It pushes boundaries that you can’t cross in real life
In 2021, Pornhub’s year in review found that the most popular porn category in the US was hentai, also known as anime porn.
Um? This surprised me at least. Do People Prefer Watching Anime Porn To Watching Real Sex? But it also makes sense when you think about it – anime is very popular right now, so perverts are also competing with anime for popularity.
There are also different hypotheses as to why people like hentai. First, there are some things you can do with Pixels that you just can’t do in real life. Hentai often challenges the imagination – I’ll always remember when I was four years old and my brother showed me a porn movie called Bible Black, and I vividly remember an anime woman getting penetrated by tentacles.
Why is hentai so popular?
It pushes boundaries that you can’t cross in real life
According to Psychology Today’s Sam Louie, young people love hentai for a variety of reasons. Hentai has a long history of ranking among Pornhub search terms. In 2019, it was the second most searched term on the site.
But the appeal of endlessness to young people is that, according to Louie, this generation needs more stimulating material in terms of arousal and intensity. Hentai allows people to explore “infinite sexual fantasies” without the constraints of reality. It can satisfy sexual desires by showing fantasies that are impossible in real life but also reprehensible.
Hentai features fetishes that are impossible in real life, such as incest, sodomy, and rape fantasies. Animated characters are also often very exaggerated in body parts, such as larger penises and larger breasts.
Most of the women in the hentai videos are portrayed as young (maybe underage, but that’s fiction so it’s never explicitly stated). Then they regularly degenerate into sexually promiscuous women who crave sex at any time of the day, whether from monsters, animals, demons, or ordinary people.
Some hentai are very vivid images. And the “It’s not true!” defense is used to justify some of the absolutely insane things that happen in the video, like rape fantasies or borderline underage characters. This can give a very twisted sexual feel to young people (but that could be real porn, after all).
Regardless of how you feel about nhentai morally, Louie attributes much of its popularity to its fringe nature. Sometimes people get so aroused by watching porn, or softer porn, that they are no longer aroused by those videos, so they have to find “more abnormal forms of sexualization” to get aroused.
But it’s not just underage characters who are portrayed as sexual partners in hentai, it’s also underage viewers. Again, this isn’t new to porn, but with so much hentai porn pushing boundaries, it’s a bit concerning.
Lawmakers agree. In the United States, the lolicon genre is banned under U.S. federal law and may be classified as child pornography for its depiction of underage girls in hentai. However, lolicon is not banned in Japan.
it can satisfy forbidden fantasies
Most hentai is made in Japan, which is a very strict and strict society about how people have to put themselves together in public. There are very strict norms regarding punctuality and other behavior, but the general rule in Japan is that it doesn’t matter how people behave in private, as long as they behave appropriately in public.
In fact, people have pretty taboo fantasies, and those fantasies aren’t real people. The women drawn in hentai are usually fantasy women and fantasy people. Characters in hentai have some physical traits that cannot be reproduced in real life.
Having said that, some people just find anime characters more attractive than real people, which is clearly a trend we’re seeing in Pornhub searches.
There are many reasons why Hentai is so popular and the most searched porn in America.
But is this a cause for concern? Is crossing the line too much? Is it harmful to young people’s sexuality, and if so, is it more harmful than real porn?
It’s hard to say, because of the lack of scientific literature examining endless effects. Hentai portrays women as hypersexual and often submissive, which some believe has a negative impact on how young people perceive women. On the other hand, this also applies to real porn, right?
While we don’t know much about the effects of hentai on people compared to regular porn or エロクール, it would be interesting to explore them. After all, this is the most searched porn category.