On the left, a depiction of "Super Girl" manga art, and on the right a picture of young cismale Nanami Igarashi wearing a black and white dress and makeup.
[Trigger Warning: transphobia, general asshattery]
Ugh, it’s a Friday night and instead of being out having fun I was reading the comment thread on an article on Kotaku. What is wrong with me? Today, Kotaku wrote a post about a Japanese bigender cismale manga artist who enjoys dressing up as female characters. The article, un-cleverly named “Dude Looks Like A Lady”, caused a whirlwind of transphobic comments. Of course.
How on earth is this video game news? ”Hey everyone, there is this Japanese manga artist who likes to wear women’s clothing as a hobby – isn’t that weird?” The article only briefly mentions his mother (a famous manga artist who drew Candy Candy), and doesn’t at all mention his skills as an artist.
Instead it focuses on his dressing in his girlfriends clothing and the ‘trend’ of Japanese men dressing up as women as a ‘hobby’. The comments? Well, let’s just say that this one sums up what you’ll find there:
“I’m not homophobic, as I happen to have a few homosexual friends, but I have to say I can’t really approve of these pictures. Guys looking like girls may look fun, but it seriously undermines gender identity.”
It’s as if the above commenter played transphobic bingo with just about every idiocy they could come up with.
As @theMirai said best on Twitter: “I swear Kotaku has an entire team of writers who know EXACTLY how to write that will incite hateful shit without being hateful themselves.”
Clarification: Igarashi is referred to as male here because he identifies as bigender and is fine with male pronouns.
Ye gods. That quote is so abysmally, Platonically -stupid- that I can’t help but cackle when I read it. It has to be a troll… doesn’t it? I mean, there’s no way that someone that ignorant could assemble such big words into such a… grammatically… coherent…
…sigh. Kotaku is a prime example of why I try to avoid reading unmoderated comments anywhere. CNN, Kotaku and Co., YouTube (!), Deviantart… the sheer number of deliberately ignorant or hateful people, who feel the need to shit in the punchbowl because they can, is disgusting and not worth my time to sift through for, er, nuggets of information.
In this case, given that the person in question really has nothing to do with video games, especially in the context of his clothing predilections, I’d say the people responsible for the article knew exactly what they were doing, and what to expect.
I cringed when I read that, yeah. Grr.
Kotaku do cover Japanese culture aspects occasionally, but I have noticed they seem to obsess over this small aspect of it quite a fair bit, probably potentially for lulzy reasons, which makes me feel a bit sick.
Speaking of Nanami Igarashi, is he a manga artist or does he just have a manga about him? All I can dig up is that he used to be a pop-idol with Johnny.
Honestly I stopped reading Kotaku a long time ago. I only wish that the the gaming would wouldn’t cite them as a reliable source of information and culture.
I’m used to Kotaku commenting on things it has absolutely nothing to do with, but it was so unbelievably neutral that my bullshit sensors finally placed my finger on why I hate Kotaku – they are that specific variety of Neutral Tone that I’m sure Jon Stewart would sprout a boner over. “We wanted to address this irrelevant issue about a person. We have said nothing good or bad about this…but we’re certain that the group our post has targeted will come up with all the hateful shit they possibly want and we will do nothing to stop it! But since we didn’t say it….we’re not hateful.”
Goddamn them and their refusal to stop hateful shit. If they like banning commenters so much why not target who deserves it?
I swear Kotaku has an entire team of writers who know EXACTLY how to write that will incite hateful shit without being hateful themselves.
Yes, exactly! This is so true. They just keep churning out fresh internet trollbait. That’s what gets the comments, hits, pageviews, whatever it takes to generate advertising dollars and ego stroking.
Maverynthia: Kotaku’s “authority” is a sad reality. They are popular, which means game companies actually return their calls. Thus, they get a lot of breaking news very quickly and frequently score inside information directly from companies, which makes them MORE popular. I loathe Kotaku and I avoid them as much as I can, but sometimes it’s the best place to grab news very quickly due to IGN and Gamespot being so disorganized, so I’ll give them that much credit.
But Kotaku is also guilty of publishing a lot of non-news, which only makes them even more of a joke. The piece featured here is a prime example; they also run schlock such as articles about the favorite games of female porn stars, how a certain game character resembles a certain hentai character, random rumors, pointless musings, and even the personal endeavors and daily exploits of grand poobah Brian Ashcraft, as if he is some sort of dazzling celebrity and everyone actually cares about what sort of coffee he had with his morning bagel or whatever.
I think I agree with everything Alethea said.
As for “cismale bigender,” “cis” isn’t a prefix used to modify “male”, but an adjective that would be short for cissexual or cisgender, although since Nanami Igarashi is bigender, I’d hesitate to use cis as a descriptor at all.
But if you have to, it really should be “cis male.”
(sorry, this is definitely a grammatical nitpick, and it’s kind of a peeve to see abbreviated adjectives – cisgender, cissexual, transgender, transsexual – be transformed arbitrarily into prefixes because the abbreviation looks like a prefix, you know?).
Why do people even still read Kotaku? From what I hear it’s nothing but nasty. The gaming news can easily be found elsewhere (even without citing Kotaku). So why bother to go there?
I’ve been wondering this for a while:
Is there a good gaming news site, which one can read without getting sexism etc slapped in the face?
Sorry if I’m missing the point somewhere, but isn’t writing an article on “Kotaku comments: still bigoted and horrific” pretty much equivalent to writing one on “Water: still wet!”
Oh irony: I just realised that I have effectively just written a classic Kotaku comment: “How Is This News??!!11″. *shoots self*
@j: Gamertell.com is probably your best bet, but I haven’t read them in a while, so they might have changed.
To the quoted Kotaku poster:
It undermines gender identity? No, it doesn’t. It only undermines your cookie cutter preferences for traditional sex roles. Get over it! You’re probably only afraid that you might accidentally fancy a guy for once. Ooooh, the horror! Cannot have faggotry threaten your uber-masculine hetereosexuality.
I think what that commenter meant to say was “This person looks like an attractive woman, and I am attracted to women, and I am completely terrified of the idea of accidentally being attracted to a man.”
::joins in the collective facepalm::
To say nothing of the “hey guys, look at them Japanese, they’re so WACKY! Orientalism, hoooooo!” attitude of pieces like this, which I have become increasingly suspicious and disdainful of.
It’s definitely transphobia writ large, and that element is a bit part of Kotaku’s commenting base. When I wrote there, publishing one of my Border House articles as a crosspost there it did bring out some of Kotaku’s better instincts but also a big steaming pile of precisely what’s on display here which is the same privileged ignorance one finds elsewhere.
“Dude Looks Like a Lady”?
Website Looks Like a Sham.
Frankly, I don’t think the problem is Kotaku’s commentariat specifically; from years of growing up around white guys who love video games, I think heterosexual white male cisgender privilege is pervasive among that demographic as a whole. I know that I, personally, took a long time to realize my own privilege and begin to confront it.
Also, a little nitpick, and I’m not trying to be confrontational, but is it really appropriate to include a trigger warning for “general asshattery”? I do think it’s important to recognize the potential ubiquity of trauma, and its diverse causes. Nevertheless, it reads like “trigger warning for being annoying” to me, which feels to me like a small disservice to the severity of trauma suffered by survivors of sexual assault or hate violence.
I know Gabe was being intentionally inflammatory when he prefaced a post with “trigger warning for dungeons and dragons” or whatever, but I think it’s important to recall that triggering is something specific and extremely severe.
And this is why I try not to read the Kotaku comment section; the articles are sometimes OK, when they’re only being informative about game news, and even then I don’t really read it all that much.
And that comment” Gah, I’m going to dunk my head in bleach and see if that gets it out
@Jimmy I think the “general asshattery” trigger is for covering all of rape, trauma, violence, death threats, and other behavior that is usually wrapped up in one Kotaku comment all in one trigger. Then again maybe it should be: Trigger Warning: Kotaku and leave it at that considering every comment usually had one or two triggers in it.
Kotaku does seem to have moderation of a sort. If something is particularly hateful it seems to get promoted to their top tier of comments. They request that comments be interesting. Apparently this means anything sexist, misogynistic, racist and downright mean.
I think the quality of Kotaku is summed up by a quote from their comments FAQ. “We only approve the comments we love.”
Well, what they seem to love makes me feel ill.
The article is indeed wrong on so many levels
Firstly the article should not be about gender at all, more about sex roles. The artist does not at anytime that i know off proclaim to be or want to be the opposite sex thus the bigender/cisgender argument is moot since he would still proclaim to be male.Dressing as he is would be described pathologically as a fetish but is really more just an expression of self and since publicised by himself a political statement.
This is where much of the homophobic backlash is generated, from a male dressing in clothes that are not typically masculine and breaking prescribed sex roles. In a way i feel sorry for our male counterparts the female role has dramatically changed over the past decade to allow much more expression (although i am not saying there is no room for improvement) the male role however has changed very little and remains far more constrictive, often violently so.
It is really interesting however that male cross dressing is one of the most prevalent fetishes in many cultures and a large number of the people who are spouting this homophobic nonsense have most probably at one time or another tried on their girlfriend/wife’s underwear or another article of female clothing.
alittle factoid about japan.. crossdressing is the second most prevalent fetish
and number 1.. frotteurism. Two extremes of sex roles