hentai:porn, truth and reality

06/04/2014

                                                                                                                                                  

List of Illustrations                                                                                                                                             

Introduction                                                                                                                                                       

Chapter 1 - How Does Hentai Show it?                                                                                                        

Chapter 2 - Hentai and Truth                                                                                                                           

Chapter 3 - Monster Genres                                                                                                                      

Chapter 4 - Hentai and the Cybersexual                                                                                                  

Conclusion                                                                                                                                                         

Bibliography                                                                                                                                                        

 

INTRODUCTION

Figure 1

I initially developed the idea for this dissertation after I saw a recent news article about a man in Japan who has just broken the world record for masturbation.[1] In a short introductory video included with the news piece, the man explained that he did not use ‘real females’ as inspiration for his record breaking hobby but preferred ‘anime’ women as they are ‘clean and pretty’.[2]  This led me to consider the implications of such a preference, both on the sexual mind of the man and those like him and on the possibilities of sex with virtual cartoon-like characters in the future. From this I hit upon a conflict between not only sexual reality and fantasy but between reality and truth in general. Is reality, or our normative understandings of what sexual relations should be, that ‘truthful’ to the actual erotic mind? I set out to explore this conflict within this work in philosophical terms using fantasy based sexual material to both illustrate and demonstrate my assertions.

The man in this video specifically mentions ‘anime’ as his chosen form of pornography but I will be examining its stationary, comic book counterpart, manga. Manga that is pornographic in nature is also known as ‘Hentai’, which means quite literally ‘abnormal’ or ‘perverted’ in Japanese.[3] I have chosen to study hentai manga as opposed to anime as I believe there is more potential for a drawn and written form to engage with the ‘truth’ of the erotic mind. My research question for this dissertation asks - can Hentai comics explore the links between pornography, truth and reality?

To answer this question I will be examining the ways in which drawn pornography/erotica can more easily cross boundaries into the taboo, subverting the laws of nature and reality. For this study I have recognised the value of having a phenomenological approach as a “philosophy that is concerned with the question of how individuals make sense of the world around them”[4], therefore the analysis of this comic form has developed around the hentai readers experience of the material. This approach is one that can be seen in others who have researched this topic area such as Ortega-Brena. I have also considered the aesthetics of the invented female representation in hentai manga will be considered in this work, highlighting the ways in which the woman has been aesthetically ‘reworked’ in drawn representation, creating a hybrid that could be considered to be better than anything the mortal or ‘3D’ world has to offer. I will also include a section considering the impact of the internet in this phenomenon, as it allows lightning fast access to this material, meaning that males can effectively download a drawn fantasy without ever leaving the comfort of their room. This digital conveyance can further ‘uselessness’ of meeting real women and simultaneously creating a new identity for these virtual sex figures that is concurrent with recent cybersexuality and cyberbodies discourse.

CHAPTER ONE

HOW DOES HENTAI SHOW ‘IT’?

An issue that is constantly highlighted in the discourse of porn studies is the failure of conventional photorealistic pornography to show ‘it’, or to properly convey tactile sexual pleasure. Photorealistic pornography may aim to show ‘it’ but the goal is never satisfied, a theme central to most pornography. The ever reaching, grasping attempts to fully depict the tactile pleasure of the act and the complete failure to do so is in fact vital to the medium.

Could hentai counter this problem with photorealistic pornography? It is similar to photorealistic pornography in many ways. It still fully depicts sexual acts in explicit detail, explaining completely the functions of sexual arousal, perhaps even in more detail than conventional pornography. However it is not real, the characters and scenarios are inventions and therefore it exists in a liminal space between reality and fantasy. Unlike erotic fiction, the brain is not compelled to imagine the acts, they are very garishly visible but still the work is not framed at all as ‘real’, merely as a repetition of sexual symbols in garish cartoon forms. It cannot be related to ‘real’ life.

With this veneer of truth stripped away, this limitless quality of hentai should be examined. Photorealistic porn may include inauthentic depictions of ‘real’ sex, however, despite many attempts to tamper with this, it is often hampered by the practicalities of its medium. For one, the use of real human actors and actresses. The other is the fact that the camera cannot show everything in sex. Sure, it can more effectively show an objective view of the sexual act from many different angles that the eye will never be able to realistically achieve, (unless engaging in extreme voyeuristic activity that is fairly unusual within normal sexual practise) but it cannot show everything. It cannot show pleasure. Photorealistic pornography can use many devices to try and recreate or re-package pleasure for an audience, but it cannot voice something that is so difficult to capture anyway. It can use the moans and shouts, the ecstatic facial expressions of the actors as stand-ins, displays of pleasure, but they are outward. How to depict the pleasure of the inside, the pleasure of the body, which cannot be voiced or acted? The camera cannot.

Although ‘pleasure’ itself may be extremely difficult to depict, male pleasure is easier than female to at least attempt to show because there is an obvious physical reaction to orgasm- the ejaculatory moment. But the primary audience for straight photorealistic pornography is male, and often they are not interested in seeing moments of male pleasure. They want to see female pleasure, because to see is to know is to own. Female pleasure is even more notoriously difficult to show in a photorealistic medium. To a lot of men it is a complete mystery, and perhaps to a lot of women too as male dominated media/socialisation does not perhaps focus on the mechanics of female pleasure. How to make it known that a woman is enjoying the sexual act, or even the orgasmic moment? There is shouting and screaming, but this can only do so much and often rings inauthentic or false. The body must also react, must provide evidence for the pleasure. It must be seen and not heard.

One way of alluding to the female reaction to pleasure is the use of the ‘Money Shot’[5] or the moment in which the male ejaculates onto a part of the female participants body, often a place imbued with erotic significance such as the face or the breasts. “ This is suggestive of the female bodies natural bodily reaction to pleasure, aka the production of liquid for natural lubrication. The ‘Money Shot’ functions as a signifier of female pleasure because the symbols of liquid and wetness have been used to denote the female orgasm. In the essay ‘Keeping it Real: User-Generated Pornography, Gender Reification, and Visual Pleasure’, Van Doorn explains the significance of the ‘Cum Shot’, a synonym of the ‘Money Shot’- “the ‘Cum Shot’ also projects the ‘essence’ of male sexual pleasure onto the screen, in the form of the ejaculating penis. Here, the visualization of (hetero) sexual difference is entirely dominated by the male genitals, relegating female pleasure to the supplementary task of watching the penis as it ejaculates on her chest, face, or mouth.”[6] In this statement, Van Doorn highlights that whilst ‘Money Shots’ are used mostly because of the constraints of the camera in filming moments of female pleasure, there may be a sexist element at play in their continued use. Instead of replicating female pleasure using the ‘Money shot’, it could be thought that the makers of photorealistic pornography are in fact dominating it instead.

Unfortunately, unlike the male orgasm, where semen is quite noticeably discharged from the male body and the display of excitement made blatant, signifiers of female pleasure are incredibly difficult to detect. Hentai therefore has a lot more at its disposal to display female pleasure as it is not shackled by the difficulties of attempting to capture ‘reality’ and working with ‘real’ humans in a ‘real’ world, however curated this world may be. I will look at three main examples of the attempt to covey female pleasure in the hentai comic. The first method I will discuss is the use of breast milk as the ejaculatory liquid. The hentai females, with enormous, udder like breasts, squirt liquid in moments of sexual pleasure. Of course, this brings up notions of Oedipal sexuality[7] and perversion as well as being an interesting device to physically display or signify female pleasure. The breast milk sprays out, not like milk in its viscosity but with the same consistency of semen.  It is an attempt to displace the ejaculatory moment, to take it and replicated it streaming from two breasts as opposed to a penis. Instead of attempting to display female pleasure from a female perspective, they have enacted male pleasure upon a noticeably female body part. Often tears are used, streaming down the face of the hentai woman, contorted with pleasure. These are another instance of liquid/water used as a notion of female pleasure.

As well as the use of different and often physically impossible ‘Money Shot’ type actions as a replacement for displaying female pleasure, Hentai also has many other mechanisms to display pleasure at their disposal due to the entirely invented nature of the pornography and the amount of control the artists have over the visual material. As opposed to a porn director, who merely (heavy irony implied) has control over the bodies and expressions of their actors, they have control over the entire world within the drawn comic and can alter it completely to perfectly arouse and display. They can show all elements of sexual ‘reality’ and imagination that cannot be seen in real life. An example of this is the use of the ‘X-Ray Shot’ within hentai comics to depict female and male pleasure/sexual reality. The ’X-Ray Shot’ shows the inside of the bodies during the sexual act, usually at the moment of climax or just to show how far the penis is inside the female. This is used to demonstrate the unseen female arousal that so many forms of pornography find difficult to show as it bypasses the falsities of moans and facial distortions (it uses this also, but that is a different matter) to show the complete authenticity of anatomy. The inside can never lie. The mechanics of the body can never lie.

The second example of hentai attempting to convey female pleasure I have coined as the ‘X-Ray Shot’. The ‘X-Ray Shot’ is a coy, cartoon depiction of the inside of the bodies, like diagrams from a children’s science book in which they attempt to show the sexual act between two humans in the most disinfected and least arousing fashion possible. They are not particularly pornographic due to this aesthetic similarity and therefore implied symbolism and relation to education and biology. They seem out of place within the explicit, highly erotic works, which never shy away from extreme sexualisation of the biological act.  

The third unique function of the Hentai comic that can be used to better display or convey tactile or bodily pleasure is the written first person monologue texts that accompany the images. This is a product of the form of the pornography. Comic books combine images with speech bubbles and thought bubbles, which can be used to convey the inner thoughts of the characters. In hentai comics this inclusion adds an extra level of eroticism to the original explicit images as by allowing the presence of thought bubbles the readers are now privy to the motivations of the character and their reactions to the acts, explaining their pleasure whilst it may not be immediately evident within the art. Also, importantly, these thought bubbles often betray the consent of the characters to the often-taboo acts, ridding the reader of moral guilt.  These erotic ‘thought bubbles’ are crucial to the comics in displaying a fully rounded understanding of sexual excitement/satisfaction.

In conclusion, the methods that hentai comics use to convey ‘it’ to their readers include thought bubbles, ‘X-Ray Shots’ and very different forms of the ‘Money Shot’ than normally seen in photorealistic pornography. What can be noted in this short study of the effectiveness of the comic book format in accurately conveying tactile sexual pleasure is the emphasis within the discourse upon the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ in the pursuit of ‘it’. Often the key to conveying ‘it’ is the suggestion of authentic sexual feelings within the audience/reader. In my next chapter I will be highlighting this preoccupation with ‘truth’ within pornography and questioning what place hentai comics have in displaying sexual reality in pornographic artefacts.

CHAPTER TWO

HENTAI AND TRUTH

A teenage girl harbours an attraction towards a cartoon character male on her favourite anime show. He is not human, too alien to even begin to resemble a real human being. He cannot be related at all to the boys that she knows. His cartoonish qualities feed her attraction as it incredibly difficult to reconcile him to the humdrum of her physical, not cerebral, life.  He is symbolic of boyhood, and the abstract romantic feelings that he creates have a curious detachment from her life. It is an uncapturable and strange urge and longing for a feeling that is manifested in this character who lacks any semblance in her world, serving instead as a totem for her burgeoning romantic lust. “But he’s not real” her friends tell her. “He’s not a real person.” They laugh at her for her obsession, turning to real boys who cannot provide as much excitement or thrill as her cartoon lover can give her, at least in her daydreams. He’s not real. To her, he may as well be. Or in fact, is he better?

This is a fairly romantic and unrelated little story constructed to introduce the idea of the hentai comic, far less innocent than the example I provided, and the twin, and sometimes warring, concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’.

There is an obvious difference between pornography and the widely understood definition of truth. Yet the impulse to watch and engage with pornography may be related to a human urge to capture and distil truth. What place does hentai have in this discussion? Of course it cannot represent this strange, reproduced and troublesome truth of porn films starring real people. Does this make hentai more truthful or less? Where does it stand in this no-mans land between reality and fantasy, and why is this important?

Firstly, it is important to highlight to the much-emphasised difference between photorealistic pornography and reality. Porn is a play on sex, a complete fictionalisation that can sometimes be dangerous when considered as a reality. Adam Geczy uses the word ‘Natrificial’ to describe contemporary photorealistic pornography, explaining “As the term natrificial is intended to suggest, porn, and here straight porn in particular, is a flouting of nature and natural relationships made pain through the theatricalized enactment of the stereotypically natural act.“[8] Geczy also claims that through photorealistic pornography “The intimate is made specular and the body mimics, or becomes, the clown of technology, delimiting coupling and love to a genital act.”[9] Despite photorealistic pornography quite blatantly ‘flouting’ nature and sexual reality, it can be taken by it’s audience as real due to it’s cinematic techniques. In fact, a current trend in pornography is the attempt to frame the pornographic action as completely real, unscripted and un-acted. “In part, the desire for ‘real’, authentic sexual practices formed a response to the increasingly spectacular, silicon-enhanced artificiality of commercial feature-length pornography. In opposition to the supposed ‘fakeness’ of big-budget productions, amateur porn posits the ‘real’ bodies and pleasures of people who could be your neighbor.”[10]

Hentai, objectively, has a very fragile grip on any form of ‘reality’. The bodies shown are entirely unrealistic; the actions often physically impossible, the scenarios are complete fantasy. Therefore it would be foolish to label any part of a hentai comic to be ‘real’. Hentai comics cannot be taken as a ‘how to manual’ or an unproduced depiction of real sexual action. It cannot be read as the way that you ‘should’ be engaging with others, the way that people ‘should’ be having sex, not only to produce the most pleasure in your companion but how normal people are in fact having sex or how to conform to society’s current sexual standards. There is no cloak of normalcy or reality in hentai. It is not in disguise like photorealistic pornography might be. However, ‘Real’ does not mean the same thing as ‘truth’ in this context. It could it be said that hentai was more ‘true’ to the human erotic imagination.

 “Since every subject’s imagination needs cultivation, the subject that fears fantasy must turn somewhere for that cultivation. Somewhere it imagines being safely “real” and free of fantasy. It turns to porn precisely because porn allows us to imagine that it shows us the real.”[11] In ‘Why Internet Porn Matters’, when using the word ‘porn’, Grebowicz is alluding to general and common photorealistic pornography, which according to the author does not include elements of fantasy. Of course, the concept that porn is attractive because it supposedly shows the ‘real’ can be strongly contested but I find myself somewhat in concurrence with this viewpoint. Photorealistic pornography offers up an erotic façade of the ‘real’ on a platter, with little opportunity for mental engagement, relying on the quick thrill of the image, the satisfying and immediate hit of reality, not mental engagement with the erotic concept. There is no mystery, which is incredibly important to erotic stimulation, as Stoller explains, “By mystery I mean converting the known to the unknown and converting the unknown to the inexplicable- supernatural, wondrous, beyond investigation, beyond question.”[12] What about fantasy porn? What about porn that engages directly with fantasy, such as hentai or erotic fiction? How is this different? This is more of a ‘purchased daydream’[13].

What are purchased daydreams? Purchased daydreams are the concept of a fantasy that is brought by an audience and completely adopted by them, but they are absolved of guilt or fear about it due to not being the original creators of the daydream, but still have the ability to craft and curate the daydream to suit their needs and desires. There is also a more menacing side to ‘purchase daydreams’ because often these daydreams can edge into taboo areas, in which the dark and sordid nature of the psychosexual can be explored, but through their very existence and creation by another person separate from themselves, absolve the reader of guilt about their own thoughts.

I find the phrase ‘purchased daydreams’ particularly compelling when used in relation to hentai comics. It is such a succinct, applicable description of what a hentai comic exists as, and why the form is so steadily popular. Purchased daydreams can definitely include pornography, but I would personally not go as far as including photorealistic porn as a purchased daydream. Photorealistic pornography is too solid, too realised, and too base to be a purchased daydream.  It is too explicit, not in its material, but in its very materiality. The images/video show too much and are too canonical, eradicating any element of fantasy that could be applied by the watcher. A purchased daydream must merely be a close suggestion or depiction of a fantasy that can be further elaborated upon by the imagination, for example erotic fiction or erotic art. This is the ‘daydream’, where the actual solid images exist solely in the conscious or even subconscious mind, it is intangible. This is elaborated on by Foucault in his history of sexuality: “In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practise and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as a pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific qualities, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.”[14] Here Foucault is speaking of erotic art, not comics but the concept is the same. The ‘truth’ is drawn from the pleasure that the image produces.

“The imperative to confess the sexual, which over time transforms sex into an object of knowledge and a problem of truth, functions at the same time to maintain secrecy around sex. Sex must be confessed because it is secret”[15] Erase secrecy about sex and show it in all its guises. In normative photo-realistic pornography, the female figure (often in this male dominated world a symbol of sexual secrecy and mystery) is splayed open in explicit positions, displaying everything. To see is to know. She is quite literally showing all her secrets. Her poses and the omnipotent quality of the camera’s eye enable the viewer to gain visual (and symbolic) access to her everything, her sexual and personal secrets. Due to the camera, which gives birds-eye, tortoise-eye, even 360-degree visions of the act, the viewer can see and understand far more than they ever could when engaging in the act personally. Then it is just amalgamous flesh and darkness, skin, dark redness, a transient uncapturable feeling that cannot be analysed or drawn away from. You are trapped within it, that is unless you choose to imitate the posturing and posing of pornography, but even then that can sometimes not be enough to fully satisfy the lust for full and total carnal knowledge. With this camera position, the audience can see it all and in this case, seeing translates immediately into understanding. There is no compromise caused by the magic of the act, no mystifying quality interfering with a clear and rational understanding. Quite importantly, there is no self-consciousness that comes with any human on human interaction but is amplified exponentially with sex. Seeing is knowledge and knowledge is, as the saying goes, power. Hentai is the same, but it takes this idea even further by allowing the male eye access to places even the camera cannot capture.

“The non-perverse person does not powerfully fear intimacy because he or she is not afraid that it will lead to a merging that swallows up identity. To be practical, we might best say ‘perversion’ when one uses an erotic act for the purpose of avoiding intimacy- intimacy of personhood, not just anatomy with another. But that thought brings us to affection, respect, warmth, acceptance, inner freedom, tenderness, and love, subjects even harder to discuss sanely than cruelty, revenge, humiliation and hatred.” [16] The involvement in reading hentai comics may be the ultimate realization of this non-anatomy related fear of intimacy, of perversion. Because the reader is not even involving themselves in a physical act but reading, looking at images, they can avoid this aspect of the erotic completely. It disallows the swallowing of identity, separates the thought completely from the readers erotic body, or a real body at all. Intimacy, even the shallow intimacy that takes place when viewing a real human body and relating it to your own, is stripped away completely. Although the sexual acts that are shown in the comics may be familiar, the figures are not. They are detached, 2D, strange, inhuman, cartoon. They serve as symbols of humans more than anything. How, then, do they manage to suggest more ‘truth’ of our own sexuality and sexual pleasure than real human actors in photorealistic pornography? The answer is in the question. It is the inhumanity, the strange pastiche of our own bodies, which creates more of an erotic charge, a truth within our minds. It is that very separation from reality that is so alluring. According to Ortega-Brena in her paper ‘Peek-a-boo, I See You: Watching Japanese Hard-core Animation’ “A hentai girl’s animated, bouncing breasts can invite heightened sensorial input and send our mind into a series of barely conscious analogies: objects that are soft but firm, warm, pulsating; objects that we know through touch—as well as smell, sight, and taste. Right now, however, we are merely seeing an icon of sorts for these sensations, or, at best, a metonymy.”[17]  The very fact that hentai merely shows us sexual symbols is what causes a direct cerebral relation in our minds between the pages of the comic and our own bodies. What we see instead of real bodies are signifiers, nothingness reminds us of ourselves, of touching others, causing deeper and more unconscious feelings to emerge when reading the comic. We are forced to recall our own experience to fully understand the one that is being shown in the comic. Consequently we are freed from the passivity of photorealistic pornography; we are engaging our minds and our imaginations. Ortega-Brena highlights that unlike conventional photorealistic pornography, the very flatness, the 2d, the unrelatable images in hentai manga lead it’s the viewers to recall their own bodies more than ever. In the lack of resemblance, we are not watching others when we view the pornography, we are instead watching ourselves. It is a reflecting action - a mirror onto which we project ourselves. As Ortega notes; “Indeed, we invite these bodies to invite us, by virtue of their pornographic function and the self reflexivity they entail, to fill their two-dimensional activity with phantasmic limbs of our sensorial experience and sexual imagination.”[18]

“Safety in the aesthetic illusion protects from the danger in reality, even if both dangers should be identical…The maintenance of the aesthetic illusion promises the safety to which we were aspiring and guarantees freedom from guilt, since (in the artistic production) it is not our own fantasy we follow…Art offers such socially approved occasions…(However the) intensity should not grow too much, but should be kept moderate. We are warned to remain at a safe distance. Too great an intensity of reaction may threaten the aesthetic illusion…We touch upon a problem which in the philosophy of art has played a considerable role, at least since Kant and Schiller, i.e. that the dispassionate spectator alone can appreciate beauty’ (Kris, 1952, pp. 45-46). Art is in the mind, say its protectors, not in the crotch.” [19] Is hentai safe? Yes, as it not only separates the real from the unreal and does not try to imitate human life, it is, technically, a work of art. Artists, written by artists, produce it. It takes technical artistic skill to produce. Hentai is supposed to exist in both the mind and the crotch; it uses the mind to inspire the crotch. It is bridging the two concepts.

 “Because unadorned fear is hard to bear and carries in itself the hint that we can go out of control, we do what we can to make it less unpleasant. Fear (a feeling that indicates we think the odds are poor) then changed to true excitement (which along with threat has it’s premise that we have a chance) to aesthetic excitement (in which we are the masters of the action, since we now decide what is reality.” [20] This really gets to the root of my interest in hentai comics as a visual source of academic discussion. These comics often depict eroticised fear - rape, attack, monsters, but in formats and scenarios that could never possibly take place in the real. The symbolic characters cannot exist; they are not direct versions of the fears we feel. By translating these fearful fantasies as successive comic images, they are controlled. By reading and consuming these images, we are the masters of our fear, we revel in it, and we find true excitement within it. Reality is separated and decided.

“For most of us, unadorned reality would boil our eyeballs. If we are to learn anything that is true, we may find that only a roundabout approach is possible. Perhaps, even from infancy, our desire to know the truth is also a constant pressure. We can’t stand it, but we also can’t stand living without it. Maybe we are not completely crazy: who, of those who buy tickets to war movies, would also buy tickets to the war.”[21] The analogy of not buying tickets to the war, but buying tickets to the war movie is exactly the reason why I chose to study hentai comics in my writing. It is the most pure example of this compulsion towards exploring taboo material without wishing to engage in it. Not many of the people who read these comics want to commit the acts they see. In fact, many are happy without engaging sexually with another at all. They are just engaging, on the surface, with a darker side of the human sexuality. They are playing with it but safe in the knowledge that it is just a brief fantasy, just a comic, not even real people. They are not as sick as they feared. They are not crazy. After all, if such material was already being created, they have no need for guilt. This highlights the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ in this context. The very separation of ‘reality’ and hentai serves as its attraction, and therefore brings it further to the unconscious ‘truth’ of the psychosexual brain.

Here is my difficulty. On one side of my argument, I feel that hentai comics offer more of a ‘true’ understanding of sexual/erotic pleasure than photorealistic pornography due to the more cerebrally engaging quality of the medium. Hentai can reach and engage the mind in a much deeper way than photorealistic pornography. However, I feel that hentai has an even greater power in erasing the compulsion towards engaging in natural and un-choreographed physical sexual acts with other human beings, merging identities and bodies. As Ortega-Brena notes, “unlike its signified live body, an animated body is not real, it inevitably arouses both involvement and disaffection.”[22]. It may be too enticing an individual activity, too easy to lose the want of another when provided with all the erotic brain food necessary to never wish to engage with another human again.

CHAPTER THREE

MONSTER GENRES

Hentai, like many different pornography mediums, has a lot of varying narrative genres within its canon. There are huge variations in genres; something to suit all and every sexual perversion and Hentai is notorious, especially within the media, for specifically catering to the most extreme of these persuasions. Of course, not all the genres are particularly extreme. The lightest genre is ‘Vanilla’, which generally follows a classical romantic heterosexual storyline, mostly based around a loving couple’s ‘first time’. ‘Vanilla’, named thusly because of its safer and more romantic themes, equating it to a safe and unchallenging flavour, is very popular among its audience and can sometimes be interpreted as more romantically engaging or respectful of relationship dynamics than most photorealistic pornography, gaining a rather significant following from girls and women due to this fact.

Futunari is the name of the genre of hentai in which the female character, who is completely female in appearance, complete with breasts and a feminine face, also has a penis. The character is not presented as transgender in any way. There is no personality conflict, no angst over the presence of the penis, seemingly superimposed onto the feminine body. They just happen to also have a male appendage. It is not really a point of discussion, perhaps because it is by nature pornography and such discussion would rather distract from the experience. To linger upon the biological implications of the grafted penis would detract from the ‘surprise’ or the ‘trick’ of the narrative. 

Sometimes genre collides. One comic that revolves around such a collision is ‘Misakura Nankotsu ni Yoroshiku’[23]. This comic can be seen on the website ‘Fakku’ [24], one of the biggest hosts of online English language translations of hentai comics on the web. The comic’s narrative revolves around a futunari (girl with penis) character being set upon by a tentacle like creature. The creature is small at first, cute, but grows with each erotic encounter with the futunari character, feeding off their semen to become a massive, threatening alien entity. It is vaguely horrifying, but with erotic intentions. It is growing, alien, forcing the character, blushing, attacked, to submit to its demands. A sick, pornograph-ied version of Ridley Scott’s Alien, pulsating, expanding out of the human body, using a human as it’s food. The ending of the comic is frightening, threatening. The creature has grown so large it almost dwarfs the main character, she/he is begging it to stop but it does not, and will not.

The most well known, at least within the realms of western culture and media, genre of hentai is probably the ‘Tentacle Rape’ genre. It’s symbols and tropes have managed to make its way, squirming and probing not unlike the titular tentacles, into popular culture. Carbone, author of ‘Tentacle Erotica’, acknowledges this adding “For instance, in the recent Prometheus, directed in 2012 by Ridley Scott, lustful tentacles have been strongly utilized even outside of the specific domain of pornography, by sublimating eroticism in horrific violence. Indeed, tentacle sex has been first evoked and popularized in renowned television series like CSI and Mad Men.”[25] The perceived extremity and bizarreness of Tentacle hentai make it an often-employed punch line within film and TV, for a character to be accused of enjoying the genre they are immediately viewed as a ‘weirdo’ or a deviant. Though often propagated as a modern example of deviancy, tentacle themes in Japanese pornography have been present for many years, as Ortega-Brena explains: “An example of the artistic pedigree of this pornographic tradition is Katsushika Hokusai’s celebrated print Octopus and Shelldiver  (Tako to Ama). Better known as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, this could well be the first recorded instance of ‘‘tentacle sex,’’ a visual trope that, in the West, has become closely associated with animated hentai.” [26] This example is well known as one of the originators of the tentacle genre, and also, interestingly not only shows the identity of the animal attacker, an octopus, but it’s whole body, which is an aesthetic choice often avoided in modern Tentacle genres.

Tentacle rape is quite self-explanatory in its narrative in that it often involves an involuntary sexual act between a girl/woman and a set of tentacles, usually ending with the woman begrudgingly enjoying this act.  Corbone notes that “In tentacle rape media, the aggressors impose themselves mostly on female characters with over-sexualized, fetishized bodies and childish faces, which happen to jib and resist until they eventually learn to accept submission – or even to enjoy it.”[27] The tentacles are bodiless, dismembered and emerge from no discernable point. Their attraction is their sourcelessness, their anonymous body. Only the groping, squirming phallic arms exist. They wriggle into every orifice with ease, often in many sizes to suit their purpose. The point is however that they are enjoyable. The women within the comic cannot deny that the tentacles are pleasurable. The tentacles are not gendered but very phallic in their shape and offer strange and unusual pleasure. It could be suggested that the embellishing suckers could be seen as female signifiers, due to their similarity to nipples, hugely important erotic body features of female within pornography. The suckers could also be interpreted as displaced and tiny mouths that desperately seek out the female breast in an Oedipal, suckling action. Often in the comic book frame the body of the monster is concealed, whilst the entire body of the female is exploited and plunged by its extended tentacles, it has complete power.

In the sub-genre of ‘Monster’ themed hentai, which includes ‘Tentacle’ porn, there are actually two opposing ‘monster’ sub-sub-genres- firstly the genre where a person is attacked by the monster, and secondly where the sexual object is the monster of the piece and how they differ in both representation and tone.  Monster girl genres, where the female is the monstrous subject, are also immensely popular but have an entirely different tone. They play very much upon the supposed sexual voracity of the ‘animal’ subject. They can also, worryingly, adhere to the notion that consent need not apply in animal sexuality. They could be, if taken literally, graphic depictions of strange, anthropomorphic bestiality (definition being - lovemaking, which is an effect of traducing the ordinary interspecies distinctions between human and nonhuman beings[28]) The monster girl in the hentai is almost always a cute, aesthetically pleasing humanoid creature, which has some trappings of animals that are usually associated with femininity/feminine beauty such as a fox or a cat. As Adams notes in ‘Why Feminist Vegan Now’: “In a patriarchal, meat eating world animals are feminized and sexualized; women are animalized.”[29] They have ears and tails, but smooth skinned bodies and full heads of luxuriant hair and, of course, hairless and exposed breasts.

CHAPTER FOUR

HENTAI AND THE CYBERSEXUAL

Presenting Internet Based Hentai as a bridge between normative and Cyber Sexuality

Of particular interest about the nonhuman woman […] is the doubling of heterosexual relations with something like material conditions. The nonhuman dimension implies some kind of relation to technologies or media, to material conditions of contemporary life. You don’t have to be Marx or Freud to sense that something weird is happening when sexuality and new technologies are folded together. - Thomas Lamarre: Platonic Sex: Perversion and Shôjo Anime [30]

Even on a material level, hentai comics are human. They are drawn by humans, written by humans, published by humans and uploaded onto the net by humans. They depict (usually) humans. Or at least the protagonists/sexual victims are humans. However, the moment the hentai comic joins the Internet matrix, it becomes something other. It becomes a part of cyberspace and cybersexuality, and begins to influence the cybersexuality of others (humans).

Like conventional pornography, a lot of hentai material depicts normative sexuality. Man/woman sexual, bodily acts. Physical acts. Once it is uploaded onto the net and it becomes part of the vast hentai online community, it transforms into an anchor for cybersexual exploration. Hentai serves as a port from which it’s observers can practise a specific type of cybersexuality- one that comes from a place of physical understanding but consists of a masturbatory act between the observer and the computer. It is not understood that the relationship is between the observer and the computer, the cyborg, the A.I., but with the flat, 2.D. inventions that dance across the screen, merely concealing the cold metal with familiar drawn shapes in familiar comic format. A comic harks back to the object, paper that could be held in your hand. A bridge once more between the physical, the ephemeral and the technological.

A story placed, a narrative, an image makes the participator unaware that he is in fact interacting with a machine. Instead of facing a woman, real or otherwise, he is in fact facing a machine. A screen in place of the lover who would stand before you is propped up on the desk, or on you knees, warm on your lap, close enough to kiss.

The figure of the woman within hentai can relate to theories of cybersexuality, as the female within the comics are essentially cyborgs. Like Maria, the robot that is created in ‘Metropolis’, one the most famous and grounding examples of cybersexuality in early science fiction, they are an imitation of the female body made solely for male enjoyment.  They are the pure inventions of male fantasy on page, now transported on the net for all to encounter. They can easily be sexually used, then cast aside with the discerning click of the mouse on the red button that closes the webpage. Their ‘first times’, for often these comics depict first encounters, can be viewed again and again, not losing their symbolic worth in a mans eyes like a human woman will. To interact with another human being would mean a loss of their own sense of self, a giving away of a part of themselves in contract of trust and understanding. They are unwilling. It is too complex, too taxing. The existence of the female body and it’s existence in relation with cyber technology and text was questioned by Zoe Safia in the text ‘Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View’: “So in response to the question ‘what place does the female body have in cyberspace’ I would say ‘almost none’. Femininity and maternity are present but displaced onto masculine and corporate technological fertility”.[31] Real women do not exist in the cybersexual environment surrounding hentai. There is no place that exists for them, and no willingness to create one.

Why bother with real women when you can have anything the mind could ever imagine, every sick thought that can’t even be played out in conventional pornography? To interact with a machine is to know everything and never give that knowledge away to another person. A dilemma is created when interacting with real women that cannot be faced when traversing hentai on the net. As stated by Mary Ann Doane in her article ‘Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine’; “Historically, this dilemma has been resolved in cinema by conflating the two- making pleasure and knowledge compatible by projecting them onto the figure of the woman.”[32] The problems of socialising with real women are wiped out by technology.

Women in hentai are also like robots or cyborgs in the similarities of their aesthetic construction. Their proportions are impossibly skewed, with enormous breasts that could simply not exist on real human women. A hentai woman is impossibly proportioned. As stated by Claudia Springer in her piece ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’: “Cyberbodies, in fact, tend to appear masculine or feminine to an exaggerated degree”. [33] They have every feature that would be attractive on human women but to an exaggerated degree, enormous eyes, incredibly long hair and vaginas that seem to have incredible powers of flexibility. This is true also of cyborgs, who are built and engineered precisely to suit a man’s needs. Cyberbodies become not only ‘better’ than a 3.D. human women, but also other, so transformed that the resemblance becomes hard to distinguish. They are so far removed from the human female they become abject in appearance.

Cybersexualities and its common discourse have a preoccupation with ‘Meat’ as a symbol of the material human body. Meat is the vehicle that transports the body around, it is nothing, and has no agency. It must be shed as soon as possible in cyber discourse, with characters in numerous books and comics quickly shedding their meaty shells to let their minds roam free in cyberspace, unshackled from the unattractive slab that contains it. Either that or it is shed differently, through the process of becoming a robotic machine, perfect and without fault or weakness that is a more appropriate vehicle for the far more important brain. Meat can be cast away like a bad butchers cut.

The idea of meat can be extended to the now prevalent ‘herbivore’ culture in Japan. Herbivore culture pertains to the trend towards men who no longer sleep or engage in sexual activities with ‘real’ aka human women and prefer instead to look at hentai and masturbate. They want no part in physical relations with women; only ‘carnivore’ men are involved in carnal activity. As stated by Claudia Springer in her text ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’; “Imaginary sex- sex without physically touching another human- prevails in cyborg discourses, though bodily sex is not altogether absent. The emphasis on cerebral sexuality suggests that while pain is a meat thing, sex is not.”[34] Only carnivores interact with the ‘meat’ of human flesh, the lesser, the ‘dirty’ and unappetising body. These herbivores live cocooned away from the problems and unhappiness that a real relationship may bring, preferring the selfish comfort of the screen and their own bodies.

The next step, of course, to fully facilitate this herbivore lifestyle is the involvement of A.I. and virtual reality tools to make ‘real’ (i.e. physical) sex using technology and a hentai interface possible. This concept, of sex without bodies, is rife in cyber literature and film, with Mary Ann Doane explaining that “These contemporary texts represent a future where human bodies are on the verge of becoming obsolete but sexuality nevertheless prevails”[35]. However the concept is close now to becoming a reality.

This is already being worked on. It has existed as theory before such as the concept of ‘Teledildonics’. ‘Teledildonics’[36] involves the wearing of a full body suit lined with vibrators, and the user would interact with others over a telephone, whilst watching visual representations of themselves engaging in physical acts. This idea is fairly primitive and, considering the fact it is about 20 years old, not predictive of what the Internet was to become. For one, the use of telephones in this type of arrangement is now completely defunct.  Herbivores do not wish to interact with others over phones. They want to interact with pure inventions instead. They wish solely to interact with the A.I. and a narrative that has no agency, to avoid emotional turmoil and confusion. In his essay on Interactive Sex Simulators, comparable to the experience of reading online hentai manga, Wynter clams that “Representations of male identity are elided entirely from the text and reduce male images to faceless, voiceless 'fucking' machines. The woman in the virtual environment appears to be addressing the man within the interface, but in actuality she is directly addressing the participant. She in fact is looking through the man she is actually performing on.”[37] By erasing the presence of the male identity within the piece, virtual woman addresses the viewer directly, he has the power, not the man on the screen, enacting the physical in drawn form. Only they, the viewer, can be the user, the one with control, and only they are satisfied by the encounter.

One example that can be seen now is the VR Tenga[38], which exists currently in Demo form. The VR Tenga is made for the Occulus Rift gaming system. It consists of a screen, which shows ‘anime’ or hentai character, and a strange extended appendage. The appendage that extends from the gaming system is not unlike a fleshlight (a cylindrical mastubatory device that is made to feel like a female vagina on its interior) but it also has a robotic element, as in the ‘arm’ of the device moves the fleshlight for the male viewer, who can now enjoy a hands free experience. The screen shows the hentai character, the same type as seen in all the comics with exaggerated breasts and eyes, responding enthusiastically to the thrusting motions of the robotic arm. In his work on ISS or Interactive Sex Simulators, technologies that  include the VR Tenga, Kevin Wynter states that “The absolute control wielded by the participant over the actions of the simulator woman and the pleasure she imparts upon his avatar is achieved directly through his actual control of the interface. Thus, actual tactile control of the technology facilitating the control of the virtual interface engenders a sense of mastery in two registers that amplify rather than interfere with one another.”[39] The VR Tenga is a fully complete, immersive, virtual but one-sided and controlled sexual experience. Practical perfection for any herbivore male.

CONCLUSION

“To prefer the virtual being—at some remove—to the real being—close up—is to take the shadow for the substance, to prefer the metaphor, the clone to a substantial being who gets in your way, who is literally on your hands, a flesh and blood being whose only fault is to be there, here and now, and not somewhere else.”

This statement, from Open Sky by Paul Virilio[40] reflects my original thoughts upon fantasy and drawn pornography as a sexual preference when I first started this project. In my mind, only those who wished to subjugate women or erase physical intimacy would seek out this form of masturbatory material. This is not wholly the case, as I have discovered and noted throughout the four main sections of this dissertation. A preference towards drawn pornographic material may not be all about a misogynistic need to replace women. It is about knowledge, power and understanding, a triumvirate vital to achieving pleasure. It is about the conflict between the concepts of truth and reality in understanding pornography as a medium.

The question I considered in this dissertation was how hentai comics explore the links between pornography, truth and reality. In this work I have noted the way in which hentai can show ‘it’, or tactile pleasure and in the following chapter used these attributes to support an idea that hentai may offer more of a‘ true’ picture of the erotic mind than most photorealistic pornography, which puts focus on the ‘real’. I have then offered some potential ways in which both concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ could be united in virtual sex technology, and the role in which hentai plays in this endeavour. 

The distinction is not so much between real women and invented women. It is between what is tactile, and what is cerebral, what is understood and what goes further in its potential for understanding. As emphasized in Foucault’s original History of Sexuality[41], the pleasure is born from power, which is embodied as knowledge or truth. It could be considered that, as opposed to the photorealistic pornographic medium, which uses aesthetic ‘reality’ to satisfy its viewers by appealing to their rationality, hentai manga’s complete lack of physical authenticity, of ‘reality’, is key to the pleasure it arouses. In a denial of reality, a refusal of it, an employment of the mind and the sense of physical self is imperative in achieving pleasure. 

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[1] Llorens, Ileana. "World Champion Masturbator, Masanobu Sato, Expands On His Favorite Hobby (VIDEO, NSFW)." The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/21/world-champion-masturbator_n_1163576.html (accessed May 1, 2014).

[2] YouTube. "World champion masturbation." YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNH5EUw7gxk (accessed May 2, 2014).

[3] "Definition of hentai in English:." hentai: definition of hentai in Oxford dictionary (British & World English). http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/hentai (accessed May 4, 2014).

[4] Bryman, Alan. "Epistemological Considerations." In Social research methods. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 15.

[5] Hester, Helen. Beyond explicit: pornography and the displacement of sex. New York: SUNY Press, 2014.

[6] Doorn, Niels van. "Keeping it Real: User-Generated Pornography, Gender Reification, and Visual Pleasure ." In Digital spaces, material traces: investigating the performance of gender, sexuality, and embodiment on internet platforms that feature user-generated content. S.l: [s.n.], 2009. 99-122.

[7] Freud, Sigmund, and Joyce Crick. The interpretation of dreams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

[8] Geczy, Adam. "Straight Internet Porn and the Nartrifical." Body and Dress in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 18, no. 2 (2014)

[9] Ibid.

[10] Doorn, Niels van. "Keeping it Real: User-Generated Pornography, Gender Reification, and Visual Pleasure ." In Digital spaces, material traces: investigating the performance of gender, sexuality, and embodiment on internet platforms that feature user-generated content. S.l: [s.n.], 2009. 99-122.

[11] Grebowicz, Margret. Why internet porn matters. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

[12] Stoller, Robert J.. Observing the erotic imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Foucault, Michael. The history of sexuality: the will to knowledge: vol. 1. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin, 2008.

[15] Grebowicz, Margret. Why internet porn matters. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

[16] Stoller, Robert J.. Observing the erotic imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

[17] Ortega-Brena, Mariana. "Peek-a-boo, I See You: Watching Japanese Hard-core Animation." Sexuality & Culture 13, no. 1 (2009): 17-31.

[18] Ibid

[19] Stoller, Robert J.. Observing the erotic imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

[20] Stoller, Robert J.. Observing the erotic imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

[21] Ibid

[22] Ortega-Brena, Mariana. "Peek-a-boo, I See You: Watching Japanese Hard-core Animation." Sexuality & Culture 13, no. 1 (2009): 17-31.

[23] "Misakura Nankotsu ni Yoroshiku." FAKKUNET RSS. http://www.fakku.net/manga/misakura-nankotsu-ni-yoroshiku-english (accessed May 2, 2014).

[24] "FAKKU - All About Hentai!." FAKKUNET RSS. http://www.fakku.net (accessed May 2, 2014).

[25] Carbone, Marco. Tentacle erotica: orrore, seduzione, immaginari pornografici. Milano: Mimesis, 2013.

[26] Ortega-Brena, Mariana. "Peek-a-boo, I See You: Watching Japanese Hard-core Animation." Sexuality & Culture 13, no. 1 (2009): 17-31.

[27] Carbone, Marco. Tentacle erotica: orrore, seduzione, immaginari pornografici. Milano: Mimesis, 2013.

[28] Shell, Marc. "The Family Pet." Representations 15, no. 1 (1986): 121-153.

[29] Adams, C. J.. "Why feminist-vegan now?." Feminism & Psychology 20, no. 3 (2010): 302-317.

[30] Lamarre, Thomas. "Platonic Sex: Perversion and Shôjo Anime ." Animation 1 (2006): 45.

[31] Safia, Zoe. "Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View." In Cybersexualities: a reader on feminist theory, cyborgs, and cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 60.

[32] Doane, Mary Ann. "‘Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine’." In Cybersexualities: a reader on feminist theory, cyborgs, and cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 20-33.

[33] Springer, Claudia. "‘The Pleasure of the Interface’." In Cybersexualities: a reader on feminist theory, cyborgs, and cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 34-54.

[34] Springer, Claudia. "‘The Pleasure of the Interface’." In Cybersexualities: a reader on feminist theory, cyborgs, and cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 34-54.

[35] Doane, Mary Ann. "‘Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine’." In Cybersexualities: a reader on feminist theory, cyborgs, and cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 20-33.

[36] Rheingold, Howard. "Teledildonics: Reach Out and Touch Someone." Mondo 2000, Spring 1990.

[37] Wynter, Kevin. "Towards a Theory of Virtual Pornography: A Phenomenological Introduction to Interactive Sex Simulators in the "Naive Realist" Paradigm." CineAction 22 Mar. 2007: -. Print.

[38] Elsner, K. "Japan Unveils Virtual Sex Machine (Video)." Guardian Liberty Voice. N.p., 15 Nov. 2013. Web. 3 May 2014. <http://guardianlv.com/2013/11/japan-unveils-virtual-sex-machine-video/>.

[39] Wynter, Kevin. "Towards a Theory of Virtual Pornography: A Phenomenological Introduction to Interactive Sex Simulators in the "Naive Realist" Paradigm." CineAction 22 Mar. 2007: -. Print.

[40] Virilio, Paul. Open sky. London: Verso, 1997. Print.

[41] Foucault, Michael. The history of sexuality: the will to knowledge: vol. 1. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin, 2008.