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New York, 10:35 AM
Thu Nov 26
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11/25/09
1) Success in Japan is decided heavily early on in your life. If you didn't pass your exams to get into the "right" middle school, you probably won't be able to get into the "right" high school, and in turn the "right" college, and in turn get a full-time job upon graduation. Otherwise, you're stuck with an endless stream of low-wage, temporary, part-time jobs. If you're lucky, you'll be a permatemp with no job security and get paid a fraction of what you're worth. This whole system of going to the "right" schools and whatnot makes it so that Japanese otaku can't do what American nerds/geeks do where they can just show an employer their mad skillz and turn that into a job at Google or whatever (and in turn, start having "real" adult lives.)
2) Because it's basically expected that you'll live at home until marriage, these guys will usually manage to not be in complete poverty, although some do end up homeless and "live" in places like all-night net cafes. The ones that live at home will fortunately have few living expenses.
3) But while they have few living expenses, they still don't make remotely enough to live, for lack of a better term, "real" lives and still need to make decisions about spending on essentials. In a sense, it could very well cost them basically all of their income to live a facsimile of a "real" life by doing things like dressing well and whatnot. Yet even though they look the part, it's still basically pointless, so why bother? Honda's point is similar to this, although his is based on some kind of psychology rather than simple financial realities.
4) Then, women are similarly in a bind. They may have been in the same situation where they didn't get on the right track in 6th grade, so they're stuck working at 7-11 or at best, being a temp clerical worker. Even if they got one of those real full-time jobs, Japanese society is so sexist that women are still really not "supposed" to work. I remember a story earlier this year, for example about a woman who sued her company for firing her because he had a baby. Their reasoning? You need to take care of the baby, and you couldn't possibly be able to take care of it properly while still working. And of course, if the women is one of those top candidates that IS able to have a real career and a real life, she can have her pick of men.
5) Therefore, there also really isn't a female equivalent of these body pillow dudes because women are coming from a different angle socially. "Fujoshi" commonly gets translated as meaning "female otaku" and while it's the closest thing that there is to a "female otaku", it's not really the same as that. Fujoshi are more like those Twilight Moms. In other words, they're basically "just" fangirls.
6) Also related to #4 are those hostesses like in the one article here earlier this year. That's one of the few jobs where women outside of that insider track can earn enough money to be independent. When you think about it though, it's still functionally equivalent to the women that just try to find one of those full-time workers to marry, because all the money that flows to those hostess clubs are from the expense account crowd, since after all they are the only ones that can afford to splurge like a thousand dollars in a single night. And of course, that's a job with an expiration date.
tl;dr the broken economy has made the standard male/female relationships start to break down.
11/25/09
It also explains why most of the Western woman I know who are married to Japanese dudes are married to working class dudes who have "nothing to lose." The dudes I dated fell into this category. If you actually do get that brass ring, it is utterly necessary to conform. I don't think people get how utterly inflexible these roles can be and how psychologically damaging.
I see the Japanese guys I went to college with (at Waseda, which is like an Ivy) now that they've been salary men for a while and they are seriously BEATEN DOWN by it. On the other hand, my host brother failed his college entrance exams twice and had a nervous breakdown and lives at home and shoplifts and burns himself with cigarettes. You're pretty much damned either way.
Career+love life (or dissatisfaction with these things) was a big part of why I left after 4 years of living there.
11/25/09
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11/25/09
Are they just as adamant that their dolls are people, or is it more like my relationship with my vibrator? Or is it like my vibrator mixed with my affection for, say, the love interest in a YA fantasy novel? Because these men see their dolls/girlfriends as their girlfriends, not sex toys/fictional characters with attractive traits.
This trend seems to be made up of mostly men. I think an exploration of the women who have realdoll boyfriends would be interesting, or women who marry male anime characters*. I wonder if the fact that it's mostly men has something to do with male privilege and assumption of a right to a relationship with a woman who fits all your criteria? Do men simply feel more entitled to a "perfect" relationship, and so the weirdness of finding it a doll becomes nullified? Are men taught to see women as having less agency than themselves, so a relationship with an agency-less object is more plausible?
*A queer look would also be interesting, but for wholly other reasons. The continued suppression and demonization of queerness would affect the potential motivation for finding not-human companionship, I think.
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11/25/09
#tips
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#tips
11/25/09
Only about Draco, though. You can have the others.
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11/25/09
Sadly, doubtful.
11/25/09
If nothing else, this just lets real, flesh-and-blood women dodge another bullet.
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06/24/09