Point - Matt

Upon my first viewing, all I had to say about hentai was, "Turn it off, please!" This was one import from Japan I had no interest in owning. Before you brand me a narrow-minded xenophobe, consider the American biases I had to overcome. First, I do not enjoy raping women. In fact, I do not enjoy the notion of raping women, and furthermore, I do not enjoy watching women get raped. This is a major obstacle in the appreciation of hard-core hentai. Margold praised pornography as a "masturbatory catharsis" - an opportunity for people to live out depraved fantasies, thereby preventing them from acting on these subversive impulses in public. If Bill was correct, and I am unlikely to challenge his wisdom, Japan is one VCR shortage away from the greatest rape epidemic the world has ever seen. Maybe, and this is the narrow-minded xenophobe talking here, there are some fantasies and impulses so evil that we shouldn't masturbate to them, cathartic or otherwise.

But this is just a cartoon, right? Seeing a woman gang raped is less disturbing when she's just paper and ink, isn't it? Probably. But it's a lot less interesting, too. Xenophobic objection number two: How can animated characters having animated sex turn me on? Mainstream American culture invests no sexual potency in animation. Smurfette did not have cleavage. Bugs Bunny may have dressed up like a woman, but he stopped short of blowing Elmer Fudd. As a child of Saturday mornings, I learned that cartoons were sweet and funny and senselessly violent, but they were not real and they certainly were not sexy. So even when the intercourse depicted in hentai falls within the sexual boundaries I find appealing (and to be sure, there is some genuinely erotic, non rape-based material in hentai) it's like watching women's basketball; all the pieces are in place, but it just doesn't feel like the real thing. I understand that in Japan children are exposed at a young age to more adult animation and therefore develop a different attitude towards the medium's perversity. But don't let my surname fool you. I'm not from Japan. And through several hours of tape I was genuinely aroused only a handful of times (trust me, ladies, men know these things).

Which brings me to xenophobic objection number three, and further proof of Bill's tactical brilliance. In an American porno, from minute one to minute eighty-five, you will see a video designed with a singular purpose: To help you masturbate. Naked women, enormous breasts, sexual positions that would make a Chinese gymnast proud, and - here's the key - nothing else. No story. No characters. No ridiculous science fiction premise, no multi-penised monstrosities. And most of all, no expository dialogue during the sex scenes. Only one part of the brain works at a time, people! I'll concede the point that erotic entertainment can also deliver an interesting story, although that notion is fundamentally misguided, but no one wants to hear back-story during the shower scene. How many times have you shared your secret plan for world domination while getting a hand-job? It's hard enough for cartoons to be sexy, impossible when they are bogged down by extraneous pursuits.

But, unlike myself, Bill Margold is neither narrow-minded nor xenophobic. Bill lauds the limited diversity in American adult entertainment. He could very well cherish the breadth of hentai. Exposition during the shower scene? Science fiction sex epics? Certainly he would argue that erotica is art, and as art, it should endure no creative restraints. The beauty of hentai, and the beauty of animation as a medium, is its ability to transcend with ease the limits of the real world. Where live-action porno is depraved and disgusting, hentai gives you tentacle rape. Where soft-core sex shows (the kind that are on cable channels all night long) are gothic and romantic, hentai gives you silhouetted genitalia and vampire love. And yes, where teenage sex romps are stupid and gratuitous, hentai gives you the "Sakura Diaries." From our Puritanical past as a city on a hill, to the x-rated mecca of the San Fernando Valley, the topography of American pornography is basically flat. Hentai offers higher peaks and lower valleys, and for its audience it provides as complete an erotic experience as anything behind the curtain at the local video store. I may not be joining the ranks of the hentai faithful anytime soon. But I think I know what Bill would have said.

He would have asked to keep the tapes. (Matt Yamashita)

Counterpoint - E.W.C.

A week before I got this hentai assignment from my editor, my boyfriend and I, along with some other people, visited a friend named Joe. Joe, like my boyfriend, is an animator and an anime enthusiast. That night we all settled down in Joe's apartment to watch the latest installment from the "Cool Devices" series. We made for a wholesome picture, gathered around the television set, wearing our winter warm-ups and sipping beer. None of us were surprised or shocked at what we saw. All of us seasoned witnesses to tentacle sex and animated gang-rape, I screamed out the traditional cries of "hanashite," "yamete," and "iya!" along with the characters (sometimes before they had a chance to voice it themselves) while my boyfriend and Joe critiqued the animation during the sex scenes. It was a great evening; we all had a good laugh, got drunk, and went home.

A week later, as my boyfriend and I watched the sample of hentai my editor gave to me to write this column, I couldn't help but wonder to myself, "What would Joe say about this stuff?"

He would say, "This is crap! Turn it off and let's watch something else!"

Much to my disappointment, my editor had given me some bad hentai. I was supposed to come up with something clever and insightful on the subject, but my thoughts couldn't run too deep given the material I had to work from.

What do I mean by "bad" hentai, you ask? Plot and porn make for strange bedfellows, you say? Nobody cares if the protagonist has a cathartic revelation during his money shot! And who the hell needs a protagonist anyway? The whole purpose behind porn is to help you masturbate, as Matt says, and you don't need much else for that but sex, right? Au contraire, friends and neighbors.

There was a time before the introduction of the VCR when porn had a story. You heard right folks, an actual story. During the seventies, the Sodom and Gomorra decade of the twentieth century, the free love movement even tried to legitimize porn as a serious celluloid art form. The grainy, low-budget smut you see nowadays is a result of the video revolution debacle. The adult film industry switched from film to video, knocking down production and duplication costs while sacrificing quality at the same time (remember "Boogie Nights?"). Hentai is the by-product of the disco era, when everyone took drugs and had anonymous sex, AIDS hadn't shown up to spoil everyone's party, and erotic cinema had fairly respectable production value.

No, I'm not going to castigate hentai for being pornographic, or accuse men of giving in to their base sexual urges. I'm not here to talk about the politics of sex. I am an anime enthusiast--period. And as an anime enthusiast I respect all genres of anime. I am here to talk about hentai and whether I believe it can tell a story. And, even so, why does it bother?

According to my friend Joe, hentai does tell a story. That shouldn't be so hard to believe. Yes, the bottom line is sex, but guess what--the story is part of the sex. Before I get into how this is true, first allow me to explain why this is true. Matt said he was turned off by the images of rape and sexual violence in hentai. Understandable. Matt is an American and pornography in America operates on a dynamic of sexual equality between men and women. To make sex erotic both partners must consent to the act. Thus the average American male fantasizes the woman not only consenting to sex but also actually asking for it, even demanding it.

Hentai, of course is Japanese. And as I understand (I'm not Japanese, so this is all conjecture, mind you), Japan has a very reserved culture where men and women do not feel so relaxed making sexual demands on one another. Part of the fantasy in hentai is to break the restraints of social decorum--to demand, to aggravate, to dominate (particularly to dominate women.) And the story is a vehicle to which an average Japanese guy arrives at an implausible situation of master and servant. He is lord almighty, powerful, brimming with sexual prowess; she is vulnerable and submissive -- at least during sex.

So guys, please don't give me that whole self-righteous yarn about rape being too evil to masturbate to, because if you don't think that any woman in any live-action porn film ever made who groaned and begged for more was under some mental or physical duress while the cameras rolled, you're either fooling yourself or you have successfully jerked out every last drop of common sense.

Human sexuality has a dark side and that fact is no different for a conservative culture as it is for us gun-toting, beer-guzzling Americans. Thank God the Japanese allow their dark sexual fantasies to seep out on ink and paper. So what they have tentacle sex! We have Larry Flynt. Ask yourself which is the lesser of two evils. On that note, I'm going back to Joe's place to pick up some good hentai. (E.W.C.)