this has been on my mind a lot. I follow some lesbian meme shitposting groups and there's tons of memes that are just like "This girl looked at me and I died and then she smiled at me and I came back to life" and I just cannot think of any cishet men's spaces that bring that have that level of absolutely dorky dysfunctional love for women. And, like, cishet men, their whole thing is supposed to be being in to women, and that just strikes me as really weird that there's not an equivalent. Like the closest I can think of is wife guy memes but that's just one wife, usually.
Do any spaces like that exist? Is it even possible given the way gender works in society?
Okay, so - R Crumb and Frank Frazetta. Both horny as hell, drawing very stylized, sexualized women. Now, compare them to anime waifu art.
Crumb and Frank, I'm going to say, they see women that actually exist in the world. They draw women in a very stylized fashion, but they actually look like and art meant to be understood as real women.
And then you've got the anime waifu crowd; the waifus aren't representations of anything or anyone real. They're not stylized representations of women, they're like second order simulacra - anime women look like anime women and are only distantly representations of actually existing women.
Like, crumb? The women he draws have massive thights and unreasonably bouyant boobs and so forth, but I think that shows what Crumb sees when he looks at real people. Those are qualities that he sees in actual people and finds beautiful. The stylized exxageration is over-emphasizing something real. Crumb sees real women in the world and draws that.
Same think with Frank. His attention to anatomy and dynamic poses is excellent. He draws people in motion the way people actually move. That's someone who studied the human body in a very deliberate way and reproduces the human body with skill, creativity, and joy. Again, very stylized, hyperreal, but it's a representation of what Frank sees when he looks at real people.
But then the anime waifus, they don't look like people nor are they supposed to. They're not drawings of women, they're drawings of waifus.
I think that's kind of what i'm getting at somehow. Like so much of how cishet men talk about women, how they create women in online spaces, it's not really women, it's not people that really exist. It's these really abstracted simulacra that don't really reflect anything real.
It reminds me of that Miyazaki quote about how the people who make anime, unlike good artists, do not study the real world and real people, and are in fact disgusted and repulsed by real people.
You beat me to it by like 8 minutes
The actual translation of the quote from
that is memed as "anime was a mistake" was actually specifically about this problem, that the anime industry is by and large by otaku and for otaku now, so it's copy of a copy bleakness and pandering with less and less lived human experience involved in what is presented.