>>26419These are essentially Project 2025 views - compare the New Japan Women's Association stuff to… literally Project 2025. They don't bring up the trans part at least, but I suspect Japanese TERFs are happier than a pig in shit about this.
I think a big part of it is the way liberal feminism & SWERF ideology kinda merged together in the anglophone west's pop-"leftism" & the two ideologies are selectively invoked depending on whatever "triggers the enemy" more at the moment. You'd immediately (and rightfully) get called out if you said "this female pop star needs to cover up, she's promoting the objectification of women" - but going "women can promote misogyny too :)" over a female artist liking big titted cartoon girls was outright encouraged at one point. Most other cultures' minds aren't honed for the anglophones' omnipresent societal doublethink though. If they see a constant barrage of "we need to get rid of disgusting coomer slop that degrades women" from the capital of the world, they'll just have their full-blown SWERF sectors' views empowered & mainstreamed with no nonsensical caveats like "it's fine when a woman does erotic cosplay, only the drawings that inspired it are harmful" (not even strawmanning, I literally saw an "enlightened game analyst" dude claim the character designs themselves are bad BUT their cosplayers are ok when the geek-feminism trend was huge). I first started noticing this long ago with the Russian equivalent of Tumblr feminists, who leaned radfem & were much more overt about thinking skimpy outfits are inherently degrading. Yeah America's been kinda moving away from these views lately and you see more "oof yikes" designs, but the snowball's been rolling since 2012 and it's massive now, globally.
It's particularly lame for this to happen to Japan though, because hyper-sexualizing both male and female characters is already what otaku did. It's not uncommon for random male Pixiv fappers to get off on both (not even just "femboy" or shota art; I've seen full-blown bishonen yaoi porn artists popular with dudes who also liked typical male-targeted hentai), and fujoshi will either draw "objectified" genderbend art of their favorite yaoi pairs ("oof her back" boobs often included) or just embrace outright "male gaze" yuri like Valkyrie Drive or Murcielago, make their own similar stuff etc. It was a great nerd culture for the actual solution of "just sexualize both & give everyone what they want" to be fully put into practice. Instead they've been importing the "id-driven sex appeal is right wing, 'sensible' art is left wing" mindset. And in fact there have been viral tweets from fujoshi about how both the incel & radfem sides only make things worse for them (their really puritanical feminists tend to also be generally anti-otaku to no one's surprise).
>>26418I've seen a Japanese comment say "I figured out Kakugo no Susume* is shonen, thus fine to show it to my young kids, but it's got really fucked up stuff in it!" so it seems very vague. A lot of shonens seem fine for younger kids while others are clearly only made for older teens, and it seems it can become confusing to Japanese people too. Better to just have age ratings than these arbitrary and needlessly gender-segregated descriptors (I think even Ishinomori wasn't a fan of that - just a statement I read with no source so take it with a grain of salt, but I wouldn't be surprised given what his "shonen" & shoujo" were like)
>>26414I think it IS something that's hard to approach for your average person, unless they're already into "risky" fiction. Personally, if you go beyond preconceived societal standards of what's been normalized and what hasn't been, I think it's comparable to the more controversial violent games where you get to kill random people for fun like GTA (and let's not forget GTA can mechanically reward you for rampaging). People try to say "well no, I just like the gameplay, you like LITERAL child porn" - if that's the case why haven't the devs done what censors do & replaced civilians with zombies, which is what happened to Carmageddon (tbh I'd argue there are weirder implications to zombie fiction where zombies represent the "mindless masses" but that's another can of worms)? No it's because sometimes you just wanna be a psycho when you play video games. Both entail having fun with a pretty dark aspect of your humanity but most people's brains are built and socialized in such a way that the mere idea of it happening in real life (let alone *doing it yourself*) disgusts them.
I've explored this argument and people's responses to it from a variety of positions and from the left it tends to be a vague "no, GTA is not the same, shut up" without much elaboration and from the right it goes into insane "porn addiction ZOG coomer brainwashing nofap" rhetoric to explain how masturbatory aid is fundamentally different. Zoomers, though, can be pretty united in being against both fun sex & fun violence (and it's not even their fault - millennials' hypocritical bullshit groomed them into it & if anything, they're more consistent in getting triggered by both).