Ask John: Is Dragonball Z Sexist?

Question:
I understand that you have been asked the question, “Is Anime Sexist?” before. But that was about all of anime, which is clearly not sexist. But, I have noticed that many shonen titles about martial arts and fighting tend to never have any girl fighters. I don’t want to be picking on Dragon Ball Z or anything, but it gets me angry that in Dragon Ball Z the girls are usually shown sitting at home cooking dinner just worrying about their husbands. I know they have a few female fighters but they usually don’t do much, or a man just saves them. So my main question is, were anime that tend to not include girls very much meant to be sexist? Or did their creators not even know that they were doing this?

Answer:
This response is an extension of the previous “Ask John” article titled, “Is Anime Sexist?” It’s not my intention to individually address charges of gender role stereotyping in every individual genre covered by anime nor any number of individual titles, but I do think the martial arts/action genre of anime is unusually fertile ground for discussion.

I think that there are a number of ways to address the issue of sexism in martial arts anime, including examination of the background behind this genre of shows and examination of the shows in relative context.

I’ll primarily focus my response on Dragonball Z because it’s a relatively easy example to address, and because I’m just not knowledgeable enough about social science to analytically evaluate the sexual thematic politics of all martial arts anime. To some degree, Dragonball does have its fair share of female fighters, but equal representation of males and females is not the purpose of the story. In the Dragonball universe that encompasses Dragonball, Dragonball Z and Dragonball GT, Bulma and Lunch were originally adventurers, and Chi-Chi originally a fighter. Chi-Chi even participated in early Tenkai Ichi Budokai martial arts tournaments. Videl also participated in one martial arts tournament. In the Dragonball GT saga, Pan is both an adventurer and fighter. Then there are also the female warriors Juuhachigo, Sangria, and the un-named female Saiyan from the Bardock: Lonely Fighter TV special. Looking beyond equal opportunity examples of female fighters in Dragonball Z, though, the priority of the series is on being an adventure series for (roughly) 12 year old boys. Criticisms of the patriarchal capitalist market aside, boys of the target viewer age for Dragonball Z typically aren’t interested in seeing female characters. I don’t think that Dragonball Z intentionally marginalizes its female characters in an effort to suggest male dominance. I think Dragonball Z marginalizes its female characters in an effort to appeal to the natural instincts of young boys. Whether or not this constitutes sexism, either intentional or unconscious, may be a matter of interpretation. If Dragonball is considered sexist, then it exists as a product of the larger societal sub-strata of gender classified capitalist economics that defines males as physical and females as emotional.

If we examine the cultural inspiration for Dragonball Z we see that creator Akira Toriyama was heavily inspired by Chinese mythology and Chinese kung-fu. If we consider that in the original Dragonball series Son Goku and Kuririn were trained by a monk, it’s natural to draw parallels between the male fighters of Dragonball and the famous Shaolin monks of Chinese martial arts movies that doubtlessly influenced Toriyama. The Chinese Shaolin monks of movies on which the Dragonball Z fighters are loosely based, excluded women from temples and kung-fu training. If the ancestry of Chinese martial arts movies begetting Dragonball Z may be accepted as valid, then Dragonball Z does, in fact, propagate a certain sexism, but rather than strictly enforce a male exclusive universe, I think Dragonball Z merely reflects its origins in a patriarchal tradition. I don’t think Dragonball Z tries to intentionally promote the patriarchal values on which it may be based.

To further explore the relationship between Dragonball Z and Chinese film we may look to the more contemporary example of John Woo’s often critically analyzed Chinese films. Much like Akira Toriyama’s Dragonball, John Woo’s classic films including A Better Tomorrow 1 & 2, Hard Boiled, and The Killer, all deal with the bond between male warriors. In this chivalric Chinese culture, women aren’t marginalized; women don’t exist. This isn’t often considered overt sexism. It’s artistic license. In the films of John Woo, just like in Dragonball, the focus is on the brotherhood and pride of men among men. There’s no comparison between women and men; therefore women are neither subservient nor superior nor even equal to men. Women exist in a parallel but separate world. There are no assertions of the dominance of the male over female in the world of men. In the stylized universe of Dragonball Z, just like in the stylized world of Chinese heroic chivalry films, women have their own status and power in their realms, but the realms of women are distinct from those of men. Frequently in the Dragonball Z universe, women simply aren’t compared to men or indentured to men or superior to men. Fighters are valued by strength and ability alone, and women exist and rule in their realm while men exist and rule in their own other realm. The women that enter the men’s world do so as genderless fighters or adventurers, just as the male fighters in Dragonball Z see each other not as “men” but as “warriors.”