So, like, I was out, ummmm, shopping with a couple of friends last night in an adult toy store. (It was for a friend, really!) We were perusing the shelf of small, battery-operated appliances, and I commented that many of the fancier ones had images human faces on the tip, and/or fanciful attachments depicting various animals (dolphins and various fish, frogs, horses, and the like) which seemed to be designed to stimulate various adjacent body parts simultaneously.
I commented that it seemed like a pretty big ick factor to me, not only that these things are produced in bizarre colors like fluorescent green or paisley patterns, but who (among the vast majority of people who are likely to make use of a vibrator, anyway) wants the image of a frog or a woman’s face next to their nether regions?
The proprietress overheard me, and said that the items in question were Japanese-made, and that there is a Japanese law prohibiting the manufacture/sale of sex toys that are “too realistic,” so that by law, there must be some element of fantasy or artificiality about any Japanese-made sex toy.
Why would the Japanese government care what people’s sex toys look like? And does it have anything to do with some sort of Buddhist or Shinto belief about graven images capturing a person’s soul? Inquiring minds want to know…
Well I can’t say anything about the OP, but assuming you are from the USA you have got some weird laws there too, as seen in this thread.
I found this site that mentions the same thing as your sex store clerk. Finding other references is someone else’s job as I googled myself on some pages showing Japanese women doing things with their dildos that are prohibited by the law…
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Japanese dildos are among the most unique in shape because of that country’s prohibition on sex toys that look like body parts. Animals are a common substitute, with dolphins and beavers among the more popular shapes; some Japanese products look almost exactly like a penis-shaped dildo but contain subtle tricks, such as a face just under the head to make the dildo a “woman.”
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Funny you should mention this now… Yesterday AM I was looking at The Onion’s site, and they ran an ad alongside it on the right for an outfit that imports Japanese “specialty” products. The item in the ad was a “Hello Kitty” vibrator.
I would have checked it out, but since it is an “Adult site”, it would have set off a general quarters alert with the security part of out IT organization and I’d be out of work.
The site apaear to be “Jlist”. But as I say, if you work for a company with computer network monitoring or anything like it, goign there while using a work PC can cost you your job.
Yes, it’s true, there’s a (legitimately licensed by the trademark owners for the Japanese domestic market) “Hello Kitty”… erm… “muscular massager” I believe is what it’s sold as. Apparently it’s just the handle that is allusive to “Hello Kitty”, and it’s presented as a vibrator but not also a dildo (simulated penis).
BTW some of these Japanese sex/pornography “laws” (such as the one about no visible pubes on nude images) have fallen into non-enforcement or even stopped being laws per se; but they remain “industry standards” by the sheer weight of the major producers’ market share and the culture’s sense of “this is just the way things are properly done”, and going beyond them gets your company labeled a low-class operation.
I’ve wondered about the “no-pubes” thing. Here I go to an adult website (AVS protected, no less) to check out some hentai, and they’ve got the pubic areas blurred out. WTF?! :mad: At first I wondered if the webmasters understood what the purpose of a porno site was, but this turned out to be a common occurance. Sometime hentai (adult artwork) pictures will show a girl without any genitalia at all :eek: That isn’t erotic, it’s creepy!
As JRDelirious points out, however, this law is not widely enforced 