Porn as practice, porn as access: pornography consumption and a ‘third sexual orientation’ in Japan

Abstract

ABSTRACT Japan is currently embroiled in an ongoing legal and social debate over the production and consumption of animated sexual images as a particularly damaging genre of heterosexual pornography for men [dansei muke poruno]. Both anti-pornography activists and free-speech advocates agree that such media play a profound part in shaping Japan’s sexual landscape – a site for the shaping of one’s sexual possibilities and sexual self. These debates, however, are also key to shaping normative ideals of what sex is and, subsequently, how one’s right to sexual expression can be curtailed, denied, or legally preserved. Drawing upon native theorizations of pornography and ethnographic engagement with anti-pornography and free-speech activists, as well as one informant’s claim to a ‘third sexual orientation’, this article argues that pornography use itself is a form of sexual practice and thus attempts to curtail its distribution and consumption restrict sexual access and sexual rights.