Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Twenty: The Spiral Dance of Symptom and Specter
Once ‘watching it’ and ‘doing it’ are equated, the relation of subject and object has changed. It is no longer a matter of the voyeur (subject) watching sex acts (objects). It is a matter of men (subject) watching what is being done to women (objects). And so the voyeur hands the optical device to Ko and challenges him to take a look at what is being done in the parked cars all around them. Ko accepts, and pages 23, 24, and 25, show how he sees what is happening. He fixes his position as subject, and the irises gradually focus in on what is to be the object: not men and women having sex, but women being done.
This scenario presents a prime example of what Mulvey sees as male anxiety about becoming feminized by being confused with the object of perception and thus sexual predation. Men are not objects of voyeurism. In the first episode of Voyeur, the male hero Ko pulls himself out of the object position in order to assume the subject position. Of course, being in the subject position also means being active, watching and doing, and so it is not enough for Ko to watch. And so, he teams up with the voyeur, and they form a company, Voyeurs Inc., to spy on people having sex in order to save women from perverts. In other words, they can be voyeurs and knights in shining armor!
