That being: pornography is “violent” media.

As the article in question deals with the effects of violent media generally upon consumer aggression, let’s get this out of the way: mass media affect consumers. They affect different consumers differently, and the most dramatic effects require consistent long-term exposure, and no social scientist worth his or her weight in grant money would claim that media consumption alone is likely to turn your kids into mass murderers…

…[T]he weight of the evidence indicates that violent actions seldom result from a single cause; rather, multiple factors converging over time contribute to such behavior. Accordingly, the influence of the violent mass media is best viewed as one of the many potential factors that influence the risk for violence. No reputable researcher is suggesting that media violence is “the” cause of violent behavior. [Huesmann, L. R., & Taylor, L. D. (2006). The role of media violence in violent behavior. Annual Review of Public Health, 27, 393-415.]

…And, anyway, given that “violent media” includes such necessities as newscasts, and encompasses countless artistic works, it’s better that we adjust to it, rather than impeding our own free expression…

If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.

The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made. [Neil Gaiman, "Why defend freedom of icky speech?"]

…But we can at least say, with the weight of decades of evidence, that media have effects. As such, figuring out what those effects might be may prove worthwhile. Social scientists agree, and, as you may know, media violence is a pet project of many of those types.

Of course, “media violence” (or “violent media”) is about as vague a term as it could possibly be, and nearly every experimental study and literature review defines it differently. Some, it would seem, define it more loosely than others.

To quantify and analyze mass media reports of the effect of violent media on aggression and violence, we coded every newspaper and magazine article we could find on the topic. All forms of mass media were considered (e.g., television, film, music, video games, pornographic magazines, comic books). [Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2001). Media violence and the American public: Scientific facts versus media misinformation. American Psychologist, 56, 477-489.]

You have to wonder how poor, delicate Drs. Bushman and Anderson would feel if they encountered, by chance or fate, an issue of Comic LO. But I digress (or do I?).

The authors take care to distinguish “pornographic magazines” as a mass medium distinct from other kinds of visual print media — “comic books,” for example, or newspapers, or non-pornographic magazines — and they make sure, via opportune parenthesis and an e.g., that we’re aware that the “medium” of porn belongs beneath that most convenient of blanket terms, “violent media.” Now, I may be pulling a bit of quotational trickery here; maybe I’ve misrepresented the authors’ intentions. Maybe they’re saying that porn is potentially a violent medium, and thus worth researching for that reason. But why distinguish it so thoroughly? Why make a point of searching news databases with the queries “pornograph*” and “erotic*” if those aren’t the sorts of things that fall particularly beneath your definition of violent media, at least for the purposes of your study?

I’ll note that this article was written in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and One, and not by some radical Christian lobby. These are, as far as I’m aware, legitimate researchers. Though, granted, they’re legitimate researchers with an agenda, legitimate researchers who make a point of testifying before government panels and so on. They aren’t wholly without zeal.

Why is porn specifically violent, or, in being porn, rife with violent potential? What is it about we Americans that makes us quake in our boots whenever sex looms on the horizon? Because, whatever it is, I imagine it’s related to that impulse of ours that sends us into a panic when an innocuous nerd looks at cartoon depictions of the deed.

So, if I may, I’ll make an effort at clearing things up a bit.

Let’s take a look at a few choice morsels from a post by Anime Vice writer Boddington.

In this writer’s opinion, I believe that though the aforementioned titles [Kodomo no Jikan, Strike Witches, Chu-Bra!!] are well beyond the limits of good taste and skirting the edge of being morally repugnant they are not criminal.

I respect Boddington’s admission of his artistic preferences here. Bias is always, always a factor — as Neil Gaiman puts it, “one person’s obscenity is another person’s art” — though obviously there’s more at work in the Handley case than what one finds fappable.

Now, while no children are exploited in the production of hardcore lolicon manga I feel the situation is more complicated than just immediate harm to children who are used in such a way. I apologize if this comes off sounding condescending, but people often forget that all things operate on complex systems. Good and evil, black and white, toast and jam are all just far too simplistic ways to meaningfully view the world. My point here is that in the short term, while no children were victimized to make these titles, lolicon porn manga still promotes the practice of pedophilia and it’s not an immense leap to see how these titles can set the gears in motion leading to the real molestation of children. [emphasis mine]

I’ve hacked this bit into three major claims that, in my estimation, need to be addressed.

Should we consider anything more than whether children were harmed in the making of the doujins in question? Well, yes, I’d say — not that this renders irrelevant the fact that no children were harmed in the making of the doujins in question. Whether Handley’s money went into an immediately exploitative industry (or, as seems to have been the case, didn’t) makes a difference — if nothing else, we can establish with some certainty that the guy isn’t knowingly supporting child abuse. But, as Boddington observes, there are a few more things to consider.

Now, does lolicon manga “promote” the practice of pedophilia? Not really — or, I should say, not by itself.

I doubt I need to explain the degree to which opinions on media effects can be mixed, even in the fields of media studies and communications — you’ve all run across studies of varying repute on the effects of video games on children, I’m sure, some demonstrating that Grand Theft Auto will be the downfall of human civilization, others showing that violent video games don’t make much difference on child development at all. But, as I understand it, experts tend toward a more moderate position. Violent or pornographic material renders consumers more likely to think about violence and pornography. Does it prompt consumers to commit violent acts in spite of the societal norms that have shaped them since birth? No — but if the consumers in question are already predisposed toward violence, the issue becomes less clear.

Here we come to that leap, immense or no, required to demonstrate that loli doujins can result in child abuse. It’s a leap that, to my knowledge, those who sentenced Handley never bothered to make. At no point was it demonstrated that, given Handley’s psychology and background, drawings of girls under the U.S. age of consent engaged in sex acts might prompt Handley to try the depicted acts himself. Perhaps potential harm to children supersedes free speech, but, in Handley’s case, it never seemed clear that there was ever any real threat of children being harmed.

There is, I’d imagine, viable territory yet to be explored by the anti-Handleyites — the territory of the subtle effects of long-term exposure, and of psychological predispositions and their implications, and of relevant studies published in reputable communications and psychology journals — and I’d like to see these explorations, rather than the reduction of lolicon into sex offender fuel, into the unsavory side of the black/white, good/evil binaries to which Boddington objects.

As Pontifus wrote on the About page, we don’t require spectacles and tweed.  In the sake of full disclosure, I should let you know my tweed smells of Goodwill, not attic, and my spectacles aren’t tiny — though the are also not large.  I’m also not wearing them just now.

I’m wearing pajamas right now, actually.  Grey pajamas, with white pinstripes.  I also have a pot of tea, with one half-full cup, sitting on my desk, next to the box of sugar cubes.  I’m not making any of this up, I’m just strange.  My room is in the second floor of a house full of English majors, effectively the attic.  My ceiling slopes, in parts, to accomodate the roof, and I am often reminded of the strange angles of the room in Dreams in the Witch-House.

Objects of interest in this room that may eventually claim my sanity, if not my very life:  a war banner of Gondor, a stuffed Killer Rabbit, a Doctor Who scarf I knitted myself, and a pair of steampunk goggles I made myself.  I won’t go into all the books — if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can check out what I’m currently reading, and any number of other unnecessary, stalker-ish facts about my book collection, at my Goodreads account.

Now that I have completed the introduction — it was once very popular for modern critics, especially feminists, to open papers by describing themselves — we can talk about something interesting.

Tentacle monsters.

I’m actually not a big fan of tentacle hentai — my interests lean more toward yuri than anything else.  But there’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, I think, concerning tentacle monsters.

The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife is, at least according to Wikipedia, often cited as the beginning of tentacle erotica.  In a literal sense this has to be true — it’s erotica that features tentacles.  Michael Moorcock, in his book Wizardry and Wild Romance, rejects tracing fantasy to mythology, as mythology was not authored in the same way fantasy was and is.  In the same vein, I don’t think it’ll be very useful to talk about octopuses and squids in erotica while looking at tentacle porn, simply because the interesting part is the sheer, alien horror tentacles are meant to cause in the viewer — if you like it, you like that horror.  People read horror novels all the time.

I should warn you now that I’m in a Gothic novel class, so I’ll probably be mentioning it a lot until mid-December.  Anyway, we just finished reading The Monk, by Matthew Lewis.  It features a monk, Ambrosio, who’s corrupted by a woman who’s snuck into the monastery just to meet  Ambrosio.  The climax, or one of them, comes when Ambrosio rapes a young woman in a crypt and then kills her as she tries to escape.  This book was written and published in the 1790s, and people were horrified by the content, though that didn’t stop them from buying it.  Ambrosio ends up dabbling in Satanic magic, and seems to become less human as time goes by — though, of course, he doesn’t feel that way about it.  He’s bitten by pangs of conscience, but usually in the form of worrying about discovery and punishment.  Other notable moments in the book are when a fellow named Raymond, waiting for his mistress to rush from a castle so they can run off and get married, clasps the ghost of a dead nun to his chest, and when aforementioned mistress, imprisoned for getting pregnant after taking a nun’s vows, carries her dead baby around, even when, as she puts it herself, it has become a mass of putrescence.  She talks about the worms in the flesh twining around her fingers.

Why am I bothering with all this stuff from a book over two centuries old?  To set up examples of similar stuff, basically.  Ann Radcliffe (she wrote the Mysteries of Udolpho), delineated “terror” and “horror.”  She claimed that terror is good and healthy — effectively, it was the sublime, like Wordsworth and Coleridge were obsessed with.  Terror draws humanity, and people can use it to contemplate their place in the world, their mortality, and their connection with God.  Terror at a dizzying height atop a rugged mountain, for example. scares the shit out of you and makes you think that you should be a better person, because you could die.  Horror, on the other hand, is a repulsive attribute of something, it pushes people away, freezes them up, and is useless.  If you want to look for the two elements in something, Radcliffe claimed that terror is the unknown — like the threat of afterlife at the bottom of that long drop — while horror is known and hated, like a dead body rotting in your arms.

Lewis effectively inverts these two.  Ambrosio eventually signs his soul over to the devil to avoid being burned at the stake, only to have the devil throw him off a cliff, killing him — but only after he writhes around, shattered and broken, for six days.  The fire would have been easier, but Ambrosio ran from the terror of it, as he didn’t know what lay on the other side, while the devil led him to believe he’d continue in our world for a while, and Ambrosio knew what was in our world.  However, Agnes (the mistress from earlier) seems to be redeemed by her horror.  Certainly, she seems perfectly fine after losing her mind in the dungeon, and even marries the guy who accidently tried to make out with the dead nun instead.

Tentacle rape works on this line.  It is a known horror, but usually attached to an unknown terror.  Lovecraft used tentacles a lot — his monsters were indescribable, but many had tentacles at the ends of their amorphous, squamous bodies.  Or, at least, they made tentacles out of themselves for a while, like an amoeba.  Now, Lovecraft didn’t write about sex.  Ever, really.  He seemed to be afraid of it — at least, the Barthian author-unit as a descriptor of patterns in a selection of texts seemed to be afraid of it.  Lovecraft did marry someone, so we can assume he had sex.  It just doesn’t ever show up in his fiction.  But Lovecraft is the acknowledged master of horror when it comes to mind-bending, impossible to understand monsters that assault the mind as readily as the body.

And now we get to the sex.  Aren’t you pleased?  Toshio Maeda introduced tentacle rape in 1987 with his Urotsukidoji manga.  He had very good, practical, pragmatic reasons for using tentacles:  it was illegal to show penises.  However, we’re not interested in what he needed to do — illustrate penetration — but what he chose to use — tentacles.  Perhaps Maeda was thinking of The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife when he came up with his soon-to-be-infamous trope.  But he put together two things:  horror and terror.  Horror is the simple violence inherent in the act, even fictional, of rape.  It’s familiar (in a relative sense).  The tentacle is a terror, it’s frightening, alien, unknown.  Many people won’t eat squid because of its texture, the look and shape of it — the same attributes that led Lovecraft, Maeda, and any number of other people to use squid limbs as an element of horror writing.

A short note at this point:  I’m not claiming any sort of primacy for Lovecraft.  I don’t know when translations of Lovecraft’s work made it over to Japan, if they were around before or after Maeda would have been planning out his manga.  I’m claiming a shared ouvre of horror.

This pattern of combination, of terror and horror, that is T(tentacles) + H(sex), draw audiences to tentacle rape even as the individual bits and pieces should repulse.  It’s The Monk all over again.

And never mind that, like Janet Weiss, some of the ladies end up liking it.  Maybe they heard a bell ring.