While I strongly admire the intent of her message I feel inclined to educate her on the baselessness of these misconceptions, but such well-intentioned commentary would be doomed to appear as bitchy nitpicking. Perfectly understandable, but it doesn’t quite justify her sweeping generalizations, and outright fostering of misconceptions.
I imagine Nabors’ intent is to enjoin women to throw off the dependence on manga (shoujo or otherwise) as a proxy means to fill the female gap in comics. Even in stories like Kare Kano that seem to champion strong young women, the females inevitably give up their own will, dreams and hopes in favor of adopting their sweetheart’s. This chauvinistic attitude is visible in Japanese comics. Women are still considered inferior in business and the glass ceiling is more like a brick wall. I recall reading that a hideously large percentage of young women only go to college to seek husbands then drop out when they get married. Japan is not what you would call “female friendly.” In Japan, it is acceptable for a man to grope a teenage girl on the train. A part of the article includes (bold emphasis my own):Ī: Sure, if you don’t mind subtly throwing away all the feminist ideals our mothers fought for in during the Women’s Liberation Movement. In an interesting article entitled American Girls’ and Women’s Comics : White Space, Rachel Nabors covers what others have already recognized as the gap in the comic market, and encourages women to become creators and be more vocal in their opinions of female representation.
This affinity between creator and consumer almost guarantees the production of beautifully crafted stories brimming with honesty, depth, and respect towards the female condition. This is despite the fact that most content is created by a large number of female mangaka (numbering in the hundreds), and is meant for a significantly large female audience. The representation of the female in shoujo manga has at times been misinterpreted or dismissed as anti-feminism fodder. Feminism in Shoujo Manga: Introduction JPosted by Naughty Ninja in Feminism, Shoujo.
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