by Josef Steiff
Hentai’s most obvious explanatory scapegoat is sexual repression. This is the notion that one’s strangest and most grotesque desires stem from ignoring biological urges, from denying oneself the gratification of regular sexual release. It’s one of Freud’s most influential principles: that abnormal or dysfunctional sexuality can be traced to the repression of healthy, natural desire. The problem with this theory as it pertains to hentai is that it hinges on the popular belief that Japanese culture actively encourages the repression of sexual drive. Historically speaking, this is a vast and troubling oversimplification. Like just about any nation with at least a couple hundred years under its belt, Japan has seen a periodic sway and shift in its core values. This habitual push-pull between conservatism and progression sometimes manifests itself in seeming inconsistencies. For example, pornography was illegal until the late 1980s, yet erotic art has been a celebrated staple of Japanese culture for centuries. What appear at first like inherent contradictions in the country’s moral makeup are merely telltale signs of a malleable culture, one that’s steadily changing and constantly evolving.
Some of Japan’s most striking cultural dichotomies can be traced back to an era in which two separate moral frameworks seemed to be operating at once. During the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868) differing attitudes about the role of sex in everyday life were drawn cleanly down class division lines. On one side you had the ruling class, the feudal Samurais, whose strict code of personal conduct was heavily influenced by the rigid tenets of Confucianism. For these prisoners of the aristocracy, passions of the flesh were severely restricted, often outright forbidden. Any form of romantic expression was generally frowned upon in the upper echelons of Japanese society. You had to slide much further down the totem pole, to the powerless peasants and toiling merchants of the working class, before you’d encounter uninhibited sexual pursuit. Shinto was the dominant faith these people clung to; among the major world religions, it remains unique in its celebration of carnal desire as a healthy, essential component of human nature. Buddhism, the other organized religious faith of the Japanese proletariat, promotes a similarly laissez-faire attitude toward sexual expression.
Japan’s aristocracy eventually crumbled and collapsed, resulting in the gradual collision of these two very different sets of cultural ideals. Opposing values, long segregated into separate social strata, began to bump up against each other. The end of Japan’s lengthy isolationist period brought an influx of fresh ideologies. These new ways of thinking scraped up roughly against occasional periods of imposed “moral decency,” such as the one that accompanied the post-war American occupation. The right hand and the left hand were suddenly and consistently at odds. Modern Japan thus seems less defined by a unilaterally conservative attitude about sex and more by a complicated and sometimes confused relationship between warring perspectives on the matter. It’s from this fissure, perhaps, that hentai was spawned—mixed signals curdle into sexual revenge fantasies, the viewer transposing his frustration with a culture constantly in transition upon onscreen surrogates. The big-eyed, squeaky-voiced, pony-tailed kind.
Hate Fuck
Is hentai therapeutic—as some kind of psychosexual spectator-ship, a means of channeling more deeply entrenched anxieties? Perhaps it functions that way for men. But for the “fairer sex?” So much of the medium speaks to a deep resentment of women and to a fear of the changing role they play in contemporary Japan. Workplace equality, political ascendancy, sexual liberation—Japanese women may still occupy a position of relative social subjugation, but baby, they’ve come a long way. Now take a look at the nubile vixens traipsing through your average hentai. They’re blushing, obedient virgins, ripe for the deflowering. Secretaries and nurses, wide-eyed servant girls, and naive co-eds—these are the desirable archetypes of adult anime. If ever a strong female figure should appear onscreen, you can bet that either (a) she’s going to make some shy girly girl her submissive sex slave or (b)—and this is much more common—she’ll be knocked down a peg or two, literally or symbolically stripped of her power. In Night Shift Nurses, it’s the innocent young med students our “hero” dutifully corrupts and defiles. Yet his first conquest is actually the power-suit-clad dragon lady who hires him. She’s a no nonsense businesswoman, a real ball-buster, so naturally she has to be broken. (Minutes she’s on screen before dropping to her knees: roughly four.) Even hentai that employ a female protagonist, an intergalactic traveler or sexy warrior princess, eventually subject the heroine to some violation or horrific sexual ordeal. Here the appeal of strong women lies in the promise of their comeuppance. These Supergirls won’t be so super once the Octo-Beasts get their loose limbs upon them.
In her seminal essay “From Reverence to Rape,” cultural theorist Molly Haskel proposes that, on the whole, contemporary cinema offers only two prevailing notions of womanhood: the Madonna (or pure, saintly mother figure) and the Whore. As a nation that has long established the rigid role and responsibility of its female citizens—as mothers, daughters and housewives, mostly—Japan has veritably overdosed on its centuries-old Madonna complex. Hentai could be seen as a reactionary revolt against that standard, though certainly not one that benefits, via representation, the women compelled to adhere to it. These films transform Madonnas into Whores, dragging the sacred image of the chaste, loyal über-woman into the down-and-dirty muck. (Hence, also, the nun raping in Advancer Tina and its shocking ilk.) Hentai often reads like a lashing out against all women: the mousey and traditional Madonnas, the promiscuous Whores, and the independent career women, for whom the support of “good men” scarcely seems necessary anymore. No getting around it, these are fundamentally misogynistic texts.
And yet one has to wonder if all this rage and violence is really even about women. Let’s can the euphemisms: hentai is rape porn. Ninety percent of the time, the sexual aggressor is forcing his/her/itself onto an unwilling partner. When this isn’t the case, the films still traffic in fear, shame, degradation, and agony. What could possibly inspire someone, anyone, to find any such extreme states of mind or states of being sexually arousing? Well, psychologically speaking, rape isn’t really about sex, but power. And that leads us to the problematic notion of Japanese Inferiority. This fabled complex—excessively evoked, though not necessarily without some merit—proposes that a century of military defeats, compounded by the unfathomable tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagaski, has effectively emasculated the character of the Japanese nation. Theoretically, one might read hentai as a fantasy reclamation of that lost power, that compromised “manhood.” Certainly, the mere physiology of the male figures in hentai speaks to a kind of wish fulfillment. If the women are wiry, petite, demure little numbers, the men are tall, dashing, muscular Alpha Males. They tend to be exceptionally well endowed, their genitals sketched epically large, to only-in-porno proportions. And when they orgasm, the ejaculation is often hilariously explosive, like some erupting volcano or geyser. That kind of machismo distortion of the human form is common in most adolescent male fantasies, not just the Japanese variety. Insecurity—about one’s body, one’s manhood and one’s power in relation to others—is a pretty universal malady of the modern man.
Hentai, then, is at least a superficially empowering medium. It’s also a revolt against good taste, a subversive transformation of the sacred into the profane, and a canvas on which to boldly splash, without reproach, one’s anger and fear and frustration. Hentai is fantasy, and fantasy has value. But how much value, this extreme and vicious variety? Do these films really cleanse their viewers of their dangerous desires or instead merely articulate, finally and with appetite-stoking clarity, the depth of their depravity? Put another way: does hentai satiate the raping, tentacled monster within or does it give it the taste for human flesh?
How Dirty Boys Get Clean?
The argument about catharsis, generally defined as a purging of the mind or spirit via sensational art or entertainment, can be traced back to long before cities were wicked, bibles were black, o
r the Overfiend had a legend to speak of. It was history’s foremost Great Thinkers, the granddaddy heavyweights of philosophy, who first took sides in that endless debate. Aristotle, in his famous Poetics, proposed that some works can actively “cleanse” the emotional palette of those experiencing them, offering a recognition and subsequent release of pent-up feelings, anxieties, or frustrations.
This conclusion was written in direct and purposeful opposition to one posited by Plato, in his own magnum opus, The Republic. It was Plato’s contention that works of dramatic sensationalism encouraged men to be irrational or hysterical, to lose control of their feelings. These philosophers were writing of poetry and theater, not animated skin flicks. And the “feelings” they referred to were those you have in your heart, not the ones that rise in your loins. Regardless, this ancient sparring of theses is the foundation of a very modern debate. Does violent art and entertainment instill in each of us a greater need or desire for real violence? Or do such works offer a healthy, harmless, and periodic outlet for anti-social behavior, a play fantasy way to get all of those messy impulses out of our system?
The latter notion, referred to today as the Theory of Catharsis, was revived and popularized for the Media Age by Seymour Feshbach. His 1955 essay,“The Drive-Reducing Function of Fantasy Behaviour,” offered a fervent defense of television and movie violence, suggesting that such materials defuse latent aggression by placating viewers with small and safe doses of vicarious violence. In other words, those that occasionally stoke their own biological bloodlust with the power of make-believe are then less likely to take it out on the “real world.” Sounds reasonably convincing, except a number of theories sprung up afterwards that actively challenged Feshbach’s findings. There was Leonard Berkowitz’s Theory of Disinhibition, which stated, in affect, that violent media lessens our inhibitions about behaving aggressively and can also confuse our sense of what is or is not “aggressive behavior.” This is somewhat related to the Theory of Desensitization, wherein prolonged exposure to fake violence conditions us to think of real violence as “normal” or “natural.” And then there’s Social Learning Theory, a.k.a. the hypothesis that since we all learn how to behave from observing others, watching dollops of violent media—especially at a young and impressionable age—teaches violence as an acceptable mode of interpersonal relations (Nancy Signorielli, Violence in the Media: A Reference Handbook, pp. 16-22)
Those last three, roundly summarized as the Anti-Violent Media theories, have gained a lot of traction in the last few decades. Catharsis, on the other hand, has been rather roundly dismissed by psychologists and cultural theorists alike. B.J. Bushman and L.R. Huesmann, two vocal proponents of the Disinhibition Theory, rather brashly asserted that “there is not a thread of convincing scientific data” to support the Catharsis theory (“Effects of Televised Violence on Aggression,” Handbook of Children and the Media, p. 236). What they meant, of course, is that controlled group studies of catharsis, the kind that virtually “proved” the Anti-Violent Media theories, yielded no such accreditation from the medical or psychiatric community. As far as most of academia is concerned, catharsis just doesn’t fly. And yet it still routinely pops up in the critical conversation, a few rouge theorists fighting the good fight on behalf of this (mostly) discredited theory.
Most of those “successful” studies looked at sample groups, tracking the various reactions of various individuals in a controlled environment. Few of them examined “real world” data. And almost none of them measured the effects, positive or negative, of violent sexual media—“rough” pornography. But that’s exactly what University of Hawaii PhD candidate Milton Diamond did in 1998. In his thesis “The Effects of Pornography: An International Perspective,” Diamond tracked the correlation between the increase in quantity or availability of pornography in Japan and the nation’s yearly sexual assault statistics. The results were surprising: from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, a period defined by the rapid legalization and proliferation of pornography, the rate of sex crimes in Japan went way down, steadily and continuously. This included both the number of rape victims (1,500 in 1995, down from 4,677 in 1972) and the number of rape offenders (1,160 in 1995, down from 5,464 in 1972).
Pornography goes up, rape goes down, and the theory of catharsis holds water. Case closed, right? Not so fast. First of all, correlation does not imply causation—there are any number of factors that could have contributed to that steady decline in sexual assaults. At best, the study suggests that violent pornography doesn’t actively cause more rapes or create more rapists. But it sure doesn’t prove that it curtails those kinds of criminal sexual desires. One has to also consider that rape is a crime that depends on an official complaint being filed. Japan may have made great leaps and bounds in its social progression, but it’s still a Shame Society, one that’s historically controlled its citizens by instilling in them fear of bringing shame upon themselves or their family. How many of the country’s actual sexual assaults go unreported every year? Experts sometimes project as many as five to ten times the number reported (Yoshiro Hatano and Tsuguo Shimazaki, “Japan,” The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality). How many of the rapists tried every year beat the system? In a country still slanted towards the dominance of the male authority figure, that number can’t be too insignificant either. Diamond’s magic decline may have been little more than a beautiful lie, at best a half-truth. If this is the most convincing case one can dig up for catharsis, Feshbach and his faithful proponents need to start showing their work.
Textually Transmitted Disease
“Pornography is the theory and rape is the practice,” feminist author Robin Morgan famously declared in her 1980 essay, “Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape.” Yet no conclusive link has ever really been made between pornography and sex crimes. Really, even the popular theories regarding violent, nonsexual media—Disinhibition, Desensitization, and Social Learning—remain mostly speculative. Hentai, which mixes graphic sex with extreme, sadistic violence, has scarcely been examined. It’s doubtful that any study will “prove” that it has a profoundly negative effect on those who watch it. But lord knows there’s also nothing out there to suggest that these films, in their transparent contempt for women and I-dare-you-to-top-this obscenity, do anything but encourage the development of unhealthy sexual preoccupations.
Hentai won’t transform a “normal” person into a slicing and dicing rapist, nor will it transform a disturbed sex offender into a healthy, productive member of society. This kind of stuff isn’t an “On” or “Off” switch for deviant sexual behavior. It doesn’t affect your actions so much as, potentially and quite harmfully, your attitudes . Its influence is insidious, subtle even. If there is, at last, a theory that explains the likely consequences of excessive hentai consumption, it is that of Cultivation. Developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Larry Gross and George Gerbner’s hotly debated social theory explores the long-term effects of modern media on the viewing public, on its general ideologies and given assumptions. Michael Morgan, who joined the Gross-Gerbner research team years later, summarizes the theory as such:Cultivation researchers have argued that these messages of power, dominance, segregation, and victimization cultivate relatively restrictive and intolerant views regarding personal morality and freedoms, women’s roles, and minority rights. Rather than stimulating aggression, cultivation theory contends that heavy exposure to television violence cultivates insecurity, mistrust, and alienation, and a willingness to accept potentially repressive measures in the name of security, all of which strengthens and helps maintain the prevailing hierarchy of social power. (“Audience Research: Cultivation Analysis,” The Museum of Broadcast Communications; emphasis mine)
Hentai as a tool for status quo preservation? Might seem like a stretch, except that, in the lionization of manly men power trips, these films cultivate gender identities as rigid as . . . well, as the pitched tents they inspire. Not since Freddy and Jason caught the outrage of concerned mo
thers everywhere have such accidentally conservative, Trojan Horse entertainments come barreling into the bedrooms of impressionable youths. Of course, the genre doesn’t intentionally reinforce anything but the fat bank accounts of the folks who supply it. (Okay, and maybe their respective reputations for no-limits filth and sleaze, too.) But it does propagate attitudes— about sex, about romance, about power, about the role women can and should play in a twenty-first-century society. Watch enough of this stuff, and its marginal “messages” start to creep in, like a virus. Especially if you’re young, with a mind like a sponge, ready to suck up any number and manner of subtextual ideologies.
And therein lies the most disturbing thing about hentai: its kid-ready collision of the juvenile and the profane. Forget the warning stickers, the “adult situations,” the insistence of anyone involved that these films are “definitely not for children.” The foundation of hentai is those wild and elaborate stories, ripped from the pulpy pages of manga and the stunted imaginations of comic-book-loving man-children. Demons and monsters? Alternate universes? Intergalactic adventure? Hentai recasts innocuous adolescent fantasy as the most rancid of patriarchal wet dreams. At its very best, the genre cultivates in its budding lovers-to-be a dehumanizing perspective on sex: it’s not something you share with another person, but something you do to them—gratification is a one-way street, women serve a simple and express purpose, and romance is inessential (if not detrimental) to the equation. Hentai is for boys of all ages, for boys to be boys, forever and ever, wielding swords, shooting guns, parting legs, having their wicked way with the whole wide world. Rocks are gotten off, balls become less blue, and the boys feel better, having vicariously, temporarily fucked their hurt away. But what of the girls? Pity those damsels in distress. No one’s coming to rescue them.
