A petition was started by Weekly Shonen Jump fan on Change.org. It’s called “We Boys Are Not Wolves. Shonen Jump Should Distinguish Between ‘Eroticism’ and ‘Sexual Violence'”. So far it has collected over 4000 signatures in under a week and the organizer has said he’ll send it to Shueisha.
The organizer’s name is Manabu Sekiguchi. He shares some of his experience in the petition description. He says that he read Weekly Shonen Jump since fourth grade. H also added that he was used to mangas with sexual content such as “To Love-Ru”. However, after meeting a friend in college who didn’t read similar works, he realized that his views were wrong because a lot of the sexual scenes in the series are actually portrayed without mutual consent and that he wouldn’t have enjoyed them if he understood it at the time.
When he was in the upper grade of elementary school, Akihabara was close to him. He says that he often heard stories of restrictions on the medium, starting with the story of “unreal youth.” Shonen Jump authors would oppose the restrictions by saying readers can differentiate between reality and fiction. However, he also said that he was unable differentiate between the two when was young himself. He remembers a time where a group of boys sexually harassed some girls, but he thought it was a normal thing. That was because it was something he’d previously seen in works of fiction.
The boy who was the leader of that group was later expelled from high school for peeping in the girls’ bath and secretly taking photos. He says that both he and the boy believed in the false common sense of Shonen Jump that “boys like that”. Because of that, he didn’t realize that the sexual harassment would damage the person’s heart.
Sekiguchi also added that readers link female = erotic because of the way girls are presented. He compares it to the Pavlov’s dog experiment. He says that he buys the magazine to ‘read a funny manga’ and that they’d buy it even without the sexual violence part, so he wonders for whom the sexual violence is drawn
Near the end, he says that he doesn’t want to turn the magazine into educational books. However, he says it’s currently training young children to understand that “male = wolf” and that part should be changed. Also, he says that a lot of the sexualized girls are younger than the high school age. That means they are minors and should not be sexualized.
The Weekly Shonen Jump fan asked the magazine to include content warnings or explanatory notes for sexual violence. He also suggested surveys for the readers which would inquire about their level of sexual education. That needs to be done in order to create expressions of sexuality that can be properly grasped by them.
Sources: Anime News Network, Change.org, Thumbnail is the cover for the Vol.5 DVD