Right. So. Let's skip over the part where you wonder, and I obviously and disingenuously lie about how I know anything about that one (read: many) Anime/Hentai/Manga/etc. comic that someone has illegally scanned online and that featured, for example, a voracious one-eyed tentacular monster with nothing but penises for legs, arms, fingers, and possibly eyes that raped/seduced/gave-birth-to-then-raped the wide-eyed un-Japanese looking young anime schoolgirl/ninja schoolgirl/ anthropomorphic animal schoolgirl/hermaphrodite/ninja furry hermaphroditic anthropomorphic schoolgirl with the power to move between dimensions with her mind. Schoolgirl. (Happily, I can honestly reassure any readers, especially those that know me, that this is the type of thing that I consider a major online-porn-hunting buzzkill. Any readers, especially those that know me, who wish they knew less or nothing at all about my online-porn-hunting preferences, well, sorry. Ask me no questions and I will tell you no unsettling info about porn.[*]) (Note: *'ed note does not contain unsettling information about porn.)

With that part skipped and with absolutely no stifling self-justifying exegesis to boot, we will go on to how maybe these weirdo cartoons are on to something. Watching (er, hearing of) far more mainstream professional porn, with its instantly sighing in ecstasy women and more-than-occasional emphasis on crowding several more people into orifices than is customary and a host of other evolutionarily improbable sex acts, well. . . Anyone who has known a woman, in the Biblical sense, will likely perceive that it's neither as easy nor as option-packed as your average porno. Sure, some women are bound to like some of that some of the time, but the thing is, the women's instant, obvious, and universal pleasuring at pretty much any sex act—yeah, not so much. It seems quite obvious the women's cries of rapture in porno is not an expression really of how much they're liking it, but an expression of how much every man wants her to like it. People like to think they're good at things. Americans, in particular it seems, like to think that it's common to be a "natural" at something. Ipso facto satisfying porn can't just be lots of boot-knockery, it's gotta be obvious the man is blowin' the woman's hair quite far back and that never, in that actress's 10s or 100s of other scenes, or with her devoted husband of somewhere between 2 days and 5 years, has had her socks blown quite that good. Sure, the men traditionally have a wildly good time as well (or portray it as such) and don't seem to suffer any drawbacks from these Herculean sexual marathons such as numbness, frustration, impotence, or rejection due to their own massive unattractiveness, but if it is not clear whose ego and pleasure is more important, you've never heard of Ron Jeremy. (He is supposed to be quite skilled, as they say, but come on.)

All this is to say, most porn is incredibly objectifying, making it perhaps unsurprising that women don't buy as much porn. (I do have a theory that the corrective to porn-inequality is for women to start buying a lot of porn and demanding it be like those few that already are, you know, a bit more appealing and woman-centric than most porn, but many female friends tell me the theory needs tweaking of a similar amount as, say, Intelligent Design.) And accepting that it's incredibly objectifying undermines my self-justifications below, but let's not get bogged down in inconvenient details.[**] The thing is, in such a painfully literal-minded culture such as ours (where the meaning of Irony in the news has been reduced to "Shit That Just Happened That We Didn't Expect" and/or been declared dead), I do think it makes a difference as to whether or not the fine respectable women of pornography everywhere are really cumming, or, Tyrannosaurus-like, are muttering "Oh, oh yeah" if they detect any signs of movement. (Not that T-Rexes muttered "oh yeah", but rather I refer to the fact we learned from that great documentary film, Jurassic Park, that they can only see and respond to movement.) (Though of course, we can't scientifically rule out that they muttered something resembling "Oh, yeah" in response to movement and/or DP.) If, in women-are-there-for-my-pleasure porn, the women seem to be having the time of their lives every second of the feature, then there is a tacit acceptance there of their role as penetration-receptacle. This, I think, is not good. On the other hand, I defy anyone (and by anyone I mean folks of less moral certitude than your Jerry Falwell or Sean Hannity types) to show me how consensual, mutually enjoyable, equal status-reaffirming sex recorded for the general public amusement, where all parties involved have some really great orgasms, would be on the net objectifying. (Notice I have neatly sidestepped perhaps the main sticking point of how it would realistically affirm equal status between the genders. I could claim I'm leaving this to the readers to think about, but really I'm just antsy to re-connect this rant to insane Japanese cartoon porn and be done with it so I can go lie down and realize I'm a horrible person.)

What in the name of Nokren Ahn Si Lang, the Made-Completely-of-Vaginas God, does this have to do with Japanese "fuck comics" and how they are "Right"? I'm so glad you asked, because I'd forgotten what I was originally talking about. "Right" we realize now, is of course the wrong word: I'm not sure that Everyone-On-Young-Women scenes in comics or Octuple Penetration is particularly of the mold of reaffirming porn I was just envisioning. "More Honest" would be a more accurate description. In the brief moments before I could hit the "Back, In the Name of Goodness and Light, Back" button on my browser, I have seen that there appears to be quite the number of variations on the raping young big-eyed buxom women theme within subtypes of Hentai and its sister Japanese styles. Whether it is a Dracula-like-Succubus with many penises, or an Experiment-Gone-Wrong-Like-Succubus with many penises, invariably it seems to grab/creep towards/enchant whatever unfortunate Japanese schoolgirl is featured in the comic, and do things that I would call unspeakable except that I've imaginatively described them in a great many snide comments here. This occasionally even happens out of nowhere in what was theretofore purely human, consensual-sex-based and quasi-realistic comic books featuring surely-of-age schoolgirls of abnormal horniness and idealized uniforms. And even though the girl or woman in question almost always ends up unwillingly enjoying it at some point in such "insane fuck comics" (for reasons perhaps only clear to the relevant Japanese author, fans, and fuck monsters) it's usually pretty clearly against her will, and the author at least, in the name of either verisimilitude or breathtaking sadism, usually includes some crying from her at being so objectified and violated as to make the straightforward meaning of the words "objectified" and "violated" ironic.

Definitely, I'm not arguing that MORE porn should be like this. I'm arguing that in a way, it seems far less insidious—any thinking person should be able to look at that and say "Not only does that not look like fun for her, but I'm pretty sure it portrays unacceptable treatment of women and reduces them to sex objects for improbably phallic creatures' enjoyment." This is in contrast to Gang Bang 19 (which I made up but am sure exists), with the subtitle "She Wants All Her Holes Filled, And She's Found the Right 8 Men to Do It", which rather asks us to accept that not only is She there for the penetrational enjoyment of 8 people of the less-fair sex, but that It's Real Fun that she's Really Looking Forward To. And you know, it may be for her and some small number of other women like her. But by making it seem like this is somehow a common or normal and care-free victimless debaucherific time, it and its ilk with more likely man-to-woman ratios but nonetheless very orgasmic sex-machines (i.e. women) send really a very similar message as Crazy Crazy Hentai. And perhaps the fact that such porn is (somehow) incredibly more realistic than Japanese Fuck Comics and appears far more pleasurable for all involved—well, that's all well and good, but it's nice if sexual gratification is sometimes portrayed in a way that is at least "Right" OR "Honest".

If you're going to objectify, don't make it seem like harmless fun because "She's Asking For It." Go for the gusto and add some tentacles.

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*Because I am a very legs-bent running about worried about my own level of enlightenment type of progressive guy, I will further add in my defense that research done even by anti-porn advocates hired directly by Nixon to prove that porn was horrible, horrible, has relatively consistently found that non-violent pornography was not correlated with aggression or negative attitudes towards women. (Probably because a not-insignificant number of men who've never or only rarely looked at porn also harbor such attitudes.) So since I'm not a big fan of snuff, or the similarly aggressive Japanese mythical-creature-on-schoolgirl porn, I feel able to maintain my legs somewhat bent. Whatever the hell that means. . . You could, of course, point to the reasonable argument that MOST or nearly all porn inherently degrades the female into an object, or at least helps maintain this view in society, and I could not completely disagree. But I respond, in a non sequitir, that you all should of thought of that before you decided for the most part not to have sex with thinking, quiet guys and instead date some "more exciting" asshole who wouldn't know what "degrades the female into an object" meant if they started handing out blow-up dolls and 12 year old virgins at the DMV.

**I do seek out/enjoy porn where the woman seems much more plausibly to be Getting Hers, but I feel that this may be unconvincing to some. For example, Gloria Steinem.