It's so nice to be a beautiful girl
Sep. 21st, 2006 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusYesterday I celebrated Japan's "mukokuseki diaspora" -- that wonderful, synthetic, portable state, or state of mind, where Japanese and gaijin interact. In reality, of course, the synthetic "third culture" produced by that fusion can be as ugly as downtown Roppongi on a Friday night. Today, as a sort of riposte to that statement, I want to celebrate something domestically Japanese, and yet also universal.
Qooqle Clippers is one of my daily glimpses into the Japanese mind, and, not very surprisingly, when the Japanese mind isn't thinking about food, it's thinking about sex. Yesterday I found the YouTube clip site framing Hime, a clip of an ordinary girl waking up, brushing her teeth, and putting on her make-up. The girl's "way of being in the world" struck me as very Japanese, and very domestically Japanese; this couldn't be an American; it couldn't even be a diasporan Japanese making a tape for an American boyfriend. The clip seems to me to be full of the kind of implicit semantic and philosophical agreements that only parties raised in the same country can really share, the kind of agreements you don't even have to agree on or specify, yet which infuse every action on screen. As such, Hime is a perfect way to put the case for the beauty of the complementary opposite of what I was advocating yesterday. If Exhibit A was the relaunched Tokion, Exhibit B is a short, home-produced "charm video" -- but also a glimpse into a whole way of being, thinking and feeling.
Hime acts like the air hostess of her own life. Her face is pretty, if not quite model-like. Her voice is light and sensual, with charming, cutely clipped rhythms and a caressing, intimate style. She's attractive enough to be quietly confident, yet remains sweetly unaffected, and this gives her a "girl next door" quality. And Hime seems to embrace rather than reject her generic interchangability with every other normally pretty girl.
Her film, though sexy, isn't structured like porn. The most sexually exciting things -- a glimpse of Hime's sex, her long, slow wriggle into her underwear, and the hamigaki section, in which she lingers on a view of herself brushing her teeth -- all come at the beginning rather than the end, defying the cast-iron "more and more exciting" law of professional porn. Above all, the logic of porn ("it's so nice to get excited and have an orgasm") is replaced by quite another logic. To quote my own lyric for Kahimi Karie's "Good Morning World" (my biggest-selling song ever, by the way, and, some would say, my stupidest as well as my wisest composition): "It's so nice to be a beautiful girl".
There's no semantic stress here, no battle with stereotypes to be symbolically fought, no jumping through hoops, no contradiction or denial of Hime's essential femininity. She's not "putting on war paint" before going out onto some sexual battlefield to meet jerks, losers, abusers. Instead, she's about to go out into a world which is sensual and consensual, not conflictual. Certainly there might be perversion out there in the floating world of milky fluorescence, but it seems most likely to be a sort of pitiful otaku fetishism or incest, and Hime understands that; in fact, she incorporates it kindly into her performance. She's almost sisterly or daughterly as she adjusts her panties, and she certainly understands the male fetish for these details, while never dispensing with her ingenue manner. There's an assumed hunger which is calmly and kindly understood, and accommodated. Why isn't there an English word for ingenue? Perhaps because Anglos don't have much use for the concept; our alluring women are forever wearing invisible devil's horns. In Hime's world the devil is absent (although a cute small dog is present).
No malicious envy is assumed on the part of the viewer, and defused defensively. Instead there's a welcoming kindness. Hime's delight in being a girl corresponds with ours in watching her becoming a girl, letting us in on her make-up secrets, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at her life, her apartment, her body, her routines. Her lack of insecurity almost makes us see her as "spoilt", but there's nothing brattily spoilt, nothing Britney-ish here. Her security puts us at ease.
With her light, solicitous gestures, Hime is part-pierrot, part-courtesan. In her performance there's no assumed hatred of women, no sex neurosis, and nothing is relegated to the unconscious. Hime doesn't sublimate the sexual meaning of brushing her teeth; it's there on the surface. And yet there's no hint of the lascivious in her performance. Hime's implied (constructed) Japanese viewer doesn't like lascivious girls who think they -- and we -- are evil for enjoying her enjoyment of her girlness. They prefer an ingenue sexuality which is nevertheless completely aware of itself, and completely in control. They don't want to have to go to "bad girls" on the fringes of society, beyond the pale, for their sexual excitement. It comes from everygirl. It could come from their daughter, their mother or their sister too. But foreign girls... well, they're different. A bit scary. They don't really go for foreigners.
And what about us? Do we want to educate Hime, raise her consciousness, help her to "empower herself by questioning her social role"? Do we want to sit her down and tell her about Western feminism, and how it's still ahead of her? Don't be silly. Hime already clearly has amazing power. Her power comes from society. She's there at the centre of society, and we're lucky to be peripheral to her, close enough to glimpse the social power of being a pretty girl. What's more, if we thought about it we'd see there really is nowhere outside society for her to step, should she question her role. Nowhere in Japan, and nowhere in the West either. Nowhere that would make her stronger than she is right now, anyway.
And so, switching off the denki, Hime goes out into the ultimate gentleness of the nocturnal world we know waits outside, the "isn't it delightful" breeziness of Japanese life. She'll be safe out there in the light, sensual, tropical calm of a summer evening. But there's a tiny hint of racism in the idea that she can only enjoy that safety because Japan is insular, protected against harsher outside manners. There's only us here, Hime, your brother and your father and your uncle. You know us, and we know you. We hardly even need the police or the army, so smoothly does everything go out there in the world of milky fluorescence.
The same evening I watched the Qooqle clip of Hime, I happened to see a trailer for a new Hollywood film called My Super Ex-Girlfriend. It's a romantic comedy about "breaking up with a superhero". The trailer shows lots of knockabout stuff as Uma Thurman -- a geeky librarian by day, Superwoman by night -- throws her half-hearted date against walls with superhuman physical strength. Although it's all played for laughs, the film presents a rather sad picture of gender relations. Here power can only be thought of as masculine; you get it by having superior physical strength and being prepared to use violence. You get it by stepping into, and superficially feminizing, the ultra-male archetype of Superman.
I find Hime's message much more positive than Uma's. To be a girl is, in itself, to be a superhero.
Qooqle Clippers is one of my daily glimpses into the Japanese mind, and, not very surprisingly, when the Japanese mind isn't thinking about food, it's thinking about sex. Yesterday I found the YouTube clip site framing Hime, a clip of an ordinary girl waking up, brushing her teeth, and putting on her make-up. The girl's "way of being in the world" struck me as very Japanese, and very domestically Japanese; this couldn't be an American; it couldn't even be a diasporan Japanese making a tape for an American boyfriend. The clip seems to me to be full of the kind of implicit semantic and philosophical agreements that only parties raised in the same country can really share, the kind of agreements you don't even have to agree on or specify, yet which infuse every action on screen. As such, Hime is a perfect way to put the case for the beauty of the complementary opposite of what I was advocating yesterday. If Exhibit A was the relaunched Tokion, Exhibit B is a short, home-produced "charm video" -- but also a glimpse into a whole way of being, thinking and feeling.Hime acts like the air hostess of her own life. Her face is pretty, if not quite model-like. Her voice is light and sensual, with charming, cutely clipped rhythms and a caressing, intimate style. She's attractive enough to be quietly confident, yet remains sweetly unaffected, and this gives her a "girl next door" quality. And Hime seems to embrace rather than reject her generic interchangability with every other normally pretty girl.
Her film, though sexy, isn't structured like porn. The most sexually exciting things -- a glimpse of Hime's sex, her long, slow wriggle into her underwear, and the hamigaki section, in which she lingers on a view of herself brushing her teeth -- all come at the beginning rather than the end, defying the cast-iron "more and more exciting" law of professional porn. Above all, the logic of porn ("it's so nice to get excited and have an orgasm") is replaced by quite another logic. To quote my own lyric for Kahimi Karie's "Good Morning World" (my biggest-selling song ever, by the way, and, some would say, my stupidest as well as my wisest composition): "It's so nice to be a beautiful girl".
There's no semantic stress here, no battle with stereotypes to be symbolically fought, no jumping through hoops, no contradiction or denial of Hime's essential femininity. She's not "putting on war paint" before going out onto some sexual battlefield to meet jerks, losers, abusers. Instead, she's about to go out into a world which is sensual and consensual, not conflictual. Certainly there might be perversion out there in the floating world of milky fluorescence, but it seems most likely to be a sort of pitiful otaku fetishism or incest, and Hime understands that; in fact, she incorporates it kindly into her performance. She's almost sisterly or daughterly as she adjusts her panties, and she certainly understands the male fetish for these details, while never dispensing with her ingenue manner. There's an assumed hunger which is calmly and kindly understood, and accommodated. Why isn't there an English word for ingenue? Perhaps because Anglos don't have much use for the concept; our alluring women are forever wearing invisible devil's horns. In Hime's world the devil is absent (although a cute small dog is present).
No malicious envy is assumed on the part of the viewer, and defused defensively. Instead there's a welcoming kindness. Hime's delight in being a girl corresponds with ours in watching her becoming a girl, letting us in on her make-up secrets, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at her life, her apartment, her body, her routines. Her lack of insecurity almost makes us see her as "spoilt", but there's nothing brattily spoilt, nothing Britney-ish here. Her security puts us at ease.With her light, solicitous gestures, Hime is part-pierrot, part-courtesan. In her performance there's no assumed hatred of women, no sex neurosis, and nothing is relegated to the unconscious. Hime doesn't sublimate the sexual meaning of brushing her teeth; it's there on the surface. And yet there's no hint of the lascivious in her performance. Hime's implied (constructed) Japanese viewer doesn't like lascivious girls who think they -- and we -- are evil for enjoying her enjoyment of her girlness. They prefer an ingenue sexuality which is nevertheless completely aware of itself, and completely in control. They don't want to have to go to "bad girls" on the fringes of society, beyond the pale, for their sexual excitement. It comes from everygirl. It could come from their daughter, their mother or their sister too. But foreign girls... well, they're different. A bit scary. They don't really go for foreigners.
And what about us? Do we want to educate Hime, raise her consciousness, help her to "empower herself by questioning her social role"? Do we want to sit her down and tell her about Western feminism, and how it's still ahead of her? Don't be silly. Hime already clearly has amazing power. Her power comes from society. She's there at the centre of society, and we're lucky to be peripheral to her, close enough to glimpse the social power of being a pretty girl. What's more, if we thought about it we'd see there really is nowhere outside society for her to step, should she question her role. Nowhere in Japan, and nowhere in the West either. Nowhere that would make her stronger than she is right now, anyway.
And so, switching off the denki, Hime goes out into the ultimate gentleness of the nocturnal world we know waits outside, the "isn't it delightful" breeziness of Japanese life. She'll be safe out there in the light, sensual, tropical calm of a summer evening. But there's a tiny hint of racism in the idea that she can only enjoy that safety because Japan is insular, protected against harsher outside manners. There's only us here, Hime, your brother and your father and your uncle. You know us, and we know you. We hardly even need the police or the army, so smoothly does everything go out there in the world of milky fluorescence.
The same evening I watched the Qooqle clip of Hime, I happened to see a trailer for a new Hollywood film called My Super Ex-Girlfriend. It's a romantic comedy about "breaking up with a superhero". The trailer shows lots of knockabout stuff as Uma Thurman -- a geeky librarian by day, Superwoman by night -- throws her half-hearted date against walls with superhuman physical strength. Although it's all played for laughs, the film presents a rather sad picture of gender relations. Here power can only be thought of as masculine; you get it by having superior physical strength and being prepared to use violence. You get it by stepping into, and superficially feminizing, the ultra-male archetype of Superman.I find Hime's message much more positive than Uma's. To be a girl is, in itself, to be a superhero.
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OK, but it is pro material
Date: 2006-09-21 08:48 am (UTC)I agree Japanese eroticism is much above its western counterpart, with all these moods to choose from, but this kind of free exhibitionism doesn't exist in the Japanese society.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 08:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 09:00 am (UTC)Re: OK, but it is pro material
Date: 2006-09-21 09:38 am (UTC)You know, reading momus' words, it was really really clear from the outset. I don't think he's as off-base this time with his porn evaluation as he was with the "Japanese love black people" bit, but here, in looking at this as the product of the woman's sexuality, and not the intended audience's needs, he misses the boat again.
Her name, btw, is kamiya hime, and I'm pretty sure this video is "もしも神谷姫が僕の彼女だったら" or "If kamiya hime were my girlfriend". It's one of a series (http://www.dmm.co.jp/mono/dvd/-/list/=/article=series/id=1326/searchstr=2qHzkq%20H) where the woman's name is swapped for another, and kanojo for "pet". That is to say, these are ownership fantasies. How wonderfully Japanese pornstars can portray the role of pet, and how liberated they must feel in the panopticon of sex!
Re: OK, but it is pro material
Date: 2006-09-21 09:48 am (UTC)See, that's a very Western way of looking at this. The idea that the woman's sexuality must be at odds with the male audience's needs. The lovely thing is that nature designed our sexualities to interlock rather well, and in Japan that seems a lot less of a problem to accept than it is for us.
Re: OK, but it is pro material
Date: 2006-09-21 09:49 am (UTC)With j-porn, as with green tea vending machines, momus has a persuasive, and fascinating viewpoint that is quite off the mark. Time and time again, the world (esp japan) gets filtered through some perturbation in the eye of momus, and, as though it were a dream, recompiled into a logical, coherent framework... just not one that reflects the social realities of (non-priveleged art world) japan. Most often it seems like he spent the day drawing pictures of unicorns, rainbows and burning-american flags, and all that just bled into his waking-dream.
Like he stressed yesterday, momus isn't really into Japan, so much as the cool (rich) kids that get out of the country and hang out in Rome or Berlin makin art and smokin dope... ie those who react against japan. And it's from these exiles that momus gets his image, so I guess I should give him some leeway.
(if my experience this time is like last, and the time before and before that, I'll be greeted with "it doesn't make sense")
Re: OK, but it is pro material
Date: 2006-09-21 09:51 am (UTC)Re: OK, but it is pro material
Date: 2006-09-21 09:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 09:53 am (UTC)Re: OK, but it is pro material
Date: 2006-09-21 09:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 09:54 am (UTC)One thing we, (when I mean we, I mean a group of astrologers/mythologists and WOMEN mostly outside of America) noted was that for the most part, there is an agressiveness in "American" Power, which woman can only possess if we "emulate" that "Maleness" and deny the biology and natural softness of "Femaleness".
There are different types of females, but American Female as a Powerful equal to male must be considered more like an "Athena" a true and total "virgin" only pals with the male, one who doesn't own any kind of "sexuality" but rather is beautiful enough to distract the body from sexual desire, a hard act to even try. This is the closest they can try to emulate or idealize and remember she is born from the head of Zeus himself, more of a concept rather than a "real woman", an ideal..
Then there is the other ground the other ideal, Aphrodite, lushious, permiscious, and easily threatened by other women, and unfaithful. She is considered "phallus friendly" as her name sugests. Its the old fasioned western concept perpetuated by the Biblical, you are either a "Virgin" or a "Whore" with no middle grounds.
Sad thing is, women can be women, enjoy being women, enjoy being mothers and not deny any of it, and feel good about it, without being threatened by other women, nor being a threat. The Brittny's of the world are a sad example of women who use the power of an image of beauty to decieve, as if to say "that which is beautiful(on the surface)is all that matters"..nothing about inner attitude, and what you project, as a woman, a mother or a HUMAN.
Although I didn't see the video, not yet, I can't help but see Hime's image in the photo as one of a very human, very beautiful and very softly feminine.
---------------
OFF TOPIC: It seems Sweden will be experimenting with a new Magazine format: The Magazine is called Ykky (I don't know if you wrote about this) but it seems that you are going to be in this issue coming out on the 28th- they consider you a "popfilosf" (pop culture philospher) I'll keep my eyes open for it, it was mentioned in this morning's news paper, Dagens Nyheter.
Re: OK, but it is pro material
Date: 2006-09-21 09:57 am (UTC)Also, the diasporan Japanese I hang out with are not cool rich kids. I spent yesterday with a friend who's the daughter of a Nagoya lumber merchant. My girlfriend (arriving here September 30th) is the daughter of an Osaka security guard (her mum runs a clothes shop). They're ordinary middle-class Japanese. They scrape up enough money, working in manga cafes or for phone companies, to travel, usually to learn a language, sometimes to go to art school.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 09:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:16 am (UTC)I never really considered Britney particularely American..
Date: 2006-09-21 10:21 am (UTC)The plague of Britneys has decended upon the world of those who wish to be pop idols but don't wish to develop their tallents... many of them are gone by the end, but they always come back the next year. I guess as long as her image holds up, she will continue to be the icon of "image" until someone who looks better and is younger (and hopefully more tallented)comes along. Although I personally wish for the end of the age discrimination in the industry -its more than likely the way it will go, with the younger, and fresher faces.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:21 am (UTC)Why should she? What evidence have you got that she's doing it because it excites her? Would you say the same about bukkake porn? The circumstatial evidence points the other way (ie she's being paid). It suits you, as the voyeur, to think that she's having a good time. She's probably not having a bad time, she's just doing her job. But your rationale is slippery slope. The video tells us a lot about your fantasies, and little to none about hers.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:23 am (UTC)Sorry momus, I don't know what it is that gets me so grumpy about your entries so frequently. Like I say at my own blog, I mostly agree with your intent here.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:26 am (UTC)I'm not sure whether going through her morning routine for money represents freedom for this girl, but perhaps loving our social roles, and profiting from them at the same time, is as close to freedom as any of us can get. There is no outside.
(I say this, of course, in today's dialectical role of defender of the non-diasporans. For the diasporans, there is an outside, and to get there represents freedom.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-21 10:26 am (UTC)"ingenue"
Date: 2006-09-21 10:28 am (UTC)1. "ingenue" is an English word (at this point).
2. If "ingenue" isn't an English word, "ingenuous" certainly is. If you require it to imply an artful faking, then "disingenuous".
3. If that's still too latinate, I think that English has several stock phrases that express the concept. You use one yourself; "girl-next-door". "Wide-eyed" might be another.
Sorry, I'm a linguist, and it bothers me when people talk carelessly about words.