Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Eighteen: Platonic Sex
If sex doesn’t exist in some natural way, if, as Saitô says, ‘love is nothing more than an exchange of illusions’ (233), then the basic structural tendencies presented in psychoanalytic theory may well be experienced and lived out within daily life in the form of Platonic sex.
What is Platonic sex?
The crude answer is masturbatory soft-porn paradise.
The deeper answer goes something like this: if you accept the psychoanalytic challenge that there is no natural sex, then forms of sexuality identified as ‘artificial’ (such as pornography) might appear equally acceptable. For instance, for heterosexual men, an image of a woman becomes as acceptable as a ‘real’ woman. In other words, love and sexuality don’t need natural or ‘biological’ sexuality that is usually associated with genital sex between a man and a woman, with allegedly natural, that is, procreative and reproductive ends. Such is the world of Chobits: it assures us that love (and sex) with humanoid personal computers is entirely acceptable, as acceptable as love and sex between humans.
It takes Motosuwa Hideki an almost year living with Chii to figure this out. He’s in love with Chii and is willing to spend his life with her, even if he cannot have sex with her, at least not in the usual way. This solution seems like Platonic love, in the popular understanding of Platonic love: love that is not consummated physically, love that remains spiritual or intellectual. But, in Chobits, sexuality is everywhere. You probably noticed all the references to porn magazines, and you probably noticed that Chii is entirely willing to model herself after those images and to buy those magazines for him. In other words, in Chobits, the absence of (genital) sex doesn’t mean that nothing sexual is happening. On the contrary, Chobits insists on sexuality, but not in the usual sense.
In other words, Chobits isn’t simply telling us that love and sexuality are still possible in the age of humanoid computers. It is telling us that that love and sexuality are, in essence, mechanical not natural. Women are not just like mecha, they are mecha, and sexuality is not simply analogous to an affair between man and mecha, sexuality is a man-mecha interface.
But a question remains: what does it mean to put the young man in the natural position, and associate the young woman with mecha?
