Article: Local meanings in global space - Mark McLelland

Local meanings in global space: a case study of women's 'Boy love' web sites in Japanese and English - Mark McLelland, Oct 2001

This article raises some issues regarding the internet and it's Anglo-centrism, particularly in regards to language and values regarding pornography.

One of the first thing it talks about is the fact that English is the language most used on the net, followed by Chinese and then Japanese. Even non-english speakers have to follow, to some extent the 'rules' of our language, for example in the structure of search engines and urls.

The issues of pornography are then raised, particularly relating to the western moral codes and their regulation of child porn. He suggests:

In Japan, however, arguments over pornography have taken a different trajectory due to the absence of both fundamentalist Christian and feminist lobby groups. Arguments about what does or does not constitute pornography are common but one very broad difference between definitions prevalent in Japan and Anglophone countries has been that Japanese censorship has tended to focus almost exclusively upon the visibility of genitalia and pubic hair, while being generally lenient on sexually suggestive situations as well as images featuring violence and young people

He goes on to discuss the images of sex in Japan and the difference in morality about sex. This is all driving toward a discussion about a subject dear to my heart: YAOI or boy-love in Japanese media. To get a good understanding of the subject, this article is really good at covering these issues in a sympathetic way. But basically, there are manga (japanese comics) aimed at a female audience where the protagonists are two men who fall in love, and often have graphic sex.

As he discusses, these comics and the whole Japanese attitude to Homosexuality in the media, as well as western Slash fanfiction, all queer or make strange the boundaries of what pornography is.

One reason may be that a pornographic genre created by women for women centred on the homosexual fantasies of young boys falls outside our received notions of who pornographers are, what pornography is and who makes up the audience for pornography.

In Japan the moral engagement with sex is different to ours:

This more relaxed attitude in Japan is reflected in age of consent laws: at thirteen, Japan's age of consent for heterosexual intercourse is one of the lowest in the world and, surprising though it may seem, homosexuality is not mentioned in Japan's criminal code, which means that technically, there is no age of consent for same-sex sexual acts.

This means that the media that shows 'pornography' will show different things. With the internet the 'pornography' is disseminated to an audience that will not normally have access to this material, which is part of the issues raised in discussions about governance of the net. One of the lesser discussed aspects is shown in this article - it's the western values, with the English language as a dominant force guiding the dialogue and the assumption is made that our values are the ones that we should follow.

The reason for including this article is two fold - one is that it illustrates the differences in culture and how that impacts on availability of information and the debate about governance, the other is to look at one of the uses that people are putting the internet to.