Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Eighteen: Platonic Sex
In many respectd, Chobits repeats the heterosexual asymmetry of desire outlined in Saitô. The logic goes something like this: if men organize their desire and their position in the world around a woman-object, then any woman-object is acceptable. Each guy just has to figure out what woman-object will be his thing. Hideki finds his comfort zone somewhere between pornographic images of women and biological women. He finds it in Chii who is at once both of these things and neither.
Similarly, if women organize their desire by immersing themselves in the object and becoming the object that the man desires, then the woman just has to figure out what kind of object she can be and make sure she finds the guy who wants that kind of thing. Chii finds that she can be the object that Hideki wants.
This is how Chii and Hideki find love, and the fact that they cannot simulate the ‘genital’ sex of biological humans doesn’t matter. That sort of sex now appears to be just another kind of exchange of illusions, another simulation, no more or less satisfying or correct. Love and sexuality aren’t about reproduction or procreation anyway.
Nonetheless, insofar as there remains the asymmetry between man and mecha, there seem to be built-in limits to how far this ‘artificiality’ or ‘denaturalization’ can go in this context. First, in Chobits, there is a general emphasis on men with female computers. We detect other possibilities in street scenes but the series directs our attention to boy meets gynoid. Second, we can find echoes of a range of object choices in Chii: because she has portals like cat ears and acts like a child, we can find echoes of bestiality and pedophilia. But these echoes are very muted. Likewise, homosexuality is imaginable but is not really depicted. Third, there is a general fascination with feminine trappings: clothing, hair, and accessories.
Such limits and interests suggest that Chobits is addressing and challenging a fairly specific regime of sexuality. Its denaturalization of sexuality proceeds along specific lines. It is twisting the logic of ‘the girl who is not one’ in specific ways. Rather moving beyond heterosexuality, Chobits seems intent on exposing its mechanisms. Enjoyment lies in exposing and knowing the mechanisms of heterosexuality rather than in denying or destroying them. That’s what makes Platonic sex so satisfying. That’s why it feels cleaner, truer, prettier, and more perfectable than whatever it is that two humans might ‘naturally’ do.
There is a popular manga series by Watase Yû called Absolute Love (Zettai kareshi, 2003-2005), which was made into a live action TV drama. In this manga, the human girl lives with a sexy boy robot. In other words, there is a reversal of the usual man-mecha sexual interface, potentially giving us girl-mecha sexual interface. The question then is: is man now the sex that is not one? And if so, are we now all girls? Another question quickly follows, that of why and whether the heterosexual matrix is needed to transform everyone into girls. And to what extent is such subversion a genuine transformation of values?
