Hentai Porn - Toon in; Toon Out

I'm watching a young girl who's tied to a tile floor wiggle for her life, and while she looks like she should be having a tea party with her stuffed animals she is instead crying uncontrollably as two men ravage her with impunity.  Neither of these men will be arrested for their pedophilia and this girl will be going through even worse sexual horrors moments later with any number of horny cephalopods and I am in no way concerned with my own morality because what I'm watching is anime – and it's perfectly acceptable – or should be. Animated Asian pornography carries with it the same stigma that ultra-violent American cartoons and video games have always had: if we're constantly exposed to this stuff, won't it affect how we act in real life?  The short answer, of course, is no.

Watching loli rape cartoons won't make a person any more likely kidnap and rape a toddler than Wile E. Coyote cartoons made kids strap rockets to their roller-skates to drop TNT-laced anvils onto birds for no reason.  We're not stupid – they're just cartoons.

What's alarming isn't the existence of animated rape pornography (normal couples act this out regularly) or tentacle pornography (which the Japanese have been drawing since the 1300's) or even child pornography (another cultural staple of Asian art), because despite our personal objections to certain kinds of animated pornography, Rule 34 states, "If it exists, there is porn of it."  And why wouldn't that be true?  Whatever your little heart desires to get off to in the privacy of your own home should be completely up to you as long as no one gets hurt.

What is alarming is how much of this stuff there – it's the biggest single industry on the planet, and that excludes completely unacceptable sex industry staples like prostitution or human trafficking.

Porn makes up more than a third of Japan's entire GDP, making it bigger than every technology company there combined.  The same is true of the porn industry in the United States, and not surprisingly, an enormous slice of that porn pie is anime, manga, hentai and Asian fetish flicks.  Fetish flicks take animation a step further by making women look like cartoons with perfect, geometric bodies (thank you plastic surgery), or by dressing of-age women to look like underage women, or by putting women in extremely uncomfortable situations that usually involve unsolicited sex or non-human rape but always end with spectacular bukkakke.  While Western audiences may cringe, bukkakke – the stylized "climax" of a sex scene – has only been around since the ‘90s, and only in direct response to morality laws imposed by a post-WWII Douglas MacArthur that prohibit the depiction of genitalia in any form of Japanese media.  Filmmakers needed a way to show that the sex was over without showing the body parts that were finishing, and presto: cumshots and facials were born.

Pardon the pun, but this is where things get sticky.  While these new and often offensive porn styles can be jarringly perverse, they are usually the result of an ironically strict culture.  The Japanese have a long and honorable history of discipline and tradition, so in order to be able to produce sexual or morally flexible creative art, the Japanese had to invent cartoons of acts that would be considered illegal.  They had to create robots that could perform duties that real women would be forbidden to do.  And they have to improvise parodies of rape, or symbolisms of aggressive sex, or new ways to enjoy good old fashion sex – like nuru massage or role play or BDSM.  They had to imagine sexual stimuli, because the entire culture is geared to prevent it.

In short, it is because Asians live such a restrained life that their pornography has always been completely creative.  In societies as free as ours, where anyone can openly have sex with anyone, we didn't have a necessity to create these clever escapes from a structured courting regiments – we could just get laid.  But because Asians have found ways to overcome the rigidity of their social etiquette, the rest of the world can enjoy whole new facets of sexuality that we may have never even explored.

So it might be abrasive.  It might be offensive.  And it might just be downright weird.  But so was rock music when it started.  And so were topless women at Woodstock.  And so was Ricky Gervais until a couple years ago.  I'm not suggesting you intentionally force yourself to watch things that you consider wrong, but let's not be quick to lump the collective ingenuity of Asian artists (and perverts, sure) into a singular "gross" basket.  If you don't like it, find something else.  If you do like it, maybe you'll be surprised – again – by what turns you on.  Whatever you're in to, it probably came from Asia, and thanks to them your freakish fetish can be satisfied with a quick Google search because if it exists, there is porn of it.