Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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Atlas Superstar
Posts: 34,426
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« on: August 16, 2012, 07:29:45 PM » |
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Guys, I'd like to tell you a story about my work as a Japanese major.
Last year, one of the major projects that I worked on was a long-ish paper for a class on Japanese popular culture in which I analyzed readership statistics and demographics for various Japanese magazines, mostly literary anthologies and manga, over the past few decades. The purpose of the paper was to demonstrate the vastly larger female periphery demographic for boys' magazines as compared to the male periphery demographic for girls' magazines and to develop several theories, which I left it as an exercise for my professor and the graduate students to determine the merits of, as to why this might be the case.
There were several points of data that did not at face value appear to corroborate my thesis, as well as several that, while they seemed helpful on the surface, in fact were not because of frankly any number of factors. For example, there were certain series running in shoujo (girls') magazines that had anecdotally significant male readerships (the general circulation of shoujo magazines does not usually rise above 10-12% male, whereas the circulation of shounen (boys') magazines is in the 35-45% female range). In each case there was something particular about these series that attracted these small but vocal male fanbases--Nana, for instance, has a variety of well-crafted and likable male characters beyond the usual romantic lead types, and also involves punk rock. (Compare this to Sex and the City, which, while it's now normally seen as a 'chick show' or a 'gay show', in fact had a straight male following in the day for reasons that I do not claim to fathom.) Strike Witches, meanwhile, had a following almost as overwhelmingly male as the shoujo magazines' was female, and this is because Strike Witches is a terrible series that I honestly can't think of a reason why almost any straight woman would enjoy.
Hence, the readership of the magazines was at least in part affected by the specifics of what was running in them at any given time and how it was being marketed. This did not mean that I could not arrive at general conclusions--indeed, I arrived at several, and theorized about several more. It did, however, mean that I had to be very careful to corroborate perceived trends across several magazines and preferably several years or even decades of readership statistics (where they were available; in some instances I did have to rely on mostly anecdotal scholarship, but I made sure to cite it from several sources).
I got an A for the paper and in the class.
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