by Midori

After my last column on the myths and realities of Japanese sexuality, you guys would not leave me alone about the tentacles.

So, let's talk tentacle rape. What's with all the alien or monster tentacles in Japanese porn and animation (a.k.a. "anime")? Some prime examples are Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend and La Blue Girl. These are pretty much the must-see titles for the genre.

Hentai, one of the many Japanese words for pervert, also is a western reference to a genre of comic and erotic work coming out of Japan or influenced by the Japanese anime artists. The Inuit may have hundreds of words for snow, but leave it to the Japanese to come up with words expressing gradations and subtlety of perversity! There are loads of different hentai styles and tentacle sex is just one of them. I enjoy many hentai comics personally, but then I did grow up in Japan.

Images of tentacles as the appendage of choice for pornographic pix are not a new thing in Japan. Back in 1820, Hokusai created the legendary image called "a fisherman's wife's dream" where she's getting it on with a couple of huge octopi. It's probably the most well known image of that genre that consequently inspired many other fine artists, such as Masami Teraoka's Sarah and Octopus/ Seventh Heaven (2001) and Michael Manning's construct creatures. Many Westerners are often surprised at the graphic lustiness of this legendary Ukiyo-e artist.

Japan has always had a playful and often symbolic sense of portraying sex in images. It helps that the cultural attitudes around sex don't revolve around guilt. Censorship of porn in modern Japan, such as the strict limitations on showing men and women's genitalia during sex, is not a result of some Japanese modesty, but rather the unfortunate influence of American morality shoved into the legal system by the post-WWII occupying forces. So you can't see the hard-core stuff to really get off? Don't blame the animators; blame the American government and its foreign policy.

The Japanese are notorious for visual puns, including sexual innuendos. There are Ukiyo-e images of courtesans fishing where she's grasping a fish. At first glance it's just a fish. Then you realize that the fish has a head that looks like a cock head. Yup, it's a dirty picture of a pretty lady giving head hidden in public view. It's not hidden because it's shameful. It's hidden to show the cleverness and artistic skill of a dirty-minded artist to a dirty-minded viewer. The visual pun of the fish as a phallus and the woman's control over a helpless fish, illustrative of some male-female relationships, is considered not just erotic but also clever and humorous. That's really appreciated in Japan.

Such symbolic representations happen all the time in Japanese imagery. A wisp of hair across a woman's face is all that's needed to symbolize ravishment, and the rest is left up to our imagination.

"The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" by Hokusai, 1820.

So, how do we explain the violent tentacle fucking? That's hardly subtle, is it? While it's violent, it's still representational. Think of the tentacles, whether those of an alien, a hell beast or cephalopod, as representation of primal desire unbridled by social expectations -- the Id, if you will. While Japanese sexuality may not be suppressed by guilt, as we know it, it is highly regulated by social pressures. Underneath all the chrome and steel of modern Japan is a culture that's still feudal and beehive-like in its social organization. To act upon one's own urges is seen as counterproductive for the health of the group.

Human urges don't do so well when they're totally bottled up, so as with many other older cultures, Japan has it's condoned outlets for desire -- pressure valves for their cramped-up Ids. Japanese mythology and folk tales are full of wild creatures that act upon "their" desires; much in the way that Greek mythology is full of bulls and swans that fornicate with people. These critters are the archetypal representations of human desires. While the octopus in western imagery is the dark monster of the ocean that brings down ships, the octopus in Japan is often the undersea comic or the clever little prankster. The undersea world for the Japanese is not a dark, watery hell, but rather it's a wondrous world full of glittering castles and partying immortal women.

Then there are the pearl divers. These are the very real women who dress in loose outfits made of white gauze who dive down to retrieve the jewels of the undersea kingdom. The sights of young women, emerging from the ocean with wet gauze clinging to their toned flesh inspires a lot of erotic awe and serious wood. They put wet T-shirt contests to shame. So, if you're a healthy guy, wouldn't it make sense to project yourself as a clever and horny octopus, with lots of phallic limbs to get it on with these swimming beauties? Having dirty thoughts in Japan was never chastised. It's acting upon them that was frowned upon and thus needed to be seriously checked.

Maybe you're wondering why a guy in a male dominant culture would need to check his sexual desires. It's simple-minded to describe Japan as a male dominated culture. Both genders are oppressed by expectations of a very old culture. The men are just as much controlled as the women. They need to behave according to a pretty limited and specific set of expected "male" behaviors. Women are also oppressed, not necessarily by men, but by the society, such that expressing direct eagerness for erotic fulfillment is considered to be too "animal" like. Images of "innocent" women at first resisting -- then going ballistic in sexual pleasure -- play with these expectations and the taboos of women's sexual self expression.

In the past, individuals in Japan felt a greater sense of belonging, due to the agrarian social structure of the village. The modern industrial world managed to decimate that, creating a sense of isolation, loneliness and disconnection for many modern Japanese. Not surprisingly, this loneliness is a common theme in mainstream Japanese cinema today.

Mix together this sense of disenfranchisement and social oppression, suppressed sensuality and animistic representation of human libido. Then toss in the weird censorship laws that ban graphic depiction of human-to-human genital contact in sex, and what do you get? Alien tentacle monsters with octopus like appendages having their way with gals who've "unleashed" their wild sexual awakenings. There's a lot of tentacle boob squeezing and graphic tentacle fellatio but only implied or blacked out tentacle-vaginal sex - which makes the image legal and really kinky.

Incidentally, tentacle sex isn't just the territory of Hentai schoolgirl anime and those nutty Japanese perverts. If you prefer kinky nun sex, there's a fantastic western representation of suppressed sexuality boiling over among "chaste" women in the graphic novel The Convent of Hell by Noe and Barreiro. For a comic touch, try Ghastly's online comic about Alien Tentacle Monsters and the Women Who Love them.

Enjoy!

Diva's Debauchery - by Midori

Top of the Guide