> When I was out in SF, Annalee Newitz showed some videos in a genre called
> Japanese tentacle porn, which involves sweet girls being probed in every
> orifice by beasts with long tentacles. What's the story of that stuff?
Hmm, this sounds like one of those urban legend things. Japanese mass culture is just awfully violent, the body gets processed in a very different way, it seems -- where we have exploding scenery, they have exploding bodies (or bodies writ large, like the Godzilla flicks; the sets are cheap models, not Hollywood mini-hotels). There's lots of explicit sexual violence in the manga and anime, often tied to masculine techno-fantasies (the violence of hooking things up: the women are really anagrams of high-tech consumer goods). "Tetsuo", for instance, turns this theme against itself, it becomes a self-violence, like the Japanese version of US-style body-piercing. Those Chiba City blues...
-- Dennis