Abstract
A woman bound with leather, a gag her in mouth, is violently and repeatedly raped by her stepbrother and his buddies. Next, an older man armed with handcuffs and vibrators assaults her. Frame after frame features graphic scenes of similar forced penetration with a variety of implements. Yet at the end of the story, the woman falls into the arms of her stepbrother, declaring he is the only one who knows how to give her pleasure, and she wants to be his sex slave forever. It hardly seems possible that this type of material would be intended for a female consumer, since it seems to fit stereotypical ideas of male fantasies, particularly with the emphasis on forceful penetration and group rape. Yet in Japan, the notorious genre of pornographic “ladies’ comics,” known for its graphic sexual descriptions and images that frequently depict women being sexually hurt, beaten, or humiliated, is created for women, by women—and sells hundreds of thousands of copies every month.
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Notes
Robin Ferrell, “The Pleasures of the Slave,” in Between Psyche and Social: Psychoanalytic Social Theory, eds. Kelly Oliver and Steve Edwin (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2002), 19.
Linda Williams, “When Women Look: A Sequel,” in Senses of Cinema: An Online Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema (SoC) 2001. Online at <http//www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/15/horror_women.html>.
See Deborah Shamoon, “Office Sluts and Rebel Flowers: The Pleasures of Japanese Pornographic Comics for Women,” in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 77–103, for more on the depiction of the female body in ladies comics and parallels with visual conventions in shōjo manga.
Watanabe Yayoi, “Bachelor Party,” Kaama vol. 7 (June 2000): 39–70.
Jane Juffer, At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 20.
Watanabe Yayoi, “The End,” Manon 10, no. 7 (July 2003): 4–103: The so-called yaoi comics, which nearly exclusively feature sex between men, are also erotic comics targeted at women.
For more on yaoi, see Akiko Mizoguchi, “Male-male Romance by and for Women in Japan: A History and the Subgenres of Yaoi Fictions0,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal English Supplement 25 (2003): 49–75;
and Kazumi Nagaike, “Perverse Sexualities, Perversive Desires: Representations of Female Fantasies and Yaoi Manga as Pornography Directed at Women,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal English Supplement 25 (2003): 76–103.
Personal interview with Miya Chie, May 1993. Sakamoto Mimei, a manga creator herself, discusses reader responses to her own work; see Sakamoto Mimei, “Yappari onna wa baka datta.” Shinchō 45, 16: 7 (July 1997): 234. Erino Miya also makes reference to reader comments, as does Karasawa Shun’ichi;
see Erino Miya, “Redikomi no orugasumu ga josei no sei ishiki o kaeta?” Bessatsu Takarajima 30 (August 1994): 130–133, and
Karasawa Shun’ichi, “Redikomi no taiken tōkōsha wa, naze kaiinu to yatta hanashi made kokuhaku shitaji no?” Bessatsu Takarjima 240 (1995): 192–202.
Fujimoto Yukari, “Onna no yokubō no katachi Rediisu komikku ni mieu onna no seigensō,” in Nyū feminizumu rebyū 3: Pornogurafii: Yureru shisen no seijigaku, Shifuji Kayako, ed. (Tokyo: Gakuyō Shobō, 1992), 73–74.
Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982), 14.
Jennifer Wicke, “Through the Glass Darkly,” in Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography Power, ed. Pamela Church Gibson with Roma Gibson (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 70.
Judith Butler, “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess,” in Feminism and Pornography, ed. Drucilla Cornell (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 491.
Elizabeth Cowie, “Pornography and Fantasy: Psychoanalytic Perspectives,” in Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, ed. Lynne Segal and Mary Mcintosh (London: Virago Press, 1992), 141.
Ellen Willis, “Feminism, Moralism and Pornography,” in Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (New York: Knopf, 1981), 223.
Nicola Pitchford, “Reading Feminism’s Pornography Conflict: Implications for Postmodern Reading Strategies,” in Sex Positives? The Cultural Politics of Dissident Sexualities, ed. Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 21.
Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
See also Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
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© 2005 Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley
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Jones, G.I. (2005). Bad Girls Like to Watch: Writing and Reading Ladies’ Comics. In: Miller, L., Bardsley, J. (eds) Bad Girls of Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977120_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977120_7
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