The Third World Feminism & One living Vocabulary

The Third World Feminism & One living Vocabulary

The institutional Sadism against women is another issue that occurs to me when I think of the argument Murakami brought up. He puts so much emphasis on how helpless these Japanese geeky hermits are. What makes it possible for them to live in the luxury of self-confinment is the economic well off off of the society that would not let people go bankcrupt so easily even when they have a couple of grown ups with no source of income in a family. More importantly, though, the society's maternal sacrifices sustains the very sickening social structure.

Recent high profile cases of the sex offenders or homicide cases are analysed to involve one common scenario where mother figures participate in complicit of the criminal acts:

1) Sons are prone to be spoiled so much for the partriarchal structure where boys are appreciated while girls are rather ignored or underappreciated.

2) Those spoiled boys grow into helpless 'aging out' (I apply the term from the previous entry on the adoption system, read it back as well) cases who can't do anything without mothers' help.

3) They prove themselves only to be failures w/o mama's cheers in workplaces, schools and relationships with others, especially with women.

4) They turn to female kids and develop themselves into pedophiles.

5) They abduct female kids and take them home to rape, kill or imprison (there was a case that kept a girl for a decade) where their mothers back them up to complete the crimes .

Most of those who ended up complying to their sons were also victims of their domestic violence. This is how the viscious circle is formed and goes around.

Er...I have begun fuming even when I am putting this post.

Another problem that I found during the whole show was that there was no feminism persepective in it. After all, the point Murakami makes on top of where he situates himself is completely phallocentric, isn't it? The voicelessness of Japanese women is another issue that I find problematic and queasy.

Honestly, I still don't understand why women don't get angry about all the overt and over sexualization of children that has been the center of the attention of geeky culture. On the contrary, the sexualized female children are justified and promoted in their hyper macho culture. The whole society is designed and institutionalized to encourage men to boost their own masculinity up at the cost of the helpless; kids. When they have no voice heard to go against it, they have no limitation to institutionalize, reproduce and reenforce the phenomenon. Currently, the sexualized female children are the very common commodities among them (oy! ill)! They even have the nickname that has been introduced to the West: isn't what lollicon is? How are mothers of girls coping with the phenomena?

Women in Japan are set back as kids (underappreciated for not being boys), always evaluated if se xually attractive or not (eh..would you give them a break? They are only kids of pre teens), dismissed if they don't serve those male centerized purposes as sex objects, threatened not to speak their minds or not to talk back to articulate men's inadequateness, they consequently grow into those very dependent and servile women perpetually and fatally coerced to sacrifice themselves.

In terms of the level of prevailance of the notion of feminism, they are in the ultimate third world condition. It is to be attributed to their ideas about basic human rights, which are next to nothing.

While flipping through the Interview magazine, which is entirely on Japanese cultures this month issue, I spotted this right comment to conclude what I started out without specific clue to end: the Japanese musician Utada says something worthwhile to quote here. The interviewer is that Nick Rodes from Duran Duran whom I barely recognized.

NR: Last year, you launched your first English -language album, Exodus[Island Def Jam] How have people in Japan reacted to?

U: Things are a bit different for me now. For years I was known as a very academic girl who did all her own songwriting, the good girl. But in English you can be sexy without lowering yourself. The language allows more room for a sense of humor and a playfulness for things. I wasn't expecting many people to buy the record in Japan, but it actually did pretty well. I do my own music programming, so I guess people are familiar enough with my intentions and what I do that they can recognize my music---even if they don't understand the lyrics.

Frankly, I don't think I am enough familiar with this musician from Far East, but my heart sank when I went over the interview or when I checked out her MTV You Hear It First. Does a woman of 22 years old have to be this repressed and stifled (as she actually articulates) for not knowing how to present herself as a grown up woman? What does she need to be afraid of so much? She should be gifted, educated and independent woman who should make enough to give no shit to anybody? No?

Padradoxically the comment in bold types explains how the ideas of being sexy and being positive about herself are incompatible. "Then, what do you want them to be?" I wish I could yell at those who enslave their 50 % of population of the society and dismiss them as secondary beings. They want them to be sex objects all the time from early on in their lives, and then, they want women to act as if they are asexual.

What we actually see in the society is that so many women lost or afraid of taking controls of their own sexuality and ultimately, their lives. An unwed woman is supposed to be ready to give her up to anybody who releaves her from being a 'sexual suspect': People might redicule or despise her if she is not married because it is thought to be an official failure. But then, if a woman is lucid enogh to handle her sex life, she would be condemned one way or another. It is just the pre-feminism condition. Wishing to get rid of the burden of having to prove herself as something worthwhile without lowering herself, a woman desperately depends on a man who marries her, believing it to be love. What all those young women need is to get education that serves nobody's but their own benefit.  Instead of it, however, they are willing to participate marriage institution that's premised to dismiss women's human rights, but they falsely believe that family is sacred and they die on it. This is how those women with no subjectivity are mass produced.

Utada got married quite early to a man who was fifteen years older, as if to spend no time on being nubile without any legitimacy of being sexually active. More importantly, though, she might have chosen to marry that early because that was the last resort to get out of her father's dominance over her life. Remember that she was a sweat shop like 'music lab laborer' to make a living for her dad, who had been parasited to her mom previously.

Utada is often compared to Britney Spears although she openly hates the comparison. I don't think it is not only fair to compare them just because their age range but stupid because it ignores the difference of characters and intentions of their arts. Alicia Keys should be another singer who might offer more interesting and worthwhile exampes to compare: Keys is also a singer and songwriter who is very successful to fake a street smart 22 sister although she really is a repressed classical music geek. But I love her anyway! They (Keys and Utada) have more things in common; they are both minorities happened to have grown up in NYC, (for utada, on and off, for Keys, all the time) and they ended up landing the same school Columbia. Here you should keep your eyes open and see if this very young woman has ever been hesitant to express her womanhood? No way. She is fully aware of what is to be the origin of her art: just to be herself more and more. Sexuality is also a huge part of who an artist is.

When it comes to Utada, what makes it so difficult to take her own sexuality under control might come from so many different reasons. But I can name her father as a starter, who made a sweat shop laborer musician out of Utada from the age of 12 (!), or her mother who was formerly a famous singer in Japan and fell into this co-dependent marriage with the abusiv e spouse, Utada's father, the self-claim producer. It was a known fact that he was a talentless and skillless man who ruled his wife with perpetual violence. It sounds to be another story of Japnese man in NY: it is very typical of those who linger here for no purpose but living off Japanese women who lack the idea of basic human rights. On top of everything, though, the fear of judgement makes even a woman like Utada act like a school girl who is afraid of evaluation and punishment from unknown others. 

It is another cliche of what Japan produces out of women in general by the time they come of age. They threaten girls so perpetually that women can't care anything but how they would be evaluated and validated by others.

While I was musing above, Utada reminded me of Lena Kiper of Nichiya (refer the previous entry on Nichiya and Ivan Shapovlof). While they seem to be completel y the opposite types, night and day, they have so much in common in terms of how difficult it is to hold themselves as artists and as women as well from those cultures where women hardly access feminism.