Melbourne's Absurd Sexy Animes

Zero Out of 2,200 Possibilities

I recently went through my archive of approx. 2,200 stickers and noticed something very odd by accident. Of course, issues of sampling biases are always a valid argument, but none of my stickers depict a single naked man, not even partially, not even posing suggestively. Women do appear, but hardly ever as well. When they do, they tend to be framed as self-empowered, like the KC Schlampenstürmer, loosely translatable as “slutty hooligans.”

So far, so normal, so coherent everywhere, right?

Well, then there is the minority of anime-sticker-designers of Melbourne. And they have gotten to work, making designs that sport sexualised female characters appealing to the male gaze. For instance, the designer(s) of the red one created two versions of the same figure: one wearing a shirt, the other bare-chested, both now scattered across the whole city.

A global pattern would be easier to explain, especially given the ever-increasing popularity of anime in general and the well-established link between anime and sexualisation; certain strands of anime have long relied on exaggerated bodies, and tropes like school uniforms that link cuteness and sexuality. These types of images circulate online, where they become detached from their original context and are reused in everything from porn to posters to GIFs. In that sense, there is nothing unusual about sexualised anime imagery on stickers. It would be easy to read it as just another case of global cultural spillover. This local quirk of Melbourne raises different questions, though. Why this niche? In this place? Why have I not observed anything remotely similar anywhere else? I don’t have an answer, yet.