SEX ACCORDING TO MAÏA

Where are fantasies born? If you ask distributors of pornographic content, chances are they'll tell you: in Japan. As of 2019, the most frequent search term on Pornhub is "hentai" (manga and anime porn). Second place in the ranking confirms this success: "Japanese."

This craze is long-lasting, worldwide, from Poland to Mexico, shared by men and women alike, and surprising. How can we explain the fact that manga, long associated as content for children, has infiltrated the intimacy of adults? How has Japanese eroticism, which is culturally very specific (for example, there are many characters in sailor uniforms, just like in Japanese schools), become universal? And how, for heaven's sake, did we go from caricatured, divisive hentai (to put it briefly: high-school girls fornicating with tentacled creatures) to mainstream hentai in the space of two decades?

In France, everyone under the age of 50 has grown up with the manga aesthetic (including families without television). Not only is the population accustomed to it, but the art of cartooning has gained a legitimacy equivalent to that of film. Hence, hentai is a porn medium like any other, whose graphic standards are no longer bizarre... to the point that by 2020, more than a quarter of Americans had already fantasized about a cartoon character (according to the work of researcher Justin Lehmiller).

Drawing images also offers unrivaled freedom in the fantasies depicted. Bodies bend to every fetish, every contortion, every fantasy: It's common to find hentai featuring not only demons and dragons but also snails, octopuses and plane trees. By graphically marking their distance from reality, these fictions allow themselves to explore impossible acts carried out by impossible physiques.

The use of stylized faces and bodies also makes it possible to escape the logic of identification: As soon as you begin a hentai video, you are entering the realm of the imaginary. There is no possible competition between oneself and the characters. If the penises are always erect, nobody's surprised, and if the characters' breasts defy the law of gravity, that's artistic license.

But of course, the lack of identification with the characters has a darker side: The viewer feels less empathy. Hentai then allows the characters to be subjected to what no human body could withstand: literally monstruous penetrations, tortures and rapes. The genre can therefore serve as a refuge (or gateway drug) for consumers looking for illegal and/or extreme videos (let me take this opportunity to remind you that not all porn consumers become so anesthetized that they "drift" toward ever more trashy content).

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