Ikemen sūhai (イケメン崇拝, “ikemen worship”; English working translation: handsome-man veneration) is the broad name for the cultural preference, in Japanese popular subcultures, for men with well-arranged features and well-proportioned bodies as the object of sexual and romantic attention, and for the consumption activity that this preference organises. The article treats it as a kink-category entry.

Etymology and definition

The word ikemen is a compound of iketeru (“good”, “looking good”) and men — either the Sino-Japanese 面 (“face”) or the English men. It surfaced in late-1990s teen-girl magazines and circulated widely in television and magazine media around 2000. The Japanese reference dictionary Gendai Yōgo no Kiso Chishiki registered it as a new word in its 2003 edition. In its narrowest everyday sense the word names a man with attractively arranged features as an individual; in the subcultural register, it stretches to name a typified male-character image and, further, the entire culture that consumes that image. The article uses the latter sense.

BL and fujoshi culture, the fan sphere around the Johnny’s idol firm and the 2.5-D stage adaptations, the rise of women-oriented games (the otome line) — these have together systematised the ikemen not as a simple appearance judgement but as a desire object whose attributes are differentiated and catalogued.

History

The Japanese postwar visual line of women looking at men as desire objects can be traced back to the 1960s film stars — Ishihara Yujirō, Katsu Shintarō and others. In the 1970s, the shōjo-manga generation that produced Ikeda Riyoko’s The Rose of Versailles (1972–73) and Hagio Moto’s The Heart of Thomas (1974) established the bishōnen (beautiful-boy) figure as something women drew for women. The late 1980s saw the rise of yaoi through the doujin-market system, and male-male relationships became, on a measurable scale, an object of women’s-side desire and visible as such.

From the late 1990s into the 2000s the Johnny’s office’s idol strategy, Kimura Takuya’s run of leading-role dramas, and the Kimura-as-template ikemen image set a shared media-level sign-system. In the same period, JUNON’s Super Boy Contest, the Harukanaru Toki no Naka de otome-game line (2000–), and other women-oriented commercial products organised attribute-typed handsome-man characters as catalogue items. From the 2010s the 2.5-D musical scene, the multi-tier male-idol scene, and the influx of K-pop male idols have kept ikemen worship circulating as a cross-generational and cross-border phenomenon.

The structure of the preference

Ikemen worship is not confined to appearance judgement. There are three working layers. The first is direct aesthetic interest in the character’s body — face, bone structure, voice, comportment. The second is the way “the interior shows through the exterior” — the character’s professional competence, the way they treat others, the way they live — operates as a narrative device that reinforces the appearance attraction. The third is the pleasure of watching several ikemen relate to each other, which is the central engine of BL and women-side doujinshi culture.

Men evaluating other men by the same metric have become a normal feature of recent online conversation. Phrases on social media along the lines of “if I had to be held by a man it would be this one”, “I respect this one’s shape as a fellow man” have moved the line between homosocial aesthetic judgement and homoeroticism into a more ambiguous place. The boyish, otokonoko (male-cross-dressing), and bishōnen neighbours sit in continuous arrangement with the ikemen line.

Sub-types

• Prince type: tall, fair-skinned, classically arranged features in a textbook configuration.
• Ore-sama type: high-handed, dominant in interpersonal manner.
• Salt-face (shiogao) type: light, understated features with low-key impression.
• Wild type: stubble, tanned skin, muscular build.
• Younger-man ikemen: youth and incompleteness as part of the attraction.
• Older-man ikemen: maturity and social success as part of the attraction.
• Suit-ikemen: combined with a business / finance / medical role.
• Johnny’s-type: the format set down by the idol industry.
• K-pop type: the standard imported through K-pop and Korean drama.

Reception and criticism

The wider reading of ikemen worship is as a commercial-culture response to a long history in which women’s right to a desire of their own has been socially restricted. For most of the 20th century, men-oriented adult expression was produced on an industrial scale while the corresponding frame in which a woman could look at a male body for her own desire was institutionally narrow. Shōjo manga, BL, otome games, and the male-idol industry developed by supplying that desire with goods.

A separate critical line has gained ground in recent years around the lookism issue. The verbal pairing of ikemen with busamen (“ugly man”) in casual ranking talk is connected, in the discussion, to real difficulty experienced by people on the wrong side of such ranking. The consensus that has emerged is that holding a preference is one thing and that ranking real other people by their faces in everyday speech is another, and the second is to be approached with more caution than it has often been.

Related terms

• BL: male-male romance written for a female readership
• Otome games
• Bishounen: an adjacent body-and-age category
• Otokonoko: an adjacent gender-sign category
• Boyish: male-coded signs worn by women
• Iro-otoko: the postwar-cinema-period predecessor
• Comiket: the distribution base for ikemen worship’s circulation