Behavior #8: Fear of Masculine Sexuality

Disclaimer: I fear I might make some people angry by writing about this topic, but I chose to write about it anyway, because I think it lies at the heart of what makes fangirls tick. Please know that in this section, I am attempting to analyze, not criticize. If fandom helps you meet your otherwise unmet emotional needs, that's totally okay. If sex makes you uncomfortable, that's also totally okay. I do hope that someday you manage to move beyond your discomfort and enjoy a healthy and fulfilling sex life (or lack thereof, if you identify as asexual), but then again, sex reaches deep into the root of human existence and because of that, inevitably, I think we're all bound to find it a little scary, at least at times. If you think I'm spitting on the fangirls I'm about to discuss - I am not. Actually, I have a lot of sympathy for them. Female sexuality is subjected to so much pressure, it's enough to drive any woman mad. At the same time, I don't condone homophobia or slut-shaming, so if you're a person who spouts that sort of talk, then yeah, I'm criticizing you. Please cut that shit out immediately. There are enough people spouting hateful rhetoric in the world already without you joining in. Anyway, on to the article.

This is perhaps the greatest paradox of the Japanese fangirl: she's largely if not entirely sexually motivated, yet it seems that she's secretly terrified of sex.

I touched on this earlier, but a primary reason why women become fangirls is that their fandom serves to compensate for the lack of emotional intimacy in their personal lives. They have emotional needs (and probably sexual needs, too) that aren't being met, but fandom helps to meet those needs, at least up to a point. A tremendous number of women who I've met in fan communities struggle with depression/mental illness, fucked up family circumstances, or both. Underground bands with dark sensibilities are particularly likely to attract emotionally fucked-up fangirls – the darkness of the music calls to the emotional darkness in the fans (I already wrote about this in So You Want to Be a Goth?) However, in the case of fangirls, as we've already established, the main appeal factor isn't the music, but the idol worship element.

Many fangirls, when asked what it is they like about their favorite band member, will answer that they like him because he's like a different species of man, possessing a special quality that they've rarely if ever encountered in the men in their immediate vicinity. On the one hand, this may very well be true. On the other hand, it suggests that fangirls harbor significant distrust or distaste toward men.

In fact, many of them freely admit this, and academic papers have been written about the phenomenon of Japanese women bucking the expectations of marriage and family in favor of “selfish” devotion to a fandom, be it visual kei, lolita fashion, or anime. There's not only tremendous societal pressure for Japanese women to marry, but there's also an expectation that once they do, they should give up their personal hobbies (see THIS ARTICLE for more info). Viewed through this lens, the act of being a fangirl starts to look like an act of feminist rebellion.

I already explained why in fact, being a fangirl is not an act of feminist rebellion, but there's no question that many Japanese women (quite justifiably) feel ill-served by what they've seen or experienced of sexual relationships. Japanese society may be sex positive in that it isn't plagued by religion-inflected obsessions with abstinence and virginity, but since sex is seen as a very private topic, most people never speak about it openly, and teenagers may not receive education about healthy sexuality, especially regarding sex-related emotions. Even today, many marriages in Japan are made more for economic reasons than anything else, and a great multitude of married couples have little if any sexual interest in one another...but how are girls raised in such households supposed to learn about healthy sexuality?

Furthermore, patriarchal attitudes still cast women in a submissive, subservient sexual role, and men aren't taught to meet women's sexual needs, meaning that it's easy for women to feel like men get everything out of sex and they get nothing (this phenomenon is by no means limited to Japan, and if you don't believe that subservient woman trope is correct, just take a look at some of that moe anime for a moment.) Beyond that, boys and girls often keep separate social circles. Single-sex high schools are still common in Japan. It's easy for women here to grow up seeing men as “other,” and never really learning to interact with them. The exact same thing is also true for men – but that doesn't exactly contribute to the formation of healthy adult relationships.

Trend pieces about “sexless Japan” are all the rage these days, but they should be taken with a grain of salt – in fact, plenty of Japanese people DO date, fall in love, and have sex (how would all those love hotels stay in business otherwise?) However, there certainly are plenty of Japanese women who feel uneasy about sex, and the sort of woman who's already uneasy about sexuality may be especially drawn to the idol worship phenomenon. After all, if you worship a man from afar, you're free to overlook all his flaws, and you can also be certain he'll never demand that you iron his shirts, make his lunches, or suck his ####. You can admire his beauty freely without fearing the danger of reciprocation.

This sexual fear sounds strange in the context of rock-n-roll. In the West, rock-n-roll has always been associated with sexual promiscuity, whether it be among fans or between band members and their female groupies. It's taken as a given that a rock star will mess around with his female fans. In fact, usually, the more promiscuous he is, the more it adds to his appeal. Of course, there's plenty of sexual promiscuity in the Japanese rock scene, too. But the transference of the idol paradigm onto the Japanese domestic rock scene introduces an element of hypocritical prudishness, as well.

Since Japanese pop idols are constructed mainly as fantasy objects, everything about their image is controlled, and that includes their love lives. Many popular idols these days have clauses in their contracts stating that they're not allowed to date, the reason being that if an idol is found to have a real-life girlfriend, it ruins his image as a fantasy wish-fulfillment object for his fans. He's supposed to exist to meet their needs, not have needs of his own, and having a girlfriend is the definition of having one's own needs. (Of course, plenty of idols date and have sex, but they have to do it in secret, and if they get found out, they're often shamed. The prohibition on private-life sexual relationships is even worse for female idols, but that's a topic for another article.)

Rock stars may not be idols, but since their popularity rests in large part on a fanbase who is using them as fantasy objects in much the same way that idols are used, they're under great pressure to keep their love lives as secret as possible. To an extent, the disclosure of love life details is up to the individual – some Japanese rockers are open about their marriages and family life (Kiyoharu, Sugizo, and Miyavi all speak about their children in public quite often), while others keep entirely mum. But in general, management companies do their best to keep women out of the picture as much as possible when bands are in professional mode. Any visible association between a band guy and a woman, no matter how tenuous or obviously non-sexual, can be cause for intense fits of jealousy from the fangirl community. Part of the job of the management is to preserve the guys' marketability by preserving the illusion that he's free of any sexual ties.

Bizarre, isn't it? Of course rock stars are going to sleep around – it's what they do. So why can't the fangirls handle that?

The easy answer is, because they're jealous. But since they already know that their own chances of hooking up with their favorite rock star are slim to none, you'd think they'd have made peace with that jealousy long ago. Jealousy is certain part of it for certain people, but often I think there's a more complicated dynamic at work. I believe a big reason fangirls can't abide the thought of their favorite rock stars having sex lives is because they secretly harbor a deep discomfort about sex and male sexuality. To be confronted with the reality that the man whom they so chastely idolize is being un-chaste in real life scares them a lot. The appeal of the idol is his untouchable quality, his unattainable perfection. To find out he's actually fucking someone in real life is to find out he's actually nothing more than a man, with the same distasteful, base animal desires as other men. How crass! How disappointingly common!

It's not just sexual relationships that can set off this response in fangirls. Any time a band member displays signs of human masculinity, fangirls launch into paroxysms of excitement, but also terror. For example, think of the massive fangirl response to Mr. Sakurai's weightlifting, to his hirsute armpits, to the times he has deigned to grow a beard, to any time he displays any part of his body uncovered by clothing. Fangirls throw fits every time the man shows a bit of his body onstage, even a bit as innocuous as a shoulder. They also can't shut up about the muscles and the body hair, but much of the time, their response is disgust rather than admiration. If they really weren't attracted to him anymore, you'd think they'd give up on being fangirls, and yet...fangirls they remain. This suggests some cognitive dissonance at work, as if they're uncomfortable with the idea that they might feel attraction towards features so closely associated with mature, aggressive masculinity, perhaps because they lack sexual experience.

The preference for slim, hairless androgyny typical in fangirls, and the extreme excitement over mild partial nudity, are more characteristic of teenagers than adults. Typically, the initial massive excitement felt by teens upon seeing (gasp!) naked people fades as they get older and gain sexual experience. Also, as teens mature, they tend to develop more sexual attraction toward adult body types (which in men generally means hair and muscles) over teenage body types. Teenage girls have every reason to feel threatened by adult men, but most of them grow out of it...otherwise, how exactly would the human species perpetuate itself? And yet, it's like fangirls are still stuck in a teenage state of mind, still nervous and ambivalent about sex.

If sex didn't make them nervous, why would so many of them have expressed such unease with Mr. Sakurai's thigh display on the Atom Miraiha hall tour? Fan comments on this incident ranged from slut-shaming (“if he had a decent wife she'd never allow him to display his thighs like that”) to homophobic (“those garters make him look gay”) to the simple “it makes me uncomfortable”… all about nothing but a pair of legs (and let's be real here, they're the sort of legs most people consider nice to look at). Slut-shaming a 50-year-old man who's built his whole career on slithering around in leather pants, singing about sex...really? Homophobia toward a man who outed himself as bisexual long ago...really? Seems to me like the discomfort for these fans comes from being confronted by a reminder of Mr. Sakurai's sexuality which they find too brazen. Perhaps the obvious enjoyment he took in wearing garters and showing off his thighs to the audience reminded fans a little too forcefully of the fact that in addition to having thousands of people desire him, he's got desires of his own – a no-no for an idol. (In fact, as I've already stated, I think his main desire in showing his thighs was a desire for troll-style lulz at the fangirl freakout, but I also doubt the man would have engaged in quite so many kinky stage antics if he didn't get off on it at least a little bit. Which is totally fine and should not be upsetting.)

The resistance towards adult masculinity and male desire extends to personality as well. Fangirls cherish constructed personalities of their idols which mirror the sorts of tropes found in girls' anime: the narcissistic foppish romantic prince, the wacky science nerd inventor, the strong and silent protector who's good at sports, the ultra small-and-cutesy-but-mischievous “lolita boy,” the jokey boy-next-door older brother, etc. (holy crap guys… is this how fangirls view the Buck-Tick members?) Of course, people embodying these tropes don't exist in real life for the most part, because they're not actual men, they're objectifications of men for the purpose of female fantasy – the male equivalent of the femme fatales, doe-eyed ingenues and manic pixie dream girls we know so well. Caricatures like this serve fantasy by eliminating the personal needs of the objectified party, so that the person creating the fantasy can focus solely on her own needs, rather than meeting the needs of a man.

Another example – why did fangirls get so angry at Mr. Sakurai over the lyrics to “Katte ni Shiyagare”? Methinks it's because of lines like “I don't need kisses of flowers. Give it to me! / You're being a tease? Go to hell!” I can't think of any better encapsulation of self-centered male neediness than those lyrics...of course the fangirls hated it. They hated it so much they missed the generous helping of self-irony mixed in along with the selfish demand for an unemotional wham bam thank you ma'am. (And that's another defining characteristic of many fangirls – they lack subtlety.)

This dynamic is probably also in play in the boys' love and slash fanfiction communities – by fantasizing about male/male relationships, women can remove problems such as jealousy of female rivals and unbalanced power dynamics imposed by the patriarchy. In fact, both boys' love comics and fanfiction are rife with themes of jealousy and imbalances of power, but with all the roles played by male actors, women can avoid over-identification with the characters – for once, rather than being gazed at, they get to be the ones doing the gazing. In fact, I tend to think that comics and fanfiction are a healthier way of dealing with these types of emotions than projection of fantasy onto living, breathing rock musicians. Fictional characters are by definition objects who exist to serve people's emotional needs. Rock stars, on the other hand, are real people, who deserve respect for their human mystery and complexity just as all human beings do. But that's just my opinion.

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