If you have ever wondered why the glimpse of an ankle was such a turn-on, check out the blush in Japanese manga.I'm not sure the ankle was ever such a turn-on. It seems more like a literary trope. Still, pictures of colonial women in long skirts with exceptionally low (even by modern standards) bodices indicate that different body parts get fetishized at different times.
And different behaviors token attraction, arousal, flirtation, and confusion. The frog in the fairy tale The Frog King is so obviously reminiscent of, uh, male parts, the princess's angry reaction to his demands takes on a whole new meaning...
What I find delightful is not the token behavior but how I, the reader, come to appreciate and understand it. So, I'm reading along in manga, and a character blushes, and I react accordingly.
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| I didn't create the blush--I just highlighted it. |
I know what the blush means. I incorporate it into my understanding of the character. Without thinking consciously, I grin or laugh or think, "Ahhhh."
Here is precisely why Shakespeare footnotes are necessary and unnecessary at the same time. If we don't read them, we are missing the jokes--but it's only possible to truly get the jokes if we are sixteenth-seventeenth-century audience members.
Actually, no, not only possible. Here's the nice thing about reading more and more and more of a genre. Eventually, even twenty-first-century readers can get the jokes--if those readers immerse themselves in the literature and tropes and references of a genre/author.
Here is the truth that "ask what it means to me/how it fits the current outcry of the moment" relativists miss. Membership in the true "in" group requires time and patience and discipline.
Of course, relativists don't react well to that particular "in" group--only their own.
After all, to master a genre means to care about something other than the outcry of the moment.
