selling our sex short

I came across some fragments of very old interviews with Hayao Miyazaki today. He was asked, probably for the hundredth time (or maybe not so many times yet, since these interviews were from the 80s and early 90s), why he tended to favor girls as his protagonists.

He expressed a couple of things in response that interested me.

First he rather strongly denounced what he viewed as a troubling tendency for otaku to sexualize and fantasize about young girls in animation. On a semi-connected note, he also said he felt forced by the economic model of things to betray his own artistic vision and create characters that were prettier than he would have liked. He mentioned having a desire to create a story in which a very plain person is the hero(ine), but expressed doubt that such a film would sell. (Perhaps that's in part why he came out of retirement to work on Howl's Moving Castle? Pure speculation on my part, but interesting to think on.)

Secondly, he said that part of the reason why so many of his protagonists end up being female is because when he envisions certain scenes, he often feels it would be too awkward and ridiculous for a boy or man to behave in the flexible/emotional/enlightened way required by the scene. He said that a woman's decision to take up the sword or use a gun or go on an adventure carries with it a sort of depth and sensitivity that wouldn't exist in the same situation with a man. People are more excited, he claimed, to see a woman make that kind of decision because it is easily inferred that the choice was made deliberately, meaningfully, not because of mere cultural pressure or being a brute.

I find that last part very sad. It's a sad cultural commentary (not on Japanese or American culture, specifically, but rather on the vast majority of the cultures that have existed on the face of this planet all throughout history) and it's sad on an individual level.

Really. Think about that. What does it mean to believe of your own sex that it's ridiculous to have depth and sensitivity? Or, conversely, that it is impossible that members of your sex ever act rashly, destructively, or with a strength that others fear?

It's a tragedy. It's poisonous. Bad for the growth of all of us, individually. Bad for the growth of humanity. Especially bad for those of us--all of us--who are at one time or another caught up in the boil-over or explosions caused by all that repression and false knowledge.

And it's none of our fault, paradoxically, even though we've done it to ourselves.

To me, being a progressive person--put aside for a moment the political trappings of the word--is about gradually ceasing to poison ourselves and our children with cultural norms like that one.

(This is not, by the way, even remotely a criticism of Miyazaki, who has my thorough admiration.)

My mind shoots off into so many different directions from this idea, I won't be able to write my full thoughts here (insufficient time).

But, briefly:

1) Fight Club.

I love this movie. But in the film we do kind of see what Miyazaki is talking about. Some really profound truths about our modern life are stated clearly in the film, especially in the first half (and I feel like we didn't fully grasp the weight and terror of those truths until now, actually; today we're finally out the the streets protesting over the arbitrary algorithms used to decide who lives and who dies, all for the sake of the bottom line of a powerful few... and we should have been this angry a long time ago). Then the men start fighting and most of the intellectual analysis and poetry is turned off, replaced with shock value, jokes, locker room talk, and the not-so-original mindfuckery plot arc.

What does it mean for men, if we reduce "real" maleness to grunting, sociopathic brutishness? What does it mean for women, if we refuse to allow any room for thoughtless rage and fighting in our model for "real" feminine behavior? I think the movie, in a way, attempts a weak answer to these sorts of questions, but it's just a start. We need to keep fleshing this out, doing the work, figuring out what our true limits are and refusing to stop sooner just because our cultural values tell us to stop.

Our urge to fight tells us something: it tells us something's wrong, we're unhappy, we don't have enough of something. If we're not allowed to recognize our rage to begin with (because it's unfeminine or not "civilized"), we linger too long with our problems without seeing them for what they are. If we make a war or a bomb or a fight club, or punch someone out or call him a dickwad, I guess we are honoring our urge to fight. But we're still forgetting to figure out what the fuck is wrong and fix it.

2) Dreams.

These mistaken notions are locked deep within us, I think. For example, for many years in my dreams (which frequently involve apocalyptic or dystopian scenarios), I was not allowed to fight while being a woman or girl. If it was just a matter of fleeing, resisting through sneaky or non-violent acts, or peacefully enduring torture, I could be myself or another female. But to stand and fight... I needed to be male. Sometimes my form would shift mid-dream depending on what was going on. Like a reverse Chevalier d'Eon.

I never even recognized this as a problem until it was resolved earlier this year and didn't happen anymore (it went on for almost ten years!). Now my dream avatars still shift around to all sorts of forms, gender identities, viewpoints, and ages, but nobody is restricted to/from battle based on sex or gender any longer. That change corresponded with a shift in my waking self as well, just feeling stronger as an individual.

But... it makes me wonder. Why is there so much fighting in our dreams in the first place? 

It has long been theorized that the purpose of dreaming (and nightmares, particularly) is to rehearse dangerous situations, so that we're mentally prepared. When we dream about fighting perhaps it's because we expect, on some level, to have to fight someday in reality?


Note 11/4 - This week the results of an fMRI study were published, reporting that when a lucid dreamer dreamed about waving his hand, he was using the same part of his brain that he would be using if he were awake and actually performing the same action. No surprise, really, if you think about it... but kind of interesting, all the same.