Porn

The time has come when it becomes necessary to describe that most essential component of civilisation, pornography. As you will have gathered by now, I consider Japan to have a lot of civilisation. And if pornography is an essential component of civilisation then surely the more civilisation a place has, the more pornography it must also have. By the end of this post I will also show, irrefutably, that it is possible to learn a great deal about a society by examining the nature of its porn.

The first thing one notices about Japanese porn is that the women themselves are strangely ... natural! There is no air-brushing to speak of, poses are not chosen in such a way as to minimise folds of fat, flattening of breasts, or unwomanly wrinkles; so it is just like looking at, well, at... at ... women. Since I came to this country I don't think I have been confronted by a single magazine like FHM, leaping from the newsstand to assault my eyes with flesh so airbrushed it is golden. Rather, I view real women.

It's rather refreshing, actually. The nature of these magazines has led me to ponder the nature of the Western relationship with its media, and to wonder if maybe the more natural state of women in publishing here has some relationship to the much greater thinness of the female population. It is completely contradictory to the standard liberal analysis of the role of women's magazines in constructing body image, but there has to be something in it. After all, I thought it!

But there you go, I have digressed. The flipside of this naturalness is the unnatural posture and slightly amateurish nature of the work, and the ... huge ... ugly ... underwear the women wear, which they often do hideous things with. The bras often have upwards of several feet of lacy padding on the front, and the panties (god I hate that word) are ... huge.

Having purchased my second porn (some of you may recall I bought one last year, and regaled you with the poetry therein), I was led to do a little internet research. I started by looking up the fightin' girls in order to confirm that they are "fighters" (sort of). I then branched out, and found an interesting website devoted to Japanese porn stars (called "AV Idols") which includes interviews with many AV Idols, and reviews of some of their movies. I have learnt much! For example, many have pondered the overabundance of pubic hair in Japanese porn, and in one of the interviews I read, the (female) interviewer said to her AV Idol guest: "you are pretty, responsible, you have big breasts and a big patch of pubic hair - you are the perfect woman." So we see the universal metric for judging womanliness - pretty with tits - expanded to include two ingredients which I think we can all agree are essential for any good porn star.

It is not only what is said in these interviews that is interesting, but what you can infer from what is not said. If I may attempt to put it delicately, I have gleaned a hint that the question asked at college here is not do nice girls swallow but do nice boys give their girlfriends the opportunity to. What a strange difference! Does it not speak volumes of the nature of things in this strange and topsy-turvy land? I have also discovered that the Boldly Inquiring Sgt M was correct in his surmise that many porn movies here involve women recruited straight off the street, so I owe his Sergeantlines a big apology for not believing him (although I still disagree vigourously with his analysis of the social meaning of this). I have provided below some reviews of exemplar porn movies from my helpful website, which I think will verify the good chap's information. I think from this I choose to infer that Japanese women are a) crazy and b) feel very safe with Japanese men. Feel free to differ. I recommend reading the reviews at this site (which I link to below): they are quite honest at times and rather amusing.

Some reviews of the more amusing or interesting movies I encountered trawling through this website are given below. Note that these reviews involve quite explicit pictures, so best not to look at them with your grandmother in the room (unlike Japanese men, who seem to be quite happy reading porn in front of old women on trains), or if your interest in porn is purely academic or doesn't extend to bukkake:

Strange game shows,
Outbid your friend,
What am I meant to do with that?
Just too wrong for comprehension.

All of these reviews give fascinating insights into Japanese culture past and present, I feel. By means of these four reviews alone I prove unerringly my contention that one can understand a great deal about another culture by investigating their pornography (and I have only delved here into the straight porn!)

Another interesting conclusion I have drawn from these reviews is that Japanese porn is little different from the rest of Japanese television entertainment: it involves a lot of talking, interrupted by occasional bursts of squealing, brought about in this case by sex rather than comedy. I imagine if one were to close one's eyes, and didn't understand the language, one would not be able to tell the difference between a Japanese porn movie and a game show. This has led me to conceive of what will one day be a very famous version of the Turing Test, which I choose to call the Tumulus Test. I think this test can be used for telling how depraved a society is (or isn't). If a decent human being with their eyes closed cannot tell the difference between a society's prime time TV and its porn, then that society is depraved. Or not, depending on your perspective. This will in turn spawn what will one day be a famous saying, probably called "Gilmour's Law" (or maybe "Suchuaaato's law" if it never gets past Japan): "One man's game show is another man's bukkake."