Well, here just to show the difference between “Tentacle sex” and “Octopus sex”, some examples from the modern day.
First is the ONLY piece of modern day octopus/traditional style tentacle sex I have ever seen (though admittedly I haven’t searched about for it):
Not safe for work!
{http}://www.momopla.net/hcg04.htm
While as these are standard modern day stuff (which I could find thousands of examples of):
Not safe for work!
{http}://www.alpha-net.ne.jp/users2/evans/gallery/Adult/19syokusyu_up.jpg
{http}://blackdog.sakura.ne.jp/uch/cg/myself_p/bd144e.jpg
{http}://www1.odn.ne.jp/jaken/ten/gazo/kuno1.jpg
What’s the weird part, the tentacles or the rape? Because the tentacles thing is incredibly foreign to me; it’s odd and in a way really fascinating to me that such a thing became an archetype in Japanese culture, when it’s something so utterly different than what our archetypes are.
Rape fantasy, on the other hand, isn’t particularly surprising to me at all. Lots of people get off on that kind of thing.
That I can tell it’s not really a big fetish here. You hear about Tentacle Sex a lot more outside of Japan than you do inside it. Living here, I would never define it as a mainline fetish like nekomimi or even the whole tying up thing. In general, as you said, if people want to have a rape fantasy, they just draw up some males to commit rape. Most don’t feel the need to bring in Cthulu for this.
Great! For your information, I was enjoying exoticizing Japanese culture. I liked the idea of an island filled with yellow, sexually perverse dwarves! Now I’m going to have to regard them as human beings.
For my first year of college (97-98) I would go to sleep after I got home from school and then wake up around 11 and watch the prime time TV shows (I recognize the Gigamesh name, but they’re all rather blurred in my head.) The total variety show/“we’ll humiliate ourselves in any way to get viewers to watch us for the two seconds between when they got home and when they go to bed”-ness of it all though eventually made me start feeling almost sea sick to turn it on. I haven’t been much of a TV person since.
instead getting pulled in by the everpowerful World of Warcraft
A lot of other people have responded with pretty good explanations, but yeah, it’s basically a combined metaphor for bondage, dominance, and rape fantasies.
Although, I should point out that I’ve seen more than a few Japanese Hentai-Manga (pornographic comics) in which the female isn’t unwilling at all. “Tentacle Fiend” features a 20-something girl keeping a tentacle-monster against her father’s wishes, for example.
Also, in the true spirit of rape fantasy, more often than not a more appropriate term would be seduction; while in the Anime it’s often full-on tentacle rape, in Manga the girl often gets pretty into it mid-way through and by the end is usually glad it happened.
I love tentacle on boy stuff myself. Like H3Knuckles said, it isn’t always presented as rape, sometimes they love it from the beginning and other times they get into it after it starts. Tentacles can come from many different sources, so it isn’t always beastiallic. I view tentacle sex the same as gang bang in that it is about complete submission.
That depends on how strictly you define “kink”. Etymologically, one could make the case that “kink” or “kinky” refers specifically to bondage (the origin is the same as for “kink” as a snarl in a garden hose or rope: The original meaning is knot). And of course, in bondage, at least one person ends up tied up, while at least one person remains free, to do the tying, so power relations are pretty inherent, there. On the other hand, if you define “kink” as any sort of non-mainstream sexual act, well, there’s some solo stuff that’s pretty non-mainstream, and I’m not sure how you can have power relations with only one person.
Quoth bup:
While octopodes are taxonomically related to slugs and snails, it’s the same phylum, not family (molluscae, which also includes clams, conches, and cuttlefish). And earthworms are annelids, a completely different family.
Why can’t you believe it? It’s a very common and old phrase… so common that there probably ARE bands named that. Typically the “BAND NAME!” thing gets thrown out when someone coins a new phrase.
And the nominees for most casualy ironic turn of phrase are…
…and that’s part of the fetish above mentioned as “guro” (which gets even worse, trust me). Then again that particular deviation happens also in Western comic-porn circles.
But yes, there is a tradition of representations of exaggerated bizarre erotica dating to the past, that when combined with modern social and media trends gives Japanese comic porn its particular flavor.