The Vapors of Addiction: An Asian Fetishist Speaks
The first time I saw Kill Bill I could not take my eyes off Gogo Yubari. If Gwen Stefani is on MTV, I am transfixed by her punky Asian backing dancers. That book, Fruits, that celebrates the cartoonish gothic Lolita look? I can’t get enough of it!
I am obsessed with Japanese women. It’s their clothes, their hair, their petite bodies–everything about them. Their “fuck you” attitude, which somehow comes out as “fuck me.”
There’s also the element of exoticism; I don’t understand a word of the language or the cultural nuance. It’s completely other, so far away from the mundane.
The idea of ritual is also a big pull. I am fascinated by rituals, by the martial artist focused completely on his or her training, or the geisha dancing perfectly with the weight of the world in her eyes.
What a cliché it sounds: the Japanese woman, the stereotypical sexy schoolgirl, the most obvious fetish object there is. But hear me out! I’m not a sleazy old man in a suit; I’m a heterosexual woman in my twenties.
The strangest thing is that I do not actually fantasize about having sex with these women. I just want to look at them. I want to watch their every move, to study their clothes, their makeup–certainly to see them naked, maybe even see them having sex, but there is no part in it for me. I am just observing. The images themselves are the fantasy, the fetish if you will. A fetish differs from a simple turn-on by virtue of the fact that it is often its own end; it is not always precursor to sex.
The Japanese version of beauty–tiny bodies, usually long black hair, slim, youthful–holds a particular prickly appeal. While I could (and do) look and look, it is not pure pleasure I’m feeling. I am so much bigger, older looking, and viewing these images rubs salt in my own insecurities. A form of masochism, perhaps, that my viewing pleasure is piqued by the humiliation of being made to feel comparatively unattractive.
It doesn’t sit very well with me, being so attracted to these oft exploited male gaze icons. The archetypal representations of Japanese women and girls are born of pure misogyny. The tentacle rape hentai cartoons, the manga characters that appear in a state of orgasm at the moment of death or violent assault, the shrinking women, the underage Lolitas… I bristle at these images, as do a lot of women, and I think it is this bittersweetness, this wrongness, that makes the fascination even more compelling. These are fantasy representations of the elements of male sexuality that I hate the most, that anger and sicken me, and yet here I am, lapping them up.
