But the Internet by no means invented these things. As it turns out, they've been around way longer than that stain in your Honda.

Bizarre sexual fetishes are a staple of the human psyche--most everyone has them, and with the arrival of Internet porn, all the walls came crumbling down. Suddenly, everyone everywhere could share their sick, nasty fantasies with the entire world, safe under a veil of anonymity.

6 Tentacle Rape - Late 18th Century

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We love to mock "tentacle porn," and Japan for inventing it. If this is your first day on the Internet, just know tentacle porn is one of the Internet's most beloved methods of making young people terrified of sex, and it is precisely what it sounds like: women being raped by tentacles (usually in cartoons).

The modern tentacle rape genre was created by Toshio Maeda, whose manga Urotsukidoji "created what might be called the modern paradigm of tentacle porn," which we suppose in Japan is actually seen as an accomplishment rather than grounds for a sexual assault conviction. According to Maeda, he started the practice in order to get around Japan's strict censorship laws, which forbade the depiction of a penis but did not forbid penetration by anything else.



Bet they regret that.

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For men, the fetish appeals to those who enjoy seeing women humiliated and subjugated by something that isn't even human. For women, the fetish appeals to those who've secretly always wanted to have sex with Squiddly Diddly.

While Maeda may have created the modern tentacle rape, he wasn't the inventor--not even close. Maeda was preceded by Katsushika Hokusai, an artist from the late 18th and early 19th century. Hokusai was the artist of the "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji," an internationally recognized series of prints that earned him fame both locally and globally. Also: he liked him some tentacles.

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Hokusai's "The Dream Of The Fisherman's Wife" is speculated to be the first instance of tentacle erotica, so by all means don't click that link if you're at work, there are children present or you have a soul.

But before you go calling Japan a nation of psychotic fish diddlers, check out "Tentacles of Desire: The Man Who Loved Cephalopods." Contained within is the story of Joshua Handley, an English artist in the late 19th century whose travels to Japan resulted in an obsession with tentacle erotica.