Give me more love, or more disdaine;
The Torrid, or the frozen Zone,
Bring equall ease unto my paine;
The temperate affords me none:
Either extreame, of love, or hate,
Is sweeter than a calme estate.
Thomas Carew, Mediocritie in love rejected
My formal (former) education was very much educational, and one thing it taught me was that when you put a group of pubescent guys together under pressure, they turn to various things for support. Some take to food, or to drink, or to mind-altering substances, or to some more previous habits or hobbies (such as cartoons) in a newly obsessive way. One thing that everyone [w]ill turn to in an all-boys' school is, to a greater or lesser extent, other people. In certain cases (and there will almost always be some) that means sex.
When I was feeling my way into adulthood, I lacked any proper frame of reference. I’ve never lived past the occasional needs of myself, so beyond the odd read, 'live action' was a closed book (so to speak) to me. And speaking of books, I tend to more or less ignore anything written along the lines of Nora Roberts, Jude Deveraux and the stereotypical portrayals of alpha males, so (possibly that is why) there have had always been a fundamental gap between sex in my entertainment (or usually, on the surface, the lack thereof) and sex in my environment. (’I have no comment to make at this time’)
‘Maybe,’ I thought, 'twenty-one will be different. After all, sex's a modern, trashy, (un)popular culture. We’re dealing not only with the mass media’s tendency to escapism, but also foreign mores (the apparent significance of Hollywood films, for example) and demographic, censorship and content problems. Not to mention the fact that said plots are often structured around mid-hour consummation while resolution at the end would only end speculation and fuel outcries. To take it further, harems and monogamous romances in modern visual culture, especially for teenagers, tend to feature sex as a kind of finish line, rather than as something that happens mid-race. Of course, sex crops up from time to time, sometimes in a disguise (such as bloodsucking in Twilight), sometimes as something narrowly averted, or seemingly offered but snatched away (viz. Chinese period dramas) and - sometimes - as is. Perhaps this is the moment to mention Lust, Caution - as ‘an adaption from which the adapters forgot to remove the sex’. At times the show punctured as almost a parody of one-sided sex (one thinks of the jarring contrast between the censored and the actual plot).
Similarly, Anime have ostensibly nubile young women in skintight plugsuits on the DVD covers. Doesn’t Anime have a reputation for being cartoon porn anyway? But I have since learned that modern entertainment, animated or live action, occidental or oriental, usually avoids a realistic-feeling treatment of sex - in different ways to previous eras, true, but to the same effect. Granted, there are lots of bouncing breasts, suddenly-revealed panties and accidental changing-room intrusions in certain genres of Anime - and Hentai is of course another kettle of fire-hose orgasms entirely - but sexual encounters per se are not usually a fact of visual culture.
Certainly Lust, Caution featured sex per se. But in obsessively chronicling the sexual adventures, it really threw the baby out with the bathwater. In Anime sex, the characters are usually fundamentally flat and unconvincing, and this carries through to their physical liaisons. Teenagers (high school kids) have sex, yes, but it’s no case of mass nymphomania. If certain shows feel odd because of a dearth of sex, School Days is the opposite, odd because a remarkable number of characters want to borrow that remarkable phallus. Similarly in Gundam SEED, when Flay grabbed Kira for a spot of unbalanced-mental-state nookie, I believe there was a certain amount of unjustified shock from the now defunct Kidscentral viewers whose parents, cartoon (and moral) maniacs, wrote in to censure the channel (not the show). The key thing about this particular liaison was that it wasn’t shocking: two teenagers in stressful circumstances had sex; it happened, it affected motivations, conversations and indeed the fight choreography (allusions to Gundam sex) for a number of episodes, and then, with time, the plot and characters moved on.
Certainly I'm not holding Gundam SEED up as a paragon of finely written, dramatic character development; I simply found that particular occurrence to be a rare instance of sex neither hidden, nor omnipresent. In its angst, its rather stilted storytelling like its hero, who retreats to the autistic security of his armoured cockpit when he’s down, SEED has trouble expressing its emotions and its often onanistic action sequences, this is the quintessentially adolescent Gundam series. Perhaps the very fact that SEED is about Gundam action first and foremost, with the relationships being a sideshow, facilitated this convincing sense that the sex is just part of what’s going on, and perhaps also it has something to do with the fact that this is the quintessentially adolescent Gundam.
There's room for an interesting entry tracking yk's pre-coital behavior - at times assertive ('demanding'), at others being literally dragged into bed ('pussified') - among other things, onanistic. . . but I'll leave that for another post. As for the most romantic day of the year, Valentine honors the eponymous patron saint of bubonic plague victims and beekeepers (among others) too. February 14th must be so depressing if you're a single Catholic beekeeper who's stuck in a church tower recovering from the plague, or if you're unattached in the coital sense.