This entry is about pornography.  I understand if that isn’t your thing, but if you could, I’d like you to read on.  Don’t worry, the only explicit content here is language.

Like so:

“Respect the cock… and tame the cunt!”
- Tom Cruise, Magnolia

Men watch porn.  Let’s get that out of the way.  The ones who say they don’t are perpetuating a polite fiction.  And men of “our kind,” I can assure you, watch porn in great abundance.

Yet, with our varied perversions, our bondage and lolicon and whatever else gets us going, few genres are as divisive as netorare, or NTR. I’m talking about stories where a boy meets a girl, but for one reason or another they haven’t taken the next step.  And then the girl meets another boy and gives up all her sexual orifices to him, completely humiliating both herself and the original boy, and usually ensuring that their relationship will be tainted forever after.

Disgusted?  Well, let’s leave that to taste.  But it’s pretty interesting stuff.

NTR has a different flavor from what we might call a “cheating story” or “cuckolding” in the west.  The surface features are similar—girl is unfaithful and gives in to lust—but beneath that, NTR is a lot more about physiological transformation:  The cheating wife may love her husband, but after a good dicking she becomes a slave to carnal impulses.  The formerly chaste girlfriend has been broken in, and now her body is irrevocably imprinted by another man’s penis like a plaster mold.  Even if the affair ends, there’s no going back for a woman’s flesh.

At the turn of the century, when sexology and the social sciences were just beginning to arrive in Japan, it was widely believed that the only women capable of independent sexual desire were widows and prostitutes.  Japan’s come a little way since then, but there’s a clear modern thought tradition of women being “activated” and sexually ripened by the desires of men.  When we think about it, why else would otaku go so crazy about the possibility of their favorite characters not being virgins?

Netorare also features an unusually high number of instances of “ahegao,” faces of drooling, eye-rolling pleasure.

For otaku, especially, NTR gets its power from some deeply rooted fears.  As the clock ticks and singlehood still looms large, many might wonder if there’s something fundamentally wrong with them.  Everybody else seems to have some essential insight into physical intimacy that they’re missing.  It’s a tiny leap of logic to assume that sex is the answer, and just a touch of perverse paranoia (or is that paranoid perversion?) to assume that once a woman knows the taste, she’s a beast.  After all, that’s how it is for men, isn’t it?

Some people call this the virgin-whore dichotomy.  Greg Stolze calls this phenomenon the WECHBY: The Woman Everyone Can Have But You. Somehow, I feel that name just says it all.

This is the way the world ends.

Further Reading

mt-i has some case examples on the appeal of netorare.

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