pecking order and aligning themselves to it in perfect Gaussian distributions: those who salivate at the sight; those who shrug and resign themselves to it; and those who run fast in the opposite direction.

As Sailer concludes, "Modern people tell themselves they don't care about stuff like that, but they do. Oh, they do."

Labels: deep thoughts, lds, sex, social studies

I like to imagine that one day during the filming of Freeze Me, the producers approached writer/director Takashi Ishii, clapped him on the shoulder and said, "We all know the plan was to make a slick, updated "Pinky Violence" sexploitation flick, but, damn, this doesn't look half bad! I know, let's turn it into an art house film!"

So what could have been a kick-ass, soft-core revenge movie instead ends up an unsatisfying pile of faux "independent film" pretentiousness. And still manages to be just as misogynistic.

The story goes as follows: after getting raped by a trio of knuckle-dragging thugs, Chihiro (Harumi Inoue) has moved to Tokyo and made a new life for herself. Then thug number one shows up and, blackmailing her with a video made by his cohorts of their previous "encounter," announces he's ready to pick up where they left off last time.

A bunch of degrading sex later, Chihiro has had it up to here and caves his head in. Well, it was about time. The problem is, she has no convenient way to dispose of the body in downtown Tokyo. So she buys an industrial-sized freezer (delivery included) to store the corpse in while she figures it out.

Then thug number two shows up wondering what happened to thug number one and decides to avail himself of the same opportunities. Chihiro spends less time putting him on ice as well. And then thug number three—well, you get the picture.

But all this freezing is sucking up the power in Chihiro's rabbit hutch of an apartment, and it being the middle of the summer, the only way to keep from throwing a circuit breaker every five minutes is to turn off the air conditioner. Then the only way for her to cool off, natch, is to take lots of long showers.

Now, to be honest, I could have spent the entire 100 minutes just watching Harumi Inoue take showers. In any case, at this point in the film, we have the makings of a clever black comedy, with plenty of eye candy thrown in.

I was even willing to forgive Chihiro her maddening passivity during the first third of the movie. It's the standard Death Wish revenge fantasy formula: pacifist gets shocked into action and delivers violent justice to evil-doers ("a conservative is a liberal who got mugged"). Except that once the revenge is delivered, the plot grinds to a screeching halt.

Here is the rest of the movie (seriously):

Chihiro's loser boyfriend discovers what's in the freezers, and after some "It's not you, it's me" sex, he gets it too. Then she jumps off the balcony. I guess. It's kinda vague. Because it's an "art" film, don't you see. Oh, and it's raining. And it's at night. The end. Wow, moved and impressed, aren't you?

I don't know if the producers truly had the Pinky Violence films in mind as an antecedent, but Freeze Me is certainly less a homage than a betrayal. And sadly indicative of regressive and repressive strains in "modern" attitudes about women and sex. (By the way, the best Pinky Violence parody/homage is the hilarious Kamikaze Girls.)

During the early 1970s in Japan, with television eating away at profit margins, just like a Reese's peanut butter cup commercial, the "pink" (soft-core porn) genre collided with the yakuza action genre and produced a series of low-budget exploitation flicks featuring biker chicks slicing, dicing, and taking their clothes off.

A few of them, such as Delinquent Girl Boss with Reiko Oshida, don't actually suck. With her husky Lauren Bacall voice, Oshida totally sells the role as a bad girl in control of her environment and her own fate, willing to use both her fists and her sexuality to achieve her aims.

I consider Oshida's Rika the archetype for such modern anime heroines as Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell) and Kumiko Yamaguchi (Gokusen). But watch Delinquent Girl Boss and then Freeze Me and you can't help but wonder: What happened?

One way I measure the relative quality of a bad movie is how long it takes me to doctor up a better script. It took me about five minutes to think of a better last half to Freeze Me.

Let's say a cop starts poking around—a female cop—wondering why the thugs haven't been reporting to their probation officer. The heat is on, and Chihiro has to figure a way to get rid of the bodies. And no way is she going to cram them down the garbage disposal. She's got to come up with something ingenious, and the cop is beginning to sense what's going on.

Ah, a physical and a moral dilemma. Now we've got pure film noir material. A comparison that springs to mind is Bound by Andy and Larry Wachowski. Freeze Me could have hummed and purred as well. Instead it alternately shivers and sweats and clunks and gives up without a fight.

I blame Thelma & Louise, which should more appropriately be titled: "The Original Dumb & Dumber." This supposed paean to film feminism follows the exploits of two unbelievably stupid grown women who have spent their entire lives as victims of impulse and circumstance and aren't about to let a little (almost justifiable) homicide stop them.

The good-guy cop (Harvey Keitel) finds them such a pathetic pair that he starts emoting like a father in pursuit of his two dimwitted daughters. Their exploits inspire pity at best, contempt at worst. Not once is logic ever allowed to compete with emotion, let alone overcome it. So why not just drive off a cliff?

It's hard not to read a very obvious metaphor into the final scene: the caring man stands by helplessly while the newly "liberated" women cast themselves into oblivion. And a woman actually wrote it.

It doesn't help that so many "artists" are so willing to read "profundity" into self-immolation, if dressed up with enough psychobabble or multiculturalism. It takes years of indoctrination to find something noble in dying for nothing, as Clint Eastwood did in the morally obtuse Letters from Iwo Jima.

Eastwood should have heeded his own advice: "A man's got to know his limits." Then again, Dirty Harry Callahan was much more sensible about things like that. Hells bells, even Rambo has a smarter motto. It's "Live for nothing, die for something!" not the other way around.

To be sure, there are plenty of movies about guys going out in a blaze of pointless glory—Barry Newman in Vanishing Point, James Cagney in White Heat, Michael Douglas in Falling Down, Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—but the directors stress that either they really deserved it or there was absolutely no other alternative.

Even then, think about it for five minutes and it's still pretty damn dumb.

And yet for far slighter provocations, women are expected to jump off cliffs, tall buildings (Vertigo) and balconies, and throw themselves under trains. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how depicting women as so unimaginative and psychologically vulnerable is supposed to counter the stereotype of women as the "weaker sex."

I ask along with Erica Friedman, "What the hell is entertaining about reading and watching women being complete idiots and being abused by men?"

Which is why there's something more invidious than the lazy, pretentious plotting going on in Freeze Me. And again, I think this is so deeply ingrained—even in modern, leftist Hollywood—that it goes without comment. That is, it is verboten for women to use sex to level the playing field with physically more powerful men.

Trespassers must be punished! Or as Emily Bazelon puts it, "Whenever a woman sins, or contemplates sin, blam!—she's immediately run over by a truck."

Jean-Claude Brisseau's Secret Things serves as the textbook alternative to Freeze Me. His Machiavellian women are similarly punished, but in proportion to the rules they deliberately—and with self-interest foremost in mind—break. Playing with fire will get you burned, in other words. And it's the man lying in the pool of blood at the end.

Ishii's Chihiro, on the other hand, seems mostly guilty of not playing the proper victim. "Life sucks and then you die" may strike the adolescent mind as profound during the teen goth years, but adults know that having to live with your choices is a heavier burden.

The last scene in Secret Things morally redeems all of its excesses, because it straightforwardly depicts two women who have learned something from their bad decisions, and who know where those scars came from. The last scenes in Freeze Me and Thelma & Louise only confirm that the unexamined life is not worth living.

And so, their lives unexamined, they stop living.

Brisseau's treatment of the subject does get so explicit at times (Ishii is restrained by comparison) that you get bored (bored with sex and nudity—now there's a crime!), or much worse, you start giggling. (The "orgy" scene: just don't do it!) Nothing kills the dramatic mood and the sexual tension faster.

But it is the vulnerability of Ishii's and Brisseau's men in the face of such female wiles that clarifies why some governments and cultures enforce misogynistic laws to prevent stuff like this from happening. The don't-objectify-me left joins hands with the don't-tempt-me right to demonize female sexual desire as the root of all societal evil.

Rika in Delinquent Girl Boss broke free of these constraints way back in 1971. It often seems we haven't moved much beyond that high water mark since. As I observe here, it's as if feminists have been busily manning the Maginot Line while the old school chauvinists have been sneaking through Belgium the whole time.

Related posts

Girls kick butt
Dirty sexy money

Labels: criticism, deep thoughts, ghost in the shell, japanese movie reviews, moral outrage, movie reviews, sex, yakuza

Erica Friedman watches the Ikki Tousen sequel and finds the plot even sillier, the breasts even bigger, the brows even lower and the panty shots even more gratuitous than last time. If you harbor any doubts about where the producers want your attention focused, check out the website.

For your further enlightenment, the first kanji is baku'nyuu (爆乳), which could be translated as "huge tracts of land." The second kanji is bakuretsu (爆裂), meaning "explosive." The other captions are "Beautiful fighters" (美しき闘士たち) + "Hyper-battle" (ハイパーバトル) + "Once again" (再び).

Labels: anime reviews, sex

This press release is a bit old, but I had been wondering when this market was going to open up.

Aurora Publishing, Inc. brings "passionate manga for women" to America with their new Luv Luv imprint. Extremely popular in Japan, but never before available in the U.S., "ladies comics," or redikomi, are romantic, hot and sexy manga about modern women and the men they love.

As I previously noted here, in the romance genre, the transition from a Harlequin line such as Blaze to its manga equivalent seems a natural one.

Erica Friedman explains the differences between josei and ladies comics here: "To sum up, most of what we think of shoujo, is actually josei. And josei manga is in no way the same thing as ladies comics."

This actually illuminates the profound differences between what is considered "acceptable" in Japan versus the U.S. Essentially, when manga are imported to the U.S., the target demographics are bumped up about five years, so josei becomes 18+ rather than 13+.

And in the U.S., "ladies comics" would be pushed into the NC-17 category. Of course, both the feminist left and the religious right point to this kind of material as instrumental in the downfall of western civilization.

While I think Naomi Wolf makes a good point about the use of artificial scarcity to increase the value of female sexuality, I'm more persuaded by C.L. Hanson's argument that desire openly expressed through art better mitigates objectification.

This may be a complete non sequitur, but we speak often of Greece as the "cradle of western civilization," of democracy and human rights. Those ancient Greeks sure knew how to admire the human form.

Labels: publishing, sex, social studies

Over at the Letters from a Broad blog (read the whole thing), C.L. Hanson reviews The Path of Dreams and concludes that she has "never read a novel that more perfectly captures the Mormon view of the perfect love story." She's almost tempted, she goes on to say,

to call it canonical in the mathematical sense. If the stars were to align for a pair of Mormons to make their love and marriage ideal in every way, the result would be exactly the tale you find here in this book.

There's a touch of damning with faint praise in that remark, but as it accurately sums up what I intended, I'll take it as a compliment. Hanson goes on to identify the same plot problem that Stephen (my editor at Zarahemla Books) also spotted (my upcoming novel will be published by Zarahemla).

Namely, the story resolves the major conflict first, the secondary conflict second, and the tertiary conflict last, which results in the plot taking a somewhat meandering and episodic path through the last third of the book. Structurally speaking, it does resemble a serialized romance manga.

Hanson, though, finds the glass half-full, asserting that this lack of conflict

actually provides an original burst of realism compared a lot of romantic comedies which rely on some of the most absurd situations in order to keep the lovers apart or to keep them (for a time) from realizing they're made for each other.

Rather, she sees Elly's "bland and uninteresting" ex-missionary companions, Melanie and Susan, as more significant flaws in the narrative. I confess that they exist mostly as plot devices to push the story in certain directions. In my upcoming novel, all the cardboard characters will be male (I say half in jest).

Hanson also touches upon the autobiographical tone of the novel and links to this post about "editing one's life." I concur completely with the concept. Unlike Chris though (read the post for the context), in my case I looked back on my college years and simply reversed all my bad decisions.

If I could manage my personal and mental life like a Stalinist state, I'd spend a lot of time airbrushing the past to conform with the whims of the neurotic dictator in charge of my current state of mind. Second best option: write fiction.

Hanson's concluding comment is perhaps her most intriguing, touching upon my self-classification of the novel as "home literature." For anyone "hoping to understand Mormon culture, values, and mindset," she suggests, "if you get this story, you get a whole lot of what makes Mormons tick."

I hadn't realized that the story had such anthropological value. But from now on I'll recommend it on that basis as well.

P.S. Hanson also launched this great thread about Stephenie Meyer. Her post Porn and Me refers to the same analogy I cite (see, I didn't make it up). Her post Questioning Objectification is about the most rational thing I've read on the subject ever.

Labels: fantasy, lds, path notes, path of dreams, religion, science fiction, sex