When I’m looking for porn to push my buttons, one of the biggest problems I have is which ‘category’ to look under. Of course I tend to start out at the ‘BDSM’ category, but there seems to be a disturbing trend for anything with a bit of chain draped over the bed or a bit of a botty slap to be included. Generally I’m like, ‘WTF?’ after a few minutes and soon I’m delving into ‘anal’ or ‘hardcore’ and recently ‘anime’.
Although the ‘anime’ category tends be very broad too and will turn out such disturbing things as:
I don’t think I’ll ever look at Master Splinter the same again…
Invariably I end up at ‘hentai’ and there I’ll find some yakuza kidnapping or innocent-girl-with-debts-forced-to-work-off-her-loan-with-rich-dude-and-his-henchmen stuff and all will be well with the world.
But that ‘hentai’ category is full of all sorts of stuff and this is where the Japanese 101 lesson begins…
Hentai literally means ‘a strange state of being’. The first character ‘hen’ means different, strange or changed and the second character ‘tai’ refers to a state, condition or attitude. Put together they refer to someone who has ‘particular sexual tastes’. It used to have a softer meaning along the lines of ‘pervert’ and was what you called someone who suggested going to a love hotel on the first date or bought their wife frilly underwear.
Now, it tends to be used for everything from tentacle porn to the very bizarre:
I had a request from a reader last week to translate the captions on a ‘hentai’ comic posted over at fetlife. Being the obliging sort of person I am, I did and it got me thinking about that line between what was ‘normal’ porn and what would be considered ‘hentai’.
I find it interesting that we don’t even have an English name for ‘hentai’. I don’t think ‘hardcore’ or ‘extreme’ really covers the sort of stuff it deals with and it is a very interesting reflection of how creative Japanese people can be. In reality, the majority of Japanese are very tame in the sexual department. Brazillians haven’t ever really caught on, the pill was only legalised in 1999 and anything to do with sex is discussed using the codeword ‘H’ (from the spelling of hentai) and whispered about with lots of blushes.
I always wonder whether the whole hentai thing has come about as a result of sex being pushed so far off the radar for most people and all that energy bubbling forth and needing to be poured into something… involving tentacles, car-sized boobs or scary things covered with spikes.
Anyway, that brings to an end our Japanese 101 lesson. Keep an eye out for those very stretchy women on a vault at a gym near you.
