Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
Published with Shizai Gouzi’s authorization. Follow the author on Zhihu under the same name.
Why are men usually the victims of domestic violence in Japanese anime, manga and games?
One common feature of this “domestic violence” is easily overlooked: it is not violent at all. Tsunehiro Uno has a term specifically for this kind of violence: safe pain (安全に痛い). This violence looks like a challenge to patriarchy, but in fact it is immediately fed back into a patriarchal loop, concealing patriarchal violence all the more effectively.
Mayo Chiki! is a good example. The male lead gets beaten up every day by his younger sister, who is obsessed with hardcore wrestling—every day, mind you. He is physically weak, too. Yet most days he still goes to school as usual, as though nothing has happened. This can only mean one of two things:
- The male lead is a monster, with a body that cannot be killed or injured.
- His sister is too weak.
So is he too strong, or is his sister too weak? Both. In fact, this is a common pattern in such so-called domestic violence: women’s violence does not count as violence. It can only become a joke or a sexual metaphor (the two are often inseparable). I chose Mayo Chiki! because its male lead is so “weak.” He makes a good example because no matter how weak a male lead—or any male character—may be, he will never become a victim of women’s domestic “violence.” The more often a woman commits this so-called “domestic violence,” the more it fashions a monstrous body for the male character—and the weaker she herself becomes.
This is how the loop works: absorb women’s violence while denying that women are capable of violence. In his discussion of AIR, Uno describes the loop this way: after a “performance” of self-reflection through safe pain, users (viewers) can enjoy their reinforced male chauvinism all the more (with a clear conscience).
What do you make of “Beautiful exteriors are all alike; an interesting soul is one in ten thousand”?
Why separate an interesting soul from a beautiful exterior? They shouldn’t be separated—and what’s more, they can’t be. In fact, they aren’t two things at all, but one. An interesting soul is a beautiful exterior. (Embodied thought.)
Beautiful exteriors cannot possibly be all alike, because exteriors that are all alike don’t count as beautiful in the first place. Take the standard influencer face: you soon tire of looking at any face of that kind. This reproducible beauty is less a form of beauty than a rejection of it. Beauty takes thought. Refusing to think and blindly following the crowd means rejecting beauty itself. Look at all that identical beauty—the same filters, the same backgrounds, the same poses, the same angles in WeChat’s Moments feed. These lookalike exteriors aren’t beautiful. They’re commonplace.
Nietzsche (surely he counts as an interesting soul) emphasizes in “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” in Twilight of the Idols, that beauty is no accident; beauty takes tremendous effort. Cicero once marveled at the beauty of Athenian men and boys—not women. That was because men at the time put tremendous effort into beauty. The gift of beauty (the looks you are born with) may fall from the sky, but beauty has to be maintained.
And although not everyone has the gift of beauty (the looks they are born with), most people can create and maintain beauty. You feel this especially strongly in Japan. There are no ugly people, only lazy ones—and that laziness is fundamentally bound up with being uninteresting.
Wilde said that one should either live as a work of art or create one. “To become a work of art,” he once wrote, “is the object of living.” Wilde did not just say this; he lived it. When he first came to London, he wore a soft velvet cap, a shirt with piping, velveteen breeches and long black silk stockings. Yeats once dined with Wilde and afterward recalled: “The Wilde family’s perfectly harmonious life was just like a deliberately arranged work of art.”1 The point is that even a harmonious life takes deliberate shaping, just as “natural beauty” depends on artifice.
If someone’s exterior is that uninteresting, it only proves that their soul is uninteresting too. The soul is just a stale Christian notion anyway. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has Zarathustra say:
I am entirely body, and nothing else.
The soul is often just an excuse lazy people make for themselves—and a very poor excuse at that. For those who spend all day harping on about their souls, the soul … is a disease. Needs treating.
Editor’s note: Objection! Those Reis all look alike! The title differs slightly from the original because of content review.