Isn't that kind of what Japanese men are doing these days?

TOKYO — With the precision of a craftsman painting a ceramic doll, Toman Sasaki blended foundation onto his fine-boned face, shaded the side of his nose with blush and shaped his lip color with a small brush. After 40 minutes of primping in his tiny studio apartment in Tokyo, he peered into a hand mirror and gave himself a nod of approval.

Along with his manicured nails, bobbed hair and high-heeled shoes, the makeup made Mr. Sasaki, 23, appear more typically feminine than male, a striking choice in a society where men and women tend to hew strictly to conventional gender dress codes.

Mr. Sasaki, a model and pop band member who goes simply by Toman, does not regard his look as feminine so much as genderless. As one of a small but growing group of “genderless danshi” — “danshi” means young men in Japanese — he is developing a public identity and a career out of a new androgynous style.

“At heart, I am a man,” said the petite-framed Mr. Sasaki, whose wardrobe of slim-fit tank tops, baggy jackets and skinny jeans evokes the fashion of a preadolescent girl. The concept of gender, he said, “isn’t really necessary.”

“People should be able to choose whatever style suits them,” said Mr. Sasaki, who has a large following as Toman on social media and regularly appears on television and radio programs. “It’s not as if men have to do one thing, and women have to do another. I don’t find that very interesting. We’re all human beings.”

Just as some American males have embraced makeup, young Japanese men are bending fashion gender norms, dyeing their hair, inserting colored contacts and wearing brightly colored lipstick.

Men like Ryuji Higa, better known as Ryucheru, his signature blond curls often pulled back in a headband, and Genki Tanaka, known as Genking, who rocks long platinum tresses and often appears in miniskirts, have made a leap from social media stardom to television celebrity.

“It’s about blurring the boundaries that have defined pink and blue masculinity and femininity,” said Jennifer Robertson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan who has researched and written extensively about gender in Japan. “They are trying to increase the scope of what someone with male anatomy can wear.”

Japanese culture has long had a formal tradition of cross-dressing in theater, from classic forms like Kabuki and Noh, where men dress as both men and women, to Takarazuka, where women play both genders.

The unisex look for men has also been popularized in the Japanese cartoon form called anime, and by members of popular boy bands.

The term “genderless danshi” was coined by a talent agent, Takashi Marumoto, who has helped develop Toman’s career. Mr. Marumoto recruits other androgynous men for fashion shows and contracts as potential models, capitalizing on their social media followings to market to fans.

Unlike in the West, where cross-dressing tends to be associated with sexuality, here it is mostly about fashion.

“I think Japanese people react to these men who look quite feminine differently from how people in Euro-American societies react,” said Masafumi Monden, who researches Japanese fashion and culture at the University of Technology Sydney and is on a fellowship at Tokyo University. “In Japan, how people look and their sexual identities can be separated to a certain extent.”

Toman Sasaki said that when he first began dressing in the genderless danshi fashion, people frequently asked him whether he was gay. (He says he is heterosexual.)

He said that he wore makeup to conceal his flaws. “There are many things I’m insecure about; I really don’t like my face,” he said. “But I also feel that who I am changes when I wear makeup.”

Several men who consider themselves genderless danshi said in interviews that they did not see a connection between their appearance and their sexual identities — or even their views on traditional gender roles.

“It’s just that you use makeup and dress how you want,” said Takuya Kitajima, 18. Mr. Kitajima, who goes by the name Takubo, said he believed men and women were fundamentally different in spite of any blurring of style distinctions. “I think men should protect women, and that principle won’t change,” he said. “Men are stronger than women, and a man should work because the women are weaker.”

But Yasu Suzuki, 22, who organizes events for other genderless danshi to meet with their social media fans, said his explorations in fashion have broadened his views on sexuality.

When he began to experiment with makeup as a teenager, he said, he sometimes attracted the romantic attention of other men. “I thought that I would want to throw up when a man said to me, ‘I love you,’” said Mr. Suzuki, who wears baggy trousers popular among Japanese women and tweezes his facial hair because he cannot yet afford the laser hair removal treatments popular among the better-known genderless danshi.

“But now that I began wearing this genderless fashion, I think I shed my prejudice,” he said. “Before, I didn’t like boys or men who love each other, but I have started to accept them. Beautiful people are just beautiful.”

In Japan, where a walk through a train station during the commuter rush highlights the dark-suited conformity of most males, young men disillusioned by corporate stagnation may be using fashion to challenge the social order.

“In my generation, women were jealous of men because they could work and do whatever they wanted,” said Junko Mitsuhashi, 61, an adjunct lecturer in gender studies at Meiji University and a transgender woman. “But in the younger generation, men are jealous of women because they can express themselves through fashion.”

She added, “Men feel like they don’t have a sphere in which they can express themselves, and they envy girls, because girls can express themselves through their appearance.”

Young girls are the most ardent fans of the genderless danshi, making up the bulk of their social media followers and showing up at events.

On an autumn night when Toman performed with his band, XOX (Kiss Hug Kiss), at a hipster clothing store in Harajuku, the center of Tokyo youth fashion, the audience was made up almost entirely of teenage girls and a few 20-something women.

Toman, dressed in a satin pink and leopard skin-print jacket, ripped black jeans and faded black and white Converse sneakers, had inserted gray contact lenses that made his eyes look huge beneath purple-tipped false eyelashes. When the band mounted the makeshift stage for a few songs — all performed slightly out of tune — the audience waved signs and screamed. Some girls cried.

Nagisa Fujiwara, 16, a high school sophomore in Tokyo, was one of about 200 girls who lined up after the brief concert to take selfies with the band. “He looks like a girl,” she said about Toman, her favorite. “But when you put that together with his maleness, I see him as a new kind of man.”

Aoyama cites one man in his early 30s, a virgin, who can't get sexually aroused unless he watches female robots on a game similar to Power Rangers

In other Japanese sexology news, it would seem that much of the younger generation is turning away from sex entirely.

Is this what happens in advanced capitalism when female liberation mixes with a brutal corporate power structure? (Or something like that?) Also, there are already a growing numbers of men known as the "grass eaters" who reject all forms of masculinity and refuse to have sex or raise a family.

And then there's this (from the article):



Something fishy is going on in Japan.

Yeah I have an easy intro class this semester (thankfully, gives me time to crawl around flowerbeds looking for weeds to preserve in my herbarium) and we were going over population pyramids. Japan is about to topple man. If you ask most of the people who live around here their civilization is declining because they are into all that freaky **** like robots. Even I'm not into **** that freaky, but I don't know if you can really blame the collapse of the Roman empire on anime.

They make 'em work pretty hard, that's for sure. It's almost like work is meant to be an individual's main purpose in life.

They don't even work particularly hard there. It's all about the appearance of working hard for wired social reasons. And apparently, it's not even necessarily about plausibly working hard. It's about putting up an appearance for the sake of putting up an appearance.

don't forget mandatory parties

That **** is the worst part about capitalism. Well not the worst. But bosses who force people to be their friends, they suck.

Super 8

They don't even work particularly hard there. It's all about the appearance of working hard for wired social reasons. And apparently, it's not even necessarily about plausibly working hard. It's about putting up an appearance for the sake of putting up an appearance.

iirc you work at Boeing STL. You are not the only person I have heard say exactly this while working there.

Go for it! In essence, that’s the Trump administration’s new directive on driverless-car development.

Under those guidelines, automakers and technology companies will be asked to voluntarily submit safety assessments to the U.S. Department of Transportation, but they don’t have to do it.

And states are being advised to use a light regulatory hand.

At a driverless-car test track in Ann Arbor, Mich., Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao painted a near future of greater safety, fewer deaths, higher productivity and more time spent with loved ones as robots increasingly take over the tasks of driving and commuters are freed for other activities.

She unveiled a document titled “Vision for Safety 2.0” and delivered a speech that was strong on vision and light on regulation.

“More than 35,000 people perish every year in vehicle crashes,” she said — 94% of those through driver error. After years of decline, fatalities are growing, she said. “Automated driving systems hold the promise of significantly reducing these errors and saving tens of thousands of lives in the process.”

Although the Vision document is vague, Congress is likely to pack on some meat. Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill that eventually would let automakers each put as many as 25,000 cars on the road even if some features don’t meet current safety standards set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The cap would rise over a four-year period, allowing each automaker to field 275,000 driverless cars by the end of that period..

The House bill would require safety assessments, but permission to test would not be required. States would be required to follow federal regulations.

The Senate is considering a similar bill, though the Commerce Committee will consider at a Wednesday hearing whether to exempt trucks from the law. Labor unions fear that driverless technology could lead to job losses. Chao, who has expressed similar concerns in the past, said she’s working closely with Congress on the matter.

She was joined at Tuesday’s announcement by Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, who said fully autonomous vehicles offer “an unprecedented opportunity to bring equal access to people with disabilities.”

Although widespread use of driverless cars is at least several years away, automakers and technology companies are making rapid progress, and features — such as automatic braking and adaptive cruise control — are already available on many new vehicles.

Tesla’s Autopilot feature, for example, enables the vehicle to pass cars automatically on the freeway. An option on the new Cadillac CT6 enables drivers to cruise along a freeway lane for hours without driver intervention. Even models from relatively inexpensive makers such as Hyundai, Mazda, Kia and Subaru offer automatic braking to avoid rear ending the car ahead.

Not everyone was happy with Chao’s announcement. Some consumer groups, which already thought the Obama administration’s standards were too lax, criticized a further pullback from government regulation.

“This isn’t a vision for safety,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s privacy project director. “It’s a road map that allows manufacturers to do whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want, turning our roads into private laboratories for robot cars with no regard for our safety.”

Two House Democrats, Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, issued a statement that calls Chao’s move a step backward: “The administration chose to cave to industry and pressure the states into not acting.”

But driverless-vehicle proponents cheered Chao’s presentation. “This is great news. Over-regulating autonomous vehicles will slow down the adoption of a technology which will create millions of new high-paying jobs across the United States and make roads safer for all Americans,” driverless industry consultant Grayson Brulte said.

Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers lobby group, appeared at the Chao event and said, “The future is not something we should be afraid of or try to slow down.”

The new standards replace guidelines published by the Obama administration in September 2016 that asked automakers to voluntarily submit reports on a 15-point “safety assessment.” They were also urged, but not required, to defer to federal rules on safety. Chao did not criticize those guidelines, but called them “Vision for Safety 1.0.”

“The new policy adjusts the tone but continues much of the substance of (the Obama administration) document,” said Bryant Walker Smith, law professor at the University of South Carolina. “It clearly reflects the input of the traditional automotive industry but doesn't exclude potential new entrants such as Waymo.”

The previous approach, however, didn’t eliminate a patchwork of state-by-state regulations. California’s regulations, for example, are considered fairly strict. Florida, Michigan and Arizona barely regulate driverless cars.

The new “Vision for Safety” advises state officials to remain technology-neutral and not favor traditional automakers over technology companies; to remove regulatory barriers that keep driverless cars off the roads; and to make the federal Transportation Department’s voluntary recommendations into law.

New legislation that emerges from Congress, however, could have more serious implications for state regulations. Under the House bill, California and other states could not bar driverless cars allowed under federal law.

How that might affect a new set of driverless regulations that California officials plan to unveil by the end of the year is unclear. The state Department of Motor Vehicles, which regulates driverless cars, said in a prepared statement that it is reviewing the new federal guidelines.

Transportation officials from both administrations consider driver-assist technology and autonomous cars to be essential safety features that could dramatically reduce collisions, injuries and deaths.

The vast majority of traffic collisions are caused by human driver error, federal safety statistics show. Fatalities have been rising in recent years as cellphones and other distracting devices have become more popular.

In 2016, U.S. highway traffic deaths rose 6%, to about 40,000.

When does this end?

When one person owns every share.

With a depression?

No, but a really good friend of mine works for Boeing in Saint Louis, and his description of it makes it to be a Dilbert nightmare hellscape. I did a stint in an R&D group at Boeing south of Seattle and that was a hell of a good time though. It seems like Saint Louis and Seattle are very much on different wavelengths when it comes to how things operate. Might also be a BDS vs BR&T thing? Defense work has been uniformly awful in my experience.

Well, yeah, but what will set it off specifically?