Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
It sometimes surprises me how willing Japanese media stars are willing to go on TV with no shirt on. I am not talking just about comedians, but major rock stars...and they have (to an American's eyes) much less muscle tone than I would expect...yet they are considered to be very sexy by their female fans.
This made me realize that to a Japanese fan's eyes, big muscles is not a necessarily positive feature, and a skinny physique is not necessarily a negative one, as it might be in the US and other places.
This is more than the emo whatnot...I don't see guys in emo bands in the US and Europe taking their shirts off...
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That's interesting, and I think you have a point there. There's definite positives given to physical traits like height, shoulder width and good skin, but there's less of a positive attribution given in being built like a brick privvy. I imagine a guy built like the standard Prop Forward gets a number of "すごい！”'s and "こわい！”'s and less "かっこいい！”'s. Even looking at media stereotyping, big built guys in Japan are usually portrayed as thugs, or gentle hearted yet scary-faced giants.
I wish I still had the survey data (my laptop literally burnt out last year and wiped both it and the report. Effing DELL. ;__; ) but as part of the study on male japanese stereotypes I took an hour's trip on a train starting at midday, both saturday and sunday and counted the number of men with their children but NOT accompanied by a woman. I got a colleague to do the same thing across London during the same week and there were significantly more Japanese men alone with their children than British men in that instance. Ok, it's not bullet-proof data, but I thought it was pretty interesting that there's a bunch of men who live along the Keihan Line at least who pretty much foul up the "japanese men aren't family men" idea. I tied this back in with the idea that in the past family role (the pillar thing) defined masculinity, and that it hasn't entirely died out in today's society, but make of it what you will.