Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Sometimes lifelong obsessions grow on you slowly, there never being one moment in time first clicked. For me this is maids. There was no one specific story, character or real life moment that spurred on what at times has been for me an obsessive fascination with maid characters, maid aesthetics and general maid culture, but it just seemed a natural attraction that I gravitated towards once exposed to them, primarily through the medium of anime. And of course I am not alone, maids stand out above the rest as a staple of otaku culture, remaining a constant through the last three decades of the subculture with roots even further back. But why maids? What facets of "a maid" can we pull out to explain this seemingly random picking up of a dying Western European profession by niche Japanese artists?
The Western idea of a maid arrived in Japan as a result of the Meiji Restoration, the importation of Western ideas into the "backward" Edo society of Japan. But this importation was not uncontrolled. The strong new imperial state sent envoys out across the civilised world to find those countries that excelled in certain fields and learn from them. They modelled their army on the Germans, their navy on the British, their industry on the Americans; maids were imported primarily from the high society of Paris, where the "French Maid" was an icon of femininity, sexuality and style. However the style was mostly just that, a fashion, and maids took many decades to develop into the uniquely Japanese interpretation we have today. During the reconstruction era of postwar Tokyo we start to see our first "maid cafes", styled on the uniformed waitresses of American diners but slowly starting to include eccentric fashions from other parts of the world as well. But it wasn't all that innocent: the history of maid cafes is intrinsically linked with Japan's unique sex-industry. Growing out of the complex brothel system of Edo Japan, hostess clubs became popular in the new Tokyo of the 1950s and '60s, placed somewhere between a standard bar and a strip club. These places are often themed, with girls engaged in role play and specific fashion/cosplays, but these places were, and remain today, seedy and unfrequented by younger men. Then came the maid cafe. Another step away from the pure sex-house, the maid cafe is at the most innocent end of the scale when it comes to the sex-industry, if such a label can even be applied to them. They are seen as a place where men can enjoy a form of soft-roleplay with the girls, and this more distant relationship between waitress and client is what made the "maid" the perfect fit. This "safe" incarnation of the hostess bar appealed to the new "otaku" type that started appearing in the late 70s, and within a decade the maid-cafe became a hallmark of otaku culture in Tokyo, particularly Akihabara. Their popularity seems to wax and wane in cycles, with an initial rise in the late 80s, another around the turn of the millennia and in the last several years yet another rise in their popularity, this time slowly seeping out into other parts of the world.
But the otaku obsession with maids is more than a happenstance of history, the two concepts are inherently intertwined. And part of this are two contrasting interpretations of the relationship. First is the more clear (to a Western audience) master-servant dynamic, allowing men to play out power fantasies of being the "master" of a beautiful girl. But rather than a dark relationship master-slave dynamic, the master-maid relationship is kept as inviolably pure: its that separation that makes it beautiful in the first place. Maids invoke a sense of mystery and impossible-love, a boundary that cannot be broken since breaking it would ruin the very thing which makes it exciting for both parties. That mystery is a part of eroticism that hardly exists in the West any more (or at least many deny the fact), that allure of the unknown. A two-frame panty-shot is exciting because it is fleeting, which is why the "why don't you just watch porn" attitude espoused by many Westerners (read American teenagers) is plain idiotic. Maids were a central part of this erotic-culture when it was still alive back in Europe: the sub-sexual allure of a heavily dressed woman, where the glimpse of an ankle, shoulder or nape would be seen as highly revealing. A form of beauty that many Westerners sadly seem to have lost an appreciation for.
The second is strangely almost the opposite of the first, instead of the master-servant dynamic there also exists a less obvious mother-son dynamic. In a Freudian (wrong) sense you could classify a maid as a form of "mother-wife", but that it purposefully crass. But this is definitely a much sorer point for most maid fans, as it seems to suggest a certain unmanliness on their part. This is what the otaku-mocking ED to Welcome to the NHK is all about after all. This idea that men all really wish to return to the loving embrace of a mother is a dark secret of masculinity, and while the Freudian interpretation of it as the seed of all sexual desire is clearly taking it too far, it does form an important role in the development of male sexuality; just as I assume is the situation vice-versa for females. But while motherly love is a topic for another post (Lalah was like a mother to me!), it's sufficed to say that maids let men engage with this desire in a temporary fantasy of childish security away from the solitude and self-reliance that the life of a young man inherently involves. Of course in anime this manifests itself in the "bodyguard maid", able to defeat all assailants and protect their master at all costs.
I think this juxtaposition between the archetype roles of servant-wife-mother really serve as the trinity at the core of maids, and all play off one another to create a "muse" in the poetic Greek sense, a beauty from whom a man can pull power, but where the development of the relationship into anything more would cause the spell to snap. A form of "spiral energy" where the battle between human desire and restraint can generate infinite energy. But while these ramblings about maids might be a little food for thought, the irony of it is that an academic discussion of maids is really quite contrary to their very appeal, especially coming from someone on the inside of it all. They are a vessel for escapism and fantasy: the sort of mystery that if you try to deconstruct it will disappear in the first place. But don't worry about that ever happening to me, my love for maids can't be extinguished by such trivial things such as logic.
Servant-Wife-Mother?