Content Warning: Discussion of sexual coercion and assault, victim blaming, fetishization of women with penises; NSFW screenshots
Spoilers for Parade Parade
In search of intersex or trans lesbian representation in anime, you may find Parade Parade, and its opening theme song “Ai-iro Otome” (Indigo Girl) is the first thing you will experience. After the title card fades, you see a girl on a stage before a roaring audience. She sways languidly, cradling her microphone in both hands as she begins to sing. “After racing through a cheerful season / What will happen to the footprints in the sand of my memory? Tears are rolling down to the beach of my heart / Wind wipes them away.” Her words are lonely but hopeful. The scene cuts away to the unnamed singer dancing alone on a beach, staring at an overcast horizon, grieving a pain unknown to us. When we leave the landscape of her emotions and return to her on stage for the final lines of the song, we also return to a world that sexualizes her; where the crowd cheers as the camera shows close-ups of her body and outfit from different angles. “Kindness pushes back clouds / But tears like rain fall from them / Sometimes, indigo girl / Sadness is just like a quick rain before you grow up.” It’s all melancholy and beauty at the start.
Pornography as a medium of the margins
It is common in both traditional media and especially pornographic media to represent trans women and intersex woman as the fetishized victims and perpetrators of rape and abuse. However, Parade Parade‘s focus on rape and abuse in specifically lesbian settings and long term relationships is rare and worth examining. The protagonist, Shiina Kaori—a pop idol—is an intersex woman whose fetishization presents her as the fantasy of a phallic woman which, in the real world, is also frequently projected onto trans women. Kaori is fetishized for having a penis and a vulva, both depicted as “fully functional” and capable of ejaculating. This, to be clear, is an eroticized fantasy: no intersex person is born with a fully functioning penis and vagina. Despite this fantasy, Parade Parade focuses very heavily on only one of these two organs, her penis, and its supposed contrast with her feminine innocence.
The fixation on Kaori’s intersexuality in Parade Parade is common for the genre of “futanari” hentai (“intersex” or “androgynous” animated pornography) which, according to Professor of Japanese and Korean Language and Literature Daniela Moro, has its roots in kabuki performances by “double-sex”, “half-sex”, or otherwise intersex and androgynous performers called “onnagata.” In a paper by Satomi Yamamoto, she argues that “Futanari” as a term referring to intersexuality and double-sexedness goes back at least as far as the Yamai no sōshi (Illustrated Scroll of Illnesses) from the late 12th century, in which intersex shamans are depicted in a derogatory and submissive way under the label “Futanari.” By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when mainstream manga and hentai as we know it today was taking shape, creators of “futanari hentai” adopted much of this degrading and fetishizing double-sex aesthetic and produced pornographic content of intersex women for mass consumption.
Kaori is written as an elusive, unintelligible, fantastical girl, not just in that she is a mythical double-sexed futanari “woman with a penis,” but also in her demure and vulnerable personality. The central sexual excitement of Parade Parade is that both of these aspects of Kaori—her innocence and her phallus—combine perfectly to make a woman who can be abused and then convinced that abuse is the best love she will ever receive. Parade Parade was released in 1996 by Pink Pineapple, a Japanese animation studio dedicated to hentai productions. The 1990s was not exactly a time of healthy representation of queer characters, but it did see increasing activism about marginalized identities, including the intersex experience. Viola Amato argues in her book Intersex Narratives that by the 1990s, as a result of the civil rights movement, there was an emergence of more “autobiographical accounts of intersex lives, conveyed from the perspective of intersex individuals.”
Parade Parade teases at the idea of an intersex woman with a voice: Kaori, on her stage, with her song, and her indeterminate but emotive lyrics all indicate she has a story to tell. The writers of Parade Parade, however, never actually allow her to be anything other than a fetish in front of an audience. The common experience of being fetishised that intersex and trans women share, and which Kaori represents, can be thought of as the fantasy of the Phallic Woman—the exotic notion of “hermaphroditism” that has, historically, encompassed both intersex and transsexual women. Begonya Enguix Grau has described this “notion of hermaphroditism” as “associated with the impossible, the unintelligible, the mythological, the fantastic and the monstrous.”
Amato also talks about “narrative violence,” whereby a narrative and its creators perpetuate harmful and inaccurate ideas about a marginalized identity. Parade Parade is narrative violence in its fetishization of the fantasy of an intersex person, as well as its obsession with this fantasy’s penis. Within this violent narrative is Kaori, attempting to tell her own story through her art, a moving character and singer trapped in pornography. The narrative violence of the film, to those of us who relate to Kaori’s position, is not at all unlike how the world outside of Parade Parade treats us trans and/or intersex women.
The narrative violence about phallic women (either in the fantasy of intersex porn or in the violent rhetoric against any women who have penises) frames us as free-use sex objects, sexual fascinations, and playthings. In society we are already the “chicks with dicks,” the “shemales,” the “he-shes,” long before we’re exposed to media that affirms these damaging tropes to us. Growing up as intersex and/or trans is a psychological minefield.
But Parade Parade being pornographic makes it a more likely place to find our experiences as marginalized women represented, because even if we are fetishized in the process, that type of narrative accurately matches what our everyday lives already look like. Because we are considered too unsanitary for the societies we live in, we are forced to look to the margins of media for representation, even if it also dehumanizes us. As a result, pornography is often the first place trans people see evidence of our own existence. And because many of us are raised with this idea of our inherent lack of value as a human, we are in a sense primed by society to embrace whatever attention comes our way.
Love at First Sight – Yuko Finds her Indigo Girl
Shiina Kaori, the protagonist of Parade Parade, feels she owes her career as a pop singer to her girlfriend and manager, Imai Yuko. The two met when Yuko was scouting women in public to find a girl who she could groom into the perfect popstar; a girl who had something undeniably unique about her. We see Yuko surveying the women passing her on a busy sidewalk and thinking to herself “Well, every girl is pretty, but… I wonder, where can I find a potential candidate? Not just a good figure, but… Somebody that nobody forgets once they see her.”
Before long she spots the back of Kaori’s head through the crowd, her long brown hair and timid gait occluded partially by salarymen. Her eyes grow large, and instantly she jumps up in pursuit, having an epiphany as she runs towards the girl she has chosen: “Wait, what is this? I feel strange.” She calls out to the mystery girl, who then turns around, and upon seeing Kaori’s face it’s clear: Yuko is infatuated. Her very first words to Kaori are classic love bombing and signal her intentions: “It’s you. Yes. You are the one.” Kaori is in a position familiar to many phallic women who aren’t used to receiving positive attention or affection. Kaori, like the rest of us, is extremely susceptible to love or even an imitation of it. Most of us know what it feels like to be prepared to do anything, accept anything, and endure anything, just to keep feeling what seems like true love. As Carmen Maria Machado writes in In The Dream House, “She is not your first female crush, or your first female kiss, or even your first female lover. But she is the first woman who wants you in that way—desire tinged with obsession.”
Kaori herself confirms that she has fallen for the spell of Yuko’s love bombing. She admits to Yuko that because she “has a strange body,” she has “avoided public attention” and has been lonely all her life. Kaori has been taught that because she has a penis as a woman she is undeserving of love and companionship in any form. Yuko dismisses her emotional vulnerability, telling her merely to “stop saying such stupid things” and pinches Kaori’s face as a punishment sublimated as play. While it’s clear that Kaori believes Yuko’s affection meant she was finally seen as a person and not an object, for Yuko, love was just a means to obtain that rare object for her own.
“It’s bigger than usual” – Phallic women as sex objects
Once Yuko has affirmed to Kaori that she is needed, she begins to initiate sex despite Kaori’s evident discomfort. “It’s bigger than usual,” Yuko says to an evidently uncomfortable Kaori, who mutters “stop it” in response. Pretending not to hear this, Yuko stimulates Kaori to orgasm, and Kaori’s apparent physical pleasure in these moments occurs as a direct result of Yuko’s refusal to acknowledge her girlfriend’s discomfort or revoked consent as real.
In the sex scenes between Yuko and Kaori, consent is blurry and most often coercive. Yuko never needs enthusiastic or re-affirmed consent from Kaori. As far as she is concerned, Kaori is her sexual property, and as such is not truly human enough for consent to matter. The push-and-pull of physical pleasure, discarded consent, compliments, and humiliation are a mechanism of confusion by which Yuko seeks to do whatever she pleases to and with Kaori while convincing her that the desire was mutual, that consent was tacitly given.
To Yuko—and to the intended audience of Parade Parade—this is perfectly sensible. Yuko idealizes Kaori to the point of objectification, and her girlfriend’s value comes from what she can do for Yuko’s career and sexual gratification rather from who she is as a person, or her thoughts and feelings. Yuko likely also knows that as an intersex woman, Kaori’s life is undervalued by society at large, and that being made to feel needed will replace the genuine love that Yuko had seemed to promise when they first met. Kaori is unable to see that Yuko’s objectification of her is not respect or love, but abuse. Yuko has made Kaori into the engine of her own success and wealth in the pop idol industry, as well as, we later discover, used her to get revenge on an old rival. But, still, Kaori does not believe she deserves any better—she doesn’t even know what better looks like. All she has are the promises of love and a future together that Yuko made at the beginning, and holds onto those to keep believing in a relationship that does not really exist.
Throughout Parade Parade Yuko’s emotional and sexual abuse of Kaori plays out within the dynamic of Yuko as a manager/girlfriend and Kaori as something of a girlpet. Having been love bombed and transformed into the beloved popstar she once dreamed of being, Kaori feels indebted to Yuko to the point where she accepts her subhuman status. Kaori’s reality has become dependent on her fulfillment of Yuko’s fantasy. Her purpose is to serve Yuko’s joy, or at least her endless pursuit of it. If Yuko had been a man, maybe Kaori would have had more visible models empowering her to leave. But in a lesbian relationship where her endosex girlfriend gives her recognition, and access to a society that would otherwise reject her, Kaori needs Yuko, and the abuse is but a minor cost.
The end of fantasy – seeing abuse for what it is
It is when Kaori is sexually assaulted by Yuko’s old rival singer, Saki Midorisawa, that it becomes clear to the audience that Yuko is intended to be portrayed as the healthier, supportive partner to Kaori. She’s placed in opposition to Saki, who is used to diminish Yuko’s abusive behavior by contrast. However, the sexual dynamic between Kaori and Yuko is also abusive, even if it is less obviously extreme than the way Saki treats Kaori. We are encouraged to believe that because Yuko is not abusive in the same way as Saki, she is Kaori’s “hero” for whom Kaori should be grateful, and whose own violence should be overlooked. This upholds the fantasy presented by Parade Parade that the sex scenes between Kaori and her girlfriend Yuko are consensual, because by comparison to Saki’s more blatant sexual assault, Yuko’s coercive nature seems acceptable—even gentle. Saki’s possessive pursuit of Kaori is not as obfuscated by faux romance as Yuko’s was, and she admits she wants to “collect” Kaori to give her own submissive girlfriend, Sayaka, a sexual partner to play with.
To emphasize the difference between the heroic Yuko and predatory Saki, Parade Parade has Saki stalk Kaori after a show to graphically assault her in a bathroom stall. Once Saki has Kaori pinned in a stall, she is surprised by Kaori’s genitals, and exclaims “What the hell is this? A guy? You’re a man aren’t you?” Kaori meekly responds “No,” and is evidently frozen. When Saki discovers Kaori’s vulva she, as an endosex woman, redefines Kaori according to her fantasy: “So you’re a hermaphrodite. This is the first time I’ve seen one. This’ll be interesting.” The scene intends to pique the same “interest” in the audience; as John Phillips writes in Transgender on Screen, “transsexual pornography plays on the tension between concealing and revealing to generate maximum excitement in the viewer.” This scene is integral to how Parade Parade builds Kaori as a character. She is a fantasy first, a “‘hermaphrodite”’ who represents the fetishization of intersex women taken to the extreme, and her humanity is a potential in the narrative that’s never reached.
Just like Yuko, Saki ignores all of Kaori’s protests. She ignores Kaori’s murmured cries of “please stop” and “please don’t touch me,” and forces her to orgasm. When Kaori orgasms by force and coercion alike, the audience is meant to believe that the visible climax of a penis—even when it belongs to a woman—is evidence of her consent. Parade Parade does not show this as anything other than normal, since the purpose of Kaori’s existence is to arouse psychological and physical pleasure through the “exoticism” of her genitalia. And so when Saki tells Kaori “You’re so pretty, but you react like a man,” regarding Kaori’s physical responses to genital stimulation, she becomes a sex object who is easy to abuse, and whose victimhood is at the same time made invisible.
Kaori as a proxy for repressed lesbians
In Episode 2, to settle their past grievances, Yuko and Saki challenge one another to a sexual contest: the first to make the other’s girlfriend orgasm wins. If Yuko loses, Kaori’s intersex identity will be revealed to the public, ruining her and Yuko’s career. Kaori and Sayaka are pure sex objects in this scene, and exist only as a way for their respective handlers to prove their sexual prowess and wordlessly express their unconfessed attraction to one another. Yuko wins the contest, using her romantic history with Saki to her advantage. She, guessing that Sayaka would have learned a proclivity for anal sex from Saki, performs the act that she herself introduced to Saki when they were together years ago.
Although Saki has lost, the two are reconciled and confess feelings they repressed when both she and Yuko were popstar contemporaries. In the past, Yuko suffered a vocal injury that prematurely ended her singing career and then fled their repressed sapphic relationship without a word or trace. Saki admits she assaulted Kaori only because she was jealous and still wanted to be with Yuko. Yuko, likewise, was only using Kaori as a proxy popstar to get close to Saki again.
For the two women, Kaori was not a woman, but a sexual portal through which they could finally express their feelings for one another. And despite having been used in this way, Kaori still shows compassion for both Yuko and Saki. Towards the end of Episode 2 she consoles Yuko, who she is still committed to, as she cries about the way she hurt Saki by leaving suddenly. Kaori, stroking her girlfriend’s back, reassures her, whispering, “Yuko, I think she definitely understands your feelings. How bitter and sad you were… She definitely understands.” And while this prompts an apology from Yuko for hurting Kaori as well, Kaori merely reassures her that her life has been better since meeting Yuko. Through the two-part series Kaori has been constantly mistreated, assaulted, used for sex and for settling sexual grudges for someone Yuko loves more, and despite all this she is still content to believe her life is better off.
Parade Parade is not a standout production. It is an obscure porn series from the ‘90s that fetishizes intersex women, all women with penises, and lesbians. But it is also an honest representation of the crude treatment and abuse we receive in the real world. The unsanitary and taboo nature of porn ends up becoming a home for narratives and representation about intersex and trans women, whose real lives are often seen as too unsanitary to be discussed in full detail in mainstream novels, TV shows, and films. Shiina Kaori is not a character that could have been written into another genre or another context, and while I wish she was treated better than she was by Parade Parade, she is somehow more true to life for the experience of phallic women who are dehumanized on-and off-screen.
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