straggy said: Oh my God, this thread is stupid. OP, please, I don't think you know what sexism is. You can't be sexist towards men - it's impossible. It's the same in the respect that you can't be racist towards white people. Yeah, maybe your pathetic "man pride" got hurt, but you haven't been hated on for millennia just because of what you were born as, which women have.
And actually, although I didn't watch the episode, a friend informed me that the Bitch-chan guy with the fedora had an ambiguous rape scene in a church where he bites up the girl's thigh despite her crying out for him to stop. The scene cuts out, but we honestly don't know what happened - he probably raped her, considering the themes. So don't sit there and say there was no "actual rape" in this anime.
Besides that, the rape that I referred to in my review was the biting. Vampire bites have been sexual for years, as someone else in this thread already said. They're obviously being used as a sexual tool here too. A lot of fiction has girls offering their blood up as a romantic gesture, one that makes her moan when she is bitten. Other examples of vampiric sexualisation would be the 1992 movie Bram Stoker's Dracula, where girls are changed into vampires during sex. Here the vampires are approaching the girl in bed, pinning her down, dragging her into baths, doing things to her thighs and breasts. One of them even tells her she needs pleasure from it too - ie, he is gaining sexual pleasure from the act, which is what rapists gain too.
The thing that romanticises this anime most though is that it is aimed at women with the intention of having women desire this girl's situation. It's not just rapey, but continually abusive. A hell of a lot of women suffer abuse - no-one desires that, even in fantasies. That is the problem here. There's a difference between S&M and rape/abuse, which 50 Shades of Grey helped to blur the lines of with its shitty writing, so please don't compare BDSM to this anime. That's really gross and insulting to people that practice it. Getting beaten because you want to be is so very different from abuse. Nobody wants psychological and physical abuse. This anime panders to noncon fantasies specifically, which have much better sources than this pile of abusive shit. It's a bad anime besides any offensive material, which I also said in my review. If you want noncon, at least watch something fucking decent.
I agree with straggy here.
However, what she doesn't realize is that there is such thing as male sexism, and even though it's a serious thing, it is just not taken as severely by society, because women have had it far, far, worse, since the beginning of civilization. It is also racist if someone discriminates against someone for being white, however it is also not taken as severely as if someone discriminates against a black person.
Why is our society this way? It has to do with History.
All races, sexualities, and genders suffer different types of discrimination, it's just that some have had it worse, and for longer, and still do.
As for Diabolik Lovers, it may be fiction, and may be fantasy, but to different degrees, people take with them what they absorb from the media into real life, so this show cannot be considered harmless. It depicts and romanticizes situations very much like rape, slavery, and verbal/physical abuse.
Then again, it's made itself very clear it's target audiences are masochists and people with master/slave or rape-fantasies, so it's pretty much just fan-service fodder for those particular crowds, and should be more bunched in with hentai than with regular anime.
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