The United States of America has always been the nexus of hentai’s proliferation globally. The geographical proximity plays a key role in this. Without the innumerable fans, who over the decades, made pilgrimages to Japan’s comic events by boats and planes, coming back home with their hoards and scanning them for online uploads, Japanese media would never have grown globally popular.
America’s geographical proximity to Japan was pivotal to what is happening today.
Random photo of Comiket, grabbed from Google. This is how hentai became a thing.
Ultimately, though I am asserting this without data, I believe it was predominantly American websites, such as Hentai-Foundry, J-LIST, Pornhub, Twitter and especially Tumblr, that were instrumental in setting forth the path that we’re now on: The mainstreaming of hentai. Researchers of the future will have a mountain of work in their hands deciphering the flow of events.
The United States is the craziest, most obnoxiously out of control country in history. Everything Americans do tends to go overboard. In contrast, whereas practically every nation develops a sense of limits and pragmatic approaches to every aspect of life, the United States is different. Very different.
The nation was founded upon the idea of freedom. That means that a legal citizen of America is provided the nation as a framework where he can reach his maximum potential. The final makeup of the society is not coded into the constitution. You can form communities, you can start companies, you can choose your associations, do whatever the fuck you want, even when what you desire is self-destructive. The obstacles to an individual’s personal growth are, to a great extent, removed.
Below is a painting of pilgrims arriving on American soil in the centuries between 1500 and 1700. It’s funny, these faithful Christians knew not that their pursuit of freedom of religion set the stage for Japanese anime pornography to become the global standard.
The United States is a chance to live out the truth that is inside of you. That is the concept of the nation, as I have understood. The nation was never supposed to comprise of pragmatic or sensible human beings who limit their self-expression, just to get along with one another. It’s a place where you can be the fucking loonie you feel and still find your place in the grand scheme of things.
In that context, I understand with the greatest empathy one could possibly muster, how madness like the gender debate has taken wings. Yes, you can choose your own gender these days, even invent one. They’re called neopronouns. But we’re not discussing that in any depth now, I already covered this in my blog entries here and here.
The American concept facilitates extremity and indecisiveness. Because what if there’s something we didn’t consider about abortion laws, for example? While every other nation has pretty much settled that one, only in America, the arguments are re-examined, leading to a Supreme Court decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade. Overnight, the federal standard was upended, and the process by which that conclusion was reached was trashed, setting the stage for state-level debate and legislative experimentation to begin again. You guys just can’t make up your minds, can you?
Below is a poignant photo of Furrycon, a convention for people who wish to dress up as animals and have dry-humping orgies. I bet the pilgrims were not imagining this would be their legacy.
Now, we’re gonna talk about politics. We’ll tie it into hentai later during the rant.
When the debate around American election laws and the drama surrounding the January 6 riots was ongoing, I blogged about the Finnish election process, which includes voter ID and paper ballots only. Finland has drama-free elections.
I hoped to provide our American readers a glimpse into the practices of a sensible, pragmatic nation. Election laws are yet another area which is very much settled in all the sensible, pragmatic nations of the world who call themselves civilized. Being civilized just isn’t the American way.
I am very serious in that statement. The American concept is to facilitate uncivilized behavior. Because allowing people unrestricted self-expression is very, very impractical in the real world, American companies that try facilitating freedom of speech are erratically indecisive, constantly going back and forth with their policies, wrecking the livelihoods of people like me.
Hentai is going very much mainstream, because American companies with their selective commitment to facilitating extremity allowed this media to proliferate to a degree where a critical mass was reached.
I realized where this was going last year when I was hired to provide consultation to a relatively new hentai media company in the industry. I cannot understate the absurdity of sitting in a company conference call on Google Meet, lecturing about Taimanin Asagi and waifu culture to corporate coats and their art department. And to have them invite me repeatedly to talk about that on a biweekly basis on an hourly salary. Here’s how that felt.
And for the official record, in the very first meeting with these company executives and their art department, before my presentation, I played the mob negotiation clip from Dark Knight where Joker does his “magic trick” with the pen.
Had Tumblr, an American social media company, never allowed porn on their platform, Hentaireviews would not exist. It was the exposure and desensitization to those influences that got me interested in exploring sexual possibilities. You Americans have only yourselves to blame that you are being exposed to concepts like NTR, wife swapping, swinging, sperm competition, gangbangs, ethical sluthood (should post a review of that book, actually!), all of which we have discovered in our research and personal experience leads to people trying out these crazy ideas in real life.
If you feel that your country is going in a weird direction, this is the reason. Freedom leads to this.
So what’s the point I’m trying to make? I want our American readers to understand the connection between what you do and what you endure. If you believe in freedom, truly believe in freedom, then allow the process to roll by its own weight. In your voting choices and consumer behavior, allow individuals and companies to reach their maximum. Do not attempt to control speech, do not attempt to control the internet, do not put pragmatic and sensible stops to preserve the social fabric as you believe it should be. Believe in freedom. Believe in the individual’s right to be fucking stupid.
