User:Rachel Thorn/Sandbox 3

I've started the Introduction, flagging points to add references. Timothy Perper (talk) 19:41, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Looks like we can rewrite the entire article from scratch, saving only a few parts and deleting all the unsourced opinions. Timothy Perper (talk) 04:04, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

(From TP, earlier) Oh goodie! More stuff to edit! And add references to!

Problem here. Kinko Ito is finishing a book in English on redisu (レディ) manga sometime this fall. I heard about it in an email from her, where we said we'd review it in Mechademia. So, with a major work coming out soon, we have to be careful with the topic. Moreover, US manga publishers have published very little redisu manga whereas the French have, e.g., from Asuka (I have a number of Asuka translations).

I prefer the expression redisu manga to josei manga but it probably doesn't matter much, although there's been an argument about it on the josei manga talk page.

I'd like to avoid cliches, if I may use the term, about "blatant" pornography and the like (so I changed it to "sexually explicit"). There are some complex reasons for this, high among them being that for many writers (Dworkin comes to mind) the word pornography refers to sexually arousing and sexually explicit material targeted at men and drawn/filmed/written by men. Moreover, there are different degrees of sexual explicitness in redisu manga and anime.

The original entry -- which the material we're developing will replace -- is just about useless, IMNSHO.

Matt, can you start putting references in? I'll add some too over the next few days.

Timothy Perper (talk) 17:35, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the help, Tim. Yes, I can plug in the citations, but I won't be able to do much until net week. Just about everything I need is here in my apartment, but there are some things I'll need to fetch from my office. As for the Itoh book, well, we'll cross that bridge when it burns. For the time-being, I think we just need a brief, accurate article that provides basic information on the subject. You're right about my use of "blatantly." I was thinking that wasn't good even as I typed it. But I don't want to shy away from the word "pornography," since there is a significant chunk of the genre that is unambiguously pornographic. And its purpose is clear. I think the Dworkin/McKinnon argument has been pretty much discredited, and I think it's absurd and hypocritical to call it "porn" if it's for men and "erotica" when it's for women, when the purpose (and to a large degree the content) is identical. I don't know if you've seen much of this stuff, but the stuff I'm talking about-and which can be purchased at any convenience store--is as hardcore and blush-inducing as any male-oriented ero manga. There's simply no equivalent in the U.S.. I actually think it shows that Japanese women are in many ways generally less repressed than American women. I certainly don't want to give the impression that "josei manga = porn" but neither do I want to gloss over the porn niche, sweep it under the rug, or worse yet, rationalize it as "erotica" that is somehow morally superior to male-oriented porn. If we make clear that such manga are created by and for women, and intended to be--to put it bluntly--fodder for masturbation fantasies, I think we can avoid confusion. Also, keep in mind that my draft of the history stops in the mid 1980s. I have yet to talk about the 1990s, when really sophisticated and high-quality josei manga were firmly established, and the "bubble" of sleazy ladies' comics burst and such manga shrunk down to a solid but not dominant niche. Yonezawa wrote that piece I quoted around 1990, shortly before that welcome metamorphosis occurred. I'll try to be concise, and I'll go back and edit what I wrote when I'm done. Just remember this is an unfinished first draft.

Inserted later by TP: Yes, and please don't take my comments as disagreement. I share your dislike for the namby-pamby term "erotica" and don't use it in anything we write. I also share your view about repression. But I also strongly recommend that we avoid the word "pornography" and say "sexually explicit" instead (I explain my thinking in more detail below). Somewhere in the "Themes and Narratives" section we should deal with the different subgenres of josei manga. Then we can deal with the "pornography" label directly.Timothy Perper (talk) 10:22, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Back to Matt here.

"Ladies" versus "josei": In the industry, the terms refer to different types of manga for adult women. "Ladies" has the image Yonezawa describes, and is still a big part of the market. "Josei" has the image of more sophisticated work favored by college-educated career women. YOU is a ladies comic magazine (though not sleazy); Feel Young and Chorus are "josei muke" magazines. "Ladies manga" is not used in Japanese. For some reason, the English phrase "ladies' comic" took root in the early '80s and stuck. BTW, older industry people tend to refer to women's manga generically as "ladies", younger industry people use "josei muke" in the same way. Go figure. Either way, "josei muke" is a neutral description, literally "woman-oriented," whereas "ladies" is associated with a specific kind of women's manga, so I definitely prefer "josei" to "ladies."

I agree that the article as it stands is useless. Let's make it a useful one. But right now, I'm behind with a translating deadline, and also have a cold, so this will probably be my last word for a few days. Matt Thorn (talk) 13:20, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Another few comments on not using the word "pornography." It has too many meanings in the Anglophone world, most of them, if not all, heavily influenced by the reader's moral views of sexuality. For many such readers, "pornography" is a synonym for smut and filth, and using the term ourselves is a kind of POV editorializing. That I want to avoid. I also want to avoid people "out there" saying that "Wikipedia says that Japanese comics for women are PORNOGRAPHIC!" So, like many US-based writers on sexuality, I use the neutral expression "sexually explicit." Thus, volume 18 of Sailor Moon has a scene with Usagi and Mamoru in bed making love, although no genitals are shown (likewise the last volume of Maison Ikkoku). You can see the editorializing if I were to say -- which I am not! -- that "Sailor Moon is pornographic." I feel fairly strongly about this, much in the same way Matt describes "josei muke" as neutral. We need to use neutral terms as much as possible to avoid POV writing. If you want to see an example on Wikipedia of how vicious arguments about "porn" can get, read the Lolicon entry.Timothy Perper (talk) 18:06, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

But Tim, this is not about some love scenes. We're talking about manga magazines specifically dedicated to publish ero manga for women. These are not stories with some explicit sex, but just sex, with the sole intention of sexually exciting the reader. I personally think the term "sexually explicit" doesn't make this clear enough, as opposed to pornography.

I understand your concern about people thinking the whole genre is like that, but explaining carefully that we're talking specifically about some magazines and not the whole thing should be enough to avoid such problem, IMO. Kazu-kun (talk) 20:18, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Can you give some examples of "just sex"? In some of our (published) papers, I made a distinction between sexuality levels 3 and 4, in which the main story line centers on sexuality (level 4) and stories in which explictly depicted sexuality is embedded in a narrative that frames and explains the sex part (level 3; see below for references). For example, Paradise Kiss has an "explicit" sex scene; is it therefore pornographic? That depends on the reader -- but it is level 3, and by definition.

My issue is terminological, not ideological. It is, I believe, more accurate and less POV to say that a specific, named and sourced manga shows "level 4" sexuality than it is to call it "pornographic." For example, there are a variety of Toshiki Yui and Hiroyuki Utatane manga that meet the level 4 criteria; are they therefore "pornographic"? The issue is not that Yui and Utatane are drawing seinen or seijin manga; the question is how do we, on Wikipedia, define "pornography" without being POV?

Most layperson viewers and readers do not care about niceties like this. For them, it's pornographic and that's it. They know it when they see it, and nothing else matters. But on Wikipedia and in general scholarly publishing about sexually explicit material, we cannot rely on this kind of personal judgment. We need criteria that can be applied to any given work without our imposing our own moral judgments.

Perper, Timothy and Martha Cornog 2002 Eroticism for the masses: Japanese manga comics and their assimilation into the U.S. Sexuality & Culture, Volume 6, Number 1, pages 3-126 (Special Issue).

Abstract in Japanese

http://www.geocities.jp/anmecomics4u/articles/2002/article_02-2.html

Link may be password protected

http://springerlink.com/content/30p8x1878nbjlrax/?p=b1029f7f328e4c91aa42cf8f4d3a825a&pi=0

Perper, Timothy and Martha Cornog 2003 Sex, love, and women in Japanese comics. In Robert T. Francoeur and Raymond Noonan, editors. The Comprehensive International Encyclopedia of Sexuality. New York: Continuum. pages 663-671. Section 8D in <http://kinseyinstitute.org/ccies/jp.php>

In brief, I won't let anyone call something "pornographic" if they cannot provide objective criteria for using the word. If they cannot, the moral and legal implications of calling something "pornographic" take precedence, and unbalance any discussion in favor of the writer's own moral judgements. I argue that we cannot and must not rely on such judgements, but that we must call it by the neutral (NPOV) label "sexually explicit" until most, not a few, but MOST readers understand "pornography" to mean one and only one thing.

I suggest that these definitions must be stated explicitly and objectively, as we did when we defined "level 3" and "level 4." Otherwise, we do not have anything worth putting into a Wikipedia article.

Timothy Perper (talk) 02:34, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

I do apologize! I forgot to add something! To make the grade for getting an assertion about pornographic content into Wikipedia, we need not your opinion that it's pornographic, but a verifiable and sourced assertion by someone else, who you are quoting, that it's "pornographic" and that its "sole" purpose is to arouse the reader sexually. Wikipedia is not a place for our opinions about these subjects. Timothy Perper (talk) 02:45, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

From the late 1970s and early 1980s, as girls who had read shōjo manga as teenagers matured and entered the job market, manga marketed to women elaborated subgenres directed at women in their 20s and 30s.^[1] This "Ladies Comic" or redisu-josei subgenre has dealt with themes of young adulthood: jobs, the emotions and problems of sexual intercourse (sometimes depicted explicitly), and friendships or love among women.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

From TP We can quote both Gretchen Jones and Deborah Shamoon for the term "pornography" in the Themes and Narratives section. Then we can quote their definitions or understandings of the word. Timothy Perper (talk) 10:27, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

From TP Ōgi does not explicitly say that there was a cause-and-effect relationship between growing up and the emergence of josei manga. However, it is the constant backdrop of her article, but -- this may be important -- it focuses our attention very sharply on two models of manga. In one, manga is produced (designed, edited, marketed) by the forces of late capitalist patriarchy and is foisted off on an unwary or susceptible public that is basically passive in what it reads and accepts as true. The second view is that manga, especially shoujo and josei manga, are artforms that the readers, meaning girls and women, demand from artists and publishers, and therefore reflects and represents what interests the reader, no matter what male editors and so on might want. Ōgi tacitly adopts the second view -- for her, shoujo and josei manga serve the needs of readers and in a real sense, it is their medium. Thus, when the girl outgrows her shoujo status (she graduates from high school, gets a job, and so on), publishers and artists respond to her by producing a new genre of manga. She wants something beyond the "dreams" of shoujo manga, and as a result josei manga came into existence to tell and illustrate stories about her.

There is nothing like Ōgi's view in the US for our comics, television, and films. The US view is that "Hollywood makes the movies, not us." If we don't like it, we don't watch; we don't expect "them" to make movies that appeal to us more or that tells stories about us. But Ōgi's view of manga is different. Shoujo manga was lacking, therefore reader demand created new forms of manga. In Ōgi's world-view, which I suspect characterizes how a great many readers feel, "they" do what WE want -- and by "they" I mean the people who publish, write, and sell manga.

However, this is not something I think we should get into. Nor do I think we need to get into Ōgi's definitional concerns about the nature of the shōjo or about what she becomes when she grows up. In my opinion, that's sociology -- interesting, but not our topic. So I'm going to use Ōgi for the first reference, but set aside all these sociological and gender-political issues.

Timothy Perper (talk) 12:31, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

A description of some of the josei manga will be helpful in showing the range and variety of josei manga. I've tentatively called the section "Themes and Narratives," but we can up with something better. Let me get at this over the next few days and you'll see what I mean. I'll add some French translation (Asuka) sources as well. Timothy Perper (talk) 04:13, 15 August 2008 (UTC)