Wednesday 14 November 2007

Pic of the day: No, he is not dating a little girl, he is taking care of the neighbor's daughter while they are away for a little while. Ayase is seeing things that aren't there, because she is in love with him herself. Others have less charitable reasons for reading things into stories.

Loli is not LOL!

Look, I know some people can't help it, they are attracted to girls or boys that are really too young for romance. This is sad but it is not really a crime as long as you don't act on it. Think about it, most people have at some point in their life just briefly thought about killing someone or at least how convenient it would be if that person would just die. You don't get arrested for such thoughts, but you normally don't go around telling everyone either. If something were to happen to the people and you had spent the last six months telling the entire community how much you wish them dead, you need a really good alibi.

In the same way, it is probably a bad idea to go "lol i got a nosebleed when the fifth grader changed clothes". Because even though it is called lolicon (or rorikon), it is pedophilia, and you really don't want to be a pedophile. I know, this is an age where we learn to accept ourselves as we are and be happy about it. This still does not include the parts of ourselves that could do incalculable harm to innocent people.

It could be argued (and a few do) that pedophilia does not hurt children as long as you don't force your attention on them. If a man grows big in his pants from watching a fifth grader change clothes, that does not hurt the fifth grader as long as you don't go on to rape her (or him). I agree, in the case where it is never discovered. But the problem is that children are not able to deal with adult sexuality, and neither are many adults. That is to say, once the lust sets in, it grows easy to do things you did not plan to do. This really should not come as a surprise, since almost all of us have some experience with this, in ourselves and/or the other person. And that's to other adults. Children are far less able to fend off your advances. Playing with that kind of fire is just plain crazy.

But what if you don't do anything to real children, just imaginary children like those in anime? That's OK, isn't it?

Well, yeah, as far as the imaginary children are concerned, of course. But what about yourself? You are still a pedophile, and using a Japanese term for it does not really change that. That's a pretty serious condition and nothing to go "lol" about. (LOL=Laughing Out Loud.) Being a pedophile will impact your social life, your career and not least your family life in so many ways. Do you really think you can fan the flames of your perversity in online forums (or even privately) and it will never come back to haunt you? If nothing else, the more you identify with it, the more it will become natural to you. But it isn't natural, and sooner or later sane people will notice, and the bomb goes off and destroys your life.

***

Japanese popular culture is more accepting than the American and even European of the fact that even the underage have sexual and erotic inclinations. It is assumed that young people down to 14 years will have similar feelings as adults about such things. (In Japan, the national age of consent is 14 - but all prefectures have a local age of consent that is several years higher, so there is no actual place in the real Japan where the age of consent is 14.) Their attraction is however usually assumed to be to others around their own age. Even in anime and manga, older men who are going after the very young girls are depicted as perverse, crazy or creepy. (Women who are attracted to young boys are more mildly ridiculed. A sterotype is the female high school teacher who tries to be sexy for the boys in her class.) Sexual interactions of any kind between adults and prepubescent children is at least as abhorred in Japan as here. (Japan generally has far less sexual crimes of any sort than America and also much less adultery. The reason for this is not fully known.)

The Japanese word "rorikon" or "lolicon" comes from English "Lolita complex" and refers to the famous book "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov. As such, it normally refers to adult men attracted to pubescent girls. It may not be correct to use this phrase about pedophiles who seek prepubescent children and men who are attracted to boys. This falls under the general term hentai (perversity) and seems to be rare. Rorikon and the female equivalent, shotakon, are depicted as more common.

The reason I bring this up is the recent animation of "Minami-ke" (The Minami's, the Minami family), an anime about three sisters living alone together. The youngest is in fifth grade (more exactly class 5-2), the middle sister is in middle school, and the oldest is in high school. It is a humorous slice-of-life anime, and rather family-friendly unless you have an active imagination. Conservatives are likely to object to the recurring theme of a fifth grade boy posing convincingly as a girl in an attempt to get friendly with the high school girl, which he admires greatly. Apart from that, it is pretty innocent.

But evidenly some of my fellow otaku are turned on by the precocious 5th grader and wish to share their elation with the world. I politely object to this. I think psychiatric treatment would be better for them than trying to convince the world that their condition is somehow normal or acceptable. If nothing else, they are putting the rest of us in an even worse light than we already are.