My Hypothesis Was Wrong. Sorry Anime

Anime has become something dirty these days. Back when the 20th century was coming to a close and anime was on the rise, America was openly embracing the zany animated antics of our eastern friends over in Japan and all seemed right with the world. This wasn't the stuff of Disney, Japan had a loving appreciation for anime and was never afraid to explore more mature subject matter that we here in the states could only laughingly scavenge from abysmal messes like "Heavy Metal" or "Rock and Rule". We were naive and this radical departure from the sickeningly sweet goo that was American Disney and Don Bluth cartoons was just what we needed for our blossoming 21st century culture.

Not all good things last however; somewhere along the path from 1999 to present day anime became ugly. Depraved lolita underage fan service with a little twist of lemon flavored tentacle rape soon invaded our zeitgeist and we haven't exactly been forgiving of anime since. We as a generation of growing pop consumers felt betrayed that there lived such a foul beast somewhere amongst the wide eyed pretty anime peoples. But don't kid yourself, it was always there. Many "old-school" fans who now disassociate with anime will argue that this kind of perversion didn't exist in the volumes it does today but I highly doubt that. With the growing power of the internet age, we are more aware of our surroundings and many Japanese studios are able to release their disturbing fetish projects to the unsuspecting masses.

Now I'm a scientist at heart and every now and then I like to bold bravely into dangerous lands and perform field experiments for the sake of human curiosity. I hypothesized that should I type the word "anime" into an unfiltered google image search I would unearth some of the most horrendous, and probably illegal, sex acts ever inflicted upon an imaginary woman. Well, I was wrong.

Sure, there were a lot of pictures of anime babes in lingerie and bathing suits, and I even found a picture of a girl suggestively fellating a video game controller, but there was nothing truly inappropriate. I continued to go through page after page and still i didn't really find anything offensive beyond some slightly suggestive poses and up-skirt shots (with panties on to boot).

At that point i decided to up the ante. Despite nearly every single picture being nothing more than a shot of an objectified cartoon girl, I decided to redundantly search for "anime girl" to see if it made much of a difference. Nope. To my surprise there was very little change, although it is funny that the word "anime" is synonymous with "anime girl". The only time that I actually did find anything disgusting was when I entered in a specific female character's name into the unyielding search engine, in which case universally the very first photo which popped up had some mature to downright offensive material. However, the same thing happens even when you put American female cartoons into the search engine.

So what's the deal? Is anime really as gross as we've made it out to be? Admittedly, my experiment did demonstrate that the very idea of sexualizing women is stamped into the foundations of anime pop culture, but it wasn't to the point of stomach churning revulsion I originally had thought.

Anime has always been filthy and while I myself don't watch it like I used to I can't bring myself to the point of venom spewing hatred like the rest of my peers. Like any medium it has its good and bad and while I can't forgive it for its unusual sex practices I can admit that I kinda knew it was there all along and am grown up enough to realize that it's not nearly as bad as it seems.