Continued High School Lust
Lest you think that mainstream Japanese men have ceased to lust after underage females in bikinis, note this Zakzak cover girl (link most likely NSFW) and tagline, “She may be a high school student, but she’s an adult E-cup!” I guess the abstracted breast size overrides the pesky age issue. Buy the DVD and support the 17 year-old model’s parents’ dream of one day owning a yacht!
September 19, 2008 at 2:26 pm
I guess we should be thankful she’s not 11?
Japanese men apparently like what they like… Do you see this changing at anything faster than decade-long increments?
September 19, 2008 at 2:54 pm
No, it seems like the more the glass ceiling breaks and Japanese women become more independent, the more that mainstream magazines have to keep lowering the age of their sex objects.
September 19, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Holy Moly, normally these posts are whatevs to me but that one is just not even close to SuhFahWah. Which I have no problem with, but whoa.Seriously though, she probably gets like 2 – 3 man at the most for something like this?
September 19, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Oops, I changed the SFW rating.
September 20, 2008 at 3:33 am
Oh, get off the moral high horse Marxy.
What precisely is this ‘mainstream Japanese man’ and what claim
do you have to understanding him?
A tad patronising, no?
September 20, 2008 at 6:34 am
It’s hardly as though lusting after amply endowed high school students is some uniquely Japanese perversion, though.
September 20, 2008 at 6:34 am
damn you, excess ‘though’.
September 20, 2008 at 8:14 am
I think it’s a little more subtle in other places. Was Britney Spears ever advertised by her breast size? The willingness for parents to commercialize their own daughters and mainstream magazines to openly show 11 year old girls in bikinis… I don’t know what other country has a lot of that. And also, this is a pretty new thing for Japan.
September 20, 2008 at 8:16 am
“Oh, get off the moral high horse Marxy.”
My problem with this stuff has never been about “morals.”
September 20, 2008 at 1:26 pm
After her mother sent in some lingerie shots of her daughter, Samantha Fox appeared topless on page three of The Sun in 1983 under the headline “Sam, 16, Quits A-Levels for Ooh-Levels.”
Britain certainly wouldn’t welcome parents pushing 11 year olds into such work but the ZakZak example you originally linked to wouldn’t be much out of place.
September 20, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Interesting. ZakZak’s pretty up on the 15 year-old thong bikini girls too though.
“What precisely is this ‘mainstream Japanese man’”
ZakZak and Weekly Playboy are not exactly fringe. If they are Maxim, they are Maxim that has wholeheartedly been supporting Over-9 and Under-18 girls in skimpy bikinis.
September 20, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Sex is not merely about Victorian morals. Oh no, girls in bikinis! It’s about class and power. And gender equality.
There is also the issue of whether it’s good for society to have adult men no longer finding adult women attractive. What’s wrong with a smart, active, professional woman?
September 20, 2008 at 2:19 pm
“Sex is not merely about Victorian morals. Oh no, girls in bikinis! It’s about class and power. And gender equality.”
Agreed. But if it’s class, gender equality you’re concerned with, I fail to see where age comes into it. The level of exploitaion ー along class or gender equality lines = would be the same whether the model in question was 11 or 19 years old, no?
September 20, 2008 at 8:42 pm
“The willingness for parents to commercialize their own daughters and mainstream magazines to openly show 11 year old girls in bikinis… I don’t know what other country has a lot of that.”
Jodie Foster,Brooke Shields,JonBenét Ramsey…..
September 20, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Ha ha! If you want to compare Jodie Foster to Saya Irie, that’s an uphill battle.
Brooke Shields is a better analog, but Hollywood films vs. B-grade gravia idols? One feels a little more like exploitation and a few centimeters closer to straight out pornography.
September 21, 2008 at 12:10 pm
You fail to answer my question…
Emphasis on the word ‘fail’
September 21, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Every civilization creates a line between child and adult, and in Japan, this is generally 20, but 18 for appearance in pornography.
So, yes, if you ONLY judge on gender, maybe 11 is not difference than 19, but add that to the fact that Japanese society already draws the line at 18, and therefore, we should judge on that Japanese standard, no?
I mean, it’s not like the PTA or most Japanese women are really excited about this new trend in underage bikini idols. Or have ever been when these things were around in the past.
By the way, if you choose a less charged anonymous name, maybe our spam filter will not throw you into moderation hell so often. I have to keep fishing you out.
September 21, 2008 at 1:41 pm
“Every civilization creates a line between child and adult”
Surely not one line. Most societies draw several lines covering marriage, sex, voting, leaving school, joining the military, drinking and more.
The age of consent in Britain is 16. Supermodels Jodie Kidd and Kate Moss both started their careers at 15, having been spotted when they were still younger. I’m not going to defend using an eleven year old for glamour modelling but I don’t think a link to photos of a 17 year old girl is the right starting point to make the argument against it.
Brooke Shields’s films and modelling may not have much in common with Saaya Irie’s career but Aceface also brought up JonBenet Ramsey and surely the sexualization of children is a problem for child beauty pageants as much as for Irie’s photo collections.
September 21, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I think “glamour beauty” (films, fashion shows, fashion spreads, something with at least the pretense of art) is pretty substantially different from gravia, which is basically a lite sub-category of pornography for more attractive girls. The context is basically art-less. Maybe Morning Musume costumes get a bit risque sometimes, but at least they had the pretext of being a musical group.
I don’t think anyone can defend JonBenet Ramsey, but were they ever making products and videos based off of her in adult sexy materials and then selling those products in the same context as pornography?
September 21, 2008 at 11:06 pm
“Glamour modelling”, at least in Britain, is a euphemism for soft porn which is why I gave the example of Samantha Fox above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Three_girl
“Page Three (or Page 3) is a feature found in the British tabloid newspaper The Sun. It consists of a large photograph of a female glamour model, who is generally topless or even tastefully nude, published on the third page of the newspaper. Women who model for the feature are known as Page Three girls.”
The Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is the largest-selling English language newspaper in the world. Another paragrapgh from that Wiki link:
“The Sun and other British tabloids have also provoked controversy by featuring girls as young as sixteen as topless models. Samantha Fox, Maria Whittaker, Debee Ashby, and many other Page Three girls began their topless modelling careers in The Sun at the age of sixteen, while the Daily Sport was even known to count down the days until it could feature a teenager topless on her sixteenth birthday, as it did with Linsey Dawn McKenzie in 1994 and Cherry Dee in 2003, among others. Although such photographs were legally permissible in the United Kingdom under the Protection of Children Act 1978, critics noted the irony of Murdoch’s Sun and News of the World newspapers calling for stricter laws on the sexual abuse of minors, including the public identification of released paedophiles, while publishing topless photographs of girls whom many other jurisdictions would legally classify as children. Controversy over these young models was resolved when the Sexual Offences Act 2003 extended legal prohibitions on indecent photography to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.”
September 22, 2008 at 12:49 am
“Ha ha! If you want to compare Jodie Foster to Saya Irie, that’s an uphill battle.”
This is one moment I feel the generational gap.My first hand experience of American society goes back to the first Reagan years.Back then Jodie was known as former Coppertone girl turns into lowteen-hooker in “Taxi Driver” and becoming the dream girl of John Hinckly Jr.
“Brooke Shields’s films and modelling may not have much in common with Saaya Irie’s career ”
Oh,No it does.Back in the 80′s Shields was known for”The Blue Lagoon” and Louis Malle’s “Pretty Baby”(1978)Brooke was a pre-teen prostitute in redlight district of New Orleans in that movie.Plus she was dating with Michael Jackson at the time.
These two and Irie Saaya has a lot in common.Stage mom willing to sacrifice her daughter’s sexual appeal at the very early age(in bikinis,ofcourse)and freaks fell in love with them.
September 22, 2008 at 9:30 am
Sorry, guvnor, for the “glamour modeling” confusion. We Yanks are a bit daft on UK vocab.
I would still argue that you are trying to compare apples and oranges here. Low teen idols in Japan are being sold in DISTINCT stores, in distinct areas of those stores. They are not appearing in major motion pictures as the star actress. They are not even acting. They are merely posing in skimpy clothing for the camera, packaged under the pretense of not being pornography, but then being sold to people as pornography, in the same magazines as pornography.
Maybe with this 17 year-old ZakZak girl, it’s close to Samantha Foxx. But I would argue that the development of the U-17 and U-13 markets is now making them have to sell the girls on the border as YOUNGER.
We can also talk about Japan’s obsession with the objective mathematical “scale” of female beauty. E-cup! F-cup! Sure there’s Double-D Nymphos elsewhere, but every Japanese female celebrity has her “three-sizes” on wikipedia pages. Does that exist in other countries for major actresses?
September 22, 2008 at 9:51 am
While I have sympathy for the POVs that Mulboyne and Aceface are putting forward, I feel that the Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver example is a bit off – surely that role is not so much exploitative as drawing critical attention to the exploitation of children.
September 22, 2008 at 10:12 am
It seems that we often end up discussing here how Japanese media A does not necessarily equal American media A (ie. investigative stuff being put in the weeklies). I`m not sure that Japanese porn and semi-porn can be compared to American equivalents at present. Print is still the main medium for porn in Japan and that has long ceased to be the place in Japan. Yes it sucks that nobody has been able to get rid of the shogakusei gymnastics crotch shot mags that pollute less discerning Japanese booksellers. When porn took off online in the USA, however, it is my understanding that there has been a boom in schoolgirl, cheerleader, etc. stuff and lets not forget that (young) J-porn also seems to be a booming genre in the USA.
I think that it is also worth pointing out that American porn also blazed a trail for some nasty painful stuff and there have been a load of lawsuits involving guys forcing nutzo porn fantasies on women (throat damage, etc.). It has its own problems and there has been surprisingly little public outrage, as in the Japanese case.
One final thing – There are Japanese womens groups that are anti-porn (mostly trying to keep it out of the hands of kids but also trying to keep kids out of it). A discussion is ongoing. I`m a bit more worried about the situation in the USA, actually. Yes, underage sexuality is a taboo and this keeps it off the newstands. This does tend to be pretty Christian right rooted, however, and the taboo also causes craziness like this -
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-17yearold-jailed-for-having-sex-with-a-15yearold-456256.html
A 17 year old jailed for 10 years for having consensual relations with a 15 year old. The worst craziness, however, has to be the denial of underage sexuality / focus on abstinence that has added to an American AIDS crisis (1 in 50 African American HIV positive, most major American cities have far more AIDS cases than Japan, a country of 125,000,000+). Japan has its problems, but denying that kids under 18 are going to be sexual is not one of them (11 year olds are another matter, of course). I`m afraid that the same American taboo that means less open presentation of under 18s as sexualized (good, in my opinion) has also been conductive to a bad situation in other ways.
September 22, 2008 at 10:14 am
“Print is still the main medium for porn in Japan and that has long ceased to be the place in Japan.”
Long ceased to be the case in AMERICA (of course).
September 23, 2008 at 11:46 pm
There is also the issue of whether it’s good for society to have adult men no longer finding adult women attractive. What’s wrong with a smart, active, professional woman?
Nothing wrong with it at all, but maybe these “mainstream men” see those women all day while readily enjoying their socially acceptable lust for them. Good for them. Maybe these photos are for a somewhat less acceptable–although certainly understandable, desire for a adolescent and youthful sexuality.
That is to say, not maybe, but uhhh…definitely.
September 23, 2008 at 11:55 pm
I mean, there’s certainly plenty of “porn” (whether it be soft, hard, or shit-splatteringly German) that features “smart, active, professional” women, or at least characters that represent them. Right?
Although maybe the point is that those ladies aren’t featured in these magazines as much–I don’t really know, are they?
September 24, 2008 at 9:07 am
While I share Maxy`s concern about the underage stuff, I`m not sure that it is so easy to go from that to a `Japanese men like younger and younger women` line of argument. I`m not really up on this, but from the shukanshi that I read, it seems like there is a prolific amount of hito-tsuma / mature stuff out there. Japanese men seem to be showing plenty of interest in older women / wives… maybe just not their own.
September 28, 2008 at 2:15 pm
>>I think “glamour beauty” (films, fashion shows, fashion spreads, something with at least the pretense of art) is pretty substantially different from gravia,
how then would studio voice, the art/creative bible , dedicate a whole issue to gravia (not the first one either) a few months ago ??
September 28, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Studio Voice is a commercial enterprise. Gravia sells.
October 1, 2008 at 4:20 am
how then does Eugene Atget , Wolfgang Tilmans or Walter Evans or Daido Moriyama get placed , if not intermixed then right next to gravia in 2nd hand (or new) bookshops