Latest Japanese Fad, Schoolgirls Wearing Panties, On Their Head
by Whoopie • 18 February, 2013 • Culture, WTF • 1 Comment
Photos are popping up of Japanese schoolgirls donning panty masks while doing mundane activities like laundry and performing karaoke. But what started this trend?
The popular theory shared by Kotaku and BuzzFeed is that an odd and eccentric Japanese superhero “Hentai Kamen” has inspired the trend. Billed as “the abnormal superhero” under salutations such as “panty bless you,” Hentai Kamen is a strange “homo-erotic parody of a Power Ranger” who wears panties on his head to conceal his identity and … nothing else. He’s got a film coming soon, but no one is really sure which came first: Hentai Kamen, or “kaopan” (face panties).
Images of girls wearing panties on their faces first popped up on the popular otaku website Akiba Blog, and let’s just say the response has been mixed so far.
Why women have always copied what men do has always been a mystery to me. Camille Paglia in her doctoral thesis, Sexual Personae . . ., wrote that throughout history we go back and forth between the era of the beautiful woman to the era of the pretty boy. For some time, now it is men who have been dominating cinema, while women have been turned into accessories, which serves them right, because, any woman who imitates a man, as women have been doing since the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s, is nothing more than a second class man.