I once went out with a guy who had a doll fetish and by that I mean he had a collection of anime figurines that were occasionally pornographic prominently displayed in his bedroom . He was really embarrassed about them too, which to me, was hilariously cute and endearing at first. It was like, he had this porn collection he could not possibly hope to hide. He would have had to put it in the closet or in a locked room. And I really dug that honesty. I related to him.

In fact I too like some (SOME!) animated porn and not only that, I prefer animated porn (hentai) to live action porn. The idea of a real woman faking seventeen orgasm does nothing for me, but for some reason suspension of disbelief allows me to appreciate the meta goodness of a fake woman making fake orgasms. It’s indefensible in concept but isn’t that all porn really? Try to keep an open mind; I’m not quite the sick monkey I seem to be.

Hentai is just safer for everyone involved to really create. Call me the Sex Police but I just can’t enjoy myself and crank one out when I’m thinking, Holy shit, she can’t do that when she has razor burn, she’ll get an ingrown hair! It’s not threatening at all and I am willing to sacrifice reality for a clean conscience. It’s guilt free for me because hentai is manufactured outside of an industry that frankly, sometimes has problems with things like exploitation of actresses and actors and Ron Jeremy’s saying shit I don’t like on TMZ all the time. Hentai porn is safer for the actors and actresses because you can’t get AIDS from a boom mike and condoms are in no way conductive to the performance process anyways, I assure you. Maybe the animators get carpal tunnel from drawing unrealistically wide vulvae, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that’s about as risky as production gets. Even at it’s most sick, tentacle and squicky weirdest, whoever is writing it doesn’t seem to be hurting their humanity because I am 99% percent sure a guy who writes a low-budget porn where “women” often get turned on by literal demons until they fuck about seven of them at once to reincarnate a god is not really interested in normal women. And even if he was interested, he’s still have to find not one demon, but multiple demons, who would be interested in that kind of thing. One demon I can believe. But seven?

Another great thing about hentai is the story quality. I challenge anyone not to find the excuses hentai uses to make itself work more entertaining than the average real porn. The stories are in every sense more detailed, if not observable at least a performance-art kind of way. Maybe that’s because animation is in and of itself a medium that more easily and cheaply lends itself to the fantastic, maybe it’s because Japanese sexuality is more abstract and fluid, whatever. I invite master’s papers on the subject and if you get expelled for sexual deviance than I apologize, that was bad advice. If you tried to make the average American porn animated and kept the scenes and stories and voice-acting as-is, it would be more than boring and un watchable, it would be repetitive too, because you can’t film eight hours of animated characters fucking without adding more animation loops than a Hanna Barbara cartoon. As the kids say, I can’t fap to that. People have done that exact thing (minus Yogi Bear, thank God) and nothing changes, it’s just awful to see. Conversely, if you applied animation to fantastical American porns like Pirates or Lord of the G-Strings, they would have been infinitely more enjoyable and more than that, profitable. At a time when traditional porn industries here in America are said to be suffering the pinch and prosecuting illegal downloading more than ever, you’d think they’d want to branch out with some new ideas. But real ones, not just getting a famous porn actress to do your voice dub, for if there is one thing worse than porn stars trying to act, it’s porn stars trying to voice-act, which is criminal. It makes hentai more legit because it makes itself worse by design.

Another thing I like about hentai is it’s pioneering spirit. It is not afraid to break boundaries… and minds, occasionally. Hentai started with pornographic comics and those comics became animated based on their sales and their often-viral fan bases. Modern real porn, as a large industry, might replicate some of hentai’s more viral aspects with gimmicks and money tricks but it’s still losing viewers. Smaller art house porn that uses real people and asks it’s audience (and even, thing of things, women) what it wants are faster growing and more tech-savvy. Is it any Japanese are perfecting hi tech porn toys and robots? I really don’t mind hearing that Google Glass-like products can project an artificial girlfriend for a lonely person , or that someone who prefers plastic to flesh can purchase a doll that looks like Sailor Moon for tens of thousands of dollars and have sex with it. That’s no different than a Fleshlight and more importantly, new innovations in sex toys are simply new ways to masturbate. And that’s something that’s likely never to change.

There is some really twisted hentai porn out there, and some of it is even illegal. Urotsukidoji is still infamously banned in England and that’s tame by today’s standards. And really, all porn should be illegal if it poses a threat or it was created through harms or exploitation. Hentai shouldn’t be stigmatized more or less because other people break laws sometimes. And yet, the exceptions seem to prove the rule, and hentai breaks more rules, so I suppose hentai earned it’s freaky ten rep just like real porn earned it’s ugly-male-actor rep. What rep their viewers earn is the more interesting question.

Me and Mr. Bondage Dolls didn’t wok too well in the end. I found out he was a thirty year old virgin I deflowered while drunk, and he found out what real women were like. We both learned something from each other and I have to say I don’t think I want to hide it. Porn and sex are like comedy and horror: no one can make you like it, and you either get it or you don’t. But it helps to be honest about what get’s you off when you turn it on.





