Bad Girls Like to Watch: Writing and Reading Ladies’ Comics

Abstract

A woman bound with leather, a gag her in mouth, is violently and repeatedly raped by her stepbrother and his buddies. Next, an older man armed with handcuffs and vibrators assaults her. Frame after frame features graphic scenes of similar forced penetration with a variety of implements. Yet at the end of the story, the woman falls into the arms of her stepbrother, declaring he is the only one who knows how to give her pleasure, and she wants to be his sex slave forever. It hardly seems possible that this type of material would be intended for a female consumer, since it seems to fit stereotypical ideas of male fantasies, particularly with the emphasis on forceful penetration and group rape. Yet in Japan, the notorious genre of pornographic “ladies’ comics,” known for its graphic sexual descriptions and images that frequently depict women being sexually hurt, beaten, or humiliated, is created for women, by women—and sells hundreds of thousands of copies every month. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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