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From inside the Feminist Nexus - and I speak here from personal experience - even worse than the unironic femininity of anime girls is that they enjoy it, and the shows around them clearly state that this is the norm. It's not just that one of the girls is more sensitive and gentle and people-oriented and physically weak than her male counterparts, but all of them! Even the warrior girls have their feminine sides, where they go "[protagonist name]!" and cling to the guy. And everyone around them expects this! That's what the author, the medium, the whole culture surrounding the medium, believes about women, how they believe women should be. Anime is a form of art that is not only bigoted, but pushes its opinions through the mouths of the groups it's bigoted against.
Once the detector trips, everything else confirms it. The short skirts and large breasts, the useless female characters, the perverted old masters, the Class S stories, the relative popularity of shonen and shoujo manga, the relative popularity of M/M and M/F ships on Archive Of Our Own. So you retreat to a Certified Feminist anime, or you fight over the ones that were feminist enough that you got invested before they betrayed you. This is why Revolutionary Girl Utena and Madoka Magica have a certain valance now, and why all internet discussion of Oniisama e... is about how the story is gross for not going the way the watcher needed it to go so she could uncritically enjoy it.
Many, many years ago, I watched Macross: Do You Remember Love? And it took my brain apart and put it back together, because I had been raised to basically be a male chauvinist by way of feminism. You mean I'm supposed to enjoy and celebrate that there are differences between men and women? You mean a woman crying for a reason she can't explain can be a symbol of maturity? You mean I'm supposed to treat women differently than men not just because I'm romantically interested in them but also simply because of their sex? What's next, all the men are fighter pilots and all the girls love a song titled "My Boyfriend Is A Pilot"? "Feminine" was not something a man was allowed to like about women, in a way that actually implied anything about them.
I would be willing to bet my left nut that 90%+ of M/M ships are written by women
I would bet your left nut on that too.
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They are. Yaoi and the writen forms are the domain of women for some reason. What's hotter than a naked guy? Two guys at the same time I guess.
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The feminists were right. Of course a woman crying at the drop of a pin is immature; the ubiquity of such behavior is a mark against women as a class. The descriptor of "feminine" implies lameness: feminine professions are low-status, feminine interests are shallow, feminine virtues are ancillary. There is value in sweetness and sensitivity, yes, but the whole is undoubtedly lesser than. The feminists were wrong to think that femininity is societally induced, but there is no shame in lamenting one's lot.
Personally, I am unconvinced that the agreeable parts of femininity must be so tightly intertwined with the lame parts. Do you think otherwise?
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