OH MY GOODNESS!

The wonderful thing about nineteen fifties television shows is how obvious the difference between good women and bad women is. The good women speak with well-modulated voices, and look so ... 'decent'. The bad women all have hairdos, make-up, racy clothing, and drink cocktails while smoking cigarettes. Many years ago I was at a Chinese banquet and the daughters of the family after dinner cadged cigarettes while we walked back to the parked cars. Their parents, up ahead, had no idea. And these were all three good girls. Obviously the smoky smell adhering faintly to them when we got back to the house was from the white women and the pipe smoker.

No, they weren't into cocktails.
They were allergic to alcohol.

Nowadays it's difficult to tell, unless they're the Real Housewives™. In which case it's obvious that they are sex-crazed drunks, of course.


Well brought up women occasionally have wine, or Scotch and water.


I've spent the last two hours reading Ranma½ in which the good girls are all violent. The apartment mate in her room is reading Cromartie High, another manga, which is about very innocent male high school thugs. I would describe my apartment mate as the quintessential good girl, because she doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, does not go out partying or slutting around, and doesn't have tattoos. She does swear like a sailor at times.
She's Cantonese, and one kind of has to expect that.


The worst girls in Ranma½ are all violent chicks who want to beat him up. Yes, they are well endowed, but that isn't the point. There is no sex in the manga, nor even a suggestion. Unless you take Shampoo (an ultra violent AND curvaceous non-Japanese character) and her guile in trying to get Ranma to love her or involve him in compromising scenes as 'sexual'.
There are also a martial arts pig, a panda, and a bespectacled duck.
They too are violent.

It is, if you look at it the right way, about the ideal of Japanese womanhood.
High-school age, insane, and psycho-homicidal.
These are all good girls.

I visited Japan once. I did not know that at the time.
Good thing I went nowhere near them.


My two other favourite manga, which I still reread, are about a defective young female vampire and the creepy neighbor boy, and an insanely violent cat girl bounty hunter in a future dystopia who likes to snack on dried sardines. The closest anybody comes to sex is garlic potstickers.
Perhaps the Japanese have goofy ideas about women.

I only have sane ideas about women, myself.
And they can be very interesting.




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