Ouran High School Host Club
Jun. 24th, 2014 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyI'm hugely enjoying Ouran High School Host Club (after sampling different versions, I've settled on the English dub as my favourite, largely because of Caitlin Glass's wonderfully sarcastic peformance as Haruhi). It's a shojo (girl's) manga and anime which pokes fourth-wall-shattering fun at the conventions of its own genre and its fans. One of those conventions, the girl disguised as a boy, gives common sense heroine Haruhi access to the world of the Host Club, where girls can explore a tongue-in-cheek fantasy world in which boys are pretty, eager to please, and never selfish or threatening.
As with Vampire Knight, actual sexuality does not enter into this realm, at least not in the thirteen episodes I've seen so far – except once, when the fantasy is intruded on by two young thugs who harass a couple of the Club's lady customers on a beach cliff. Haruhi, in male guise, confronts the thugs; they throw her into the water (God knows what they would have done if they'd realised she was female). This gives the clownish romantic lead, Tamaki, a heroic moment as he dives into the sea to save her. He's furious; has she forgotten she's a girl?
That sits uncomfortably, of course, but it gets more uncomfortable a little later when club VP Kyoya makes a mock-threat of sexual assault - again to remind Haruhi of her real gender. Fortunately, Haruhi sees through Kyoya's pretence at once. He only wants to remind her of her real gender and her resultant vulnerability. She even compliments him on what a "nice guy" he is for trying to underline Tamaki's message. (How much of a sexual threat can he possibly represent anyway? He hasn't even got any nipples.)
The best face that can be put on this is that Haruhi, who lost her mother at an early age, is learning to become more dependent on others – for example, she could have called the other Host Club members for help when the thugs made their appearance. Her independence, for good or bad, is a repeated theme of the anime. But I think Kyoya's threat makes it clear that it's not just that she's independent, but that she's an independent girl.
Any temptation to see Haruhi as a feminist hero (she's practically a Mary Sue) is undercut by her fundamental passivity; the Club come up with crazy schemes and she reacts or comments. She has no particular desires or goals of her own (I'm not even sure what's she's studying). But if really want to know the writers' stance on feminism, you need go no further than the female supremacist Zuka Club, who try to poach Haruhi away from the Host Club. "We've had quite enough of all your oppressive male contempt for women-kind!"
(The character on the flag says: "woman".)
By a weird coincidence, I watched that episode at about the same time I stumbled across the introduction to an essay which had this to say:
It almost seems a shame to think of OHSHC in terms of anything but laughs, but the above stuff hasn't dulled my enjoyment – rather, it's piqued my curiosity, for example about the differences and similarities between Japanese and Western ideas about femininity and feminism. Is the Zuka Club a crude parody of Western feminism, or its Japanese equivalent? (I need to find the manga to compare the comic versions to the animated versions, which will give more clues.) In any case, although I haven't yet read widely, I have yet to come across a manga or anime in which the female characters weren't passive, sidelined, or actively mistreated. Maybe Gatchaman. ;)
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Hewitt, Marsha. "The Negative Power of 'The Feminine': Herbert Marcuse, Mary Daly and Gynocentric Feminism". in Morny Joy and Eva K. Neumaier Dargyay (eds). Gender, Genre and Religion: Feminist Reflections. Waterloo, Ont. : Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press for the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 1995. (Full disclosure: I only read like a page and a half of this before I was in over my head. :)
As with Vampire Knight, actual sexuality does not enter into this realm, at least not in the thirteen episodes I've seen so far – except once, when the fantasy is intruded on by two young thugs who harass a couple of the Club's lady customers on a beach cliff. Haruhi, in male guise, confronts the thugs; they throw her into the water (God knows what they would have done if they'd realised she was female). This gives the clownish romantic lead, Tamaki, a heroic moment as he dives into the sea to save her. He's furious; has she forgotten she's a girl?
That sits uncomfortably, of course, but it gets more uncomfortable a little later when club VP Kyoya makes a mock-threat of sexual assault - again to remind Haruhi of her real gender. Fortunately, Haruhi sees through Kyoya's pretence at once. He only wants to remind her of her real gender and her resultant vulnerability. She even compliments him on what a "nice guy" he is for trying to underline Tamaki's message. (How much of a sexual threat can he possibly represent anyway? He hasn't even got any nipples.)
The best face that can be put on this is that Haruhi, who lost her mother at an early age, is learning to become more dependent on others – for example, she could have called the other Host Club members for help when the thugs made their appearance. Her independence, for good or bad, is a repeated theme of the anime. But I think Kyoya's threat makes it clear that it's not just that she's independent, but that she's an independent girl.
Any temptation to see Haruhi as a feminist hero (she's practically a Mary Sue) is undercut by her fundamental passivity; the Club come up with crazy schemes and she reacts or comments. She has no particular desires or goals of her own (I'm not even sure what's she's studying). But if really want to know the writers' stance on feminism, you need go no further than the female supremacist Zuka Club, who try to poach Haruhi away from the Host Club. "We've had quite enough of all your oppressive male contempt for women-kind!"
(The character on the flag says: "woman".)
By a weird coincidence, I watched that episode at about the same time I stumbled across the introduction to an essay which had this to say:
"As a critique of the oppression of women, feminism is, at its root, a critique of domination… Feminist critical theory begins with the assumption that there is no standpoint outside of domination and alienaton from which to theorize, but rather that we ourselves speak from within the conditions of alienation that are already given to us…"Put more simply, we've grown up in a culture in which some people rule and some people are ruled, whether obviously or subtly – we've never experienced anything else. No wonder resistance to the women's movement has included so many nightmares about women taking over and enslaving and mistreating men. If you and your whole culture have known nothing but domination for centuries, how can you imagine any relationship except domination?
It almost seems a shame to think of OHSHC in terms of anything but laughs, but the above stuff hasn't dulled my enjoyment – rather, it's piqued my curiosity, for example about the differences and similarities between Japanese and Western ideas about femininity and feminism. Is the Zuka Club a crude parody of Western feminism, or its Japanese equivalent? (I need to find the manga to compare the comic versions to the animated versions, which will give more clues.) In any case, although I haven't yet read widely, I have yet to come across a manga or anime in which the female characters weren't passive, sidelined, or actively mistreated. Maybe Gatchaman. ;)
__
Hewitt, Marsha. "The Negative Power of 'The Feminine': Herbert Marcuse, Mary Daly and Gynocentric Feminism". in Morny Joy and Eva K. Neumaier Dargyay (eds). Gender, Genre and Religion: Feminist Reflections. Waterloo, Ont. : Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press for the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 1995. (Full disclosure: I only read like a page and a half of this before I was in over my head. :)
