This Week in Anime

Let's Talk About Sex in O Maidens in Your Savage Season

I was lucky enough to have unmonitored internet access, which in hindsight probably did more harm than good to my development as a person, but not even a thorough understanding of 69 memes could make grown-up literature palatable to a young Micchy. That's about where we find the girls in O Maidens in Your Savage Season: old enough to be reading Haruki Murakami's latest novels, but still terrified by the weird psychosexual shit that crops up in them.

While I don't love everything Okada's written, I've been telling people since Aquarion Evol that she's at her best when tackling adolescent neuroses through humor. Her melodramas aren't for everyone, but I feel pretty confident recommending her comedies. O Maidens in particular is great for taking every embarrassing thought about sex that goes through an awkward teenager's head and putting it right out in the open. It's painfully relatable and pulls no punches, both hilarious and incredibly upsetting.

I say both, for O Maidens is all about the duality of the enticing and the terrifying.

It's pretty wild that the idea that even weird girls can be horny is so rare in mainstream media. To someone like me, who grew up a weird girl, that notion seems like a given, but in a society where girls and women are perceived as sexual beings only so far as they're sexually desirable, the simple decision to tell a story about the loser girl's relationship to sex is pretty radical. As much as O Maidens is a story about teenagers figuring out sex, it's also a story of girls refuting gendered ideas of purity—usually despite themselves.

Where the other girls are just socially awkward, Hongo is thoroughly, unapologetically weird. She's a 16-year-old author who sexts people on Omegle for research, actively freaks out her classmates, and has no problem talking about sex just to get under her friends' skin. But being able to joke about sex doesn't equate to being comfortable or experienced with it; in that respect she's no different from the other members of the club.

Hey, so long as he doesn't turn around and decide that dating his own students is okay, I'm fine with whatever reasons he has not to fuck minors. Hongo's teacher thirst isn't unusual for a teenage girl, just so long as they don't actually get together.

Talk about a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sexual awakening lol.

This whole time, she's been trying to draw a distinction between romance (the chaste stuff she's read in shoujo manga) and sexuality (which she equates with erotica), but there isn't a hard line. And that's the toughest thing for these girls to understand. Romance is more approachable; Kazusa's seen it in media her whole life. But the sexual facet of a relationship is foreign territory, so her instinct is to box it away as a wholly separate thing. The truth is that love and sexuality can be so intertwined that it's meaningless to try to label a feeling as strictly one or the other, even if it's comforting to do so.

The beauty of Okada's sex comedies is that they never lose sight of the connection between sexuality and emotions. That's the case in Aquarion Evol, where the horny-on-main character eventually realizes he wants more than just titty, and that's definitely the case in O Maidens as well. Kazusa might not fully understand where her attraction to Izumi starts and her love of him as a person ends, but ultimately it doesn't matter where that boundary is or if it exists at all.

Nina's an interesting character, since she's pretty enough that in any other show she'd be the popular but unapproachable beauty. But Okada sidesteps that stereotype by allying her with the awkward ostracized girls.

Exactly! Just as Niina rejects the fantasy version of herself that society projects onto her, Okada refuses to portray her (or any of the characters) as the shallow archetypes they initially seem to be. Even the Mean Girls have depths that Sonezaki fails to catch. They have unique personalities, and just because they happen to fuck and wear makeup doesn't make them superficial. Sonezaki, however, refuses to see them as anything more complex, and that makes Niina's words ring all the more true—not only do men tend to judge women by appearances, but patriarchy encourages that behavior in everyone, even those who think they're above it.

It's tricky, because it's not wrong to want someone to find you attractive, but it's also absolutely shitty that women are largely reduced to their looks.

I can think of a fair number of candidates. A certain Mushroom Eggplant, for instance.

Again, there isn't a hard line between romantic love and sexual desire; for many people, one implies some amount of the other, and that's okay. Feeling love is normal, being horny is normal, and people are better off accepting that they're not mutually exclusive.