Feminism and Subculture, ch. 2

[owlectomy]

La. I have been spending all my time looking at puppies on YouTube. I feel better now.

Ch. 2 takes on Hayao Miyazaki's movies. "I like them," Murase says, "I really really do, it's just there's one fly in the ointment..."

And it's this: his heroines are all too wholesome. They pass from innocent girls who have no concept of sex and sexuality to being mothers and grandmothers without any sense of darkness, desire, sexiness to come in the middle of it. Murase says, real girls are not like this. It's sort of utopian to imagine these worlds that have so few complications of sex and romance, but it's willfully naive and profoundly unhelpful to girls living in the real world.

This does have a little bit of truth in it; it's probably why, although I like Nausicaa as a movie, I think Nausicaa herself is not as real a girl as some of the younger girls in Miyazaki movies, like Chihiro and Kiki and Mei and Satsuki. And if all movies were Miyazaki movies there would be a huge gaping hole of the kind Murase describes. But while Murase may not have been able to identify with that kind of wholesomeness, I was. Girls are pushed to grow up fast enough as it is; as a teenager it meant something to me, having that world open where curiosity and hard work and the natural world meant something and you really didn't have to worry too much about the rest of it.

It's better than "The O.C.," anyway.

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Well, this was written after Princess Mononoke had just came out, but it's true! I was thinking about the author's thesis, and for with most Miyazaki characters, you really really really really don't want to think about any of them having sex. And then I thought about Howl. So--I've only seen it once and I don't remember it in any great detail, but it definitely isn't as sexless as the author generalizes.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Mph. I have no problem with Miyazaki girls viewed sexually, though I haven't seen Nausicaa. Not all young women regard sexuality as something composed of 'darkness, desire, and sexiness'. Odd, from my pov, but true, that for some it's pure everyday stuff, all yang and quite Id-free; and Miyazaki's very yang-type heroines are doubtless among that number. I mean, look how Chihiro responds to the yingish Id rampant all around her. I can see her as a perfectly sexual being in a couple of years: the outlines of the girl she'll be are already sketched in.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Mm, yeah, that's true. I think one of the things that bugged me about the essay was the assumption that all girls must have as much sex-related angst as the author herself.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I can't seem to find the entry where you say what this work is. What work is it?