Comments on 2-D Love
My perception of Japan is a country which developed at an amazing rate, which had some strange consequences for the society, making it , (despite the generally traditional "Asian Famnily Values") very insular and lonely. It has come to the stage that people take take to substituting realy, healthy human companionships to devoting themselves to 2-D characters. Needless to say, the worst part is that some of these characters often prepubescent...! Another irony is the fact that these "lonley" men and women fall in "love with these characters whose physical features almost entirely unrepresentative of the Japanese population, or for that matter any other ethnicity on earth. Makes you think what just a few years of media influence can do to an entire population's body image...
Highly disturbing as it is (makes you think if most modern, globalized societies are heading this way), I hope it is a very small bunch of people who are part of this sub-sub-culture. I consider myself fairly liberal, but I think somethings are plain wrong, unhealthy for the body, mind and soul!
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2.
Scott
New York
July 24th, 2009
8:04 am
It's fascinating the author has nothing to say about the fact that the 2-D objects of affection here are cast as children 10 - 12 years old. That seems like a significant aspect worth exploring--why these men would cast their lovers this way, what it means, any conclusions to be drawn--but no, absolutely nothing here.
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Recommended by 85 Readers
3.
CS
Tokyo, Japan
July 24th, 2009
10:10 am
Answer to Scott-it may be because in Japan, the feminist/economic revolution did a very simple thing-it put a meat cleaver (or maybe sword is more appropriate for Japan) straight through male-female relations. So instead of men and women evolving their roles (say men becoming more in touch with their softer side and women gaining autonomy WITHIN the family), the hyper-capitalist society of Japan completely split off the sexes-didn't reconcile them. So single women (young and not so young) make money, go shopping, travel, etc., quite happily without men (marriage is just a trap of servitude) and disenfranchised men become these otaku creatures who never learn about real sex and relationships. The child imagery in the porn is quite disturbing, but fits, because people were/are completely naive about adult relationships before marriage (capitalism also aborted the system of pre-arranged marriage where boy-men were married to girl-women in order to produce children and keep society orderly and productive). So instead of getting married and having to subsume themselves to adult responsibilities they didn't want, the single people are now untethered...in so many ways.
More are here. By my count 3 of 45 challenge the generalizability of this one particular strange guy.