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Yeah, "accidentally" put in there by the creators. That's the point; it's about as unironic as the porn clichés of "oops, my hot neighbour came out of the shower in only a towel and somehow got locked out of her apartment".
Why is there a groping scene in the show? For the male viewers to get their thrills. Which is fine, that's what these shows are about, but expecting women to watch it and go "nope, nothing to see here" is a bit much. I don't know if guys would be "this is unironic and accidental" about shows where the trope is that the hot male lead constantly ends up in nothing but a towel with some groping by the second male lead, but it's the distaff parallel (it would seem for cdramas the trope is "hot male lead in bath tub, some very light BDSM choking ensues"). This is unabashedly for the female gaze.
I said something similar last thread, but here goes again: Eva is in part a parody / deconstruction / reconstruction / modification / discussion of such cliches. The protagonist is an ordinary 14 year old who is suddenly asked to pilot a giant robot, and it's entirely unpleasant and terrifying. He's constantly around this extremely submissive girl who dresses in skintight latex, and then she walks out of the shower and he grabs her boob by accident like he's in a harem show, except it's awkward and disgusting and nothing comes of it, and then the girl dies and is replaced by her clone, which is part of a system of flesh puppets that a madman is using to melt the entire planet into a hive mind. Then a sexy assertive foreign girl shows up and constantly comes on to the main character, except he's too scared to respond and she's actually quite unpleasant to him and just acting out due to her psychological problems. There's also a hot irresponsible older lady who is a chronic alcoholic who hates herself and doesn't know how to interact with other people except through sex. And a hot scientist who is sleeping with the same man her dead mother used to in order to feel any kind of connection to another human being.
If you wanted an example of fanservice for its own sake, it would be hard to find a worse one than Evangelion. I could probably advance the argument that every single piece of fanservice in the show is both diagetic and serves some greater narrative purpose. Even if that's just "hey, remember what it was like to be a teenager?"
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Men are not, generally speaking, complaining about the hot guys being shirtless a lot in popular movies and TV shows.
In general, it has been long Noticed that the stereotypical male reaction to a male physique in popular media superior to his own is to use it as inspo to Git Gud, whereas the stereotypical female reaction to a female physique in popular media superior to her own is to perceive it as a threat to her Wonderfulness.
All the while a hot male physique is much more difficult to achieve than a hot female physique.
To be fair, a hot male physique* is generally thought to imply physical prowess, and something you can work on by improving your physical prowess.
So Git Gud is both possible and instrumentally useful beyond hotness, but a woman who is already in a healthy weight range can do much less, and it's unclear what purpose it would serve beyond attracting men.
The optimal physique for impressing other men (gay or straight - mutual admiration among male bodybuilders who get that far is pretty homoerotic) is more muscled than the optimal physique for attracting women, which is more muscled than the physique you get if you optimise for balanced athleticism*. Men in actually elite military units are a lot fitter than you or I, but they aren't obviously jacked, and they would be if it made them more combat-effective.
* Obviously there are some areas of strength-focussed sport, notoriously including baseball hitting, where being jacked and roided is optimal for performance if there is no drug testing regime in place.
I don't know; the Royal Marines look pretty good to me.
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If only there was some popular story that served to make this common knowledge.
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Indeed
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I'd wager that there was almost no-one who found that scene titillating, given the dreary room, the blood, Rei's expression, Shinji's awkwardness, the utter destitution of every element and tone. Eroticism in art has its place, and this was a good use of it, given the youthful ignorance of the characters. And frankly, some writers are just more attuned to those kinds of things that others.
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Okay, but... why?
Put it this way: you're entitled to dislike fan service. You're entitled to disdain the male gaze. You're entitled to not be interested in shows that exist to please men.
But you are arguing two contradictory things:
Like, if you genuinely believe that it's "fine" for some shows to featuring boobs and butts and groping and fan service, why is it "too much" to expect a woman to watch it without going off?
Now, if she was compelled/tricked/reluctantly dragged into watching it, or had no idea what sort of show it was and was enjoying it until the sudden fan service, okay, I can see some hard eye rolls, but I'm going to be honest, I don't think you (or most women) are "fine" with shows like that. You just sort of grudgingly tolerate their existence.
(FWIW, I have never seen Berserk and am not much into anime nowadays. Just sayin', as much as I dislike the seething hatred that sweats out of some of our He-Man Wimmin-Haters, they aren't completely wrong that a lot of media just gets outright snipped for the horrific crime of... being appealing to men.)
Okay, further explanation has demonstrated that that particular scene wasn't just about titillation. But it's the Battle Lingerie trope that is responsible for the eye-rolling. Some games etc. do put it in For The Guyz. And okay, we have to accept that. But it's not realistic, and it's not there for any reason other than "male sexuality is really easy to unlock, just boobs'n'butts". (The zeppelin boobs and impossibly chunky thighs are the turn off for women watching).
God bless Torchlight, lo these many years past now, where I played as a female character (can't remember if it was engineer or what) and mine eyes did widen and gaze aghast as I got a better piece of gear that was less coverage for my character. I remember swapping the gear on and off, and yep the stats for armour etc. got better and yep the battlekini got skimpier.
The corresponding male character was covered from goggles to bootsoles, so it was even sillier. So if I wanted to play the game, I played as a male character because yes, I know it's fantasy vidya games but there are some absurdities that just break immersion.
I'm not going to complain about guys liking the female characters in games to be zeppelin boobs running around the battlefield in high heels, but I'm also not going to pretend it's not what it is. Though let's hear it for gender-equitable armour!
I'd argue that if a female character has comically big boobs and/or a comically skimpy outfit then it's done for the comic effect.
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Maybe this is generalizing, but I suspect that the vast majority of women in committed relationships are turned off by their men showing sexual interest in other women.
But I doubt it explains the phenomenon I suspect is observable here, which I think is relatively recent.
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Disagree; dread game is a PUA staple.
That doesn't mean a woman likes it. A thing might make a woman behave temporarily in a way you like but that does not mean that she is content and happy, nor does she like the thing that triggered the change.
Or is everyone interpreting "turned off" as literal sexual arousal and not the general "I hate this and want to turn my head from this, not look at it, feel disgusted by this" way?
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Offended and insulted, rather than necessarily turned off.
Turned off by their men showing sexual interest in other women in a low-status way, definitely. And slow-mo replay of the shower scene in an anime is as low-status as it gets.
But slow-mo replay of shower scenes in kdramas are a-okay! A man being offended by his girlfriend ogling at another dude's abs is also low-status, apparently. I'll reiterate @Botond173 that goonerbait targeting the female gaze is freely celebrated, and the expectation that men should "suffer" through it to make their girlfriends happy seems to be norm in many, many relationships. At least, in the west.
And also in South Korea presumably.
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I'm guessing the intent was to inject light humor into an otherwise heavy scene that depicts the reality of depression.
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Nah, he’s right about this specific example. The “groping” is part of a claustrophobic, unsettling segment where the protagonist finds his crush/teammate/mother figure living in a genuinely disgusting apartment. You’re supposed to ask what kind of human would live like this.
There’s plenty of shameless fanservice in the show, but this ain’t it.
Yeah, Evangelion is in part a story about the horrible inner experience of male teenage sexuality - it's unsurprising that a woman viewing it either wouldn't notice it at all and just see fanservice, or be disgusted enough to just look away and not think about it.
I suspect a show with an equivalent treatment of female sexuality would disgust most men, probably far more so given that they don't have "ugh, men" as an easily available response. Which makes me wonder, now that I think about it, because I can't think of a work like that (to be fair, my reading list is pretty male and not very teenage). If we were to do a 2x2, where you have Evangelion as male/negative and, say, Twilight as female/positive, what's the female/negative?
My wife is always showing me young adult fantasy books for women, ones that she loves because she grew up reading them. I'm like, for God's sake, why does every one of these books have to feature the protagonist getting her period? Almost no books about male protagonists feature them ejaculating for the first time.
It doesn't disgust me though, but I'm more irritated by the fact that women are so obsessed with their periods.
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Wait, what’s the male/positive fantasy? Cause I think Eva is completely distinct from Twilight in ways which don’t fit on either of those axes.
Someone has definitely written grim, psychosexual coming-of-age stories for teen girls, but I’m not really sure what. Gone Girl and Lovely Bones are pretty different. Carrie? Any one of the interchangeable angsty pregnancy dramas? There’s got to be some shoujo out there which fits the bill.
Dear Brother, which was, interestingly, a significant influence on Evangelion.
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Honestly don't have an obvious candidate to mind, it's not the sort of fiction/movies I go for. The South African novel series Spud would be a good example, though it's aimed at kids of that age and very much not high art - Spud suffers through all the angst and pimples, but he ends up in a loving relationship and on course to as normal a life as one can live in SA. Generally the sort of people who do more artsy things tend to be older, and more focused on the negative, or at least the aporeic aspects of the psyche.
Stephen King is one of the absolute last people I'd go to for an accurate portrayal of that kind of interiority. I think insofar as a man can write this, the obvious go-to is Twin Peaks - except that Laura Palmer has to be this cipher, that we only learn about from others, precisely because Lynch can't be in that part of her head (note the extremely strong parallels between the EoE hospital scene and the scene of Laura putting on her stockings in FWWM, both beating you around the head with "I KNOW YOU'RE TURNED ON BY THIS CHARACTER AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT IT").
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True crime?
Not really "about the horrible inner experience of [female] teenage sexuality", except, uh, maybe some true crime narratives I'd prefer not to read. Given the general higher cultural discomfort involved (as I typed that sentence with male/female I half-expected some jackass will call me a creep just for that), I'm guessing not a show, but a book by a woman author, maybe an Anna Kavan type. Maybe an arthouse film.
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