“Who the hell gets off on cartoons? Why don’t those freaks look at real women?”
Sound familiar? That’s what I hear every time the subject of hentai comes up in a real life conversation. And about as many times as I hear those words, I’m smiling and nodding and agreeing with them. Does that make me a liar? Sure, but I’ll be damned if conformity doesn’t make my life so much easier.
But that’s a topic for another day. For now, let’s just deal with the questions:
Q. Who looks at hentai?
A. Me, you, and most of Japan.
Q. Why don’t I look at real pornography?
A. There is very little porn that has real women in it. Or rather, as I like to say, “I used to like porn before I learned to use Photoshop”.
First off, a picture of a real woman is not a real woman. It’s a picture. It’s ink on a page. It’s pixels on a screen. What’s the difference between a picture of a real woman and a cartoon woman? Trick question. They’re the same thing.
Secondly, pictures of women are almost always photoshopped to hell and back. Ever seen a porno mag? It’s a bunch of paintings, not photographs. The women are super-deformed. It looks grotesque. Women don’t have pencil thin waists, flawless skin, gravity defying breasts and perfectly sculpted hair. That’s called “special effects”, not reality.
Third, even in real life the average porn star is not a “real” woman. She’s usually half plastic. Breast implants, lip implants, coloured contacts, several pounds of make-up (covering the entire body), tricky lighting schemes, buckets of hairspray, etc.
In fact, the entire process of making porn is based around making the women look “better” than reality. The problem is, we know what reality looks like. Ever heard of the uncanny valley? If not, look it up. It applies. Altered women aren’t hot, they’re gross. They offend my sensibilities. They just are not sexy*
So how does this all not apply to hentai as well? Hentai is fake from the start. It’s accepted that you’re dealing with fantasy from the moment pencil hits paper. There is no trickery, there is no uncanny valley, and there are no unnatural alterations. It’s just fantasy, not altered reality, and fantasy is hot.
*Of course I’m generalizing. I do look at “real” porn, but it’s got to be tastefully edited at least. Videos suffer less from this problem, but it doesn’t stop the women from looking freakish a lot of the time.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
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12 comments:
This is too true. It's so true that it's scary. I compare hentai and explicit sex tapes and the tapes almost always leaves me sick and at times even destroys my appettite for at least a day. Even Maddox proclaims porn's dominance over real women; this quote from the Alphabet of Manliness, "The reason women don't like the idea of men watching porn during relationships is because women feel like they have to compete with porn, when in fact, there's no competition. Porn always wins."
Although sometimes I get weird urges for either totally artificial or partially artificial wank-off material, the latter is much less preferred, unless it is something surrealistic like say, "65 guy creampie." The day when I have the option for the real world experience, the girl had better be damn lava hot and or me to be horny as a rhino before I delve into the real deal.
lol sing it my brother but real women is okay too u know
You are crazily right.
Every time I hear "Hentai isn't real, look at real porn dork." I am so mad It usually ruins the rest of the day. This post...just...man, you've said what I've been trying to. Love your games.
it is true great minds think alike
and that no truer words have ever been spoken
This post wasn't about porn vs. real life. It was about "real porn" vs. hentai. "Real porn" being pictures/videos of "real" women.
The point of the post being that "real" is a meaningless term when it comes to pornography.
Hentai vs. real life, well that's a topic for another day.
I knew this would be a good post from the moment I read the opening question: “Who the hell gets off on cartoons? Why don’t those freaks look at real women?” Because I have been asked that exact same question before and it pissed me off.
You've said exactly what I've been thinking for years. Thanks man.
Hentai beats almost anything, unless the object in question is the paragon of its kind, and the hentai is on the strange side - with one exception. Some women have the ability to make hentai look like nothing, even if they don't measure up to the images. The trick is finding them.
I had to come back to this post after finding my own personal reason for preferring hentai... about a month or two ago, my computer's motherboard went out, leaving me bereft of hentai, since everything I have is stored on the hard drive and that was the only computer I had.
So, after a week without anything, I felt I needed something. My sister and her husband lived next-door to me at the time, and I knew he had some porn dvds lying around. They were gone for the week, as were my parents, so I went over to their house (had the key so I could feed their animals) and dug one out.
I rushed back over to my place, stuck it in the DVD player, already had an anticipation boner... which died exactly five seconds after it started. Why? Because it was so very faked.
You see, looking at it, you'll notice that hentai conveys emotion, whether positive or negative. It's was created by the honest brush of an artist to portray that emotion, whatever it was. Most real porn? Fake. Very fake. Amateur stuff is okay sometimes, because they don't know how to fake it yet.
That faking just makes me sick, that's why I prefer the portrayal of a character that truly feels within the scope of its existence to a bottle-blond pretending she enjoys it.
Speaking from the inside as one who has made some (mild) porn once upon a time yes it is unbelievably false. Not only as said here buckets of paint on skin, hairspray, posed positions, airbrushed - but drugged, drunk, out of it. I mean can anyone even fantasise a girl LIKES twisting around over and over again for six to eight hours in uncomfortable positions that cause cramps under blazing lights in a smelly grubby room while cameras click? Get real.
The only way to do it is stoned out indifferent, otherwise your contempt for the guys who sucker into this burns your brain like acid and you can't do it. The only reason for it all - take the money if you can stand the stupidity of it. Like prostitution porn is MONEY with a dash of contempt.
Cartoons don't come across as so ugly stupid because as you say, they are honest fakery fantasy from the start.
The tragedy is that so many men learn sex from porn. As a result they are appalling lovers and so never get much from real sex. That pushes them back to the easy but very limited possibilities of porn. That's really why women don't like it if one of their lovers uses porn - because it's a totally different way of sex and a porn user can't comprehend real deep sex. Makes 'em s-o-o boring.
true...true...
More true words were never uttered. Since first learning of the differences between hentai and porn, I've always wondered why someone would rather prefer the sight of shoddy acting and a ton of barely perceivable flaws (though those flaws do add up altogether) to genuine portrayed emotion and perfection in form (at least based on the skill of the artist).
"real" porn- get-rich-quick scheme
hentai porn- true erotic artwork
As always, love the games you make, LM! Keeping my eyes peeled for your next one!
agreed
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