Attention! This post contains the following words and phrases that some readers may find objectionable or funny: “tentacle porn,” “pubic hair,” “ass hair,” “penises” and “cooter.” Also the words “fuck” and “finger” as verbs.
The Museum of Sex: what a great idea. Where else can you finger the cooter of a Real Doll without spending $6,499 to own one? I don’t know, although I made sure I washed my hands thoroughly with soap and hot water afterwards.
The temporary exhibit on the ground floor, “Peeping, Probing and Porn: Four Centuries of Graphic Sex in Japan,” displays the full range, from woodblock prints to looping videos of modern anime. As is often the case, the older stuff is more intriguing.
When Edo (present-day Tokyo) first expanded from a backwater fishing village to a teeming metropolis, young men packed up and moved there for opportunity and to fuck around a bit, figuratively and literally. Edo became known as the “City of Bachelors,” inspiring a booming sex trade, then, in the natural progression of things, copious pornography. The first mass-produced porn, commissioned by the rich or sold as cheap prints to the masses, chiefly depicted the wide caste of prostitutes, from streetwalkers to live-in courtesans, doin’ it with a variety of men. Many prints concern the popular fetish of voyeurism, whether through mirrors or peeping perverts, as well as what’s perhaps the first instance of tentacle porn, from 1820 by the same guy who woodblocked the famous Beneath the Great Wave off Kanagawa.
I found it interesting that pornographers in early 19th century Japan had no qualms depicting pubic hair of either sex, male ass hair or penises the approximate height and girth of the owner’s head. Strangely, they became more conservative in certain narrow respects as the centuries advanced, until, for example, the depiction of pubic hair was banned or at least restricted in modern times.