- Table of Contents:
First to get the obvious stuff out of the way, of course there are pockets of people on the left and on the right who are not against hentai of any kind (including the lolita stuff). I have already considered the topic from a non-political angle. If you are interested on my stance on the issue read that article. I am not going to make my argument in this article. I am only exploring some main-stream views on the topic here, not presenting my own.
Overall it was a mistake to refer to “left” and “right” in this article’s title since the critics of hentai on the left and the right seem to make similar points if you remove the political jargon with which they flavour their polemics to cater to their base. Still it might be worth looking at where the differences lie.
In a response to this article, I got the clever-silly criticism that “hentai is far from being romantic classical art” which is to say that it is not “real” art at all. I will address this criticism in the final part of this article. It might surprise you that the person who made this point was a self-proclaimed radical feminist and not someone on the right. This could be down to the fact that there is no left or right except as spectres of “the enemy” to conjure up in the minds of people when trying to rally political-financial support. Or it could simply be that in many ways the left’s and the right’s negation of hentai are on a similar level.
This post was initially prompted by the Australian government banning the import of hentai from Japan in 2020. Needless to say this useless gesture will not stop Australians from reading and watching hentai through the internet. It has however hurt the artists who create this hentai but they’ll manage, as they always have, against bullies of this kind. The mainstream left’s reaction to this ban was pin drop silence.
Elitism: The Theory of False Consciousness
In 2020, I wrote: “The left which champions itself as the defender of our personal freedom for us to make our own souls above all artificial limitations of power structures. How could this very same left be against sexual artwork?”
The Right also champions itself as the defender of your personal freedom and I have found that claim to be equally as valid as that of the left in the time since I wrote those words in 2020.
Of course what I meant was that the Left does not believe that we make our own selves, so there really is no contradiction from the Left’s point of view. You see, what the left believes is that we are endlessly malleable and manipulated by social structures like Capital. What I didn’t know was that there is a word for this, and that word is “False Consciousness.”
In this view the humble hentai artist is part of a power structure and creates artificial limitations for the individual with his pen. I will explain how the hentai artist creates these artificial limitations in the next section but first I want to elaborate on the concept of False Consciousness.
I do not know whether there is a word for it in right-wing circles but “False Consciousness” certainly exists as a strongly held belief on the right too. I guess the closest word for it would be the idea of the NPC-meme, the Non-Playable Character.
According to this meme, popular on the right, the average person is an NPC who has no capability for internal monologue or thought, who is a fully pliable “mass man” who believes everything Liberal authorities and corporations tell him and who mindlessly consumes harmful pornography and worthless pop culture like the Marvel Cinematic Universe rather than rebelling against the current Liberal regime to restore a more conservative order.
Or in other words the implication of the NPC-meme is that the reason why there is no right-wing revolution is due to the fact that the NPCs have been manipulated by the liberal media and authorities to accept the status quo and not because of any failure within the logic of the right itself. It will soon become apparent how this is similar to the more left-wing concept of False Consciousness.
Some right wingers will even go as far as rejecting democracy because the average person, the NPC, can’t be trusted with power and will be manipulated by the media and education to vote for the left or to vote for fake conservatives who in reality are Leftwing.
Going back to the 2020 ver of this article, I then went on to say, “To understand this let us briefly answer the question of why the left is for women engaging in sexual promiscuity often even sex work but is somehow against depictions of women engaging in sexually promiscuous behaviour in hentai artwork.”
It was a bit cheeky for me to say that the left was in favour of sexual promiscuity by women but it might be more accurate to say that it is not a major concern for the left as it might be in right wing circles.
The answer which I provided back in 2020 to these apparent contradictions was a Thomas Sowell-tier answer which simply assumed the motivations of the left, in other words a character attack masquerading as an explanation. It was not a good answer, still there was a good point within that answer so I shall go over it in the next section.
Anyhow the real answer to the question is False Consciousness. The idea of False Consciousness is that the reason that a revolution starting in industrialised countries to overthrow capitalism and establish communism did not happen, as Marx had predicted it, was that the proles, the people, had been deceived by Capitalist-financed degenerate culture such as pornography, television and other vices to not rebel against the forces which oppressed them.
Or in other words that it was not because of any failure within Marxist logic that a left-wing revolution as they wished did not materialise but because the masses were too dumb to get Marxism and too dumb not to be deceived by their capitalist masters. I don’t think I need to point out the similarity between this and the right-wing position that the average person is a pleb who doesn’t get the superiority of the right-wing position.
But what has any of this Marxist stuff got to do with the modern left, you might ask? It is true that the modern left is not (usually) advocating for an international worker’s revolution but then neither is the Right and yet the right is susceptible to the same elitist thought. I believe the modern left has fallen into the same pattern of thinking, it doesn’t really matter whether or not they got this from Marxism for my point.
A response to this article said that: “more people are unable to separate art from real life than you would think, which is why such restrictions have to be made in art sometimes.” A reasonably worded statement but it is only actually reasonable if you believe something like this: “you and I superior ones can tell the difference between fiction and reality, but the average person is too dumb to be able to.”
I am a bit of a misanthrope myself, so I don’t have the highest opinion of the average person, frankly I don’t like having to defend the intelligence and integrity of the average person here. Back in 2020 I wrote in a reply: “I guess I just think the rights of those who can’t make a difference between reality and fiction should be limited with swift and harsh punishment rather than my rights be pre-empitvely limited because of them.”
With all this talk about elitism, I should note however that the side which has more popular support is the anti-hentai side. This impression might change a bit when young people who have access to hentai grow up but I don’t have much faith in people.
Labour Theory of Art Value
Earlier I promised that I would answer the criticism that hentai is not “real” art. I will do that but at the same time I will also fulfill my promise to explain how according to the left an “hentai artist is part of a power structure and creates artificial limitations for the individual with his pen.”
Back in 2020 I wrote: “As deviant and perverted as hentai might be it takes effort to make whereas it takes no real effort for a young woman to be a sex worker. This is the reason why the left is for legalizing sex work but against sexual artwork. What the left is against for at bottom is standards and even Hentai drawings and figurines display standards of beauty which is why the cultural commissars of the left allowed this ban to happen.”
Clearly I was angered by the silence of the left at this ban but now that I am used to being betrayed by “the left” (and “the right”) I can see that I was too harsh and “cultural commissars” sounds plain silly.
Anyhow my intent clearly was to highlight the effort necessary to create the hentai, if it was so easy then I would like one of those critics to go ahead and draw a 30 page hentai doujin, in 99% of cases they’ll fail. I am not saying that it is an impossible task but it is hard. I don’t know if anyone has a real definition of art (just saying that it’s bad for art not to have a definition is meaningless) but clearly the effort that goes into making it has got to be part of the definition. When you are looking at a painting you are also marveling at the skill of the artist. In some ways it is more impressive to see an artist’s realistic rendering of a natural scenery than the natural scenery itself.
My other point was that the left was against hentai artists because their art reinforced beauty standards. I don’t know why I didn’t plainly say this. I guess it’s because it sounds silly. Anyhow the old argument goes that beauty standards hurt those who can’t fit into them. This is true but honestly at some point it is up to people to find alternative ways of being rather than bullying people who enjoy this stuff. Honestly just create your safe space and leave me alone.
As for it not being “classical” or “romantic,” that is just snobbery so I dismiss that. After all didn’t men go to the opera house to see women’s legs?
As for the sex-workers point, I was once again echoing a Thomas Sowell-tier comment. There is some truth to it but you could argue that the left is not trying to destroy standards but just to expand them to include others. You could also argue that they have done it in an unnecessarily destructive way, hurting innocent creators.
The left has been very supportive to women doing stuff like onlyfans and yet trying to cancel artists who create erotic content. The artwork that artists create is as theirs as the women’s bodies are their own. At the time I thought being an artist creating beautiful artwork is clearly harder than just being beautiful. I am no longer sure whether this is true or whether it even matters since beautiful things are beautiful.
In 2020, I wrote: “This censorious bigotry of no expectations also extends to the feminist hatred of all artistic depictions of beauty in all mediums.”
Feminists? Do you remember them? Pepperidge Farm remembers feminists. For some reason nobody talks about them and the trans issues stuff is more popular now. I cared about all this stuff too much back then. I mean hentai still exists, yes even loli and shota.
In 2020, I wrote: “Hentai is classical art with human standards of beauty achieved through grueling hard-work and plus romantic passion which is why the left wants to replace anime with the formless, graceless, passionless, purposefully low effort-looking post-modern tumour of cal art in western cartoons and ban hentai altogether.”
I really did call Hentai classical art lol. I am not even interested in classical art so why did I even consider it some kind of gold standard? Because it is hard to make. I guess I was doubling down on that. Kinda reductionist but also I think it was because I liked how idealised the human form was in both art forms - though obviously I preferred how it was idealised in one medium over the other. As for cal-arts and western entertainment in general. I just ignore it and it ignores me. Simple as.
If for some reason I can’t find any art that appeals to me then that’s just an opportunity to create my own. If anything there’s too much stuff I like for me to read already. Those visual novels and web novels won’t read themselves!
In 2020, I concluded: “In their zeal to free mankind from all standards they are even destroying those standards which make human life worth living, freedom worth dying and killing for, and civilisation possible at all.”
Well, that escalated quickly. It’s a nice conclusion but it doesn’t match this article. I guess I just wrote it because I thought it sounded cool but I didn’t have anywhere appropriate to post it before I forgot the whole thing.
I now think you should just hang around people who have similar standards and just not bother with people who disagree with you. Let them be as long as they let you be. To put it bluntly, make a safe-space yeah. Hanging out on your own is fine too, maybe even better in some ways.
- By Otaking.
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