7. Why Fangirls But No Fanboys

Another strange hallmark of Japanese domestic rock fandom is the massive gender imbalance. Rock fandom in Japan is almost entirely dominated by women. Sure, men may listen to the music and buy the records, but by and large, it's the women who are getting excited enough to go to shows, join fanclubs, etc. To attend a rock show in Japan is (usually) to be surrounded by a massive horde of women. The opposite may be true in cases where most or all of the band members are female – but all-male rock bands outnumber all-female rock bands by a huge margin. Despite the recent advent of girl bands like Band-Maid, Scandal and Bridear (whose market success has a whole lot to do with idol culture, but that's a topic for another article), for the most part, it's boys on stage, girls in the audience. This goes equally for both the indies and the major scene. Why?

It's easy to see why there aren't very many male fans of boy bands like SMAP or One Direction, because boy bands are basically idols. The whole point of a boy band is to appeal to the sexual fantasies of girls, so for straight men, at least, there's not much of a draw. But in the global West, rock music has tended to be more of a guy thing. Playing loud guitar while sweating profusely into your leather pants is undeniably macho.

I have no data on this, but I strongly suspect that in fact, in secret, Japanese bands have almost as many male fans as female fans, in terms of people who listen to their records. And yet, Japanese guys often won't admit to liking Japanese bands, and they also won't go to shows. Why not?

Partly it's that “Westerners are better” inferiority complex at work again – Japanese guys freely admit to liking Western rock bands, but liking Japanese bands isn't seen as cool the way liking Western bands is seen as cool so guys are less willing to admit that they like Japanese bands. But partly, it's because the more a Japanese rock band attracts a fan following of idol-worshiping fangirls, the more that band starts to get perceived as a form of idol, and therefore, the harder it is for a guy to admit he likes that band.

In general, I have observed that Japanese men tend to be far more secure in their masculinity on average than Western men. For the most part, in my observation, Japanese men seem to have far less need to constantly prove their manhood to one another than Western men do, and the lack of overt homophobia in Japanese culture helps. The underlying assumption of Japanese men seems to be “male until proven female, straight until proven gay.”

And yet, there's no denying that sexual attraction is the primary motivator behind the idol culture that gave birth to the Japanese fangirl. If there's a whole horde of screaming women in the audience at a live show, male fans are probably right to assume that at least most of those women are primarily if not entirely motivated by sexual attraction to the band members on the stage, and it makes male fans nervous to be caught up in that kind of dynamic, so they distance themselves in order to hang on to their masculine pride.

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