Render Your Gender

On the scale of who is manliest, it's widely understood that with my 26 cm feet, foreboding appetite and hairy neck, I surpass your average Japanese gentleman (and I'm a woman, if you're just joining us). Of course there are those who are bigger, hungrier and hairier, but allow me to make a generalization: I have most male Tokyoites my age beat when it comes to masculinity.

For example, I spent the other afternoon helping a straight male friend select an organic lip cream while he fretted self-consciously about the puffiness under his eyes. Then he showed me the best places to buy lightly used designer-label fashions. Then, over espressos and macrobiotic sweets, we talked about how to maintain a slender figure (he likes to take his French bulldog for walks). I could barely keep up with his refinement.

If these are typical interests for straight guys in Tokyo--they certainly don't appear to be atypical--then it's no wonder that Japanese women are pushed that much further to the high-pitched, vulnerable extremes of girliness.

Do you see the adorable necklace pictured above? I think there's a pink telephone woven into it, a purple strawberry, and a yellow choo-choo train, too. I wore it to a bar (because my friend made it for me) and was complimented endlessly on my neckwear, in a very sincere and reverent (and high-pitched) way. It's only one small example, but it reiterated for me Japanese womens' unique interest in the painfully cute. It once baffled me, but when offering a girl a facial is a way of hitting on her, it's clear to which side of the gender spectrum it's more popular for both sexes to gravitate. And if young Tokyo men already rival the average American woman in knowledge of skin care products, then I guess there's nowhere for young Tokyo women to go except toward child-like sweetness. This is all making a tiny bit more sense.