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Y'know, after reading through your TWCFM posts, I would really love to read an analysis on the shows first episode, that is, if there's anything to analyze.

i'm working on a longer one for the website, but that'll be a long time coming, so just for you i'll lay out my sketch of master thief vs lady looter so far here

tldr: it's really easy to want to see lupin as an asshole and fujiko as a victim this episode. that impulse is what master thief vs. lady looter is about

fujiko exists to be lupin's love interest. you don't need to watch or read much to understand that she's "the girl". but twcfm knows what we're expecting from a feminist deconstruction of lupin the third, and it's easy to see master thief vs. lady looter as lupin the third with the misogyny dial turned up. here, for example

it sounds like lupin's being, depending on your point of view, either correct about or misogynistic towards fujiko. If this is lupin being correct about fujiko, he anticipated her trickery and stopped her in her tracks. If this is lupin being misogynistic towards fujiko, him saying this is a moral judgement. what are we picking up on to get us to either conclusion?

let's look at the context. this comes right after fujiko tried to seduce him. lupin is the last person in the world who would stop an opportunity to have sex with a beautiful woman. he even called her an "extraordinarily fine woman" earlier. if he truly thought her value was only in her body, he wouldn't have passed up an opportunity for sex. plus, if this was a trap, chances are he would've been able to get out of it easily like he did the jail. if fujiko exists to be lupin's love interest, why are we forgetting what we know about lupin?

this also comes after fujiko told lupin what she's heard about him, and lupin says "i'm a lover of learning" after. how does she conduct her thievery? it sounds like he's doing the same back at her. we can guess why what fujiko's heard about lupin sounds nicer than vice-versa. chances are, she's turning her head after not because of lupin specifically, but either her dislike of how others see her or his interrupting her ruined whatever it was she was gonna do to him.iIf she were truly upset with him, she wouldn't have suggested to split the loot seconds later. the two of them are equals. she can take him repeating a few untrue assumptions her way without breaking. if fujiko exists to be lupin's love interest, why are we forgetting what we know about how fujiko?

even though both of those initial interpretations are quick to come to, they don't take the context or who the characters are into account. "fujiko exists to be lupin's love interest" seems obvious, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

you know that gag where lupin jumps into fujiko's bed and fujiko ejects him with a spring-fist?

this gag is meant to be...well, a gag, giving lupin his just desserts for being a pervert. imagine if this wasn't a gag. if we truly saw fujiko ejecting lupin from her bed as him getting what he deserves, lupin the third would be a very different series. lupin getting his "just desserts" is really just for this moment only. after this and jokes like it, no matter how many times they make them, fujiko and lupin will continue to exist as they do. sometime's she'll trick him, sometimes he'll get one over on her, but we generally know they're still involved. we see them a lot in situations in which her truly hating him wouldn't make much if any sense. knowing everything we do, why are we still treating this as lupin getting his just desserts in isolation? how is fujiko a victim of lupin's perversion here, but not enough to not be involved with him anymore or turn us off of the series entirely? what are we meant to take away from this that doesn't ultimately put their relationship in a bad light?

well, nothing about fujiko. she isn't doing much other than punishing lupin. since this won't change how she relates to lupin, she's functionally just a vessel from which to dish out the punishment. nothing about lupin and fujiko's relationship beyond that, since how we think of them in these gags doesn't translate to how we think of them elsewhere. whether you even think the punishment is warranted depends entirely on how you perceive lupin's womanizing. so, despite the gag suggesting that it's a bad thing, lupin's jumping into the bed ultimately doesn't have any negative long-term consequences. lupin the third didn't originate with a consistent storyline where negative long-term consequences for anything would make any sense, so why bother to repeatedly punish lupin if nothing is going to come out of it? the only definitive thing we can get from this gag is what's already evident: lupin is a pervert. that's it.

monkey punch wasn't an idiot. he may have loved drawing naked and scantily clad women, but he knew that women being relegated to sex objects is generally a bad thing. lupin was originally conceived as an anti-hero, parodying james bond-type characters and their consistent womanizing. fujiko was the parody bond girl[s] to lupin's parody bond. she wasn't her own character at first - her name, literally "the twin peaks of mount fuji", was originally a placeholder for suspiciously similar-looking, large-chested female thieves that lupin got himself involved with until they eventually all meshed into one character.

so it's no wonder that we're able to see the bad stuff lupin's doing. that's not the problem. all we got out of the bed jumping gag was "lupin is a pervert", and all we got out of the first scene i showed is "lupin is an asshole" or "lupin is correct about fujiko" in every case, fujiko is a vessel through which to tell us something about lupin.

the thing about series like lupin the third is that female characters exist to indicate that the male characters aren't gay. the difference here is important. she doesn't exist to indicate that he's straight, she exists to indicate that he's not gay. lupin the third isn't entirely about lupin pursuing women. in fact, it's pretty homosocial. if you're attracted to women, you're gonna wanna portray attractive women being attractive. if you think men and manly stuff are more important, you're gonna reduce women's presence in your work. since it's mostly men and manly stuff, you won't want people to get the wrong idea. that's how you end up with female characters reduced to romantic/sex objects. the fact that fujiko is supposed to be especially hot also tells us something about lupin that he consistently "bags" her. that's the problem.

"not gay" is not a sexuality. when we talk about gender, we talk about women, not men. when we talk about sexuality, we talk about gay, lesbian, bisexual, or any label other than straight. it's as if to be straight and a man - "not gay" - is to not have a gender and sexuality. similarly, it may be easy to take lupin's place as the title character for granted even if he's not at the center. when we define lupin as "not gay", what are we really saying about him?

fujiko, objectively

the very first shot of the show is fujiko from lupin's point of view. something else we get from lupin's point of view: when fujiko walks to the altar and kisses the cult leader, the people in the background seem to be blushing...without actually looking at her/them. the cult leader, as we eventually learn, is very much into both women in general and fujiko in particular, but he isn't blushing.

similarly, when we see fujiko dance from the cult leader's point of view, the two guards are blushing while looking at him. all the women are looking at him, too, but they aren't blushing like the men are.

the third instance where something similar happens is in no one's point of view, so it's a bit more complicated. after fujiko calls the guards on lupin, the two burlier ones take him away while the younger-looking one stays behind. she's hot, we know she seduces people, and he blushed - it seems like fujiko seduced him to his death. but consider the order of events. he was looking away from her when she said "thank you, you saved me"...

...she walked up to him and grabbed his arms, and he only started blushing after she grabbed them, never having even looked at her...

...she assumed what he was gonna say before he said it...

...she made them tip over (she stood on her toes, after which they fell, i need to save image space on this post though), after which he tried to get up and said he didn't mean to, meaning that him being on top of her was an accident...

...after which she poisons him and he, sweating bullets, slumps over.

if this was a seduction, why did fujiko do everything? if he wanted some and fujiko appeared to be entirely receptive, wouldn't he have initiated at least something? we can chalk his not initiating anything up to shyness or "resisting" because he can somehow smell that something's up, but that would imply that he's otherwise into her. how are we so sure of that? the only hard evidence we have that he's into her is that he was blushing while fujiko is naked, but it isn't hard evidence at all. blushing can happen due to attraction just as easily as it could due to shyness, modesty, or discomfort. he could've blushed because someone suddenly approaching you is unexpected, being grabbed on the arm with no prior prompting is awkward, or a naked stranger doing all of this to you at all is uncomfortable. plus, he only blushed when she grabbed his wrist, never at her.

we don't know this guy, let alone any of the other guards who were blushing. they could be shy, modest, thinking about something else entirely, or a bunch of things other than easily seduced or enraptured by fujiko. to see this as an unambiguous seduction is to see the young guard as having had a part in it. instead, the context is telling us that fujiko assumed he wanted certain things out of her which he may not have. why were we so quick to assume that this was fujiko successfully luring yet another drooling man for her own ends?

when we think of sexism, the first thing that comes to mind is usually hostile sexism. hostile sexism is a lot easier to identify because it's, well, hostile. take the sentiment, "fujiko is an evil slut who used her body to trick an innocent man into dying for her own personal gain". in this case, the "personal gain" was literally not dying - the implication was that she dressed the guard's corpse up in her clothes to take her place at the execution. killing people is bad, but fujiko was about to die herself. plus, jigen kills people, too. do we think he's unsalvageably evil for that? fujiko's just doing her job. why should it matter at all what the guard wants or what she used to get out of there?

according to hostile sexism, women are inherently manipulative, stupid, whiny, morally compromised, and in need of being "put in their place". we can pretty clearly get why this sentiment is misogynistic - it frames fujiko as evil solely for hurting men's feelings and being a "slut" at the expense of her personhood. the thing that's usually posited as the bad thing in fujiko's using her body to steal things isn't that she's stealing things, but that she has ulterior motives. what she's a "slut" for is having her own agenda - not using her body in a way that ultimately benefits the man on the other end. she makes men think she's romantically or sexually receptive to them, and it's bad because she actually isn't.

but fujiko's a criminal. criminals are supposed to do bad things. it isn't hard to imagine that the people lupin steals from would be upset at having been stolen from, or that the people on the other end of jigen's barrel would rather not die, but we don't prioritize how they feel and from there paint lupin and jigen as irredeemably evil. we should treat fujiko the same.

the less visible form of sexism that's usually harder to spot but is equally harmful is benevolent sexism, because it sounds, well, benevolent. take the sentiment, "all these men want one thing out of fujiko, so you can't fault her for doing what she did to that guard." the young guard certainly didn't "want one thing" - again, blushing can mean other things - so we didn't use the hard facts of the situation to come to this conclusion. why do we want him to "want one thing"? could fujiko not have killed him otherwise? is her ability to seduce entirely contingent on what the man on the other end should want out of her? this implies that the way she conducts her trickery doesn't require any actual effort. if all men truly wanted "one thing" out of fujiko, she wouldn't actually be capable of tricking anyone. all men would just give her whatever she wants solely because she's hot without her having to lift a finger. we went over all the good reasons she has to do what she's doing. why are we discounting what fujiko did herself?

according to benevolent sexism, women are inherently fragile, caring (like wives and mothers are supposed to be), innocent, morally pure, and in need of men's protection. the sexism of the hostile sexism was easy enough to understand, but focusing on "greedy whore" may cause us to gloss over another part of what got us to "whore" in the first place: overlooking fujiko's motivations as a character. if we aren't thinking about fujiko's motivations, we may not see why the benevolent sexism is sexist at all because it sounds like we'e being nice to her. "all men want one thing" makes the men out to be so horny that they don't see that they're being tricked. it's their fault. we're giving fujiko an "out" from scrutiny.

but why does she need an "out"? and why is that "out" men being blindingly horny? men mistreat women all the time, but that guard was just standing next to her. she initiated everything. he did not need to be attracted to her for any of that to happen. but if she didn't seduce a blindingly horny guard, she only assumed he wanted "one thing" and killed someone who didn't "deserve" it. what would we think of her then? she’s the one who approached him. she’s using her body to trick people. if we're set on giving fujiko an "out", she can't be the capable and competent adult she is because we wouldn't like her so much otherwise. is fujiko tricking people really so terrible that we need to dismiss the possibility that she can actually be a thief? we don't feel the need to come up with "good reasons" why lupin's a thief or womanizer, least of all on the basis of what his victims are, do we? the benevolently sexist sentiment is actually saying the exact same thing that the hostile sexist statement is.

hostile and benevolent sexism are two sides of the same coin. the commonality is the idea that women are more irrational, weaker, and less capable than men, and therefore need to be kept "below" men. the only difference is in how they're conveyed. we usually think of bigotry as hostility, but bigotry is bigger than that - it's a framework for seeing the world that's based in the presumption that certain types of people have intrinsic characteristics, and because of that they should be judged differently. hostile sexism openly derides women for not fitting the standards set by benevolent sexism, and benevolent sexism unilaterally paints women to be the bad guy when they "step out of line" in the fashion of hostile sexism. degrading someone and putting them on a pedestal are both ultimately not treating them like a human.

since we aren't thinking about fujiko's motivations and are discounting her capability, we could only interpret this as an unambiguous seduction by interpreting the young guard as falling for the seduction - as attracted to fujiko. fujiko's often spoken of in terms of "no man" being able to resist her, right? you can't assume that "no man" can resist fujiko without assuming that all men are attracted to fujiko. fujiko is a very attractive woman, sure, but men aren't a monolith. there's no way that every man in the world is attracted to fujiko. what if fujiko doesn't fit a guy's "type"? what if he finds women who look like fujiko generally attractive, he's just not into her specifically because of some aspect of her personality? what if he isn't attracted to anyone but his romantic partner? what if he's gay? what if he isn't interested in romance or sex at all? what if the guard was just uncomfortable with a naked person he doesn't know randomly approaching him, which is a reasonable thing to be uncomfortable with regardless of how attractive she is or whether he was actually attracted to her? assuming that "all men want one thing out of fujiko" is assuming a lot about all men.

to understand fujiko as a thief is to understand that she knows that she's beautiful. she actually uses her body. since there's no way that every man ever is attracted to her, it should follow that she can make incorrect assumptions about what men want from her like she did that guard. but can you blame her? she's not only supposed to be so attractive that "no man can resist her", but she's supposed to say something about lupin because we consider "bagging" a woman like her to say something about a man. fujiko is everything a woman should be. like any woman who's considered to be conventionally attractive, she didn't decide that about herself. value is applied to her body from the outside as if she's a shiny object for sale. she wouldn't be a very good thief if she couldn't anticipate that others apply such high "value" to her. to quote ways of seeing by john berger:

"To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determined not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight."

if you're used to being gawked at by men because you're supposed to be beautiful, chances are you'll assume a random man you don't know is no different from any other. if you're intending to mislead him using your looks, it's only logical to perform yourself conforming to what you're expecting that archetypical gawking man to want out of you as a beautiful woman. how he's actually looking at you and what he really wants doesn't need to factor into that. if that's what the man actually wants out of her, it's by chance. if he gets tricked, it's on him not for being attracted to her - there's nothing wrong with being attracted to fujiko - but for assuming that she isn't capable of more.

fujiko from the perspective of the average lupin writer

it shouldn't be lost on you that we were seeing the two other instances of background extra blushing from the points of view of two men we know to be unambiguously into fujiko. in a way, setting these up from their points of view is a way to test our point of view. if we saw being kissed by fujiko as something worth being jealous of like lupin did, wouldn't it make sense for all those blushing guards to feel the same way? if we saw fujiko dancing as enticing like the cult leader did, wouldn't it make sense for those blushing guards to feel the same way? if we saw lupin and the cult leader as horrible perverts towards fujiko, but we still interpreted the blushing guards to feel that way, why did we think that was obviously what the blushing was about? why are we so quick to come to conclusions about these extras who we know nothing about? did we project attraction onto the non-blushing women, too? did we assume that the one blushing woman blushed for the same reasons as the men? in the next episode, cicciolina says that neither men nor women are able to resist fujiko - is that holding water with our assumptions here?

there's also oscar's blushing. since we saw her blush at a man, all the other men who blushed must in comparison be blushing for "normal" reasons. they'd show us otherwise, right? given that no piece of media is neutral, how are we so sure of that? this is still coming to conclusions too quickly. why is oscar our only metric when we have so much more to go by?

unlike them, we saw evidence all over the episode that the cult leader is not only attracted to women, but fujiko in particular. (you wouldn't be using scantily clad women as furniture if you didn't like looking at their bodies.) because of that, and because fujiko is dancing specifically for him, we can say with certainty that the he blushes at her then because he's attracted to her. he didn't need to blush at the altar to still be attracted to her because all those other indications make it safe to assume that his attraction to her is a baseline. all we can say for the guards is that they're men. we need to look at more than what there may be to blush at.

lupin the third is a series originally created by a straight man primarily targeted at straight men. when women are reduced to romantic/sexual objects via the process i described in the intro, they end up reduced to their bodies. this more often than not results in the women being portrayed through a mode of framing female characters which feminist film theory calls the male gaze. in patriarchal societies, gender imbalance is reflected in visual media, and this is one of the primary ways in which that's done.

there's three parts to the male gaze: the man behind camera, the man on screen, and the spectator. the man behind the camera is attracted to women, so the woman on screen is displayed to reflect his perspective - he frames her body as inviting attraction because he's attracted to her body. there doesn't need to literally be a male character there, but the disparity of a man not being positioned in this way in the same piece of media results in the woman being reduced to her body - objectified - in comparison. the spectator is invited to not only share the point of view of the man behind the camera, but, if there's one there, project attraction onto the male character due to the framing.

to be clear, the male gaze isn't when you're a man and you find a female character attractive. it's the name for this particular way of framing female characters. you don't have to be attracted to women or a man to understand the unspoken implications of the male gaze. the messages it conveys are broadcast to us all the time because, unbeknownst to the man behind the camera, the way he chose to portray his attraction isn't free of cultural misogyny.

a great example of the male gaze in action is, ironically, the bed-jumping gag. notice how fujiko's naked in both of the iterations i showed? we wouldn't think lupin is getting his "just desserts" if we didn't think fujiko was worth lusting over - we saw her as "something" to look at and him as someone looking at her. all of this does nothing on her end other than speak to how hot she's supposed to be. did we even consider why she could possibly be punching lupin out of the bed other than that he wanted to sleep with an innocent, beautiful woman? maybe it was too soon and she needed more time to get ready? maybe, knowing them, that's just their "thing"? aren't they supposed to be involved? isn't fujiko supposed to be the opposite of innocent? to quote ways of seeing again, about the painting vanity by hans memling:

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”

here, the condemnation is directed towards lupin, and fujiko is an outlet through which to condemn him. we can only consider the subject of vanity to be vain if we think that a woman appreciating her own appearance is vain - we'd rather she direct herself towards us. similarly, we can only consider fujiko as passively being perved over if we'd rather she not have sexual agency in that moment in the same way lupin does. why are we assuming that she's passive by default? would lupin not deserve punching into the wall otherwise?

the quiet part: the only "good" option for a woman is being "something" pretty to look at, and the only option other than the one "good" option is that she's intrinsically evil, or hysterical, or what have you. women can't have agency and be "good". it should say something that, through the misogynistic point of view, it's only hostile sexism that recognizes fujiko as having initiated the "seduction" of the guard. fujiko's either incapable of having the sexual agency required for her to be a thief or a slut. if we saw her as just doing her job, she wouldn't be just something to look at anymore. that's why it's objectification - the male gaze turns fujiko into "something" rather than a human being with a brain. we don't have assumptions about who we should be looking at or who's thoughts and feelings are important and why out of thin air.

the male gaze isn't just the result of individual men-behind-the-camera's attractions because it reflects larger cultural patterns. it's a projection of our expectations of gender that happen to come in the form of sexual roles - it reflects the gendered and sexual inequalities of patriarchy. it isn't the gaze of literally every man ever, it's the gaze of what the archetypical man is "supposed" to want in terms of what kinds of bodies are "supposed" to be attractive. the central assumptions of the male gaze are that "women's bodes"* are more beautiful and weak, "men's bodies" are less beautiful but stronger, men are attracted to women by default, and "men act and women appear" - attraction works in the form of men having a sexuality and women being the recipients of sexuality. these assumptions about what attraction "should" look like are so ubiquitous that we let them overpower everything else, including what any of the involved parties may be thinking or feeling.

*as later episodes show us, what we conceive of as "men's" and "women's" bodies requires we make other unspoken assumptions, so it's a lot muddier than it's usually made out to be.

ultimately, women are their bodies. the man behind the camera wouldn't be framing female characters like this if he didn't think that how they look was the most important thing about them. throughout patriarchal societies across history, women have been, as gayle rubin put it in the traffic in women, "given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favors, sent as tribute, traded, bought, and sold" because they were supposed to "provide" reproductive and household labor for men. that is, the male gaze isn't just about finding fujiko hot, it's about assuming certain things about her body because of what women are supposed to be. (compare that to this - if goemon was fujiko and jigen was a man who doesn't dislike fujiko, we'd be understanding this sequence differently.) if we think that "fujiko exists to be lupin's love interest" without looking deeper into what we mean by that, she can exist to be "for" any other man just as easily

attaching gendered characteristics onto people because of what their bodies "should" represent is something we do a lot. you see in other types of bigotry, too. in fujiko's case, it may mean that we define her as "woman" rather than "thief". that's why she can be innocent and beautiful one moment and a "slut" the next. in this way, the male gaze is a sort of mitigation of threat. wendy arons, when discussing the objectification of women who fight in hong kong action movies, described it like this:

"The focus on the body — as a body in an ostentatious display of breasts, legs, and buttocks — does mitigate the threat that women pose to 'the very fabric of...society', by reassuring the viewer of his male privilege, as the possessor of the objectifying gaze."

in other words, we know that fujiko tricks people, but we keep falling for it and assuming whatever man is too because we don't want her to trick us. if she could seriously trick us without us objectifying her, we were tricked by a woman.

the male gaze is really just a symptom of the cause. it limits what we see of fujiko on screen and on the page because her body is supposed to be the most important thing about her. twcfm uses a lot of specific examples of all the specific ways fujiko can appear to us and why. master thief vs. lady looter's point is more simple: no matter how it looks, she's a thief. in the first scene, it was obvious that lupin had something up his sleeve, but did we see fujiko the same way? or did we just see a hot woman either being evil or being passive towards a perverted cult leader? we tend to define her against the men she's placed opposite, but she's a person with a brain. she's neither an "evil slut" nor a dainty and fragile victim of men's lust. her capability isn't dependent on how men feel about her at all - she's capable on her own.

that's why they had fujiko kill that guard rather than just seduce him. killing him carries the same moral baggage her seductions do once they're found out, but if we're intent on just focusing on her body, we won't think about how she manipulated an innocent man to her own ends. not because we're forgiving of fujiko, but because we see the man on the other end as having enjoyed it and so nothing bad as actually having happened. we render fujiko incapable because it gives us our power back.

when presented bluntly with her killing, if we were hostily sexist, we used that to scorn her, and if we were benevolently sexist, we sought out justifications in the man's inherent greater strength/danger/sexuality because we were uncomfortable with her capacity to do such a thing. but either reason depended entirely on how we interpreted the guard to feel about her. so, ether way, we were so intent on wanting fujiko to be "something" to look at that we prioritized an extra's feelings over her agency just because he's a man - a perfect illustration of how we perceive fujiko's tricking men as a whole. it's a part of the "love = death" equation they did for the literal deconstruction aspect.

with that in mind, let's take a look at another time later in the episode where it's easy to misinterpret something lupin says about fujiko. he talks a lot about fujiko's "desperate measures", and it is easy to get the impression that fujiko's measures really are a result of desperation given what we see. but applying value to a woman's body isn't just finding her sexy. what was he actually saying?

we're getting a montage of him sneaking into the vault indirectly while he's saying this. "just for some drugs" - he's after those drugs too, so he doesn't actually think the drugs are not important. he wouldn't have approached the cult leader like she did.

again, she's just doing her job. there's nothing especially bad or desperate in her willing to kill for the sake of her job compared to when, for example, jigen does it. this is just another thing lupin wouldn't have done himself. fujiko doesn't use tricks, props, and gadgets like lupin does, so there's really no easier way for her to have gotten out of there.

plus, there was nothing explicitly suggesting that lupin thought her killing that guard was bad when he confronted her about it earlier. "only when necessary" seems to have been fujiko justifying herself to what seemed like an accusation. given what lupin's heard about her, i wouldn't be surprised if she's used to hearing things like that from a place of accusation. that gunfight wouldn't have gone how it did if fujiko where wholly upset with him.

"how far she falls" in regards to what? we can apply this to a million different things. given what lupin just said, he seems to be talking about her methodology. It seems like he sees the way she does what she does as her putting herself through the thick of it where he'd prefer to try to find a shortcut. of course that'd seem "masochistic" to him.

this was neither lupin's own crass misogyny nor him correctly analyzing her mode of thievery as actually "stooping low". lupin is interpreting fujiko through his own point of view as a thief. however, it seems like he doesn't entirely understand why and how fujiko does what he does. he said "i kinda like that" after - even if he doesn't understand it, he doesn't seem to be placing any sort of label on her. this was us projecting our thoughts about fujiko onto lupin's neutral phrasing.

lupin as pervert

you know the phrase "real men don't hit women"? it's been used in countless campaigns advocating against men's violence against women. in the paper "'real men don't hit women': constructing masculinity in the prevention of violence against women", author michael salter discusses the case of one such campaign. in 2014, united nations development program goodwill ambassador antonio banderas was a part of a un campaign to help stop violence against women. he recorded videos and wrote articles to that end, one of them saying:

"As a male and as an artist I believe that women are a source of life - and poetry. Not even with a rose petal should women be offended or abused … Hitting or abusing a woman is an act of cowardice. Real men don’t hit women."

according to banderas, women are "a source of life and poetry". they provide something valuable that men supposedly lack. because of what they "provide", they don't "deserve" to be abused. how do we usually think of women "providing" "life" and "poetry"? he was essentially saying that he respects women because they're supposed to be mothers and pretty. women can be both mothers and pretty, but women aren't just mothers or pretty. and why is being a mother or pretty considered to be a "provision"? can't they be either for their own sake? what women can or can't "provide" shouldn't factor into the reasoning of why they shouldn't be abused at all. women shouldn't be abused because no one should be abused. additionally, instead of saying that abusing women is bad in itself, the locus of the criticism is on the character of the male abuser. "real men" don't hit women because "real men" aren't cowards. as salter put it,

"The reverence for women expressed by Banderas is not premised on a shared humanity or equality but rather on essentialist differences between men and women, and the value of femininity as synonymous with motherhood. The invocation of the rose frames the protection of women in terms of romantic love and heterosexual desire, both capitalising on but also advancing Banderas’ public image as recently single movie star and heart throb."

he goes on to describe how several of the campaigns he looks at used people and phrasing we'd consider conventionally masculine in opposition to men who enact violence against women. men with traditionally masculine jobs such as firefighters and police officers with stern expressions acting as poster boys for men who don't hit women, celebrity spokesmen who supposed embody "real" masculinity in their social and cultural capital motivating male fans to follow in their footsteps, physically strong men with scars who challenging abusers to fight them instead, militant language like "stand up" and "challenge" to encourage men and boys to "fight" the "bad men" who enact violence against women, expressions like "my strength is not for hurting" which affirms that men are strong and just need to use their strength for good, women adoring their strong, masculine partners because they don't abuse them as if that isn't the baseline for a good romantic relationship of any kind.

if "real men" don't hit women, then men who abuse women are, what? faggots? the most pervasive form of abuse against women is domestic abuse. how can non-"real men" be the sole source of the abuse if they're weak, cowardly, effeminate, and not "man enough" to "get a girl" in the first place? statements like "real men don't hit women" are usually made to get boys and men on board in these sorts of campaigns, but why do boys and men apparently need to have their masculinity affirmed to convince them to not "hit women"?

the irony in "real men don't hit women" is that the belief that strength - a greater perceived capability for violence and sexuality - is what makes a "real man" is at the very heart of this abuse against women. men enact violence against both women and other men in the service of proving their masculinity. men coerce female partners into sex because they believe it's the woman's "duty" as his partner, and beat them if they refuse for whatever reason. men stalk, harass, and take violent revenge on women they believe to have somehow "betrayed" their affections, even if it's by just not being interested. men touch and catcall female strangers, believing their encroaching on their personal space is a compliment rather than an invasion of privacy. men beat other men they perceive as "bad men" to establish their comparative "goodness". we expect men to be aggressive or physically engage in a way that "proves" their strength in some way, be it through actual violence, sports, violent video games, or even intellectual or social "dominance". a response of violence is a response of restoring one's masculinity. how can "real men" be the solution to the problem if the idea of a "real man" is the problem?

we know that degrading and abusing women is not a good thing. and we know that men are the most likely to do this. but, due to other gendered baggage we have, we're kind of clumsy with how we think of men who are attracted to women who mistreat women (or we perceive as doing such). we deride the predatory gay man for foregoing his supposedly superior social position by going after the "incorrect" targets of attraction, and the female pervert for not behaving as a woman "should" regardless of who she goes after. compared to them, the straight male pervert doesn't have anything glaringly obvious for us to deride. he's a man, and we expect men to be capable of having a sexuality and "using" it. he's going after women, but women are supposed to be the "correct" targets of attraction and they're not supposed to be so strong that they're incapable of being victims. if his gender or sexuality were to blame for his perversion like how we blame gay men's sexuality or women's gender, what would that say about men who are attracted to women?

we cast men into the categories of "good men" and "bad men", "real men" and "fake men", "good majority" and "deviant minority" precisely to preserve the sanctity of that archetypical "real man". if it's only a few bad apples - if there's "bad men" and "good men" - there's nothing wrong with masculinity as a whole. "real men don't hit women" is better understood as "men who are outed as abusing women make men look bad". since we're so focused on "good men" and "bad men", we end up essentially twisting the woman to define the man. the abuse of women is posited as bad not because women are people, but because it's assumed that women are too weak to take a hit. men are better suited to redirecting their supposedly greater strength to protecting women. but who is it that women need protection from? are women really so innately weak and feeble that they can't possibly protect themselves?

there isn't just something wrong with masculinity, there's something wrong with how we think of gender and sexuality as a whole. the fact that the specter of the "bad man" essentially lets straight men off the hook is more than enough evidence of that. you couldn't be a libertine if you felt like your gender and sexuality have consequences.

to imply that lupin's attraction is something to worry about would be to imply that his attraction to women is bad. to imply that his sexuality is something to worry about would be to imply that men's capacity for such things in general is bad. lupin's perversion is supposed to be a quirk of his character. jigen, goemon, and zenigata aren't perverts, lupin is. if something is just the way you are, it's neutral.

hence the cognitive dissonance in lupin's writing. we didn't take his calling fujiko an "extraordinarily fine woman" too seriously, right? what makes us think we were seriously condemning him later in the episode? his phrasing sounded mean? it could only sound mean if we thought that fujiko was somehow a victim of her circumstances. if we're being hostily sexist, she's a slut and lupin's just the better thief. if we're being benevolently sexist, lupin's being a big meanie to a dainty little girl who accidentally tripped her way into the big scary criminal underworld filled with men who all want "one thing". either way, he's the one being defined. she's just defining him.

similar to fujiko herself, lupin's perversion is worth punishing when it needs to be, but his going after women is lauded or turned into a lighthearted joke (that is, made easy to dismiss) when it needs to be. if he's drooling over a woman and it isn't immediately obvious that she dislikes it, she's hot, so of course he's drooling over her. if he jumps into fujiko's bed and she punches him into the wall, he's an eager pervert who's getting his just desserts. women are objects we can define him against. whether it's as "good" or "bad" doesn't matter.

men being reduced to their genitals is dehumanizing, but it's the reduction we're making both of that guard and of lupin. why is it forwarded in a series in need of a feminist deconstruction? because it comes with the benefit of men being considered beyond reproach. if "wanting one thing" makes men so irrational that they automatically fall for fujiko, they have no responsibility in anything that comes next. this is how, for example, female victims of sexual assault by men are blamed for their own assaults. "if you weren't wearing such a short skirt, he wouldn't have assaulted you". if men can never "help it" whether they're "good" or "bad", it's the female victim's fault for "causing" the assault, it's okay for men to assault women who do things to "deserve" it like wearing short skirts. sexuality, after all, is supposed to indicate physical strength and mental capability. "men act". we expect men to be like this. the only difference between a "good man" and a "bad man" is that, when a "good man" is violent against women, it's thought that the woman deserves it, be it by "stepping out of line" or simply being hot. (see: the next episode, as well as fujiko and goemon's arc.)

pointing to lupin as uniquely bad for jumping into women's beds ultimately serves to reify the very same social roles we expect out of men and women which cause what we think we're condemning him for. from another article by salter on the same topic:

"History shows us that violence against women has coexisted with its public denunciation for a long time. Historian A. James Hammerton described the nineteenth-century English tradition in which groups of young men constructed effigies of known wife-beaters to be paraded and beaten around the village before being set on fire. The public degradation of domestic violence perpetrators was not an outbreak of proto-feminism or an early form of male consciousness-raising. Hammerton argued it was a ritualised projection of masculine authority through the humiliation of men, and women, deemed to have breached social codes of respectability. Other similar rituals were performed targeting women complaining of rape or suspected homosexuals, since they were also considered to be challenging the gendered social hierarchies of the day."

when we condemn lupin, we condemn his masculinity. we say that he doesn't "deserve" fujiko for how he behaves. is fujiko "something" to be "deserved"?

our problem with lupin's perversion isn't that he's treating women like objects. we wouldn't want to watch or read a series about him if we were able to consistently see that. our problem is that he's openly sexual towards beautiful women, which we consider to be disrespectful. his jumping into fujiko's bed is bad because it's fujiko who's bed he's jumping into. that's just benevolent sexism. it's not that lupin never does anything worth criticism, but that we're only recognizing it as bad because we don't think that's "how women should be treated". again, men mistreat women all the time, but what's the actually bad thing here? women being objectified, or women being "corrupted"? if monkey punch thought it was the former, he wouldn't be using a naked fujiko just sitting there to convey to us that lupin is a pervert. from the "default" point of view, "pervert" when applied to him really means nothing more than "man".

we're not noticing the actual misogyny. as a result, what we're attributing lupin's "badness" to is impermanent and can change based on how he behaves. we don't actually take any "bad" stuff he does seriously because, well, why should we? he's lupin. we wouldn't suddenly be okay with the title character being an asshole if we truly believed it was gonna last. making the james bond parody a disrespectful pervert betrays that monkey punch didn't understand the real problem with how those bond girls were showing up: they exist to indicate that james bond isn't gay. they're supposed to be a part of what makes him a "real man".

where fujiko would be irredeemable for just doing her job, our condemning lupin for the entirety of the episode (if we did at all) is merely a slap on the wrist in comparison because we're doing it from the standpoint of the male gaze. since lupin is ultimately a "real man" - he has fujiko, all those masculine trappings, and is the title character - we only temporarily acknowledge the fault then move on while women are still objectified for our viewing pleasure. why is the logical conclusion of his "natural" attraction either misogyny or superiority?

the straights are not okay

something you should know about lupin and fujiko: monkey punch has gone on record saying that they aren't in love, they just like having fun with each other as a man and a woman. this characterization is directly contrary to everything that bed-jumping gag is supposedly representing. if fujiko exists to indicate that lupin isn't gay, lupin exists to indicate that the lupin writers aren't misogynistic for fujiko existing. a relationship where both parties exist to indicate something about one another isn't much of a relationship, is it?

the idea of attraction as a distinct aspect of one's identity is relatively historically new. even the language used in japan for it today is comprised primarily of western imports. historically, partnering with men has kind of been an unnamed raw deal for women in patriarchal societies. women need to be kept "below" men in the first place because they're supposed to be wives, girlfriends, one-night stands, or sexy furniture before anything else. from jane ward on the topic,

"Across time and place, most forms of heterosexual coupling have been organized around men’s ownership of women (their bodies, their work, their children) rather than their attraction to, or interest in, women. Women were men’s property, slaves, and laborers, and women produced heirs to whom men could pass on their lineage and possessions. Women were the people with whom men had procreative sex, and women of privilege (wealthy women, white women, women of high status) were sometimes perceived as delicate and virtuous, in need of men’s protection and seduction (as in medieval and Victorian traditions of courtly and chivalrous love). But in none of these arrangements was “liking” women, or regarding them as men’s most logical and beloved companions, a requirement in the way that contemporary straight culture now presumes—or at least strives."

unfortunately, this baggage never entirely wore off. we wouldn't be forgetting everything we know about lupin and fujiko if it did.

why did fujiko lose the competition? the episode never gives us a concrete reason other than that lupin got there first. how come? did we see fujiko's ability as somehow taking a greater toll on her, leading to her getting there slower? if we saw this all as somehow unfair to fujiko, how did we accept a feminist deconstruction of lupin the third making lupin win while being mean while we get gratuitous shots of gujiko suffering lying down? is he just the better thief? there's nothing proving that, either, other than the series being titled after him. and we did see a lot of fujiko scantily-clad and struggling against the cult leader and his guards interspersed with lupin sneaking around the facility with relative ease. it would be offputting to see "master thief" lupin supposedly suffering in quite the same way, wouldn't it? why is it what we're expecting when it comes to fujiko?

there's also fujiko's whole thing with the cult leader - a metaphor for her relationship with lupin ("does this remind you of anything?"). when fujiko confronted the cult leader, did we assume that she couldn't hold her own just because he's a pervert? or that she was being disrespected by being in mere proximity to him? why'd she smile here after confronting him, then?

again, is fujiko "something" to be "deserved"? she didn't have to win the competition to "prove" her ability. thinking that she does would be like letting a child win at a game because they're a kid. writers may portray her ability as "lesser" than lupin's or worth condemning, but it's on them for thinking that her ability is "lesser" in the first place. were she real, they'd get tricked by her.

as it extends to other entries, think about how lupin later on became more lighthearted as a character. that wasn't the case in the mangas.

this may sound harsh, but lupin being suspicious of fujiko means that he anticipates her double-crossing, means he respects her intelligence. as was the case in the example i gave in the intro. monkey punch may have thought this makes lupin disrespectful, but it's more disrespectful to assume that either fujiko doesn't have something up her sleeve or fujiko having something up her sleeve makes her irredeemably bad where it wouldn't lupin. if lupin said the same thing about a male character who we know betrays people, would we be taking this as lupin insulting his character?

similarly, supposed "voice of reason" jigen calls fujiko a slut for sleeping with 1000 men, but supposedly disrespectful lupin calls this attitude parochial. how is fujiko a "slut" but not lupin, when he does the same thing? he can still objectify women while thinking like this, but what do we make of that when he actually gets to fujiko later in the chapter?

if we take this as sexual assault that fujiko retaliates against, we ignore that they're still gonna be involved after this while putting aside everything fujiko does herself. the victim's behavior is often used as justification for assault, but in this case, we have two options: fujiko shouldn't have thrown out lupin because she's already a slut (hostile sexism), or fujiko only slept with lupin and said that he's the best lover she's ever had because she couldn't meaningfully consent to him, his presence around her harms her enough in itself (benevolent sexism). it's often the latter that makes us default to seeing lupin as a disrespectful pervert to fujiko by default as if it's the lesser of two evils. why are we more okay with lupin being "bad" than we are fujiko? how is that any different from not wanting fujiko to be capable of thievery? why did we agree with jigen calling her a slut earlier, but she's a poor, helpless victim here?

since monkey punch based his concept of lupin being a pervert on benevolent sexism, that often extends to how he tended to portray sexual assault: as a "bad man" encroaching on a helpless woman. as a result, we can only see portrayals like this as sexual assault if we accept that lupin is a "bad man" and look at fujiko through the male gaze. showing up by surprise in a woman's bathtub isn't okay just because you're involved, but wouldn't it be easier and better for fujiko's line of work to be just as neutral as lupin's and for the two of them to just have a relationship? for the little context we're given and what we know about everyone, lupin could've surprised fujiko in the bathtub simply because his mischievousness means that he doesn't have a good sense of time and place.

although we know that lupin and fujiko are both thieves and involved, we aren't thinking of them that way. we're thinking of them in terms of how men and women "should" relate to each other. since we see male/female couplings as "natural" and not requiring explanation, it means that we often tend not to do the "work" to see how fictional male/female couples are couples - how they relate to each other as individuals. instead, we tend to default to seeing how they relate to each other in terms of their genders, since we're conceiving of "man" and "woman" to equal "couple" with no further explanation needed. in this case, we know that they won't stop being involved, so we tend not to place any major stakes in their relationship status. that's how we end up forgetting what we know to be true about lupin and fujiko when we see them together. we don't need to have them "explained" to us because their relationship is the "default", both in terms of lupin the third's status quo and in terms of what we're expecting out of fictional relationships.

it's easy to condemn lupin as uniquely bad if we're not thinking about how it reflects on him and fujiko being together regardless, if we consider both lupin's "not being able to help it" and a man "having" a woman as not worth remark. we can only think of that as neutral if we consider romantic relationships between men and women to be both natural and intrinsically unequal. we can't truly "punish" lupin if we see this as "the state of things."

this is a work of fiction. as I've shown so far, there's nothing in-universe that's entirely preventing us from thinking of them as equals. our - and the average lupin writer's - preconceptions about what relationships between men and women should look like are so strong that we're assuming certain things by default, including that lupin and fujiko cannot have an equal relationship or much of anything in common. it's true that fujiko is often written in a misogynistic way, but is there no other way she can exist?

if no man can resist fujiko, rule number one of this universe can't be true. lupin can't love, respect, or genuinely "have fun" with fujiko. he can only "not resist" her because he's a man. fujiko, since she can't initiate anything without us placing a moral judgement on it (see: the intro), can't openly feel much towards lupin either. the way lupin the third is written isn't gonna change, so in addition to recognizing that fujiko is a thief, we need to reframe how we look at lupin.

twcfm's spin on lupin

master thief vs. lady looter's point on lupin is simple: lupin is straight. we should be able to understand that even if what we're seeing doesn't look immediately romantic. you think that would be easy given how being horny for women is his defining character trait, but given everything we've talked about, the terms on which we're defining his sexuality are a lot more contingent on his "having" fujiko or literally lusting after a woman they are in his actual character. that means women need to be objectified for us to understand that lupin is attracted to women. this does not automatically indicate that lupin is straight because sexualities other than "straight" and "gay" exist, and the male gaze does not rely on interpreting anyone as having a sexuality to work. (again, see the next episode and goemon's arc with fujiko.)

seeing lupin as actually straight rather than just "not gay" requires that we see how he can be straight completely on his own. so, what does it mean for lupin to be straight? as i detailed in the "lupin as pervert" section, we already treat lupin like a straight man, and he wouldn't be able to be a libertine like he is if he wasn't a straight man. but how is he straight?

one thing about being a part of a "dominant" category of any kind is that you don't think of yourself as dominant, you think of yourself as the default. straight people tend not pay too much mind to themselves as "straight" because society at large generally prioritizes straightness. men tend not to pay too much mind to themselves as "men" because society at large generally prioritizes men. women and anyone who isn't straight, on the other hand, are usually aware of themselves as outliers to the purported "default". to repeat something i wrote bout in another post, this is called double consciousness - how marginalized people are able to view things from both their oppressor's side as well as their own, while people who aren't facing that sort of oppression most likely aren't familiar with the other point of view. when fujiko looks in the mirror, chances are she's seeing "a woman called fujiko mine". when lupin looks in the mirror, chances are he's seeing "lupin the third".

lupin is often written in ways that seem neutral, but that's only because they're ultimately a reflection of the writers's point of view. "no man can resist fujiko" is something you can only have him say if you believe that men are attracted to women by default and that fujiko is universally attractive. when you consider lupin to have his own point of view, they can easily reflect his characterization as a womanizer and moreover him as straight. for example, men who like men do not say stuff like this.

he's saying this to jigen while he's upset and staring out the window. bringing up how "beautiful babes" as opposed to jigen can "get away" with doing that implies not only that lupin thinks that "babes" are "beautiful", but that manly men like jigen are not supposed to do that. but he isn't saying this to demean jigen, he's saying this as a friendly gesture. this way of bonding with other men - through references to masculinity and the objectification of women - is pretty standard heterosexual male homosocial bonding. gay, bisexual, and asexual men, like anyone else, can be misogynistic too. however, being queer means that the social dynamic for them tends to go that they have to withstand things like this as opposed to perpetuating them (as death day wonderfully points out). lupin, on the other hand, is bringing this up on his own. there is no additional context through which we can reinterpret this, so it's safe to say that these are assumptions he holds. is he saying this to jigen because he's assuming that jigen will agree with him? this, coupled with what we already know to be true about lupin, is some straight boy shit.

you can see lupin as a clueless straight guy all throughout master thief vs. lady looter. he doesn't understand why fujiko is "masochistic", he also doesn't understand why fujiko accusing him of rape to get him taken into another cell worked, he says a lot of things that sound crueler if you forget that he's looking to have fun, and fujiko's reaction to him suggesting a competition indicate that he may not have thought of what a competition may entail for her. this gets us to what the two of them have in common: they're both thieves. he could've wanted to "steal" her in reference to that, no? if lupin saw fujiko and wanted to challenge her as a thief, but, because his priority is fun and he isn't thinking beyond that, didn't think about the literal processes which govern how she conducts her thievery as a woman, it's no wonder he sounds offensive to us.

how can fujiko be just as interested in a man like that? well, due to double consciousness, we kind of expect people like him to slip up like that. it's why it's so easy to excuse lupin. we often have the impression that bigotry is an irredeemable evil, but if that were entirely true, i wouldn't need to write any of this. it's easy to be inundated with certain cultural messaging, and even moreso if you're a part of the "dominant" group and conditioned to see yourself as the "default". he's not above criticism, but being who he is may mean that fujiko can understand him in the same way she does herself and other men - as products of their environments. it's easy to see how she took to him despite him not understanding her.

ultimately, lupin and fujiko are both thieves who like to "have fun" with each other. with that in mind, master thief vs. lady looter - and whatever writing the two of them are subjected to - come off a lot better.

some additional stuff

with the visual/verbal motifs and the rest of the show in mind, here's some more interesting things we saw this episode

lupin and fujiko "steal the formula", like fujiko did in goemon's introduction.

lupin tells us that the drug is only revealed "special occasions".

fujiko gets fake-married to the cult leader as lupin looks on.

like i said in the verbal motifs post, the guards are references to jigen and goemon. fujiko disguises the goemon-guard in her wedding dress and lupin gets away from execution using a dummy.

i take this as:

part of what inspired this show is how goemon was introduced into the series. "ko to iu onna" refers to him.

drugs = metaphor for implicit biases, things looking a different way to us on the outside. this episode is a sort of intro for the rest of the show - "we're gonna show you all the implicit biase that went into making this".

fujiko and lupin's relationship can only be what it is because "women exist to indicate that men aren't gay". fujiko got married to the "idea of lupin" while the "real lupin" is trapped by our expectations of him. (you can even see this in this episode's second eyecatch, where lupin's hands and two "the woman called fujiko mine"s are trapped by two "lupin the third"s.)

jigen exists because a straight guy can't be hanging out with a girl (dummy), goemon was modeled on fujiko which influenced how he was written (guard in fujiko's clothes), and they can't be openly gay. they need to "die" for lupin and fujiko to "live".

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