Within the American cartoon world, there has always been cartoons that don’t show enough female representation. If there is female representation, it is either societies overexageration of feminity or the representation is very far and few. Throughout the 1990′s, most cartoons had a predominantly male cast with one to four (if we are lucky) different female characters. The lack of representation doesn’t lie within just cartoons but throughout our modern American pop culture.
Cartoons are a thing made predominantly for children but just because it’s catered toward children, it doesn’t mean that cartoons are not important to the development of a child’s brain. Cartoons are one of the first things a tiny human being is going to see. It is important from a young age to teach girls that they ARE strong. That they don’t need to be rescued like their Disney princess counterparts.
Forgive me for incorporating Beyonce into this, seeing as Beyonce doesn’t have much to do with anime, but I wanted to quote the woman who was featured in her most recent song “Flawless” and I am going to use this lens as a way to compare the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her lecture “We Should All Be Feminists” with Sailor Moon.
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.”
What Sailor Moon has taught me was to NOT make myself small. This show was one of the first in which it told me that I can be just as strong as any boy because Sailor Moon and her female soldiers were risking their lives and the safety of the world rested on THEIR shoulders and no one else’s. They fought battles on a daily basis and received cuts and bruises like none other, and even to the point of taking on missions where they KNEW that they were most likely going to be killed, yet they went into the mission with their heads held up high and came out victorious.
“We say to girls, ”you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man”
One of Sailor Mercury’s biggest dream was to be the best doctor in the world. When she wasn’t fighting crimes, she was constantly studying and always made sure to never forget her studies because she understood that in order to be a successful doctor, one needs the best education that they can get. With this dream of hers, no one ever questioned her gender. Not even the men that would rarely appear on the show, as a matter of fact, most of the men applauded her brains and her effort.
Tuxedo Mask is the only male character who is featured as a main character and while this character occasionally helps with missions, more often than not, he turns out to be the damsel in distress and Sailor Moon has to save him quite often. He never questions his masculinity either and instead is grateful for the Sailor Soldiers in helping him.
“Because I am female I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important.”
Shows will always have some sort of layer of problems. It’s really hard to avoid and to try and please everyone is sometimes impossible. I am more than happy to admit that Sailor Moon does push for an aspiration towards marriage whereas the other shows produced for young boys during that time did not have the same message. Yet there are other characters in this show like Mercury, Uranus and Neptune et cetera who do not have the same aspirations as the other soldiers do to marriage.
“We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or for accomplishments which I think can be a good thing. But for the attention of men.”
I couldn’t agree more. In Sailor Moon S, with the introduction of Neptune and Uranus, everyone is competing to find the “purest soul” and it’s either for themselves or for the safety of the world. Very rarely does this show showcase the soldiers fighting for the attention of a man, and on the occasion that this does happen, it is always featured in a fill-in episode and is not of huge importance to the major plot of any season.
I know for some people they find shows like Sailor Moon disgusting and that it showcases underage girls wearing school girl uniforms with their panties flashing and over-sized breasts but I feel as though this is a very shallow way of viewing this show in particular and other cartoon shows that might feature something similar to the Magical Girl fgenre. Sailor Moon was catered specifically for young girls. Not for men (although all are welcome to watch). This may seem like a harsh opinion but for me it is the men who take a show as innocent as this and make it into a pedophiliac fantasy. I say this because I identify as a feminist, and I have the right to behave however I want, I have the right to wear whatever I want and I do not want to live my life where I am constantly being policed on how I behave simply because I am a woman and Sailor Moon has played a major role in my influencing who I am and what I stand for today.
Sailor Moon is more than just school girl uniforms, it’s about strength, and the unity that comes with friendships. This show is devised of an assortment of characters and all of them are very different from each other, but instead of focusing negatively on their differences, they utilize that difference and work together to overcome either the antagonist or conquering something within their own personal lives. This is so important for the development of a young girl in this modern age. There are more cartoons with the damsel in distress trope than there are of empowered women in cartoons. Don’t even get me started on the lack of women of color in cartoons. (As a side note, because I don’t want to get too heavily into this but just to let everyone know, Sailor Moon is not white.)
In conclusion, shows like Sailor Moon has influenced our pop culture in the United States. With shows like The Powerpuff Girls, or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic it is very obvious to me on how these shows connect with each other. Whether its the Powerpuff Girls fighting crime or the My Little Pony gang coming together in building a strong friendship despite their differences.