A New Type of Guy Just Dropped
Jan. 25th, 2023 08:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingYesterday evening I experienced a brief bout of harassment on Twitter. Maybe this might be interesting to talk about, so I'm including a few screenshots with commentary under the cut.
.
I know that there are legit "Japanese nationalists" on Twitter. Like any alt-right ultranationalist group, they are unpleasant. The best way to handle people like this is to block and report them (and then delete the emails Twitter sends you saying that they found no abuse on their accounts). An academic acquaintance specializing in Art History recently spent a year of her life being hardcore harassed by them; and, as far as I know, her engagement achieved nothing. Twitter is just like that, what can you do.
So now there's a new type of account: "Japanese nationalists" who fight to defend their inalienable right to enjoy boobs in anime.
I don't want to explain the symbolism here, but it's not great. To summarize, people who call themselves "Japanese nationalists" are heavily invested in World War II revisionist history. In the story they want to tell, Japan was a poor sad victim of the evil Americans, and the colonization and genocide Japanese military forces enacted in Asia and across the Pacific definitely did not happen. I think it's fair to compare "Japanese nationalists" to Holocaust deniers, with the caveat that what the Japanese military did in China alone makes the deaths of six million people in European concentration camps seem like a drop in the ocean.
To be fair, there are a lot of American historians in particular who are ultranationalistic themselves and see the Pacific War as nothing more than "those sneaky Japs bombed us, so we nuked them." I fucking hate people like this, true story. It's actually because I had so many openly racist teachers and professors that I decided to become an academic in the first place, to try to push back against that sort of narrative. For all the good that did, but I digress.
Anyway, what Japanese nationalists on Twitter like to do is target female academics and historians and basically say, "You, as a white woman, are behaving like a cultural colonist by making a career out of studying Japan."
Regardless of how valid this conversation might be if it were made in good faith, it's basically the same bullshit that's been going on since 2017, in which progressives are baited into arguments by identity politics weaponized by trolls. In the case of these "anime nationalists," it's just people trying to call out what they see as a "woke agenda."
And honestly? I totally get that. There are a bunch of North American "anime feminists" who I cannot tolerate precisely because they do in fact attempt to enforce their own political agenda onto a foreign culture. They do this without any ability to speak or read Japanese or any interest in listening to what actual Japanese people have to say, and I refuse to have anything to do with them.
But again, regardless of how valid this conversation about "cultural tourism" might be if made in good faith, it's just flame bait by trolls who want to keep "wokeness" out of popular media.
So they post this...
...and then also this:
So these people aren't against "white colonization" or "cultural tourism," per se; they're just alt-right holdovers who need to go outside and get some sunlight.
Of course, Twitter being Twitter, I can't delete the comments they've made on the original tweet from June 2020, nor is it possible to convince anyone moderating Twitter that targeting aspects of my identity in an attempt to encourage a dogpile of negative and dehumanizing comments is "harassment." You would think no one would pay attention to weird creeps like this - and I don't take them too seriously myself - but the unfortunate truth is that their identity politics psy-op works. I'm afraid that people on my side of the cultural divide, like the LGBTQ+ community and advocates for racial justice, will see these charges of "white colonization" and take them seriously.
To be super grim, I suspect it's not a coincidence that this bout of harassment occurred immediately after the shooting in Los Angeles. Even if you're sympathetic to the position that "white" people shouldn't study or write about East Asian cultures, you have to agree that using that sort of tragedy as a springboard to attack someone over a book about manga is fucking ghoulish.
The wild thing is that I actually fundamentally agree with "anime nationalists." Like, I love anime boobs. I don't think the weird shit in anime should be censored. I think self-identified online feminists who go out of their way to point out "problematic" elements in Japanese media need to touch grass. In principle, I don't think Japan should feel compelled to uphold a constitution written by an occupying military power, and I don't think the United States has any right to dictate Japan's foreign policy. And, to be honest, I think women (and men!) of every race and nationality can and should have sex with Asian men.
The super wild thing is that I'm agreeing with a lot of these positions in the book itself, in which I try to argue that a lot of North American scholars of anime and manga were trying so hard to apply a second-wave feminist perspective to Japanese media that they ended up saying truly absurd nonsense, like that "Sailor Moon is pornography" and "Hayao Miyazaki is a pedophile."
But, in the end, you can't have a conversation with people like this, especially not over Twitter. The only thing to do is block and report them and hope they get bored and move on.
For what it's worth, I never wanted to write or publish that stupid book in the first place. It's been literally nothing but trouble, and I knew that's how it would be going into it. The only reason I went through with publication is because I was bullied by people at the university where I was working at the time, and we all know how that turned out. If I could go back in time and unpublish the book, I would do it in a second. If I never write about gender again, it will still be too soon.
.
I know that there are legit "Japanese nationalists" on Twitter. Like any alt-right ultranationalist group, they are unpleasant. The best way to handle people like this is to block and report them (and then delete the emails Twitter sends you saying that they found no abuse on their accounts). An academic acquaintance specializing in Art History recently spent a year of her life being hardcore harassed by them; and, as far as I know, her engagement achieved nothing. Twitter is just like that, what can you do.
So now there's a new type of account: "Japanese nationalists" who fight to defend their inalienable right to enjoy boobs in anime.
I don't want to explain the symbolism here, but it's not great. To summarize, people who call themselves "Japanese nationalists" are heavily invested in World War II revisionist history. In the story they want to tell, Japan was a poor sad victim of the evil Americans, and the colonization and genocide Japanese military forces enacted in Asia and across the Pacific definitely did not happen. I think it's fair to compare "Japanese nationalists" to Holocaust deniers, with the caveat that what the Japanese military did in China alone makes the deaths of six million people in European concentration camps seem like a drop in the ocean.
To be fair, there are a lot of American historians in particular who are ultranationalistic themselves and see the Pacific War as nothing more than "those sneaky Japs bombed us, so we nuked them." I fucking hate people like this, true story. It's actually because I had so many openly racist teachers and professors that I decided to become an academic in the first place, to try to push back against that sort of narrative. For all the good that did, but I digress.
Anyway, what Japanese nationalists on Twitter like to do is target female academics and historians and basically say, "You, as a white woman, are behaving like a cultural colonist by making a career out of studying Japan."
Regardless of how valid this conversation might be if it were made in good faith, it's basically the same bullshit that's been going on since 2017, in which progressives are baited into arguments by identity politics weaponized by trolls. In the case of these "anime nationalists," it's just people trying to call out what they see as a "woke agenda."
And honestly? I totally get that. There are a bunch of North American "anime feminists" who I cannot tolerate precisely because they do in fact attempt to enforce their own political agenda onto a foreign culture. They do this without any ability to speak or read Japanese or any interest in listening to what actual Japanese people have to say, and I refuse to have anything to do with them.
But again, regardless of how valid this conversation about "cultural tourism" might be if made in good faith, it's just flame bait by trolls who want to keep "wokeness" out of popular media.
So they post this...
...and then also this:
So these people aren't against "white colonization" or "cultural tourism," per se; they're just alt-right holdovers who need to go outside and get some sunlight.
Of course, Twitter being Twitter, I can't delete the comments they've made on the original tweet from June 2020, nor is it possible to convince anyone moderating Twitter that targeting aspects of my identity in an attempt to encourage a dogpile of negative and dehumanizing comments is "harassment." You would think no one would pay attention to weird creeps like this - and I don't take them too seriously myself - but the unfortunate truth is that their identity politics psy-op works. I'm afraid that people on my side of the cultural divide, like the LGBTQ+ community and advocates for racial justice, will see these charges of "white colonization" and take them seriously.
To be super grim, I suspect it's not a coincidence that this bout of harassment occurred immediately after the shooting in Los Angeles. Even if you're sympathetic to the position that "white" people shouldn't study or write about East Asian cultures, you have to agree that using that sort of tragedy as a springboard to attack someone over a book about manga is fucking ghoulish.
The wild thing is that I actually fundamentally agree with "anime nationalists." Like, I love anime boobs. I don't think the weird shit in anime should be censored. I think self-identified online feminists who go out of their way to point out "problematic" elements in Japanese media need to touch grass. In principle, I don't think Japan should feel compelled to uphold a constitution written by an occupying military power, and I don't think the United States has any right to dictate Japan's foreign policy. And, to be honest, I think women (and men!) of every race and nationality can and should have sex with Asian men.
The super wild thing is that I'm agreeing with a lot of these positions in the book itself, in which I try to argue that a lot of North American scholars of anime and manga were trying so hard to apply a second-wave feminist perspective to Japanese media that they ended up saying truly absurd nonsense, like that "Sailor Moon is pornography" and "Hayao Miyazaki is a pedophile."
But, in the end, you can't have a conversation with people like this, especially not over Twitter. The only thing to do is block and report them and hope they get bored and move on.
For what it's worth, I never wanted to write or publish that stupid book in the first place. It's been literally nothing but trouble, and I knew that's how it would be going into it. The only reason I went through with publication is because I was bullied by people at the university where I was working at the time, and we all know how that turned out. If I could go back in time and unpublish the book, I would do it in a second. If I never write about gender again, it will still be too soon.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-27 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-28 12:44 am (UTC)Still... It sure would be nice if Twitter would let you delete unwanted comments on your tweets. Also, I think that one of the things Tumblr does right is to allow you to 100% block a person so that all of their activity surrounding your content is deleted. I get the whole "free speech" thing, but also, you know. Facilitating harassment only tends to grant free speech to a certain type of person.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-31 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-31 02:05 pm (UTC)On one hand, I'm more amused than upset... but on the other hand, it's still upsetting! Your support and sympathy means a lot to me. Thank you!