The golden age of masturbation

[imomus]

In the ID magazine Japan Special, Tom Vanderbilt, reviewing Lionel Lambourne's book Japonisme, says: "Japan has evolved from consumer-goods economic powerhouse to a more "soft power" form of cultural influence. The modern metropolis, in any country, now pulses to a beat of chopsticks clicking over sushi... We devour manga and anime and horror films like Ringu, chronicle the strange goings-on among school girls (Lolita one day, Betty Boop the next)..."

In a slightly oblique way, Tom seems to be suggesting that part of Japan's "soft power" (which is also, of course, software power) includes porn. Now, I'm not sure what the consumption figures for Japanese porn outside Japan are; I know the Japanese porn industry is meant to represent more than 1% of total Japanese GNP, but figures on its overseas consumption are hard to, well, come by. I do know that J-porn has brightened up my life ever since I bought my first multi-system VHS player in 1992, though, and particularly since the internet ushered us into "the golden age of masturbation". I now don't care to look at non-Japanese porn at all; most of it looks vulgar and crude to me, its gurning rockstar actresses seeming marginal and decadent beside the wholesome and generous milkmaids of J-porn. So I keep an eye on sites like Babypink and CPZ, if only for purposes of—ahem!—cultural criticism. After all, as Vanderbilt says, "we would be vastly disappointed if suddenly we learned there were no more incredibly minute schoolgirl obsessions, no more odd game shows, no more bizarre animated characters."

Aside from the obvious attaction of porn (the procurement of fabulous orgasms), there are incidental joys and values to be had. Porn is a kind of social work sometimes, a way for disadvantaged men to live out vicariously the experiences of the advantaged, and for attractive girls to share their beauty with the largest possible number of admirers. Beauty is not egalitarian, but porn shares it out. It also portrays a world of utopian embodiment, a world radically free from guilt, a world in which the incompatibilities between instinct and civilisation noted by the late Freud are blown away completely.

Sometimes, too, it's just very funny. Take this movie, Senior, Your Dick is Just Only Mine. The wildly optimistic wish fulfillment is a scream, but the Jinglish alone could make you cream. As far as I can see by, well, screwing up my eyes, the strapline reads "Hinata is a brand new art club member. In this club has many strange kind of people who let me wear various costume every day and touch my body... But in fact I am very fun to be in this touchy relationships and to have intercourse..." In even smaller type, we read: "My panty began to get wet again because of thinking about such a erotic things... ah, how long is the club activity time?"

Coming soon, I should think, Hinata-Chan! Thank you for your tiredness!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I must say that imagination, or the act of realizing it consistently, is what I find lovely about J-Porn. Oh those subway grope videos....

I found one movie of a nurse who sneaks in like some guilty shameless slut having no self-control to the bedside of a man who apparently was recovering from major cranio-facial trauma. As he lay there in the bed, she pulls down his shorts and gives him head. At the end of the act the nurse, as if in some revusion at what she has done, does not spit out his come, but slack-jawed lets it dribble out, her eyes half shut in a strange face at once gratified and sickened at her own action. Only once did the bandaged "victim" look up at all.

I loved it, it was so damned refreshing, if, to some, gross.

SUN

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

The fact that you could type all this out with one hand is laudable, Nick.

There may be some work in this for you and your fabled hucklebone. Why, think of the wardrobe!

Happy grunting,
W

[imomus.livejournal.com]

From what I've seen, the only foreigners allowed in Japanese porn movies are, ahem, tall black men.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Hm. Well, how about the Ainu? You could break into that niche market, and (forgive me) work your way in from there.

Mind you, I've never even seen j-porn; that's what museum installations of eighteeth-century court dresses (and those tiny embroidered gloves, shoes and stomachers) are for.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hentai!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Retrosexual, actually. ;)

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

my bird's frightened of billy goats. i just asked her.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Japanese porn is as formulaic as any other...does your obsession with Japan ruin your objectivity on the topic???

[blndsnnts.livejournal.com]

Male porn is only platonically utopian, not 21st century utopian. Why? Because sex workers and women working in porn may enjoy their jobs, and many do, but they gravitate between catering to/being aware of the male gaze and “a mysterious jouissance” that belongs to them (Zizek). In this sense, many women in Western society are sex workers, even if they don’t get paid for it. Middle-class American women imitate sex workers in the bedroom, etc. The inner split does not coalesce with male jouissance because with porn, male jouissance cares only for itself. The woman is on screen and the man is watching. Porn established itself in the twentieth century out of repression. Without the Victorian era and female stereotypes and economic superpowers, I don’t know if porn would exist. Watching is a male function. That’s why there’s not a lot of porn for women. Culturally, many women don’t know how to watch or they internalize the male gaze and have to deal with a split-personality type of deal. Supposedly women’s brains have to be completely empty in order to orgasm and going from work to pleasure is not the ideal setting for it.

The only way male porn could in any way be culturally relevant is in masquerading as satire, which is what most of your music is. If it weren’t satirical, you’d be very puritanical. Guys who like porn the most are usually puritans.

[(Anonymous)]

i agree with you that porn is not utopian
and it's always amazing to me how fashionable it is to disregard the cruelty within the porn industry

[mo-no-chrome.livejournal.com]

Without the Victorian era and female stereotypes and economic superpowers, I don’t know if porn would exist.
Really? Think of Classical-era pornography...

Other than that, though, I couldn't agree more.
To say that porn is radically guilt-free is untrue in the sense that it's the guilt which creates the pleasure - as you note when mentioning that puritans enjoy porn the most.

Nor would I say that the pleasures of porn are only for men who are 'disadvantaged', that all porn is is a vicarious way of living out fantasies which one can't achieve in real life. Another and probably more deep-seated satisfaction of porn is to buy into a system of objectification in which one as a watcher and in terms of the porn 'character' with whom one identifies in fantasy is always in the position of objectifier, not objectifiee. So it's a sop to feelings of powerlessness, whether related to sexuality or otherwise. The view that the provision of such a sop is a valuable 'social service' seems to address the symptom, not the cause.

[blndsnnts.livejournal.com]

True, but we're anglophones. When pornography hit Britain, it became commercialized. Pornography went from belonging to the elite to something satirists used to critique the government and upper-classes to the Marquis de Sade's critique of morality/religion to something that could generate a lot of money. In other words, when it hit Britain, it began to lose a lot of the social critique baggage it used to have. Eventually, it would have none.

I agree with you. If we've kept one thing from the Marquis de Sade, it's that pornography and power are inextricable.

MALE PORN???

[(Anonymous)]

what in heaven's name is 'male porn'?
porn for everyone i say.
the whole problem with any kind of sexual-political-social-whatever argument is that it fails to recognise the fact that there are just as many forms of sexuality as there are people engaging in acts of sex.
can we just sack with the whole male/female thing.
it would be a step forward.
(btw, i'm a girl if that makes any difference)

Re: MALE PORN???

[blndsnnts.livejournal.com]

Porn was never made for women. It was actually made with the strict intention to exclude women. Look no further than Victorian England when the community began to accept porn's existence, as long as it didn't get into the hands of the morally corruptible (i.e. women). Porn wasn't written by women until the turn of the century and by then in the form of 'erotica.'

If you're saying something about lesbians, that's interesting. But there's something deeply ironic about a lesbian watching mainstream porn. Porn makers and sex workers don't take lesbians into account. That's just not where they make their money. But that's not to say they shouldn't.

[neciegabby.livejournal.com]

theres this unfortunate unavoidable fact that what you're talking about involves your own taste and is therefore personal, but i mean nothing cruel or personally combative, just want to pick your brain.

so ok, "ahem!—cultural criticism" - i get the sense you dont even fully believe what you're saying here, that you're winking at us. it strikes me as a skirting of the issue. sure theres a bit of glee in it (porn is a giggly topic) but isnt it also that dangerous trap where the educated ironist gets to claim to enjoy, one degree removed, the essentializing/stereotyping/subjugating pap that he would disapprove of others gobbling up?

you're so careful not to associate yourself with the consumption of j-porn - you're a purveyor of culture, not a consumer of it, and thus no geisha girl fetish for you, you're just checking in to see if other people are still fetishizing that ignorant old idea.

your interests in porn have to do with utopianism, egailty, ironic humor at how bad the translations are? i agree that all these things are angles from which we can look at porn, but in a way isn't there a strange degree of intellectualist prudishness in needing to find an angle from which to view porn in the first place? i'm remarking on a general phenomenon amongst the ironic culture elitists, the wallpaper mag mock-porn fashion shoots, nerve.com, isnt deep throat hilarious approach, which then trails into actual porn consumption. isnt this suggesting we have to distance ourselves from just wanking to it like some lowly consumer might? isnt it a bit like the classic 16 year old's excuse of 'oh i watch it cuz its funny'? if you've got a fetish for japanese girls, can't you just have a fetish for japanese girls? cuz i've got one hell of a fetish for gurning rockstar actresses, and i just sort of wonder about our modes of apologizing for it?

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

I know the Japanese porn industry is meant to represent more than 1% of total Japanese GNP

It sounds like you've done your bit for the export drive over the years!

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Momus was just inspired by yesterday's orgy. Karl should introduce Miki to him.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

I've always found Japanese porn to be extremely unarousing. In all the stuff I've seen, the women are so drugged they can barely move, yet still seem unwilling and unaroused to the extent that the man often struggles to penetrate. Unless it's like Aussie wine and they only export the crap stuff...

I suppose some porn consumers don't like the idea of porn where the woman has any kind of agency in the situation and/or enjoys the sex.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

You forgot about the faked orgasms and high-pitched whining/screeching and the fact that, just like US porn, all the jizz has to go all over the place (face, hair, armpits, whatever) and then the scene abruptly ends...

[touristathome.livejournal.com]

I remember reading an article about a year ago (don't remember where and I know if I try Google I'll just end up with porn sites) about a Japanese pornographer who had a revolutionary idea: porn where asian men are portrayed as sexually healthy, and where asian women are (gasp!) actually shown to be enjoying the sex!

My experiences with Japanese pornography have been exactly how you described. Apparently they don't just export the crap stuff, because this pornographer had the exact same complaint you did. I tried navigating the sites that Momus linked to above, and my views on Japanese pornography (it's terrible) still haven't been proven wrong.

Whatever happened to Momus' entirely sensible view on porn (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/148296.html) of a couple months ago?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

J-porn is not a "cabaret of empowerment" concealing its opposite. It's a cabaret of disempowerment concealing its opposite. It is not "raunch feminism" but "soft power".

[touristathome.livejournal.com]

Somehow I fail to see the "soft power" of a grown woman in a schoolgirl uniform moaning "Itai! Itai!" (or, alternately, "yamete!") as she gets fucked up the ass.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's Western porn which is curiously obsessed with ass-fucking. In the J-porn I've seen, anal sex rarely appears. What you do see, though, is an enormous amount of vaginal stimulation with vibrators.

[neciegabby.livejournal.com]

thats still about a narrative distancing occuring whether or not anyone is actually getting power from anything. this 'soft power' is a story you're telling yourself about how what you're seeing isnt the real deal, the exact inverse of how scripted up skirt or bang bus style porn hinges on the story that its all true. I think these sorts of stories and ironic distances keep us safe from the moral implications of the porn we choose, and thats something we ought not cop out of. What if this 'cabaret of disempowerment' doesnt conceal anything, but you're ironically engaging in it as cabaret to avoid the troubling implications of subjugating porn?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My "narrative distancing" in this little piece was very much a "cabaret of embarrassment" concealing/revealing its opposite. I am not claiming to consume this ironically (and yes, I'd seen the Onion piece linked below). I consume it because I find it beautiful, and because it "procures fabulous orgasm". Rather than ironic pleasures, I talk about incidental pleasures, like the Jinglish, the social work angle, the equal-access to beauty that porn provides, the embodiment, the emphasis on role play as role play, and the sheer sense of fun that so often comes across.

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

I just checked out those sites linked to upthread, and now my head is occupied by unfortunate images of Momus wanking!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's funny, when I looked at those sites, the last thing on my mind was images of myself wanking. To each his own...

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

Hmm, good point (blushes wildly like a Japanese schoolgirl)

[armoredbaby.livejournal.com]

I just watched some piece, which inspired by Momus mention of the subject at all. The guy was extremely abusive and all the attractive gal did was... well...kinda cry against the whole scene, like some j-date-rape video with a bit of bondage thrown in for good measure at the tail end. Of course, throughout, was the infamous j-mosaic.

Unarousing is the word.

[(Anonymous)]

The girl on the mag doesn't seem to be what any western type would consider a porn star. If I didn't know better, I'd say she was advertising computer software or some community college.

[(Anonymous)]

yeah. Except for the "Senior your dick is just only mine" yellow text...

Don't I wish

[ambiguboi.livejournal.com]

I wish we had girls that pretty at my fucking community college.

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38979

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Jean Snow picks up on this post on his blog (http://jeansnow.net) and links it to Yuki's post Japanese girls and our fascination with gay boys (http://www.kissui.net/mt/archives/001278.html).

"These may be very perverted," says Yuki, "but much deeper than Sailor Moon and all the other yaoi stories that are currently available on the market. Just to clear up, I don't read comics on a daily basis (although I totally can) and I definitely am not into these modern yaoi cultures which girls turn into otaku and forget to how to talk with real live men...Although it's an interesting subculture to look into."

Agreed.

[(Anonymous)]

Nothing turns me on more than these AV stars' low education levels, rural working class backgrounds, and employment desperation. If only they could scream out the name of their backwater hometown or exact numerical amount of debt during sex... then we'd be in heaven.

Marxy

Re: Agreed.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We seem to be split between thinking these people are genetically rich, sharing their beauty endowment with those less fortunate, and thinking they're poor and desperate victims from the sticks. The implication of the latter is that nobody in their right mind, with money and education, would ever appear in an AV. But doesn't your description ("low education levels, rural working class backgrounds, and employment desperation") also describe most of the people making pop music too? And yet you and I, over-educated bourgeois, also make pop music. We make it because it's inherently fun to do. It contains a lot of energy, the life force, eros.

Re: Agreed.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, there's clearly a post-post-post-something debate on how sex workers are not exploited but willing practitioners. That's all and fine, but I think it would be hard to disprove that a vast majority of those in the Japanese sex industry are there out of the self-perception that they've run out of other options for financial support. How many members of the 2005 Waseda University graduating class will pursue a career in pornography? We make music because it generally extends from our other pursuits and does not necessarily close doors to mainstream society. Maybe 100 years ago, "being in a band" and "being in a stag film" had equal anti-social connotations, but Pepsi sponsors rock concerts now. I don't see them sponsoring Forced Bukkake 12 anytime soon.

Marxy

Re: Agreed.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Pepsi sponsors rock concerts now. I don't see them sponsoring Forced Bukkake 12 anytime soon.

Time we got out of pop and into porn, perhaps!

Re: Agreed.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

http://www.livejournal.com/users/itdepends/19347.html?thread=90259#t90259

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This, on I Love Everything, is quite an interesting discussion: Why do people watch porn? (http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=6474604&showall=true). Not that I endorse any specific positions being laid out there, more the general, well, thrust.

hehe...

[(Anonymous)]

I am a mid 20s woman...
I like porn very much occasionally...
The J-porn is in a category by itself. I now find myself I have to be in the mood for it.

No longer satisfied with the free little samples they have online...
I was wondering if any free spirited males could offer good quality porn sites, either korean/japanese that are in english... that I could buy the dvds?

Thanks...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

[armoredbaby.livejournal.com]

Always arousing, the basket of smooth skipping stones basketed in the foreground.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

i wreck my brain every night (thoughts like worms) how 2 revert back 2 prudence in style, feeling guilty and nickrworld is still on about it. so i might as well. scroll down to marx-brothers.

http://www.japansm.com/home.htm

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

i forgot...franz ferdinand can come as well. they pay for it all. he he he.