‘My Girlfriend is Shobitch’ and what we teach teen girls about sex

Anime

I would have thought there was nothing that would convince me to watch an anime with “bitch” in its title. But then Vrai, my colleague at Anime Feminist, gave it not a good review exactly, but certainly a better review than I’d expected:

“[T]here is a shockingly workable idea in this premise. Kosaka is a really likable heroine, and her approach to sex is both uncommonly depicted and relatable (I certainly remember trying to frame sex as academically as possible as a high school honors student because I was terrified of it).”

I wish this title had been translated to Vrai’s suggested, “My Girlfriend is Too Much to Handle.” The non-word “shobitch” is short for “shojo bitch,” where shojo means virgin (keep in mind it is a different character set than the one that means “girl”) and the Japanese interpretation of the English word “bitch” is really more like our word “slut.” (Remember the femme fatale “Bitch-sensei” in Assassination Classroom?) The title is purposefully contradictory—describing a girl who is inexperienced, but acts like she isn’t—and the show discusses a contradiction of another sort: media messages about sex having no basis in reality.

The leading lady is Kousaka Akiho, a brilliant student. She excels at everything she puts her mind to. So when her classmate, Shinozaki, asks her out, she decides she’s going to be an A+ girlfriend, too. Cue a comedy of errors as Kousaka pores over health books, explicit podcasts, and every possible media message about what men want in order to appease her new beau—even though it backfires and makes him uncomfortable instead.

Kousaka is intensely relatable. Research and practice worked for her grades, so why wouldn’t they work for love as well? She puts her whole heart into everything she tries. She’s clearly intelligent. Her studious nature paired with her inexperience in the ways of love lead to her taking every pop culture message about the objectification of women quite literally.

As a teen girl, I learned for the first time that my body was not my own. If I didn’t put the right clothes on it at school, I could be sent home to change so I wasn’t a “distraction.” But the mall gave me a contradictory message, as all the stores predominantly sold girls my age crop tops and low-cut dresses, all of it made from cheap, nearly see-through fabrics. Women’s magazines showed me how different outfits, makeup, and workout routines would make me “sexy.” They showed me “50 ways to please” my man. TV shows like the OC taught me that my virginity was the best “gift” I could give a guy, and if I didn’t, I was cold, and if I did, I was slutty.

As time went on, the messages contradicted themselves. When I was 14, I was walking with my mom when a trio of construction workers wolf-whistled at me. As I smiled and waved at them, my mom scolded me. But a couple years later, when I was walking alone and ignoring a man who said hi and asked me to smile, he began shouting that I was a cunt. It was confusing.

Is there anything more perplexing than being a teen girl? You look at your new body and it feels startlingly removed from your identity. You’ve seen curves like this in advertisements, as a product to buy or sell. They certainly don’t mesh with your own perception of yourself.

It’s not perfect, but “My Girlfriend is Shobitch” ends up almost being a meta-discussion about how we teach teen girls about sex. Not once during this episode does Kousaka consider what she can get out of a relationship with Shinozaki. She only knows that pleasing her man, the way Cosmopolitan magazine tells us to do, is the most important test of her character to date.

And Shinozaki? Well, god bless the boy, he doesn’t know what to think.

 

This premise of this show wouldn’t work if the male lead simply went along with Kousaka’s overtures. After all, Kousaka is only doing what she’s told men love. We have to give Shinozaki credit for seeing Kousaka as a person, as somebody he genuinely wants to get to know. While the episode begins with Shinozaki’s specific sexual fantasy about Kousaka, it seems to be within the context of Kousaka’s shared enthusiasm and agency. But in real life, Kousaka doesn’t seem to believe she has any agency, or any right to enjoy sexy stuff herself. In other words, there’s a very clear divide between what Shinozaki is supposed to want and what he does want, which at this point seems to be to make Kousaka as happy as she’s trying to make him.

Kousaka is a good student and has mastered the messages teen girls are taught. She knows that male pleasure is paramount and she’s just a means to an end. Hearteningly though, this episode demonstrates that this isn’t a message that benefits anyone. There’s some hope that over time, this will become clear to this surprisingly cute couple.

A caveat: after just one episode, it’s way too early to recommend this show, or even to gauge whether it’ll even stay watchable. (It could certainly do with a lot less of Shinozaki’s handsy childhood friend.) Also make no mistake that this is an ecchi show, with panty shots and lewd camera angles that would objectify Kousaka even if she wasn’t trying so hard to objectify herself. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the ways this show shines a light on all the messages a teen girl internalizes. It proves just how contradictory and silly they actually are. Like discovering the monster under your bed is really just a shadow, it’s sweet relief.

My Girlfriend is Shobitch is streaming on Anime Strike. 

Otaku Links: We’ll miss you, Grape-kun

Otaku Links

Screenshot via URAHARA, episode 2. 

Be scared of something and do it anyway

Careers

Last month I taped a segment with Fox News. I haven’t watched any of it and I don’t plan to.

When I tell people that, even my loved ones who understand me best, they seem puzzled because I’m not shy. I speak loudly with plenty of inflection, and I love trying to entertain other people and make them laugh. I make conversation with everyone from my Lyft driver to my dental hygienist. I’m an introvert, but my friends say I’m the most extroverted introvert there is.

But here’s the thing: I really don’t like how I sound. I’ve never gotten over my voice deepening so much when I was a teen. In a few short years I went from being a featured singer in the school choir to being mistaken for my dad when I picked up the phone. That’d be unsettling for anyone, but when you’re a petite five-foot-one woman, it definitely feels weird.

Disliking the sound of your own voice is not unique. It’s because we hear sounds differently when they come from inside ourselves. According to the Washington Post, hearing your voice or seeing your face from a second person perspective elicits a reaction similar to disgust. Time Magazine goes a step further and suggests hearing your recorded, unfamiliar-sounding voice is akin to body dysmorphia. Maybe one of my trans or nonbinary readers could weigh in?

Even so, I do not avoid opportunities to speak, and that’s why I think it’s hard to convince others that I don’t like my voice. I am on a lot of podcasts. I have been interviewed on the radio and for documentaries. I even sometimes enjoy public speaking, especially when it’s somewhere I feel comfortable, like when I gave a talk on my concept of Otaku Journalism at Crunchyroll Expo (which should be on YouTube pretty soon, but even when it is I won’t watch that either).

In short, I don’t have a great voice. I am not a naturally gifted public speaker, or somebody who started out liking it. But through time and practice, I’ve become somebody who can do it on command and even have fun.

Recording equipment set up in my living room.

I think we use “introvert” and “extrovert” as convenient excuses to avoid stuff, when they’re only labels meant to define your natural inclinations. There’s no reason an introvert can’t become a performer and there’s nothing preventing an extrovert from choosing and enjoying a more solitary profession, and letting their social side come out on weekends. I especially hate the smug memes about why introverts (it’s usually introverts) are secretly better.

The way I see it, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes—and far more than you could fit into the two rigid categories of introvert and extrovert (or the eight personality types of Meyers Briggs, for example). These are good starting points, but they are not the end-all be-all of our personal definitions.

Yes, we are naturally better at some things and worse at others. But if we avoid the things we want to, we’ll never grow, we’ll never get better, and we’ll feel bad about the stuff we never did and wonder what might have been. Life in your comfort space is nice, and an excellent place to revisit when you’re overwhelmed, but if you spend all your time there, it gets boring.

I want to encourage you to be scared of things and still do them. Heck, to be bad at things and still try them! I’m trying to be a good example of this. Which is one of the reasons why I am in Japanese class, even with my bad accent and the fact that I have to study twice as much outside of class to keep up with everyone else. Which is why I run races even though I was always the slowest kid in gym class. Which is why I go on TV even when I’m scared to watch it and see how badly I definitely screwed it up.

It may sound like torture to fill your life with uncomfortable, difficult things, but you can start with one thing at a time. I don’t want to live a life where I limit myself to only doing the things I’m good at, and I don’t think you want to, either. To quote Jake the Dog in Adventure Time, sucking at something is the first step to becoming sort of good at something. What will you try today?

P.S. In the time since I wrote this, I signed a contract to do a writing + acting gig. I haven’t acted since high school, so I’ll keep you posted on how that turns out.

See also:

Otaku Links: Even more self-promotion than usual!

Otaku Links

Top image: Detail from Mugi Tanaka’s Crunchyroll Expo illustration featuring the Urahara main characters.

The double-edged sword of making people mad

Fandom, Writing

In 2015, I wrote Why you want to make readers emotional, and included this line: “In the future, I’d like to avoid articles that make people angry, but even that can have its place.”

As it turned out, anger had its place in my blog post last Monday. Last week’s post did incredibly well on Twitter, sparking a lot of heated discussions about cartoons. While I watched my blog post tweet’s likes and retweets spike, I took a look at what else was catching people’s attention on Twitter. Stuff like:

  • A wrestler I’ve never heard of getting dunked on for opining that all anime is bad;
  • Kadokawa’s PR trainwreck after firing the director of Kemono Friends;
  • The latest stupid thing Trump has done (and there are too many to count).

It’s not a coincidence: people are most likely to share stuff that makes them furious. In a study of online sharing of the New York Times, content that made people emotional (sometimes joyful, but usually irate) was shared nearly ten times as often as other types of content. “If something makes you angry as opposed to sad, for example, you’re more likely to share it with your family and friends because you’re fired up,” the researcher told a reporter.

Additionally, while positive vibes can take effort, reacting in anger is often simple to do. And once you start a negative cycle, the instant feedback can become addicting.

I’ve got an idea about the psychology behind this. Years ago, when I was a newbie journalist, I helped dogpile onto another reporter who was already getting a bunch of hate. It’s not important and I don’t want to get specific, but she wrote an article that upset Magic: The Gathering fans.

I wrote my two cents on it, on Twitter of course, and something shocking happened. Like most journalists who write about geek fandom, especially if they sometimes reference *eyeroll* feminism, I had a slew of hecklers who were always ready to drag me down. What was so amazing was that these people, who were always so quick to insult my articles about geek topics and even quicker to question my knowledge about Magic: The Gathering, were chiming in and agreeing with me! People I usually got daily insults from were palling around with me, and as embarrassing as it is to recount now, it felt euphoric.

If you are wondering why a certain Youtuber went seemingly overnight from inclusive feminist to transphobic Red Piller, this is probably why. White women like us are privileged: we can easily be accepted into communities that used to send you death threats by shifting our message to something haters find more palatable. The only downside is abandoning the people in need who you used to support and oh yeah, also your soul.

After going back to writing my usual articles, and watching my new “friends” go back to being detractors, I realized that the cost of getting approval from these people was too high. However, I remember what it felt like to suddenly obtain the fleeting reward of approval from my most vocal dissenters, simply by putting down another woman journalist. (They couldn’t possibly turn around and do that to me, right? Leopards would never eat my face.)

Pair that approval with that rush of righteous anger that comes with re-sharing something I disagree with, and it’s obvious to me why we can’t quit. We’re hard wired to share negatives, which go viral unlike anything else. Plus, the people who are most capable of making your life a living hell go mellow (and who cares what decent people think?). It’s easy, too: you don’t have to be clever, you only have to be mean.

A constantly angry blog or social media presence can make for plenty of viral material, but in my opinion it’s not worth the elevated blood pressure. It’s also less likely to be truthful. Ever wonder why fake news spreads so quickly? Fake stories are designed to tap into your emotions and make you so mad that you share before you consider checking the facts. You’re angry or frustrated and you want to release some pressure by passing that emotion forward. When I put it that way it sounds kind of selfish, and not like something a happy person would do.

That’s my conclusion: happy people don’t do this. People who feel good about themselves don’t feel an endless urge to stoke their anger, to blow off steam in a way that hurts or calls out others, or feel a need to drag you down so they can feel a little better, even for a moment.

When you’re about to share something that makes you mad, first think about why you’re sharing it. Does it confirm a negative opinion you’ve held about a person or group of people, making you feel smug that you were right? Are you helping to gang up on somebody who said something dumb on Twitter because your boss made you feel powerless in front of a client, and this person is a convenient punching bag for your feelings?

(That’s not to say there aren’t good reasons for sharing stuff that makes you mad—in the New York Times, an exposé of reprehensible conditions at New York nail salons once inspired hundreds to boycott manicures and pressured the governor into ordering an emergency measure. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t always share infuriating stuff with the intention of creating change.)

Our cycle of negativity is irresistible. But it isn’t good for us. It’s nice when one of my blog posts does well, but as it started to get attention, I began to feel as jittery checking Twitter as if I’d had four cups of coffee. Better to share things that make the world a little better, even if they’re not going to go viral.