Knights of Lamune. All right, show of hands in the house, who's watched Knights of Lamune? Lamune & 40 Fresh in the Japanese, cute show about pneumatic holy virgins who pilot Gundam-ripoffs in birthday suits as opposed to plug suits - anyone? No?
Peppy theme song?
Ahem.
I've watched Knights of Lamune. It came with sterling recommendations from an anime club member, something to the effect that if he could pull off that no-hander psychic saturation shtick he wouldn't ever leave the house. Down I plopped therefore, amidst the cushions with my mug of fruit tea, ready for a bit more ecchi to while away the dismal Canadian spring - and not realizing the effect of a week's worth of mailing-list analysis of yaoi leitmotifs. So when halfway through the first ep you had Cacao waking Parfait in the night hot and flustered from using her special psychic technique - bear with me this won't take a minute - when Cacao jumped Parfait in her bed, and the latter squeaked in protest-
"Iya! Dame yo!"
-I blinked.
Sneaking suspicions go a long way sometimes. Knights of Lamune not qualifying as hentai per se, I pulled strings and ended up with a few tapes' worth of Otaku's Best Mix (research, she says to the boys, research - and could you answer a few questions while you're here? Like what's up with the socks?). The sampling felt quite representative: humor, tentacles, furry, bondage, schoolgirl stuff, fantasy stuff - even a smidgeon of plot. I watched through it all, which seems to imply that I have a stronger stomach than the boys themselves. A particular episode of Cool Devices was pointed out to me repeatedly as being quease-inducing, but it was no worse than the more gleeful run of Gundam Wing torture dj/fic, and rather better than Rika. (Though your mileage will vary depending on whether you can disassociate when it's a female character getting raped. I can, but I'm probably in the minority.)
The conclusion?
Well, it's awfully like yaoi.
Not shounen-ai or june. The whole plot and characterization thang - no. Yaoi, the sort that's in good part porn - and if you define porn the way my anime club boys do (erotica), the proportion rises to a 4.0 GPA. As far as I can tell, however, these PWP yaoi doujinshi provide the bottom line for explicit scenes all across the genre. Ukes vary widely in personality, but lay them out on their backs (or stomachs, whatever) and behaviors converge fast. What they converge to has always seemed to me a little weird, fun though it may be. Don't know of any preconceptions which have women acting the way ukes do in bed. Heck, even in corner-store porn the gal has to look as if she's enjoying herself.
Well, now the mystery's solved for me: ukes aren't coded females in bed, they're coded hentai females. Paradoxically, this doesn't bother me a whit, because hentai females are so far out they're beyond traditional stereotype. In fact, it can be argued that the 'bottom' position in hentai or yaoi has nothing to do with reality in either genre, and much to do with each other.
Women in hentai cry like ukes, you see. They cry when circumstances seem to be demanding that they have fun. They blush too, and stutter denials, and are rubber-doll helpless in the face of whatever's being done to them: as often as not non-consensual and involving machines like the one in Barbarella, not to mention tentacles. They self-lubricate, but they have a good excuse for that. So the physiological weirdness is taken up by their breasts, which are really more sensitive than water balloons have a right to be. (If jello has a jiggle factor of five, hentai boobs have a jiggle factor of ten - and the boys don't mind if you quote them on that.) At a touch they send up a stream of dove-like moans - oh, those lovely tense Japanese vowels! Oh, those glottal stops! - that make me think of the proverbial housewife who tends the phone sex hotlines while ironing or cutting coupons. Quick seiyuu cash. And when it's all over, they ask for more in the gag panel at the bottom.
Even the embarrassingly catchy opening theme of Knights of Lamune could just as well be an Uke Anthem:
"Yamete yoshite sawaranaide BABY
iya yo dame yo aseranaide BABY
urahara na POSE nara buki ni naru wa
Yamete yoshite hayaku tomete BABY
Motto motto soba ni ite yo BABY
Tomerarenai toshigoro ne doki doki doki MAGIC shiteru no"
Stop it cut it out don't touch me
BABY
No no don't do it don't hurry BABY
If I pretend to say no I've got a weapon
Stop it cut it out stop right now BABY
Stay beside me stay with me more and more BABY
Guess you're at an age where you can't stop
gulp gosh oh wow you're making magic (thanks,
Jeanne! ^_^)
(Sung by a pair of female seiyuu on helium, but never mind. I'd pay to hear Ranmaru and Yuuki karaoke it, but my currency is devalued nowadays.)
Hentai couldn't have borrowed its interactions off of yaoi sex scenes, so it had to be vice-versa. Maybe the First Yaoi Doujinshika - instead of going by personal experience or researching gay sex in RL - picked a few sailor fuku specials off the corner store racks and worked from there. It's what I would have done in fact, because they make great drawing aids. Don't think Michelangelo had female models for all those nice sibyls on the Sistine ceiling, and anyway what's hot is hot. It's just that most men want to view those hot qualities in bishoujo, and most women want to view them in bishounen. Why hot is hot is beyond the scope of this article. In fact, I'll go further: I haven't the slightest, and I hope you'll tell me.
Issues look simpler from this view.
Take the coded identification thing...
Men in hentai certainly don't cry, but they don't moan either. Occasionally they give instructions. They're there to make the girls bounce and jiggle and get wet, and any time you see their expressions they look smugly satisfied just doing that. Yaoi semes are all emotive bleeding hearts by comparaison. Which is quite understandable, since yaoi fans are at least half interested in the semes, and that's not the way it works in hentai. It's not because there's a received impression of how men are supposed to act; no one's expected to be stoic in live-ac porn, after all. It's because - and here's the cute catchy bit the boys had to repeat to me several times before I really caught on to the implications - you're supposed to be looking at the girl.
Not identifying with the girl. (Find me a straight man who'd admit to identifying with the girl in porn or hentai, even in a lesbian piece.) Not wondering whether her behavior reflects stereotyped views of your gender even if she's not the same gender as you. Looking at her. If you happen to like looking at a him better, by all means find or develop a genre with the same visual topos that allows you to look at a him. It doesn't diminish your right to get miffed at the suggestion that you want to be that way, or are in fact that way. Because that's not the point of the exercise at all.
Simple, right? Simple.
Oh, and as for psychic saturation, if I ever do a Gundam Wing doujinshi I'll definitely have Wufei learn it as a meditation technique. I think it'd go over well.