No! Look Over THERE!

And now for more fun adventures with Dolls and So Forth Week at GRC, which I really might just have well called ‘Look! No One Wears Pants.’
An argument often leveled at anyone who protests against the sexual objectification that finds expression in statues where women don’t wear pants for no good reason whatsoever, whereas their male counterparts are fully-panted, is: ‘Whatever! So she’s presenting at the viewer! You know what’s really bad? Figures in JAPAN!’
In JAPAN the breasts thrust outward at more perilous angles, the legs bend ever so more coltishly, the expression conveys either hapless shame or a desire to be instantaneously mounted, and of course, the pantlessness is even more pronounced! Why are you wasting all your precious and finite caring on AMERICAN figures you cultural imperialist when in JAPAN everything is so much worse?
Having visited the Action Figure Museum in Nagahama, I can say that there is some truth to the assertion that some Japanese action figures display truly revolting levels of casual misogyny. I wasn’t in there for ten minutes before I developed the urge to fold my arms over my chest and hunch past the viewers enthusiastically gazing at the tiny facsimiles of enormous-breasted fourteen-year-old girls in tiny scraps of black leather.
Of course, not every Japanese figure is like that something the ‘but-it’s-worse-in-JAPAN’ commentator sometimes appears to conveniently forget any more than every American figure is like the infamous Mary Jane comiquette. There were plenty of female figures that were cute, or tough, or sexy without being objectified in Nagahama; but the collected effect of so many pointed nipples and so much lovingly detailed cameltoe made my stomach roil.
So I’m willing to concede that in Japan, things might be worse. What I fail to see is why that should have any effect on my criticism of American figures. The possibly greater vileness of Japanese figures doesn’t mean I’m obliged to give comparatively -less-digusting-but-still-gross American ones a pass. Gosh, I’m not even American, and I write this whole darn column about American comics every week.
I am perfectly willing and able to criticize the cultural products of any nation whenever I find those products endorsing degrading sexual objectification of the female body.
And I see it way too fucking often.