Guest post: It’s a Japanese anime thing

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Knock-knees.

Ah, yes, uchimata.

Pigeon toes. It’s a Japanese anime thing. Along with eyes-closed giggling with a hand covering the mouth, or showing gushing excitement by squeezing one’s elbows against the waist while waving her raised fists back and forth, or sitting on the ground, knees pointed forward and inward, legs bent out to the sides, forming a “w” shape when seen from above. It’s vaguely arguable that some of this aesthetic has roots in geisha and kabuki and old Japanese kimono culture, but these days, characters in such poses almost always come dressed in a short-skirted schoolgirl or French maid costume. It’s one of the defining aesthetics of Japanese anime, and it’s deliberately pornographic — far from traditional, ceremonial, or austere.

The “moe” look has been slowly emerging since at least the ’60s (the “cute witch fantasy girlfriend” trope, imported to Japan via American TV — I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched — was an early prototype), but it was formalized into animation style guides around the ’90s. These animators were adult men, and although the comics and cartoons they produced were ostensibly aimed at teen girls, they were often actually consumed by other adult men.

Then fashion magazines aimed at girls took it up. Real life (as opposed to drawn) teen girls in glossy photo shoots were instructed to do those poses. Soon after, pigeon-toed walking became a social contagion which has caused a medical epidemic among Japanese girls and women: they came to believe they’re supposed to walk with pigeon toes in order to be seen as desirable by men. But it causes severe and painful bone and muscle deformities.

The Sailor Moon series is probably the most canonical example of this subgenre of anime: from the 1990s, it was a cartoon about teen girls with superpowers, but it was drenched in sexualized poses and even full-frontal nudity in the original Japanese airings. It was clearly made with horny men in mind just as much as teen girls. And just as the West exported the submissive magical girlfriend to Japan via Jeannie — who called her boyfriend “Master”, you’ll recall — the Japanese kinked and sexed it up a hundredfold and exported it back to us via anime — which has become a cultural juggernaut among Western young men.

That mix, female-character driven stories told through the male gaze is ground zero for the recent trans explosion: a girl or woman is what a horny man imagines a girl or woman to be, rather than a human female. It’s no wonder trans and anime are virtually synonymous online.

And there it is in that male athlete. From the pigeon toes alone, an entire decades- and continents-spanning history unfolds before our eyes…