Lolicon - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

, also romanised as lolikon or rorikon, is a Japanese portmanteau of the phrase "Lolita complex

Complex (psychology)

A complex is a core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes in the personal unconscious organized around a common theme, such as power or status...

". In Japan, the term describes an attraction to underage girls (whether prepubescent, pubescent, or post-pubescent) or an individual with such an attraction. It is also commonly used when referring to lolicon manga or lolicon anime, a genre of manga

Manga

Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...

and anime

Anime

is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....

wherein childlike female characters are often depicted in an erotic manner, in an art style reminiscent of the shōjo manga (girls' comics) style. Outside Japan, "lolicon" is in less common usage and usually refers to the genre.

The phrase is a reference to Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...

's book Lolita
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...

, in which a middle-aged man becomes sexually obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl. It was first used in Japan in the 1970s and quickly became used to describe erotic dojinshi

Dojinshi

is the Japanese term for self-published works, usually magazines, manga or novels. Dōjinshi are often the work of amateurs, though some professional artists participate as a way to publish material outside the regular industry. The term dōjinshi is derived from and . Dōjinshi are part of a wider...

(amateur comics) portrayals of young girls. In the 1980s, lolicon manga became widely available in a number of anthology pornographic manga magazines. In 1989, a serial killer was found to be a devoted lolicon fan, creating a moral panic and calls for regulation of manga.

Laws have been enacted in various countries, including in Japan, which regulate explicit content featuring children or child-like characters. Parent and citizens groups in Japan have organized to work toward stronger controls and stricter laws governing lolicon manga and other similar media. Critics say that the lolicon genre contributes to actual sexual abuse of children

Child sexual abuse

Child sexual abuse is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent uses a child for sexual stimulation. Forms of child sexual abuse include asking or pressuring a child to engage in sexual activities , indecent exposure with intent to gratify their own sexual desires or to...

, while others say that there is no evidence for this claim. Studies of lolicon fans state that lolicon fans are attracted to an aesthetic of cuteness rather than the age of the characters, and that collecting lolicon represents a disconnect from society.

Definition

Generally, lolicon manga and anime portray sexual attraction to younger girls or to girls with youthful characteristics. Three kinds of sexual attraction to young people have been identified in adults: pedophilia

Pedophilia

As a medical diagnosis, pedophilia is defined as a psychiatric disorder in adults or late adolescents typically characterized by a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children...

, preference for prepubescent girls or boys; hebephilia

Hebephilia

Hebephilia refers to the sexual preference for individuals in the early years of puberty . Girls typically begin the process of puberty at age 10 or 11; boys at age 11 or 12...

, preference for early pubescent girls or boys (generally 11–14 years old); and ephebophilia

Ephebophilia

Ephebophilia is the sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19. The term was originally used in the late 19th to mid 20th century, and has been more recently revisited by Ray Blanchard. It is one of a number of sexual preferences across age groups subsumed...

, preference for mid-to-late adolescents. Individuals in each group respond sexually to visual images of children and young people in distinct and narrow age ranges. Lolicon manga and anime contain images and narratives involving romantic and erotic interactions between typically an adult man and a girl in the age range desired by such men.

Strictly speaking, Lolita complex in Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

refers to the paraphilia

Paraphilia

Paraphilia is a biomedical term used to describe sexual arousal to objects, situations, or individuals that are not part of normative stimulation and that may cause distress or serious problems for the paraphiliac or persons associated with him or her...

itself, but the abbreviation lolicon can also refer to an individual who has the paraphilia. Lolicon is a widespread phenomenon in Japan, where it is a frequent subject of scholarly articles and criticism. Many general bookstores and newsstands openly offer illustrated lolicon material, but there has also been police action against lolicon manga.

The kawaii (cute) style is extremely popular in Japan, where it is present in many of the manga/anime styles. The school-age girl in a school uniform is also an erotic symbol in Japan. Burusera

Burusera

Burusera is a Japanese word coined by combining , meaning bloomers as in bottoms of gym suits, and , meaning sailor suit, the traditional Japanese school uniforms for schoolgirls.-Burusera shops:...

shops cater to men with lolicon complexes by selling unwashed panties, men can make dates with teenagers through terekura (telephone clubs), and some schoolgirls moonlight as prostitutes. Sharon Kinsella observed an increase in unsubstantiated accounts of schoolgirl prostitution

Enjo kosai

means "compensated dating" and is a practice which originated in Japan where older men give money and/or luxury gifts to attractive women for their companionship and, possibly, for sexual favors. The female participants range from primarily school-aged girls to housewives. A common misconception is...

in the media in the late 1990s, and speculated that these unproven reports developed in counterpoint to the increased reporting on comfort women

Comfort women

The term "comfort women" was a euphemism used to describe women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 from some Japanese scholars to as high as 410,000 from some Chinese...

. She speculated that, "It may be that the image of happy girls selling themselves voluntarily cancels out the other guilty image".

Genre characteristics and meaning outside Japan

Lolicon manga are usually short stories, published as dōjinshi
Dojinshi
is the Japanese term for self-published works, usually magazines, manga or novels. Dōjinshi are often the work of amateurs, though some professional artists participate as a way to publish material outside the regular industry. The term dōjinshi is derived from and . Dōjinshi are part of a wider...

(fan works) or in magazines specializing in the genre such as Lemon People
Lemon People
was a sexploitation hentai manga magazine published by Kubo Shoten from 1981 to 1998 in Japan. The first issue had some gravure idol photographs, but the format of the magazine quickly switched to all manga by the eighth issue....

, Manga Burikko
Manga Burikko
was a lolicon hentai manga magazine published by Serufu Shuppan from 1982 to 1985 in Japan. The magazine was launched as a competitor to Lemon People, but it only lasted three years. The manga in the magazine were generally bishōjo and lolita manga which were mostly science fiction, parody, shōjo...

and Comic LO
Comic LO
is a Japanese erotic manga magazine featuring fictional prepubescent, early pubescent and highly juvenile-looking girls. Comic LO has been published by Akane Shinsha since October 2002. It was published irregularly until May 2004, when it became a monthly magazine. The "LO" stands for "lolita only"...

(where "LO" is an abbreviation for "Lolita Only"). Common focuses of these stories include taboo relationships, such as between a teacher and student or brother and sister, while others feature sexual experimentation between children. Some lolicon manga cross over with other hentai genres, such as crossdressing and futanari
Futanari
Futanari is the Japanese word for androgyny or hermaphrodite. Until 1644, the appeal of sexually ambiguous, futanari characters portrayed by onnagata actors was a popular element in Japanese drama, and there is a flourishing futanari anime and manga genre in Japan today.- History in Japanese...

. Plot devices are often used to explain the young appearance for many of the characters. Schoolgirls accidentally showing their underwear

Panchira

is an expression used by Japanese women to warn each other that their underwear is visible; the term carries risqué connotations similar to the phrase "your slip is showing" in English usage. The word is a portmanteau of and chira, the Japanese sound symbolism representing a glance or glimpse...

are common characters in the lolicon genre.

Akira Akagi believes that during the 1980s, the lolicon genre changed from being tales of a young girl having sex with an older man to being about "girl-ness" and "cuteness". Akagi identifies subgenres within lolicon of sadomasochism, "groping objects" (tentacles and robots replacing the role of the penis

Penis

The penis is a biological feature of male animals including both vertebrates and invertebrates...

), "mecha

Mecha

A mech , is a science fiction term for a large walking bipedal tank or robot, including ones on treads and animal shapes.-Characteristics:...

fetishes" (a combination of a machine, usually a weapon, and a girl), parodies of mainstream anime and manga, and "simply indecent or perverted stuff". Additionally, lolicon can include themes of lesbianism and masturbation

Masturbation

Masturbation refers to sexual stimulation of a person's own genitals, usually to the point of orgasm. The stimulation can be performed manually, by use of objects or tools, or by some combination of these methods. Masturbation is a common form of autoeroticism...

.

Men began reading shōjo manga in the 1970s, including the works of the Year 24 Group

Year 24 group

refers to one of two female manga artist groups which are considered to have revolutionized shōjo manga . Their works often examine "radical and philosophical issues", including sexuality and gender issues, and many of their works are now considered "classics" of shōjo manga...

and the "girly" works of Mutsu A-ko. According to Dinah Zank, lolicon is "rooted in the glorification of girls culture in Japan", and therefore uses shōjo manga vocabulary. The lolicon style borrows from shōjo manga designs and has also been influenced by women creating pornographic materials for men.

According to Michael Darling, female manga artists

Mangaka

is the Japanese word for a comic artist or cartoonist. Outside of Japan, manga usually refers to a Japanese comic book and mangaka refers to the author of the manga, who is usually Japanese...

who draw lolicon material include Chiho Aoshima

Chiho Aoshima

is a Japanese pop artist and member of Takashi Murakami's Kaikai Kiki Collective. Aoshima graduated from Department of Economics, Hosei University, Tokyo. She had a residency at Art Pace, San Antonio, Texas in 2006. This young graphic artist began in Murakami’s factory with no formal art training...

(The red-eyed tribe billboard), Aya Takano

Aya Takano

Aya Takano was born 1976 in Saitama, Japan. She is a Japanese pop artist associated with the Superflat movement.-Early Life and Influence:...

(Universe Dream wall painting). Kaworu Watashiya

Kaworu Watashiya

is a Japanese manga author from Tokyo, Japan, notable for the creation of Kodomo no Jikan, the first of her works selected to be translated into English – though the publication of the English version was cancelled by the licensee, Seven Seas Entertainment, due to concerns as to North American...

created Kodomo no Jikan
Kodomo no Jikan
is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by manga author Kaworu Watashiya. The story revolves around a grade school teacher named Daisuke Aoki, whose main problem is that one of his students, Rin Kokonoe, has a crush on him. It was first serialized on May 22, 2005 in the Japanese seinen...

, interpreted as a lolicon work by Jason DeAngelis. According to Darling, male artists include Henmaru Machino

Henmaru Machino

Henmaru Machino is a Japanese artist, described as the Magritte of the ero manga world, whose works prominently feature themes of dysmorphic hermaphrodism and body transformation, as well as dozens of other sexual paraphilia...

(untitled, aka Green Caterpillar's Girl), Hitoshi Tomizawa

Hitoshi Tomizawa

' is a Japanese manga artist. Alien 9 is his best known work; his manga tend to be short, with sci-fi stories involving children and insects. His art was fairly standard shōnen manga style for his first series, but starting with Alien 9 it became very distinctive, but with very large eyes and...

(Alien 9, Milk Closet), and Bome

Bome (sculptor)

is the pseudonym of a Japanese sculptor, primarily sculpting anime-styled women for mass commercial release. The name is a contraction of and , both of which he wears regularly. He started making garage kits and now works for Kaiyodo, a Japanese company that specialises in anime-related figurines...

(sculptures). Weekly Dearest My Brother
Weekly Dearest My Brother
is a series of six bishōjo-centered manga booklets that were released weekly for a short time in Japan. The manga would come packaged with a limited edition plastic-figure assembly kit, designed by Ohshima Yuki, of the featured character of the week...

is a manga and figurine series which according to Takashi Murakami, women find cute and "an innocent fantasy", but arouse "pedophiliac desires" among men.

The meaning of lolicon has evolved much in the Western world, as have words like anime, otaku

Otaku

is a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga or video games.- Etymology :Otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another's house or family , which is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun...

and hentai. "Lolicon" is also used to refer directly to the products, anime or manga that contains explicitly sexual or erotic portrayals of prepubescent girls. However, there is disagreement if this definition also applies to child-like characters who are not clearly prepubescent and if it applies to material lacking explicit sexual content.

Origin

The phrase is a reference to Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

's book Lolita
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...

, in which a middle-age man becomes sexually obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl. The term "Lolita complex" was first used in the early 1970s with the translation of Russell Trainer

Russell Trainer

Russell Raymond Trainer was an American author and novelist who wrote The Lolita Complex, a seminal book which contributed to the development of manga and anime in Japan.-Biography:...

's The Lolita Complex and may have entered Japanese nomenclature

Nomenclature

Nomenclature is a term that applies to either a list of names or terms, or to the system of principles, procedures and terms related to naming - which is the assigning of a word or phrase to a particular object or property...

at that time. Shinji Wada used the word in his , an Alice in Wonderland manga parody in 1974. The shortening of the term to "lolicon" came later. Early lolicon idols were Clarisse from Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (1979) and the shōjo heroine Minky Momo, (1982) as female characters in shōnen series at that point were largely mothers or older-sister characters. Although Clarisse was depicted as 16, older than most "lolicon" images today, she inspired "fairytale-esque" or "girly" fanworks. Galbraith asserts that Minky Momo was an attempt to court lolicon fans. This is denied by Satō Toshihiko, who planned the original Minky Momo.

1980s

The lolicon manga genre began in the 1980s with Hideo Azuma

Hideo Azuma

is a Japanese manga artist born on February 6, 1950 in Urahoro, Hokkaidō, Japan. Azuma made his professional debut in 1969 in the Akita Shoten manga magazine Manga Ō...

's works, such as. In 1979, Azuma had previously published the first "blatantly lolicon" manga in his own self-published dōjinishi magazine Cybele. Azuma's works became popular among schoolboy readers because most of the pornographic manga up until then had featured mature women influenced by gekiga
Gekiga
is Japanese for "dramatic pictures." The term was coined by Yoshihiro Tatsumi and adopted by other more serious Japanese cartoonists who did not want their trade to be known as manga or "irresponsible pictures." It's akin to Will Eisner who started calling his comics "graphic novels" as opposed...

. Other dōjinshi magazines began featuring "underage or barely pubescent virgins" in erotic contexts and by the late 1980s this "fantasy genre" had spread to some mass market magazines. Frederik L. Schodt

Frederik L. Schodt

Frederik L. Schodt is an American translator, interpreter and writer.Schodt's father was in the US foreign service, and he grew up in Norway, Australia, and Japan. The family first went to Japan in 1965 when Schodt was fifteen. They left in 1967 but Schodt remained to graduate from Tokyo's American...

and Dinah Zank both suggest that Japanese laws prohibiting the depiction of pubic hair may have encouraged the spread of "erotic manga with a rorikon flavor." Throughout the 1980s, notable lolicon manga artists who published in these magazines include Miki Hayasaka

Miki Hayasaka

is an illustrator and manga artist born on 1955-09-05 in Toyama Prefecture, Japan. After graduating from high school in 1973, he moved to Tokyo and began attending classes at Chiyoda Designer Academy, though he left before completing his degree. During the mid-1970s, he worked as a background...

, Kamui Fujiwara

Kamui Fujiwara

is a Japanese character designer and manga artist. Fujiwara's father was a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. He excelled in mathematics and computer science when in grade school. He graduated from the Kuwasawa Design School, which is attached to Tokyo Zokei University...

, Kyoko Okazaki

Kyoko Okazaki

is a Japanese manga artist whose manga are popular for their unorthodox style and controversial topics, for instance sex, sadomasochism, drugs, homosexuality, rape, murder and prostitution. The Tokyo born Okazaki often focuses on urban Japanese life in the capital from the 1980s and 90s. Her...

, Narumi Kakinouchi

Narumi Kakinouchi

is a female Japanese manga artist, animator, director, character designer, and an animation director. Some of her work has appeared in the adult manga magazine Lemon People....

, and Yoshiki Takaya

Yoshiki Takaya

is a Japanese manga artist best known for creating the manga Guyver, which has been adapted into multiple anime features as well as live action films. Guyver was serialized in Shōnen Captain for the lifetime of the magazine from 1985 to 1997...

peaking in the mid 1980s.

Frederik L. Schodt has suggested that one reason lolicon manga is popular with some fans is because the female characters portrayed are "younger, slightly softer, [and] rarely possessing an in-your-face aggressive feminism" which is often found in female characters in American comics.

Public attention was brought to bear on lolicon when Tsutomu Miyazaki

Tsutomu Miyazaki

, also known as The Otaku Murderer, The Little Girl Murderer, and Dracula, was a Japanese serial killer.-Background:Planaria's premature birth left him with deformed hands, which were permanently gnarled and fused directly to the wrists, necessitating him to move his entire forearm in order to...

kidnapped and murdered four girls between the ages of 4 and 7 in 1988 and 1989, committing acts of necrophilia

Necrophilia

Necrophilia, also called thanatophilia or necrolagnia, is the sexual attraction to corpses,It is classified as a paraphilia by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The word is artificially derived from the ancient Greek words: νεκρός and φιλία...

with their corpses. He was found to be a "withdrawn and obsessive" otaku

Otaku

and in particular he enjoyed lolicon. The Tokyo High Court

Tokyo High Court

is a high court in Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. The Intellectual Property High Court is a special branch of Tokyo High Court....

ruled Miyazaki sane, stating that "the murders were premeditated and stemmed from Miyazaki's sexual fantasies

Sexual fantasy

A sexual fantasy, also called an erotic fantasy, is a fantasy or pattern of thoughts with the effect of creating or enhancing sexual feelings; in short, it is "almost any mental imagery that is sexually arousing or erotic to [an] individual"...

" and he was executed

Capital punishment

Capital punishment, the death penalty, or execution is the sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences. The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally...

by hanging for his crimes on June 17, 2008.

The case caused a moral panic

Moral panic

A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order. According to Stanley Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics and credited creator of the term, a moral panic occurs when "[a] condition, episode, person or group of...

about "harmful manga", and "sparked a crackdown by local authorities on retailers and publishers, including the larger companies, and the arrests of dojinshi creators". In the aftermath, the Japanese non-profit organization CASPAR was founded with the goal of campaigning for regulation of lolicon.

2000s

Public sentiment against sexual cartoon depictions of minors was revived in 2005 when a convicted sex offender

Sex offender

A sex offender is a person who has committed a sex crime. What constitutes a sex crime differs by culture and by legal jurisdiction. Most jurisdictions compile their laws into sections such as traffic, assault, sexual, etc. The majority of convicted sex offenders have convictions for crimes of a...

, who was arrested for the murder of a seven-year-old girl in Nara

Nara, Nara

is the capital city of Nara Prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan. The city occupies the northern part of Nara Prefecture, directly bordering Kyoto Prefecture...

, was suspected as a lolicon. Despite media speculation, it was found that the murderer, Kaoru Kobayashi, seldom had interest in manga, games or dolls. He claimed, however, that he had become interested in small girls after watching an animated pornographic video as a high school student. He was sentenced to death by hanging.

2010s - present

In February 2010, a proposal to amend the Tokyo law on what material could be sold to minors

Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths

The is a prefectural law passed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly in 1964. Its purpose is to promote the healthy development of people under the age of 18 by restricting their access to published material that is considered harmful...

included a ban on sexualised depictions of "nonexistent youths" under the age of 18. This proposal was criticised by many manga artists, and opposed by the Democratic Party of Japan

Democratic Party of Japan

The is a political party in Japan founded in 1998 by the merger of several opposition parties. Its socially liberal platform is generally considered center-left in the Japanese political spectrum...

. The bill was put on hold until June of that year, where after some amendments, including changing the text for "nonexistent youths" to "depicted youths". However, in spite of the changes, the bill was rejected by the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly

Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly

The is the prefectural parliament of Tokyo.Its 127 members are elected every four years in 42 districts by single non-transferable vote. 23 electoral districts equal the Special wards of Tokyo, another 18 districts are made up by the cities, towns and villages in the Western part of the...

in June.

A revised edition was presented in November that year to the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, which would require self-regulation of "'manga, anime and other images'...that 'unjustifiably glorify or emphasize' certain sexual or pseudo sexual acts"...depictions of 'sexual or pseudo sexual acts that would be illegal in real life'". However, the bill no longer uses the term "nonexistent youth" and applies to all characters and to material that is not necessarily meant to be sexually stimulating. It was approved in December and will take full effect in July 2011, however, the bill does not regulate mobile sites or downloaded content and is only intended for publications such as books and DVDs. On April 14, 2011, the title Oku-sama wa Shōgakusei (My Wife Is an Elementary Student) was listed as a title to be considered for restriction due to "child rape". It was later published online by J-Comi

J-Comi

J-Comi Jコミis a website that distributes out of print manga and doujinshi as DRM-free ebooks, with the permission of the authors and supported by advertising. The first beta test began on 26 November, 2010, and included all 14 volumes of CEO Ken Akamatsu's Love Hina. Over the first two days of the...

. On August 25, 2011, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party submitted a petition requesting stricter laws on child pornography

Child pornography laws in Japan

Production, distribution and possessing for sale or distribution of child pornography depicting real children is illegal and strictly enforced.-Legal background:...

, which included animated child pornography.

Controversy

The legal status of lolicon manga and anime that portray children involved erotically with adults has changed with time and is currently under intensive debate in Japan. A Japanese non-profit organization called CASPAR has claimed that lolicon and other anime magazines and games encourage sex crimes. According to Galbraith, Yasushi Takatsuki has noted that sexual abuse of minors in Japan has declined since the 1960s and 70s, which "roughly coincides with the increasing presence of fictional lolicon". Galbraith feels that this is not an argument that lolicon "compensates for or relieves real desires", but instead that lolicon imagery does not "reflect the desires" of readers, or inspire them to commit crimes. It has been suggested that restricting sexual expression in drawings or animated games and videos might actually increase the rate of sexual crime by eliminating a harmless outlet for desires that could motivate crime.

Cultural critic Hiroki Azuma

Hiroki Azuma

, born May 9, 1971 in Mitaka, Tokyo is a Japanese cultural critic.-Biography:He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1999 and became a professor at the International University of Japan in 2003...

said that very few readers of lolicon manga commit crimes. He states that in the otaku culture, lolicon is the "most convenient [form of rebellion]" against society. Azuma says that some otaku feel so "excluded from society" that they "feel as if they are the sort of 'no good' person who should be attracted to little girls". Sarah Goode describes the accumulation of lolicon materials as being "a medium through which disaffected men may choose to express their sense of anomie

Anomie

Anomie is a term meaning "without Law" to describe a lack of social norms; "normlessness". It describes the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and their community ties, with fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values. It was popularized by French...

and disconnection with society". When questioning the relationship of lolicon to "finding children in real life sexually attractive", Goode presents the argument of a lolicon fan "that even if I could be classified as a kind of anime lolicon, it'd NEVER translate into RL

Real life

Real life is a term usually used to denote actual human life lived by real people in contrast with the lives of fictional or fantasy characters.-Usage online and in fiction:On the Internet, "real life" refers to life in the real world...

pedophilia. This is predicated on the belief that the anime lolis I like DO NOT EXIST in RL."

Setsu Shigematsu believes that lolicon manga should not be equated to photographic or adult video lolicon materials which involve real children; instead she argues that lolicon represents an artificial sexuality, turning away from "three dimensional reality" and redirecting sexual energies towards "two dimensional figures of desire". Akira Akagi writes that in lolicon manga, the girl represents cuteness, and that it is not her age which makes her attractive, and furthermore, that lolicon fans project themselves onto lolicon characters, identifying themselves with the girl.

Lolicon manga has been and is marketed to both boys and men. Sharon Kinsella wrote that lolicon manga was a late-1980s outgrowth of girls' manga, which included yaoi
Yaoi
In careful Japanese enunciation, all three vowels are pronounced separately, for a three-mora word, . The English equivalent is . also known as Boys' Love, is a Japanese popular term for female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by...

and parodies of boys' and adult manga. This occurred as more men attended amateur manga conventions and as new boys' amateur manga genres appeared at Comiket

Comiket

, otherwise known as the , is the world's largest self-published comic book fair, held twice a year in Tokyo, Japan. The first Comiket was held on December 21, 1975, with only about 32 participating circles and an estimated 600 attendees. Attendance has since swelled to over a half million people....

. Kinsella distinguished between the attitudes toward gender of amateur lolicon manga and that of male fans of girls' manga. While parody manga created by women ridicule male stereotypes and appeal to both male and female fans, lolicon manga "usually features a girl heroine with large eyes and a body that is both voluptuous and child-like, scantily clad in an outfit that approximates a cross between a 1970s bikini and a space-age suit of armour" This latter feature expresses both fear of and desire for young women, who have become increasingly powerful in Japanese society. Kinsella noted dominant British and American genres and imports of animation video in the 1990s derived from lolicon manga, suggesting women, and therefore also men, in all of these countries have gone through similar social and cultural experiences.

Ito characterises otaku as having more affection towards the anime and manga world than for a realistic world, saying that to the otaku, the two-dimensional world portrayed becomes "more real". Ito views the preference for young girls as sex objects in manga and anime to be due to a change in Japanese society in the 1970s and 1980s. Ito says that at that time, boys felt that girls were "surpassing them in terms of willpower and action". However, as the boys believed girls to be the weaker sex, the boys began focussing on young girls "who were 'easy to control'". Additionally, the young girls of lolicon exist in the media, which Ito points out is a place where one can control things however they want.

Critical responses to lolicon manga and anime

Responding to the portrayal of Clarisse from Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, Hayao Miyazaki criticized the artists and fans who idolized her as a lolicon idol. He differentiates his female protagonist

Protagonist

A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...

s, labeling those the aforementioned idolize, according to The Otaku Encyclopedia, "as pets". Later, he would go on to say, He expressed concern as to what this might mean for "human rights

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

for women."