Title: Why women criticise sexualised character designs (READ OP)
Reason: User Banned (Duration Pending): Defending the sexualisation of minors.
By default heterosexual women and men are attracted to very different things, and they'll find each others sexual interests yawn-worthy or even off-putting. Anime and JRPGs combine a lot of common attractions for men and women, yet majority of it is catering to the male gaze women find off-putting, so it gets the most amount of flak since that's where they are exposed to it the most and it can be difficult to filter it. Since the medium is a sort of contact point between opposing interests, there's a lot of people defending their own side, be it with good arguments or not. I see the sexualization in games and anime as a reflection of the sexual repression in these societies as a whole. Both US and Japan are highly sexually repressed going from childhood into adulthood and the subject matter is handled as taboo, but since it is one of the most integral parts of us as humans, it's not something that can be just tucked away neatly. The more repressed public society is, the more they make fetish stuff and use every trick in the book to subvert the unnatural repression over things we are consciously or subconsciously attracted to. Of course there's reasons for why society has these taboos, immature sexuality being perhaps the biggest problem zone due to it being so vulnerable to abuse and trauma, yet it's something pretty much all of us share in one way or another, and perhaps due to the lack of handling it we never quite grow through it and find unhealthy ways of dealing with repressed feelings that aren't openly handled. I see a lot of the criticism in the west towards Japanese infantilization and sexual depictions of women more as a sign of how we cannot handle anything remotely tied to children being conflated to sexual desire, whereas in Japanese culture people aren't as fearful of seeing cute things or petite proportions as sexually attractive, and aren't conflating it to being a pedo. The problem is that it does blur the line and does allow some very questionable material that skirts any regulation. I think there's a point to be made about how the fetishistic nature of Japanese portrayal of sexuality actually stems from US influence after WW2 and the importing of those morals, which created this weird amalgamation of culture where there's super weird fetish porn, but it's censored, and there's otherwise normal fantasy games, but the female characters are running in battle bikinis and it's rarely acknowledged. Perhaps it's a way of "filling up a quota" of what otherwise cannot be fulfilled by society at large, the same way the vast porn industry does in the US? Sorry if that was a bit of and off-tangent ramble, but I'm more interested in the base human psychology and cultural cues behind what we see in this media and how people here react to it, than picking apart yet another skimpy dress and making generalizations of how the Japanese are so far behind us woke peeps here.
Link: https://www.resetera.com/posts/8638043/
Archive.is (legacy): https://archive.is/EHx5w