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kaigouOne of the things that didn't really strike me hard until watching Kekkaishi was an implication that I've seen repeated in plenty of other animanga (and western comics) but never really gave much thought: that girls are, by definition, weaker in every single way.
If we're going to argue that "weakness" is based on a physical standard, then in general it'd probably be relatively true to say that, overall and on average, a woman is "weaker" than a man. (This requires we discount the outliers like "men who spend their days sitting at a desk" contrasted with "women who are Olympic athletes".) If the average height of the American woman is 5-foot-3-inches, and the average height of the American man is 5-foot-11-inches, height and weight and basic build would imply that a man, on average, would probably have more basic strength than a woman when it comes to lifting, shoving, pushing, kicking, and other fundamental ergonomic forms of power.
Coming at it from a former athlete's point of view, I sometimes get annoyed with this simplification, though, because there are different types of strength. There's power -- which is explosive strength: the ability to compress one's muscles and release the compressed power into a single drive. This is the power measured by ergometers (rowing machines). Then there's endurance and stamina, which are a type of strength but one that relies on consistent, long-term, repetitive motion and the ability to continue that motion indefinitely. You can have a lot of explosive power but little stamina, and vice-versa. There's also elastic strength, which is repeated compression and expansion of muscles at rapid pace, like in gymnastics. Someone could do six handsprings without breaking a sweat but still have difficulty moving a washing machine. There are other classifications of strength, but that should be enough to make it clear that we can't simply say that one person is "weak" compared to another person based upon one type of measurement.
Now, in most Western comics, when we talk about superheroes, there seems to be a fundamental assumption that what's powering the hero (or heroine) is, underneath it all, a measurement of physical strength. Catgirl can only get so far against Batman; his larger muscle-mass, height, reach, and explosive power outrank hers, so it appears we have no compunction accepting that in an even fight, he'd eventually have the upper hand. (Again, ignoring outliers like women who've trained extensively in martial arts against men who have not, or who have trained in non-elastic-emphasizing ways.) Hrm, I seem to recall that Wonder Woman even gets outranked a number of times, against male superheroes, and again this has always seemed to me based on the reader's/author's assumption that everything else being roughly equal, a man's strength is ultimately going to be higher than a woman's strength.
Okay, fine. I'm willing to go with that, or at least let it be. Where I find myself stumbling is the question of the source of power: muscular, or... spiritual.
In animanga where there's a supernatural aspect, the source of power is not innate to the person's physical body. It's rooted in something spiritual or supernatural, where the wellspring is within the person but not necessarily on a physical plane. In Naruto, there are fighting styles which capitalize on physical strength, but there are also fighting styles which completely disregard physical strength and use exclusively mental strength (ie genjutsu, I think it's called). In Kekkaishi, the source of power seems to also be a kind of internal wellspring of... something, never clearly defined, but something that acts as a kind of spiritual battery, allowing one to create, manipulate, and control energy. You can find similar assumptions of "power source" in stories like Bleach, Loveless, Yu Yu Hakusho; more on TVTropes' page on Ki Attacks.
I think my first major notice of this motif (of spiritual as source of strength) was in Naruto, because that was the first manga/comic I'd read in which there was even a girl (of the same age) to contrast with the male lead/s. It's muddier in Naruto, though, because of the varying types of fighting styles and the inclusion of things like genetic requirements for certain fighting skills/styles (iow, the ability is tied to the physical, be this inherited from parents or the result of transplant).
Thus, when Kakashi sits Sakura down and gives her the little speech about how she's "not as strong" as her teammates, and thus needs to play to her own strengths (ie technique and finesse and control), I was willing to go along with it. A twelve-year-old girl might be equal in endurance or stamina to her male peers, but as puberty strikes, her muscle mass isn't going to (on average) bulk up quite as much as the boys, so her relative dynamic strength may be less (although her elastic strength may be higher, if she trains in that direction).
And since I had experience myself of being physically (muscularly) weaker than many of my teammates, I knew firsthand that honing your technique can, in the end, make you stronger than someone with greater physical strength and worse technique: because the use of finely-tuned technique allows for better efficiency. Good technique means being able to save your strength, so you can go farther and longer, with less actual output for the results you get. I'm aware it's a bit of a flip to go from that Kakashi-speech to (after the time-skip) Sakura being able to create small earthquakes with a single punch, but it's a valid demonstration of the kind of power one can amass if one is attuned to the use of technique and finesse for the most efficient use of one's power. At least, that's how I was willing to rationalize and/or accept these murkier elements of the Naruto-verse.
Then we get to Kekkaishi, where there's no distinction in styles at all. Both Yoshimori (the hero) and Tokine (his childhood friend) are raised in the same style, use the same ki/internal power source, fight with the same actions and styles. Yet repeatedly, Yoshimori is described as being utterly superlative, power-wise (okay, when he puts his easily-distracted, somewhat-lazy adolescent mind to it), while Tokine is, well... she's weak.
And I suddenly asked: weak, by what standard?
Much like Yu Yu Hakusho, the set-up in Kekkaishi appears to be divorced entirely from physique or muscle. Yoshimori is smaller and lighter than both Tokine and Gin (another fighter, who's part-demon or something like that), yet he can summon up these brute force attacks that surround nearly the entire block with a spiritual barrier. Tokine manages two about an eighth that size, and she's exhausted, while Yoshimori goes on to repeat the action two or three more times without a second thought.
Uhm. Wait. If the spiritual power is grounded in something other than the physical, then on exactly what grounds can anyone argue that a girl, by definition, must be "weaker" than a boy?
What is this source of ki or chi or spiritual power that only boys seem to be able to muster such massive displays of brute force? If the limitations are not solely physical (in which case we might argue, lacking major training, that girls are more likely to demonstrate lesser power than boys of same age and build), then what other limitation could possibly cause the difference in spiritual strength?
That, I think, is where the sexism is hiding, the kind that's possibly far more damaging than the western comics superhero path, where physical strength is often an important facet of the overall strength of the hero or heroine. In animanga where the root source of power is mostly-spiritual or even only-spiritual (as in Kekkaishi, or even D.Gray-man), then there's really no grounds other than simple sexist essentialism to quantify girls as weaker than boys. They're girls, ergo, they're weaker, in all respects.
What exactly does it mean, to have spiritual power, to be able to summon up huge amounts of chakra or chi or ki? Where does this wellspring have its base, and how can we define it, to determine who should, or should not, have power, or even the ability to tap into that power?
One trope is that power can't be harnessed in an untrained state. The first interactions with internal power, it's supposed to be wildly chaotic and almost more destructive than constructive. The hero is likely going to take out a number of small buildings before figuring out how to work with his ability. Overall, AtLA (Avatar: the Last Airbender) manages to overturn a lot of tropes, but it doesn't skip this one -- the first few times Aang goes into the avatar-state, he's nearly so destructive and uncontrollable that he undoes any positive results of entering the state.
I can't think of a single instance in which a girl's first expression of power is at an uncontrollable, more-damage-than-good, level. If boys go from "can't control it" to "learn to handle massive amounts of power", girls are stuck on a different path. For a girl, it's more likely she'll be characterized as somewhat intimidated by what (little) power she does have, or at least very cautious/careful with that power (Sakura, Tokine); either way, she won't be the one tossing small buildings about while she gets a handle on things. But just wait; if the girl does get access to subsequently larger amounts of power/skill, eventually it will naturally consume her and she'll go crazy with it.
See also "Azula, final battle".
(For more about that trope and Azula in particular, again check outsnarp's essay on women and power. That post really should be on TVTropes, if the concept isn't in there already.)
Another trope is that the more experience you have, the greater you can tap into, and the less effort it takes to do so... unless you're the hero. If you're so lucky as to be the (male) hero of the story, then you can probably tap into excessive amounts of energy from very early on, to the amazement and surprise of everyone around you, and you can keep pulling it out of your hat, trying new things that no one's done before just by virtue of pure instinct. (I can see echoes of this "do it your own [unconventional] way" as path to success even in non-fighting shonen-genre like Hikaru no Go, but it's sure all over the place in stories like Kekkaishi, D.Gray-man, Bleach, and similar.)
Note, also, that this "pure instinct" seems to balance on the sword-point of "pure heart"; that trying something no one's done before requires having the sheer heart, somehow. As if believing you can do it meets the requirements for actually doing it. More colloquially, it "matters that much" that somehow, the hero gets it to work -- Allen Walker, Yoshimori and Naruto are cut from classic cloth for this, being relatively straight-forward, affable and gregarious souls who wear their hearts on their sleeves. (Like Sasuke, Ichigo from Bleach always struck me as a little too devious or self-contained to fit that mold. He may be single-minded in his goal, but he's not quite as empathic or devoted-to-others that we'd see him come to a breaking point over his fear for his friends; like Sasuke, he's more likely to respond with anger than anxiety.)
It should come as no surprise that girls follow the "everyone else" rule, where they only get to tap into greater power with less effort if they've been at it for awhile. If a girl is focused entirely and with great emotion to an outcome that's predicated on her ability to tap into her internal power... she's probably going to fail. The demonstration is usually a desperate "please work! please work!" kind of cry, for male or female character, but where the boy gets to demonstrate emotional anguish, the girl seems to just crumble into hysterics. Sometimes accompanied by frustrated crying (cf transitional damsels).
I really think this is all just a jumble of genre conventions that authors don't really give much thought to -- because if they did, they (I hope) would see that when you put it all together, it doesn't make any freaking sense. It's not a coherent set of limitations unless you subscribe to the notion that girls are weaker on all counts than boys, in every way possible and solely because they're girls.
Otherwise, an author might have to raise the question of: why is it that stories repeatedly show girls unable to muster equal amounts of non-physical, willpower-based, internal power -- yet these same supposedly-weak girls can muster massive amounts of healing power? (Yes, Sakura and Ino and Orihime, I'm looking at you.) Wouldn't healing someone's major injuries require a massive tapping-into of power and a major output of power?
We're not talking about physical strength here, after all; we're talking about something internal and intangible that gets translated into tangible by the user -- so the root source would not be defined (one would think) for any particular purpose. You could use eggs to bake a cake, or you could use eggs to make an omelette, or you could toss the eggs at someone's front door -- the egg itself contains the potential for all three but not a limitation of only being for cakes or only being for front doors. It seems reasonable that to pull up, sustain, and deftly control the energy needed for healing, would require someone of significant root-source (to have enough to make a difference) and significant control (to make it go in the right direction) and probably incredible amounts of stamina (to keep at it until the job is done). How can one say, quantitatively or even qualitatively, that this is any less than what the hero's needing to fight his battles?
Underneath it, I'm thinking, the message is basically: girls don't have enough willpower.
Even when the female character is shown as being smarter than her boy-peers (Tokine and Sakura definitely, and probably others but right now I'm going blank) -- there's still something inside her that acts as a limiter. The problem is that the only logical limiter I can see is not due to some essential quality of Being Female. The limitation is solely the author, busy inserting or relying on genre conventions that say "girls can't fight (or, girls can fight but won't win)", even at the cost of internal logic: which means the only logical limiter is due to Being Written Female.
Excuse me, I'm going to go rewatch the first five episodes of Seirei no Moribito to make myself feel better.
If we're going to argue that "weakness" is based on a physical standard, then in general it'd probably be relatively true to say that, overall and on average, a woman is "weaker" than a man. (This requires we discount the outliers like "men who spend their days sitting at a desk" contrasted with "women who are Olympic athletes".) If the average height of the American woman is 5-foot-3-inches, and the average height of the American man is 5-foot-11-inches, height and weight and basic build would imply that a man, on average, would probably have more basic strength than a woman when it comes to lifting, shoving, pushing, kicking, and other fundamental ergonomic forms of power.
Coming at it from a former athlete's point of view, I sometimes get annoyed with this simplification, though, because there are different types of strength. There's power -- which is explosive strength: the ability to compress one's muscles and release the compressed power into a single drive. This is the power measured by ergometers (rowing machines). Then there's endurance and stamina, which are a type of strength but one that relies on consistent, long-term, repetitive motion and the ability to continue that motion indefinitely. You can have a lot of explosive power but little stamina, and vice-versa. There's also elastic strength, which is repeated compression and expansion of muscles at rapid pace, like in gymnastics. Someone could do six handsprings without breaking a sweat but still have difficulty moving a washing machine. There are other classifications of strength, but that should be enough to make it clear that we can't simply say that one person is "weak" compared to another person based upon one type of measurement.
Now, in most Western comics, when we talk about superheroes, there seems to be a fundamental assumption that what's powering the hero (or heroine) is, underneath it all, a measurement of physical strength. Catgirl can only get so far against Batman; his larger muscle-mass, height, reach, and explosive power outrank hers, so it appears we have no compunction accepting that in an even fight, he'd eventually have the upper hand. (Again, ignoring outliers like women who've trained extensively in martial arts against men who have not, or who have trained in non-elastic-emphasizing ways.) Hrm, I seem to recall that Wonder Woman even gets outranked a number of times, against male superheroes, and again this has always seemed to me based on the reader's/author's assumption that everything else being roughly equal, a man's strength is ultimately going to be higher than a woman's strength.
Okay, fine. I'm willing to go with that, or at least let it be. Where I find myself stumbling is the question of the source of power: muscular, or... spiritual.
In animanga where there's a supernatural aspect, the source of power is not innate to the person's physical body. It's rooted in something spiritual or supernatural, where the wellspring is within the person but not necessarily on a physical plane. In Naruto, there are fighting styles which capitalize on physical strength, but there are also fighting styles which completely disregard physical strength and use exclusively mental strength (ie genjutsu, I think it's called). In Kekkaishi, the source of power seems to also be a kind of internal wellspring of... something, never clearly defined, but something that acts as a kind of spiritual battery, allowing one to create, manipulate, and control energy. You can find similar assumptions of "power source" in stories like Bleach, Loveless, Yu Yu Hakusho; more on TVTropes' page on Ki Attacks.
I think my first major notice of this motif (of spiritual as source of strength) was in Naruto, because that was the first manga/comic I'd read in which there was even a girl (of the same age) to contrast with the male lead/s. It's muddier in Naruto, though, because of the varying types of fighting styles and the inclusion of things like genetic requirements for certain fighting skills/styles (iow, the ability is tied to the physical, be this inherited from parents or the result of transplant).
Thus, when Kakashi sits Sakura down and gives her the little speech about how she's "not as strong" as her teammates, and thus needs to play to her own strengths (ie technique and finesse and control), I was willing to go along with it. A twelve-year-old girl might be equal in endurance or stamina to her male peers, but as puberty strikes, her muscle mass isn't going to (on average) bulk up quite as much as the boys, so her relative dynamic strength may be less (although her elastic strength may be higher, if she trains in that direction).
And since I had experience myself of being physically (muscularly) weaker than many of my teammates, I knew firsthand that honing your technique can, in the end, make you stronger than someone with greater physical strength and worse technique: because the use of finely-tuned technique allows for better efficiency. Good technique means being able to save your strength, so you can go farther and longer, with less actual output for the results you get. I'm aware it's a bit of a flip to go from that Kakashi-speech to (after the time-skip) Sakura being able to create small earthquakes with a single punch, but it's a valid demonstration of the kind of power one can amass if one is attuned to the use of technique and finesse for the most efficient use of one's power. At least, that's how I was willing to rationalize and/or accept these murkier elements of the Naruto-verse.
Then we get to Kekkaishi, where there's no distinction in styles at all. Both Yoshimori (the hero) and Tokine (his childhood friend) are raised in the same style, use the same ki/internal power source, fight with the same actions and styles. Yet repeatedly, Yoshimori is described as being utterly superlative, power-wise (okay, when he puts his easily-distracted, somewhat-lazy adolescent mind to it), while Tokine is, well... she's weak.
And I suddenly asked: weak, by what standard?
Much like Yu Yu Hakusho, the set-up in Kekkaishi appears to be divorced entirely from physique or muscle. Yoshimori is smaller and lighter than both Tokine and Gin (another fighter, who's part-demon or something like that), yet he can summon up these brute force attacks that surround nearly the entire block with a spiritual barrier. Tokine manages two about an eighth that size, and she's exhausted, while Yoshimori goes on to repeat the action two or three more times without a second thought.
Uhm. Wait. If the spiritual power is grounded in something other than the physical, then on exactly what grounds can anyone argue that a girl, by definition, must be "weaker" than a boy?
What is this source of ki or chi or spiritual power that only boys seem to be able to muster such massive displays of brute force? If the limitations are not solely physical (in which case we might argue, lacking major training, that girls are more likely to demonstrate lesser power than boys of same age and build), then what other limitation could possibly cause the difference in spiritual strength?
That, I think, is where the sexism is hiding, the kind that's possibly far more damaging than the western comics superhero path, where physical strength is often an important facet of the overall strength of the hero or heroine. In animanga where the root source of power is mostly-spiritual or even only-spiritual (as in Kekkaishi, or even D.Gray-man), then there's really no grounds other than simple sexist essentialism to quantify girls as weaker than boys. They're girls, ergo, they're weaker, in all respects.
What exactly does it mean, to have spiritual power, to be able to summon up huge amounts of chakra or chi or ki? Where does this wellspring have its base, and how can we define it, to determine who should, or should not, have power, or even the ability to tap into that power?
One trope is that power can't be harnessed in an untrained state. The first interactions with internal power, it's supposed to be wildly chaotic and almost more destructive than constructive. The hero is likely going to take out a number of small buildings before figuring out how to work with his ability. Overall, AtLA (Avatar: the Last Airbender) manages to overturn a lot of tropes, but it doesn't skip this one -- the first few times Aang goes into the avatar-state, he's nearly so destructive and uncontrollable that he undoes any positive results of entering the state.
I can't think of a single instance in which a girl's first expression of power is at an uncontrollable, more-damage-than-good, level. If boys go from "can't control it" to "learn to handle massive amounts of power", girls are stuck on a different path. For a girl, it's more likely she'll be characterized as somewhat intimidated by what (little) power she does have, or at least very cautious/careful with that power (Sakura, Tokine); either way, she won't be the one tossing small buildings about while she gets a handle on things. But just wait; if the girl does get access to subsequently larger amounts of power/skill, eventually it will naturally consume her and she'll go crazy with it.
See also "Azula, final battle".
(For more about that trope and Azula in particular, again check out
snarp's essay on women and power. That post really should be on TVTropes, if the concept isn't in there already.)Another trope is that the more experience you have, the greater you can tap into, and the less effort it takes to do so... unless you're the hero. If you're so lucky as to be the (male) hero of the story, then you can probably tap into excessive amounts of energy from very early on, to the amazement and surprise of everyone around you, and you can keep pulling it out of your hat, trying new things that no one's done before just by virtue of pure instinct. (I can see echoes of this "do it your own [unconventional] way" as path to success even in non-fighting shonen-genre like Hikaru no Go, but it's sure all over the place in stories like Kekkaishi, D.Gray-man, Bleach, and similar.)
Note, also, that this "pure instinct" seems to balance on the sword-point of "pure heart"; that trying something no one's done before requires having the sheer heart, somehow. As if believing you can do it meets the requirements for actually doing it. More colloquially, it "matters that much" that somehow, the hero gets it to work -- Allen Walker, Yoshimori and Naruto are cut from classic cloth for this, being relatively straight-forward, affable and gregarious souls who wear their hearts on their sleeves. (Like Sasuke, Ichigo from Bleach always struck me as a little too devious or self-contained to fit that mold. He may be single-minded in his goal, but he's not quite as empathic or devoted-to-others that we'd see him come to a breaking point over his fear for his friends; like Sasuke, he's more likely to respond with anger than anxiety.)
It should come as no surprise that girls follow the "everyone else" rule, where they only get to tap into greater power with less effort if they've been at it for awhile. If a girl is focused entirely and with great emotion to an outcome that's predicated on her ability to tap into her internal power... she's probably going to fail. The demonstration is usually a desperate "please work! please work!" kind of cry, for male or female character, but where the boy gets to demonstrate emotional anguish, the girl seems to just crumble into hysterics. Sometimes accompanied by frustrated crying (cf transitional damsels).
I really think this is all just a jumble of genre conventions that authors don't really give much thought to -- because if they did, they (I hope) would see that when you put it all together, it doesn't make any freaking sense. It's not a coherent set of limitations unless you subscribe to the notion that girls are weaker on all counts than boys, in every way possible and solely because they're girls.
Otherwise, an author might have to raise the question of: why is it that stories repeatedly show girls unable to muster equal amounts of non-physical, willpower-based, internal power -- yet these same supposedly-weak girls can muster massive amounts of healing power? (Yes, Sakura and Ino and Orihime, I'm looking at you.) Wouldn't healing someone's major injuries require a massive tapping-into of power and a major output of power?
We're not talking about physical strength here, after all; we're talking about something internal and intangible that gets translated into tangible by the user -- so the root source would not be defined (one would think) for any particular purpose. You could use eggs to bake a cake, or you could use eggs to make an omelette, or you could toss the eggs at someone's front door -- the egg itself contains the potential for all three but not a limitation of only being for cakes or only being for front doors. It seems reasonable that to pull up, sustain, and deftly control the energy needed for healing, would require someone of significant root-source (to have enough to make a difference) and significant control (to make it go in the right direction) and probably incredible amounts of stamina (to keep at it until the job is done). How can one say, quantitatively or even qualitatively, that this is any less than what the hero's needing to fight his battles?
Underneath it, I'm thinking, the message is basically: girls don't have enough willpower.
Even when the female character is shown as being smarter than her boy-peers (Tokine and Sakura definitely, and probably others but right now I'm going blank) -- there's still something inside her that acts as a limiter. The problem is that the only logical limiter I can see is not due to some essential quality of Being Female. The limitation is solely the author, busy inserting or relying on genre conventions that say "girls can't fight (or, girls can fight but won't win)", even at the cost of internal logic: which means the only logical limiter is due to Being Written Female.
Excuse me, I'm going to go rewatch the first five episodes of Seirei no Moribito to make myself feel better.
no subject
Date: 29 Sep 2010 05:13 am (UTC)It's kind of interesting to me thinking about how the same patterns with women play out in JRPGs. They can't be depowered as much as shounen heroines in general, because players want to be able to use their characters and because leveling up with numbers is somehow more acceptable than leveling up through manly training. But the same patterns tend to still fall out. I can't decide which is more irritating, when your level 80 mage capable of killing a dragon with one hit (much less a spell) gets kidnapped to motivate the hero, or when the girl who's been systematically prevented from getting stronger by the author gets kidnapped to motivate the hero.