anime and feminism

WARNING: This post contains stuff that you probably will not be interested in unless you 1.) Watch Ouran High School Host Club and 2.) like half-baked feminist analyses of pop culture.

Why why why WHY do I always get the urge to write a blog post just when I'm about to work on something important. I've got a Physiology mini-thesis review of related literature waiting to materialize in the adjacent browser tab, and it's due on Monday already, but DEAR LORD am I fired up and ready to write something completely unrelated on my blog. Maybe it's the coffee float I just ingested. I got if from Jolibee for an extra twenty five bucks, and its resemblance, in terms of taste, to Kopiko instant coffee is unignorable.

Anyway, I'll stop the rambling and proceed with that thing that got me fired up in the first place - no, not coffee (well, it's partially that), but Ouran High School Host Club.

If you are either Jules or Rap, I know what you're thinking: How uncharacteristically OTAKU-like of me! Well shut up okay. I've ran out of Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and Arrested Development, so I resorted to digging into a pile of anime my sister so kindly left for me in my laptop. Because I recall some friends raving about Ouran, I picked it over all the other weird-sounding anime titles in the bunch. Cait was nice enough to leave me a little foreword so that I'd know what to expect.

In summary: "its nice"

Now for an obligatory introduction to the series: It revolves around a girl named Haruhi who, on her first day in the snottiest, richest school in Japan, is forced into servitude at the Ouran High School Host Club when she breaks a ridiculously expensive vase. The club is composed of a bunch of "handsome" boys (in the story they're supposed to be really hot stuff but they look like all other anime boys to me) whose sole purpose in life appears to be "making girls happy." Naturally, most of the story derives its comedy from having Haruhi pretend to be a boy, which is quite easy to do since her body seems to lack the typical feminine curves, her hair is cropped like a boy's, and her voice is low enough to be mistaken for a high-pitched male voice. The members of the Host Club all know that she's really a girl, and because the female population of the school seems to be really taken with her (believing her to be male), the Club decides to keep it a secret.

I don't watch a lot of anime, but from what I've seen, I guess Haruhi would be considered very different from most heroines of Japanese shoujo (note that I have limited knowledge regarding anime and I'm just banking on the little tidbits I pick up from my otaku sister). For one she doesn't care about her appearances very much. She doesn't mind wearing baggy oufits and short hair all the time. In fact I get the impression that she actively chooses to dress up this way, not just because she's concealing her gender but simply because it's her personal preference. The only times we see her wearing "girly" clothes are the product of choices of male characters such as the Club itself, or her dad, who picked out for her this outfit below:

So she isn't as concerned with her appearances as most Japanese heroines are. To top it off, Haruhi is intelligent, snarky, unselfish, and hardworking to boot (when the Club whisks her off to a resort somewhere, she complains that she would rather have stayed at home to study). For these reasons, Ouran has been called by some as a feminist anime. On the basis of Haruhi's character alone, one might be inclined to agree, but after seeing Episode 7, I'm highly doubting this.

The thing about Ouran is that while it partially intends to be a satire on Japanese shoujo by winking at conventional character situations and archetypes, it still perpetuates traditional, antiquated, and one-dimensional representations of women. It was all quite tolerable (and funny) up until I watched Episode 7, which drove me to write this long post. I don't know where I begin to discuss this, so here are some bullet points that I'm just shooting off the top of my head:

• The show sorely lacks diversity in its female characters. So far, only two females are recurring characters, one of them being Haruhi herself and the other one being Renge, this weirdo otaku girl who sort of breaks the fourth wall by providing us with her analyses of the show's characters at random points during the show's progression. This is not to say that the show lacks female characters, because oh boy there are quite a lot, aside from Renge and Haruhi. The show needs female characters, but only to serve as a goal for the existence of the Host Club, which, after all, exists only "to make women happy." The number of girls who go to the school don't have their own stories, and they don't even have their own names (that I can recall). They exist only to highlight the popularity of the Host Club, to fawn over Tamaki-senpai and for that matter, all the rest of the members of the Host Club. 
• All the non-protagonist female characters seem to act as foils to highlight the typically male-attributed qualities in Haruhi. Haruhi is courageous, which shows in how she can casually pinch a centipede and fling it away, while all the other girls are afraid of bugs and run screaming at the sight of a centipede. When Haruhi does drive the bug away, all the girls reappear around her and croon, "Oh Haruhi, you're sooooooo manly!" (This is in Episode 7.)
• In Episode 7 also, we see that a bunch of girls are being physically harassed by two men at the beach. Of course they're defenseless and weak, so Haruhi, being the man-figure, steps in and saves them. However, she fails at doing this and gets thrown into the ocean for her attempt at a rescue. As she sinks to the seabed, who should come to her rescue but *surprise surprise!* a man, Tamaki-senpai.
• Tamaki is mad that Haruhi attempted the rescue, given that she is completely untrained in fighting and could have gotten herself killed as well. It's a valid reason to be mad at someone, right? But the way the dialogue was constructed made it seem as if Haruhi's fault was NOT that she was foolishly risking her own life in the rescue, but that she was GIRL who was going against a couple of GUYS. The moral lesson that Tamaki SHOULD HAVE sent out to Haruhi was, "If you're not trained in combat, do not attempt combat because you could get yourself killed." However, what ACTUALLY came out was, "You are a woman, therefore you cannot defend yourself, so you should leave the fighting up to us boys."

So what I'm trying to say is that while Ouran quite obviously winks at silly, hyperpolarized representations of gender in anime, it ultimately does nothing in the long run to subvert the power roles and stereotypes prevalent in society. It shows us one-dimensional women and tells us, "Girls are ditzy, boy-crazy bimbos. Isn't that funny? Ha-ha!" and does close to nothing to say, "Sexism is wrong." 

Okay this has been a really long post and I doubt that any of you will actually read it so goodbye I'm gonna make the most of my caffeine intoxication and work on my Physio paper now bye.