From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2003 - 20:31:04 MDT
As the virtual worlds get more and more interesting
and people start buying up real estate, artifacts,
prileges, etc., it might be worth looking at an
ongoing predecessor - Manga!
I recently visited a Japanese coffee shop / book store
and, noting a whole bunch of unbelievably cute slender
young Japanese girls, all sporting the same hair
styles, clothes, etc., all like something right out of
a Manga fantasy novel, I asked the cashier (similarly
atired) the following:
"Does Manga drive fashion, or does fashion drive
Manga."
Once she understood the question, she replied that she
thought that Manga drove fashion, which I had
suspected. For those who are uninitiated to the Manga
scene, the differentiating characteristic is simply
that the text is integrated with graphics, as in a
comic book. Manga, however, covers the entire gamut
of literary expression, and must be taken - where it
applies - as serious literature.
To try to settle an issue of biology and culture that
same weekend, I bought a couple of cheap XXX DVDs from
a Japanese vendor at a local computer swap meet.
Interesting. As I had surmised from other sources,
Japanese/Asian men appear to be somewhat
physiologically deficient in at least one area - at
least wrt relative gross size... Nice to know, as a
normally endowed Euro. (But they make up for it in
energy, it seemed.)
However, perhaps more interesting was the take on sex
that seemed to prevail - admittedly with a small
sample, but it does dovetail with other data nicely.
While Euro/American women are generally portrayed as
enjoying sex in the corresponding sort of videos, the
Japanese women are invariably shown crying out in
pain, and the relationship is clearly portrayed as one
of power, with strong undertones of sadamasochism. I
found it boring and tasteless rather than erotically
stimulating, despite the fact that the women were
quite beautiful.
In fact, by comparison, the eroticism in the printed
Manga is far more captivating. I got a couple of big
boxes of Manga novels of all kinds by accident from a
closing store recently, and made the error of starting
to glance through them as I was loading them into my
office. Two hours later.... I'm straining my eyes in
the twilight still trying to make it through the door.
From an objectivist standpoint, the printed Manga is
art as it should be, romantic, stylized, architypal
portrayals of life at its essense. The art is often
truly beautiful, and the erotic scenes.... Well, I'll
let the reader check it out.
So, content rules. A static image on paper beats
thousands of frames of motion video.
I did note that the same vendors at the swap meet did
have XXX Manga videos or "anime." However, they cost
3X the live DVD price.
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