When I was younger, I watched several different kinds of Japanese Anime with my brothers. My brothers and I always spent time together at night and waited for dinner to be cooked. Since I have three younger brothers and there was only one television in our house, I had no right to decide what I really wanted to watch (usually movies), and it became a tradition in my family. Therefore, I got used to watch whatever they want, and the first anime popped in my mind was Dragon Ball. it was highly popular in my childhood; all the boys watched it at home and discussed it on the other day with classmate. And the story was actually from a series of Japanese Manga and was about different adventures of the protagonist, Goku experienced throughout his childhood to adulthood. As other animated films or cartoon, there were also several bad guys or monsters that the protagonist and other characters need to beat, however, the main characters (son and grandson and friends of Goku) were actually males. Maybe because of the Asian culture, females in the Dragon Ball were always the ones beloved and protected and waiting males to be back home. I think this is how Dragon Ball influenced me about how I value gender when I was younger that males are supposed to be strong and overcome everything and females are supposed to stay at home taking care of ev
erything.
The other interesting thing was, when I was in the elementary school, I found no difficulties discussing all the plots, figures and different cool styles or pattern of Gong Fu with classmate no matter girls and boys. We all enjoyed the anime a lot. After elementary school, I went to five-year-college directly and since it was a Language College, most of the students are female. There were only eights males students out of 45 in my class. On the first few weeks, students were active in building up relationship with each other and I found myself have difficulty chatting with “girls.” I know it may sounds ridiculous, but since I lived in the dorm when I studied junior high school and had got used to live without television, all the comics, novels, tv shows or cartoons I read and watched were all introduced by my three younger brothers. I even have never had a Barbie before! All I had were cars, robots and Lego. I realized at the age of 15 that there were actually something different about preference between males and females. That was the second time that I learned about gender from Dragon Ball.
Now I’m grown and I clearly know that it is totally okay for a girl to be fond of “boyish cartoons” instead of Sailor Moon (a Japanese cartoon which is also highly popular for girls.) and, I am really appreciate that I know several “boy’s” stuff so that I can also share same topic chatting with my male friends.
My cousin grew up with all brothers and ended up liking masculine cartoons as a kid too. I think that's pretty cool that you experienced both masculine and feminine cartoons, it must have given you some pretty different views of gender and sexuality as a kid.
ReplyDeleteI have never really seen Dragon Ball but it seems like a typical masculine cartoon. It sucks that you weren't able to watch what you wanted, but at least this gave you a good way to relate to the boys. Since watching boy cartoons, it must have been completely different in the gender and sexuality you eventually saw in the girl cartoons.
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