Interestingly enough it seems like a lot of people never actually have sex (granted the following article is about japan, but they're not that different). So it almost seems like these extreme stalkers wouldn't actually become physically active, although that doesn't really make it any better.
The idol culture is extremely unhealthy. This is objectification turned to 11. They get a pass in the US because it seems so distant and Japan is "odd and cool" but it is actually really creepy.
Fans like those stars for their whole package (myth, personality, songs, artistic expression, style, etc) not e.g. just for their body (which is usually implied by objectification).
It's also not much different than our pop idols, especially of yore (up until the 00s or so, before several other occupations, such as games, social media, web surfing, selfies, and tons of higher quality TV and movies) basically replaced pop music as the major obsession of western kids.
There have been idols attacked (and even murdered) plenty of times in good ole US.
Further reading seems to show they are different from pop idols of the west, both in fan culture[0] and how much control a talent agency has over the idols' personal life, including forcing idols to remain single so as to seem attainable by their fan base, which "may cause fans to be unable to distinguish between fantasy and real-life" [1].
That was commonplace in the west for musicians and actors with a mass young fan base -- they often were forced by management to be single, or appear single, hide their relationships etc, not to disappoint the fans of the opposite sex. And of course actors/singers/etc who were gay/lesbian/bi/etc were forced to hide it for marketing reasons.
And we grew out of it. Japan did not. I wish we stopped giving Japan a pass for the things it does wrong. In terms of gender equality, minorities inclusiveness, gay rights, it lags far behind.
>I wish we stopped giving Japan a pass for the things it does wrong.
I also wish people stop considering their country's morals and current fashions as the yardstick to measure the whole world...
(Especially if they don't have such a great, past or present, track record even by their own standards, to begin with).
Who are you to give or give not Japan "a free pass"? Who said Japan needs a pass from outsiders?
To quote Feyman:
"The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, "Ohayo, gozai masu," which means, "Good morning."
Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu ," and puts the tray down for us.
Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!"
We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were."
yeah, my main issue with it is it seems really exploitative. Get a bunch of kids and control every aspect of their lives in exchange for fame, subjecting them to all kinds of pressures and limiting their experiences...
Almost 100% of an Idol's life is manufactured by the studios. What is presented to the public is barely even a person, more of a product hyper-tailored for a specific audience.
It's all of the downsides of a celebrity multiplied by 10 and no to much of the upside. The company controls how they look, what they say, who they associated with, their entire creative output, everything. They get treated more like breakfast cereal mascots than actual living human beings.
My understanding is that the pay sucks because the company takes almost all of the income. On the other hand your expenses are also very low because the company provides everything. Housing, food, clothes, etc... Many of which are sponsored so forget about making your own choice.
The fame and fun factor are certainly a big reason why people willingly do it, but that's about it for compensation.
At what point does one differentiate between obsession with idols and obsession with pop stars in other countries? In my experience, J-idols appear to put a lot of work into their personalities as part of the group and their "talent" which goes beyond the fetishization of beauty we usually associate with objectification. In other words, do we know that Japanese fans view idols as people tending to objects?
I don't even think that's the issue. I saw a documentary on Japan and they visited one of these idol "talent agencies". It's an incredibly creepy structure that's just not comparable to anything we have in the West.
That's not too far off. But instead of having overly controlling parents the idols have overly controlling corporations running their lives and 24/7 scrutiny from an extremely fickle and difficult to please fanbase.
Why does everyone feel entitled to give their opinion on Asian idol culture when they clearly have the barest of exposure, usually consisting of watching a documentary or reading a CNN article...
When I hear fertility crisis I always wonder how it is possible to differentiate between people having children later in their lives and people not having children in the first place. As long as the age of child rearing is rising fertility will appear to go down until it spikes up one day.
Outside of a 30 year window female fertility drops to essentially zero. aka you can be reasonably sure looking a few million 55 year old woman that they are not going to have significant numbers of kids.
As the drop below replacement rate started in the 60’s it’s easy to verify the trend is real.
Given that female humans are the only female mammals with this egg limitation I bet we can crack this with stem cells too
In the mean time freezing is subject only to cultural stigma, effort and cost. Should just offer to freeze some every 20 year old’s eggs just like tetanus shots are offered to children. Younger eggs being more viable than a young 30-somethings trump card. Then people don’t have to make a conscious decision to do it and boom replacement age increases by two whole decades if we feel like it
If this became common, I would be worried for the future of humans.
Both sperm and eggs are produced in quantities millions of times higher than apparently necessary. Nature doesn't waste resources without good reason. There's a very good chance the large number of inactive sperm and eggs are part of an as-yet unidentified selection/evolution mechanism.
Freezing eggs might break that mechanism, and we probably wouldn't see the problem for many generations until human evolution suffers...
I mean you could argue that about actually curing cancer and extending our average longevity, maybe there is some additional cellular state we aren’t aware of that is being selected out
So that’s not a good enough reason for me to say “lets not pursue these obvious ideas we already have the technology for”
>Given that female humans are the only female mammals with this egg limitation I bet we can crack this with stem cells too
We can, eventually, I'm sure. Biology is just a mechanism, and with enough work and knowledge, we can figure it out.
However, would it make much difference? I'm thinking most women don't have children because they don't want them (or any more of them), not because they've become infertile due to age. In fact, most mothers seem to lost all interest in having more kids after having 1 or maybe 2: going through the experience shows them the grim reality of child-rearing, so once they've "done their part" with 1 or 2 kids, they've had enough.
Perhaps, if we achieve biological immortality, along with eliminating age-related infertility, people will have more kids, because they could afford to wait a long time between them. They could have the first one at 30-50, after they've gotten themselves financially situated, then they could take a break for a few decades, then have another one, then take another break, etc. Maybe after 2-3 decades, they'll have forgotten what a pain in the ass the previous one was.
Both of your paragraphs are based on a flawed assumption of not wanting any kids or any more kids. As opposed to wanting kids but not wanting to make a choice before a certain age. Some people dont want any or any more and we aren’t referring to them.
I would say the population that would like the possibility of children at a later age is big enough to make a difference.
I am talking about the peak range so 15 + 30 = 45. A 30-34 year old woman is 500x more likely to give birth than a 10-14 year old, and over 100x more vs a 45-55 year old woman. https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/fertility-and-birth-r... (scroll down). You do see even younger and older births, but at even lower rates.
So yes these births do add up, but are effectively ignorable when analyzing trends.
> . A 30-34 year old woman is 500x more likely to give birth than a 10-14 year old
that's heavily skewed by the fact that far more 30-34 year olds are trying to have kids while most 10-14 year olds are either not having sex or actively trying to avoid pregnancy.
I'm sure you're joking, but if there is a massive body of research on 10 year olds having sex I'm not going to go googling for it at work, but I think it's safe to say that more women in their 30s are trying for babies than 10 year olds.
The stats are more clear on 45 year old women having ~1/3 the odds of becoming pregnant and after that over 90% of any pregnancies spontaneously aborting. It’s only after that that the odds are further lowered from ~3% to below 1% because they also have less unprotected sex. Still, based on relative odd it seems that biology is playing a significantly larger role than culture.
Odd that the youngest bracket (14–19) is bounded with a minimum age of 14. There have been a handful of births from younger mothers in the past 30 years (a 10 year old girl in 2006 in the US). Insignificant in the total graph, but weird to exclude given that the oldest bracket is open-ended (>50). Just renaming the bracket to ≤19 would suffice.
The youngest documented mother ever was 5 years and 7 months (Peru, 1939).
The Netflix anime Kakegurui describes a lot about idol culture in Japan through one of its characters. It doesn't try to justify or judge the practice but it presents it thoroughly.
People tend to generalize Akihabara to the rest of dull, boring Japan.
There is one (or two?) underwear vendor machine... in a sex shop. Someone was comparing this myth to the idea that in the US you can have your car washed with stripper boobs, which I am sure you can... somewhere...
The loli genre is frowned upon, but there is a slightly different view of pedophilia here: instead of being seen as psychopaths like in the west, they see them more as immature men-child stuck on highschool fantasies. And let's be frank: Japan is far behind when it comes to fight the rape culture.
'They' in your last sentence is a subset of the otaku culture, what you would now call incels in the west. It is creepy as hell, but it is a fringe minority.
> Japan is far behind when it comes to fight the rape culture.
By which metric? According to the first statistic I found online, it's far below most western countries in rates of rape (of course, statistics might be reflective of underreporting instead of actual occurrence of a crime).
> statistics might be reflective of underreporting instead of actual occurrence of a crime
I wouldn't trust (as in compare globally) any crime stat from Japan, as they have a 99% conviction rate [0]. This obviously cannot be achieved unless you set up your process to make sure only safe cases enter the systems. And guess what especially occurs in private areas, without witnesses leading to he-said-she-said?
A culture were you don't want to bring shame to your family doesn't help either.
> of course, statistics might be reflective of underreporting instead of actual occurrence of a crime
There you go. Almost all of my female friends who I am close enough to hear about that have been assaulted in their past and they have not reported it (and blame themselves for it of course).
On this map, most countries you will see who are below 5.0 probably have some serious under-reporting.
The regulators allow for the toddler sex but somehow normal sex is censored, all this at a national level by regulators chosen by normal citizens. It is the tip of the iceberg reflecting a problem.
> in the US you can have your car washed with stripper boobs
That is also a reflection of a problem, at least adults are involved.
The ethnographic research into the consumers of the people who watch such animations would disagree with you; for them, the more unrealistic the representation is, the more desirable. See the work of Patrick Galbraith and Mark McLelland, who are both respected researchers in Japanese culture studies. It is not clear that a desire for the cartoon form extends to the desire for real child pornography, just as it is not clear that playing violent video games extends to the desire to kill people in real life, or reading erotic Harry Potter fanfiction extends to wanting to haves sex with Daniel Radcliffe.
Some* booru owners complained that realistic 3d tags gained a significant share and views in recent years. I don’t remember if they posted exact percentages.
* not going to post it here, but it’s not hard to figure out
Unrealism doesn't necessarily mean just form of the character in the image, it can also mean what's shown in the image - is something unrealistic happening? Nevertheless, I don't doubt that realism is a significant aspect for some people, but those aren't the same people as the lolicon community, and the people who really do believe in the "2D > 3D" meme. I'd also wager that a good portion of recent stuff tagged with 3d isn't loli or shota, and could be in part explained by the popularity of SFM/Blender porn of 3D games like Overwatch.
In any case, it stands to reason that people who would enjoy real child pornography would also enjoy simulated porn (and likely, the more realistic (3D) the better), but it doesn't therefore follow that the majority of people who enjoy the less realistic content (which by far outstrips the 3D content) have the same tastes.
Assuming it does say something about a persons real life preferences (and I'm not sure that it does) I'd much rather they spend their time in front of a computer watching cartoons than out in the world causing harm. I figure it's best to give anyone cursed with desires they can't morally satisfy any outlet we can give them for those feelings.
Most of it is probably elementary school, with some from middle school. I think putting equal sign between `loli` and `toddler sex` is a bit misleading to put it mildly.
Toddler sex exist but you can name it differently. Maybe my denomination is wrong but the problem is still there. Generally speaking when someone points at the moon looking at the finger is not a good idea.
This comment is like judging the entire US because of the case where a crossdressing kid was stripping at a bar for money.
And I have to say that fictional underage characters being sexualized is not something that bother me, on the other hand, REAL kids being sexualized does bother me a great deal.
Interestingly enough it seems like a lot of people never actually have sex (granted the following article is about japan, but they're not that different). So it almost seems like these extreme stalkers wouldn't actually become physically active, although that doesn't really make it any better.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/asia/japan-fertility-intl-hnk...