Content warning: Fanservice, harassment, sexualization of minors
Golden Boy is an ecchi comedy anime where all women are queens and the main character, Oe Kintaro, considers himself lucky to be able to lick their boots—figuratively and literally. I found it sometime in middle school, most likely through an AMV Hell compilation. A friend and I watched it together and added our commentary via AIM, mostly laughing at how ridiculous everything was. We tried to make light of the motorcycle babe in episode five and how weird we thought it was, and I know I was definitely covering up the impressions she left on my young brain.
If mentioning AMV Hell or AIM didn’t date everything well enough, this was also the time that other wildly horny OVAs were namedropped and “recommended” as tests of courage (the gore, assault, and tentacle-filled Urotsukidoji comes to mind). By comparison, Golden Boy was far from the worst thing I could have been watching as a child in the ‘00s with unrestricted internet access. Although Kintaro’s respect for women toes (and occasionally crosses) the line into objectification and some of them get more respectful treatment than others, the series overall gives these female characters more agency and regard than other anime of the same genre.