Japan is legendary as the country where men routinely grope women in crammed subway and train cars. Well now Japan has identified a new form of sexual harassment - public display of a man's hairy chest. From the Sydney Morning Herald (where else?).
"JR East, the biggest train company in the world, slapped a ban on a poster featuring a man's moderately hairy chest - an image it considered so shocking to Japanese women that it constituted an open-and-shut case of sexual harassment.
"As sexual harassment becomes more of a problem, the standards for displaying posters in public spaces are becoming stricter," a representative of the Morioka branch of JR East instructed the Mainichi Shimbun.
The poster, an advertisement for a 1000-year-old nudity festival where men in loincloths attempt to ward off plague and ensure good harvests, "wasn't just out of line because there was nakedness; the pictures showed things that were particularly unpleasant for women, such as chest hair, and it was decided that showing them things they didn't want to see was sexual harassment".
One woman told the paper that Japanese women loathe chest hair by a 4 to 1 margin.
No comments:
Post a Comment