Before I start, let me just say that this is what you get when you ask people for topics in an open-ended manner and promise to deliver. I actually didn't set up any system for deciding what topic, but surprisingly (to some) I have a lot to say about tentacle erotica.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can check the Wikipedia article above, or if you are adventurous, you can Google it for images and video. Be warned: things can get awful pretty fast in the world of Hentai. Additionally, please make sure such images are legal in your place of residence.
Tentacle Rape, Tentacle Porn, and Tentacle Erotica are all part of one large subset of Hentai, which is a style of pornography mostly associated with Japan, made from artistic images rather than live “actors.” Hentai can exist in the form of Manga (a Japanese comic book or graphic novel), single images, or as animation. There are particular artistic styles associated with it, but most of these are congruent with the styles of less explicit manga and anime (Japanese animation). Hentai also has many genres within it and a quick cruise over to 4chan will reveal a number of these if you are still feeling adventurous. Gay, straight, male, and female are all targeted with different varieties of Hentai porn.
Why don’t the Japanese watch normal porn?
First of all, “normal” isn't a very definitive word. “Typical” American porn, which might include depictions of a variety of acts highly atypical of most Americans, is technically illegal inside of Japan. These laws might have changed slightly recently, so don’t take that as an absolute, but for a very long time the live depiction of genitals, along with particular other private areas (notably pubic hair), was not legal. Of course, markets don’t respond to government controls by giving up demand; the Japanese demanded porn, and porn they got. The legal prohibitions on displaying genitalia did not apply to art, which included pornographic images penned rather than filmed, and thus Hentai was born.
From there, the artists within the genre developed their own styles and expressions, and the mechanisms of the market delivered ever more varied, and sometimes disgusting, products. The great advantage of drawn images over live actors is that you can draw literally whatever you want, or more accurately, whatever the market demands. You can draw characters that are physically flawless, or of impossible proportions. Huge breasts, tiny waists, giant members, and crazy positions are all possible without the difficulty of hiring an actor that meets those specifications, if some such person could actually exist.
The only limit is your imagination, and the human imagination is very powerful indeed.
So how do we go from huge breasts to tentacle porn?
Sexual Novelty and Pornography
Quite simply, the human sex machine places a high desirability on novelty. This is especially true of the male of our species, whose sexual experience tends to revolve around seeking out and pursuing mates, rather the female experience of selection and preservation of a mate. Novelty, in evolutionary terms, often represents genetic diversity and stronger offspring. Even in a long-term relationship sexual novelty can be present in variation of the act itself as a way of maintaining mental excitement.
Pornography has the capacity to hijack this response by presenting the user with an unending supply of fresh faces and bodies to tickle their craving for novelty. Pornography compulsion (or addiction, depending on your terminology) is considered by many to be a real and challenging problem for modern teens and adults, who have almost unlimited access to its use online. “Use” is the proper word, not just “view,” as most people masturbate when viewing pornography, which provides the mental stimulus that is necessary for completion of an orgasm. People (almost always men-let us be honest) who use pornography heavily often suffer sexual side effects including being unable to achieve an erection without porn and being unable to have orgasms while engaged in normal sex acts.
So, the offer of pornography is not just seeing what is normally taboo, though that is undoubtedly part of many excitements, but seeing something fresh, new, and novel. This breeds market pressure to produce materials which contain not only new faces, but exceedingly novel acts and presentations. Eventually these acts become less taboo or original to the market and new ones must be conjured up, such as the shift in the acceptance of anal sex in porn and the American population since the 90’s. If you are reading this and don’t really understand what I’m talking about, consider yourselves lucky.
In Japan, this quest for novelty was no less powerful in the market of hentai, but hentai, unbound by the need for physical actors and their physical (and ethical) limits, was able to create novelty of its own with images. This combined with the fact that you can move beyond typical real-world taboos into areas that are either impossible or totally illegal to produce a host of strange content, some of which is explicitly illegal in parts of the US. Hermaphrodites (futa), murder and gore (goru), pedophilia (lolicon), and our subject, tentacle rape, all became genres within Hentai with real, ongoing market demand.
I’m sure there are many more niche genres that I don’t know about (believe it or not the author of this article doesn’t know that much about hentai beyond passing discussion), but for all of them the driving force is novelty and, especially in the lolicon area, taboo. It’s probably safe to say that a great deal of the hentai that gets translated into English for markets in the US falls into some of the more extreme categories for the same reason: it is competing with real live actors and has to deliver a novelty of its own that live porn cannot.
A brief moral discussion
Is tentacle rape evil? Wrong? What about lolicon, which depicts sex with children? What about the individuals that view these materials? Will they become inspired to rape, murder, or molest children?
The article thus far has focused on markets, market demands, and how consumers respond to the material they are consuming. In this model it is always the market that creates the material, objectionable or not, and not the material that inspires the market. There is little to no evidence that pornography inspires rape or other psychoses (actually, the availability of porn tends to be correlated with lower rates of rape). Though there are personal and interpersonal consequences to pornography abuse, these rarely are affective beyond the individual or his life partner.
Some types of hentai (usually lolicon) are technically illegal in various parts of the US under law. If you are reading this and considering looking for it, please consult your local or state laws to see if it is legal for you to view it. Arrests have been made, people have gone to jail for possessing lolicon. The novelty is not worth the risk. The strong reaction against lolicon is likely due to our desire to protect children, but I will say that drawings are not children. Child pornography is deplorable not because it enables the viewer to carry on a paraphilia, but because a child is victimized in its production. This is not so with any hentai, whether it depicts children, rape or murder.
