by Josef Steiff
Homunculi and the Deadly Sins
Homunculi have a human form, but no humanity. They are brought into the world when alchemy is used to realize human goal by going against human limitations. And in just the same way does our use of economics to attempt to replace human value bring the sins for which the homunculi are named into the world.
When we use humans in the service of economic value, rather than using money and profits to increase and realize human values, we quickly lose our humanity, becoming akin to homunculi. In business, we treat humans as mere commodities to be paid as little as possible and dismissed when profits can’t be further extracted from them. In love, we mistake purchases for affection. When our relationships take place in the context of greed and prideful, self-serving desires, the other capital vices are sure to be borne in the wake of our actions. Lust and Envy, Gluttony and Wrath, and Sloth as well—the vice closest to the Elric brothers.
Sloth is perhaps the least obvious of these capital vices. Why is Sloth a capital vice, and why is she the vice that the Elric brothers bring into the world with their forbidden act?
Sloth is not a mere laziness, or at least this is not the sense in which Sloth is a capital vice. As a capital vice, according to Aquinas in Summa, II-II, Q. 35, Sloth is a feeling of weariness when faced with the knowledge of how much work it is to do good in the world, and to act in a right manner. Sloth, then, is opposed not to activity or to liveliness, but to charity and care for others. And so Sloth is the servant of Pride, in life as in Fullmetal Alchemist, for both are self-interested and avoid and shirk the difficult work of living within the limits of an honest and virtuous life. And it is perhaps right that she should be the product of the Elric brothers’ action because they were unwilling to accept and take up the difficult burden that fate laid upon them.
While Greed is the root of evil, and Pride is the beginning of sin, Sloth is the attendant of all vice. It is Sloth that keeps us from taking the hard road and accepting the responsibility of treating others well and working within the limits we find ourselves in. Sloth is the dream of the quick fix, the get-rich-quick scheme, and the attempt to solve a human problem through technology. Along with Greed and Pride, she is the third of the most essential of the deadly sins of capitalism, and of all other forms of alchemy as well.
Equivalent Exchange
But the world isn’t perfect, and the law is incomplete. Equivalent exchange doesn’t encompass everything that goes on here. But I still choose to believe in its principle: that all things do come at a price; that there’s an ebb and a flow, a cycle. That the pain we went through did have a reward and that anyone who’s determined and perseveres will get something of value in return, even if it’s not what they expected. I don’t think of equivalent exchange as a law of the world anymore, I think of it as a promise between my brother and me; a promise that someday we’ll see each other again.
—ALPHONSE ELRIC, Fullmetal Alchemist
Simple economic equivalent exchange brings us eventually to great imbalance, loss, and injustice. Safety regulations are cheated—some estimates put the number of work-related deaths at one every five minutes in the United States alone. Children are hungry and cold in the same nation where others buy shower curtains made of gold and fifteen-thousand dollar umbrella stands.16 Free and fair equivalent economic exchange brings about conditions which are not fair, and in which we are not free. The reason is simple: in our world, unlike the Elric brothers’, we have allowed economic exchange to transmute human values; we have not adequately protected people’s freedom, opportunity, health, and welfare from the transmutations of markets and money. This is the “truth behind truths” of our economic structure: the power to profit without work and to purchase whatever is desired is able to disobey the law of equivalent exchange only because capital is built up by human sacrifice. The secret ingredient in capital is the same as that of the Philosopher’s Stone.
If the market will not make good on its promise of equivalent exchange, we too must come to treat it as an incomplete law, and we too must think of it as a promise that we must make to one another. A promise to respect each other, to be fair, to care for each other and strive for our common good. Most of all, a promise to oppose and always guard against Greed, Pride, and Sloth: a promise to be charitable and to accept that the hard work of helping others is our responsibility. In this way, we can strive, within a capitalist economy, to avoid the capital vices of the alchemy of money, and use our economic alchemy to support humans within humane limits, rather than to rage against those limits in a selfish, abusive, and exploitative manner.
Alchemist and capitalist both: Be Thou for the People.
17
Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Sex and Were Afraid to Watch
ANDREW A. DOWD
Sexual Decisions. That was the name of the first college-level sexed textbook to make its way to the islands of Japan. 1985 was the year.
At the time, any graphic depiction of the naked male or female form was expressly forbidden. This fledgling volume, a translated version of a very tasteful, contemporary American text, didn’t reach campuses in all its original glory. Many of the drawings and photographs within the book—the detailed sketches of genitalia and the full-frontal model diagrams—were unceremoniously excised. Those that weren’t got black boxes plastered over them or were air-brushed into blurry obscurity. Sex could finally be studied and talked about in a Japanese university classroom. Students just had to use their imaginations a little. This, again, was 1985. This was Japan.
My, what a difference two decades can make! To say that Japanese culture has become more, shall we say . . . permissive of sexually explicit materials is to understate the point. Images that would have gotten their purveyors locked up in the 1980s now adorn the covers of magazines, staring out from wire racks in airports and convenience stores. Stroll down the right avenue in Tokyo and the city becomes a smut aficionado’s playground, with pornographic video vendors and adult bookstores on every corner. Sex sells, and it’s everywhere.
There’s manga, that intrinsically Japanese brand of comic book, the kind whose best-selling titles now seem split almost evenly between kid-appropriate action fantasy and full-on, no-limits erotica. These books fly off the shelves, into the hands of any and all age groups, parental discretion neither suggested nor required. In Japan, the taboo has become commonplace, private desires have become public domain, and we all have a pretty good idea of what keeps sons rising in the Land of the Rising Sun. As web columnist Jon Wilks puts it, in his tongue-in-cheek, (almost) complete Dictionary of Japan Sex, “without hentai and its associated pictorial success the world would know little of Japan’s outlandish sexual practices.” The dirty secret’s out. Proof’s in the Gokkun pudding.
But what happened to the puritanically repressed Japan of legend, that nation of prudes, of functional and strictly missionary sex? Did this place ever really exist? Have things changed or are we just now seeing the real face of Japan? Either way, attitudes have certainly shifted. The unconvinced need look no further than one of the country’s most profitable and prevalent cultural exports, manga’s younger cousin, those same wild fantasies put into herkyjerky motion. Got a strong disposition and a stronger stomach? Plug “hentai” into an Internet search engine. For kicks, pepper in a few choice keyboards, like “tentacle” or “bondage” or “dismemberment.” Go ahead, I dare you. What you’ll find waiting at your fingertips would make Larry Flynt blush and give the Marquis de Sade pause. Forget slasher movies, those perpetual scapegoat texts of the Moral Majority. This here is actual torture porn, Grand Guignol in the master bedroom, the real return of Robin Wood’s infamous repressed.
“How’d you like your hymen broken by a horse speculum?” someone asks a bound, gagged, and hung upside down sex kitten early into Pigeon Blood. It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Girl doesn’t really have much of a choice. In this twisted fable, a bored hedonist oversees a mansion of sex slaves, young girls he m
akes crawl on all fours, lick up puddles of fresh urine, and serve at the whim of his cruel, sadistic sex drive.
The ten-part Night Shift Nurses is worse still. Here, a hulking horndog of a doctor is hired to “break in” the virginal nursing staff of a secluded hospital, to train them in the arts of erotic pleasure. Except there’s nothing particularly erotic or pleasurable about the horrors he inflicts upon these fragile, bright-eyed waifs. Sick monster starts by raping each of them, then steadily escalates the intensity of his “training,” creatively incorporating stress positions and the systematic insertion of strange objects into uncomfortable places. The young victims are then left in quivering heaps, alone in the dark, often soaked in their own fear-and-pain-induced bodily fluids. Rough stuff. And then there’s Tentacle Rape, the always popular, deeply peculiar depiction (popularized by such titles as La Blue Girl and Twin Dolls) of colossal squid beasties penetrating sweet young things with their phallic feelers. Compared to the episodic atrocities of Night Shift Nurses, such oddball sci-fi flourishes seem kind of comical, if still predicated on some pretty nasty business.
Of course, adult anime isn’t all violence and viscera, monsters and mutilation. It’s the graphic stuff that grabs the headlines and sets the message boards aflutter, but a Google search of hentai, minus any grisly qualifiers, will unearth a much wider and more eclectic range of “mature” animated entertainment. Hardcore and softcore, gay and straight, underage and old age, fetish and comparably tame “sensual fantasies”—here in the States, “hentai” is about as specific a signifier as “porno.” Really, it’s a broad distortion of a precise distinction. What we call hentai—basically, any and all pornographic anime—the Japanese refer to as ero (erotic) or seinen (adult). They also use the single letter “H” (pronounced ecchi) in much the same way the Western world uses “X” or “XXX.” Hentai, to the Japanese, is a slight or an insult, comparable to pervert or weirdo. Thus the animated pornography actually classified as hentai in Japan is the really bizarre or extreme kind: the rape fantasies, the pedophilia porn, the slimy tentacle titillation, the sadomasochistic snuff films. In a market that caters to the every whim and desire of its clientele, these are the only movies that still carry any real measure of stigma or taboo.
True hentai, in other words, is the hard stuff. And from here on out, when I use the term, that’s what I’m referring to. This is the obscenest of the obscene, the seedy underbelly of Japan’s burgeoning sexual revolution, repellant to all but the most jaded of carnal connoisseurs. It’s pretty tempting to outright condemn these films, on moral and social grounds, as the sick and twisted outgrowth of a sexually deviant, misogynistic culture. (Animated or not, is there any viable defense to be made for, say, the simulated torture and gang rape of a schoolgirl?) Yet to disgustedly denounce these controversial texts, with no consideration of what inspires them and from what deep cultural crevices they seep, is to deny the real value they may possess—potentially, theoretically, as a safe outlet for a society’s darkest desires, its pent-up frustrations, and its most unusual curiosities. Steady your resolve, stifle your gag reflex, and dive headfirst into the mad, mad history of hentai.
Abnormal Conception
If the pictures are to be believed, giant sea beasts were making amorous advances on young Japanese women as early as 1814. That’s the year that a painting called Diver and Two Octopi appeared in Katsushika Hokusai’s art collection Kinoe no komatsu. The picture, tame by today’s anything-goes standards but quite provocative at the time, depicts a skinny-dipper being pleasured by two enormous squids, their tendrils roaming freely over her naked body. Though it’s difficult to infer whether this interspecies love pairing is consensual or not—the girl’s eyes are closed in what could be construed as ecstasy, and she doesn’t appear to be fighting off the horny monster’s affections—this popular image struck some kind of chord in the national psyche. It’s often cited as the very first known example of Tentacle Rape erotica.
That tentacle-in-cheek history lesson aside, the real birth of hentai can be traced back to Japan circa the 1920s. It was then that a number of academic journals sprung up, their express purpose to examine the growing phenomenon of “perverse sexuality” or eroguro-nansensu (“erotic, grotesque nonsense”). Cheaply printed and accessibly written, titles like Kisho (“Strange Book”) and Gurotesuku (“Grotesque”) tackled the psychology of perversion through ultra vivid description, indulging in the kind of sensational sexual fantasy they were supposedly dissecting. Predictably, if rather ironically, these journals gained popularity outside of academic circles, appealing more to the folks they purported to study than to those doing the studying. In a culture deprived of the sexual imagery it craved, the analysis of the demand became the supply. Sales spiked, a cult of interest was cultivated, and the Japanese government became increasingly suspicious of the “educational value” of these publications. They pulled the plug on the study, but the journals continued to circulate, no longer beholden to any sort of dubious academic obligation. It was during this time that the word “hentai” first entered the Japanese lexicon.
Printing of these now-underground fetish magazines was suspended during World War II, when any and all paper supplies were devoted to the war effort. It was well into the 1950s, after the post-war American occupation, that they resurfaced with a vengeance. This was a tumultuous time for Japan and its culture, one divided between strict reinforcement of moral codes and a growing desire, on the fringes of society, for freedom of sexual expression. The market for hentai grew through the 1960s and 1970s, but it remained underground, out of the line of fire, its writers and publishers operating just out of reach of the long arm of the law.
The fusion of hentai and shunga (Japanese erotic art) was a natural and obvious progression, one that flourished in the pages of underground manga. Some of the desired fantasies were so bizarre and extreme that they more or less had to be drawn. Can’t find any actual multi-limbed creatures to suggestively photograph? Don’t really want to murder and mutilate a living woman? In the world of hentai manga, the pen really is mightier than the sword. As with all sexually explicit material in Japan, these publications hovered well below the mainstream. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, when the tide began to shift dramatically in favor of legalizing pornography, that adult manga began to really take hold of the public consciousness. Almost overnight, these books became a sensation. It was as though the proceeding sixty years of black-market wheelings and dealings, of sordid stories scribbled across forbidden pages, had all been foreplay. Here, at last, was the explosive orgasm. The Age of Hentai had finally arrived. And manga was at the forefront of it.
That is, until someone had the bright idea of putting those lewd drawings into motion. It was during this period of radical social upheaval, when laws prohibiting pornographic materials fell like dominoes with each passing year, that hentai anime first reared its randy head. The loosening of media content restrictions dovetailed neatly with the proliferation of VHS and the fledgling years of the international anime boom. Hentai found its way into anime via the new medium of OVA, or Original Video Animation. These were serialized fantasies, distributed exclusively on video, usually one episode per tape.
Lolita Anime, released in 1984, was not just the first hentai OVA, but also, broadly speaking and per most estimations, the very first animated hentai. It was an anthology series, with no real narrative thread tying together its various tales of adultery, underage intercourse, and sexual humiliation. Many of the genre’s hallmarks were introduced in the OVA’s six-episode run: bondage fantasies, scandalous encounters with clergymen, yuri (or lesbian sex), and more. Even more influential was Cream Lemon, released later that same year, another anthology that helped shape the popular hentai template. This series introduced more surreal elements to the formula, setting its graphic sex scenes against a constantly changing backdrop of bizarre genre tropes and convoluted melodrama. In an exemplary episode, a schoolgirl overcomes her history of sexual abuse by masturbating in
front of her classmates . . . a development that immediately inspires a mass orgy around her. (Offensive or empowering? YOU be the judge!)
The overarching framing device, loosely employed on an episode-to-episode basis, involves a brother and sister inching ever so slowly into an incestuous relationship. Here, in the dialectic between this reoccurring narrative and the one-off short story snippets it bridges, is a “something-for-everyone” pornographic democracy: instant gratification for some and a meticulous, deliberate build in erotic tension for others. Though they upped the ante in outrageousness, extremity, and elaborate sci-fi affectation, few of the OVAs Cream Lemon subsequently inspired could boast such a complicated modus operandi. Nor could they lay claim to such classically beautiful animation, reminiscent of mainstream 1970s anime. Before or since, rarely have such outlandish sexual situations been so elegantly, artfully depicted. Cream Lemon set a standard of taboo-smashing almost-artistry, basically laying a foundation for the entire hentai movement. Alas, it also set a queasy precedent: the dependence of one gender’s sexual liberation on another’s complete degradation. There’s a reason, in other words, that girls just don’t watch this stuff.
Bi-Cultural Attraction
So where do these fantasies come from? A budding cultural theorist with a degree in psychology and a tolerance for exquisitely, color-fully rendered depravity could make a career out of answering that question. Many have, I’m sure—if nothing else, hentai is among the most revealing and psychologically loaded brands of smut available. It might seem appropriate to place the burden of baggage on the creators of these films, the writers dreaming up each boundary-pushing scenario, and the animators bringing them to ever so vivid, oh so lurid life. Yet hentai, like all pornography, is more a product than it is an art form. In fact, it’s a multi-million dollar industry. Those making this stuff are meeting a demand, plain and simple, and they’re certainly not operating in some kind of cultural vacuum. Forget bedroom politics. You could map a complete cultural history—the complicated gender relations and collective sexual insecurities of a whole nation—onto the prevalent images and reoccurring motifs of this gruesome genre.
