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Abstract
If pornography is, as Richard Dyer defines it, a genre which aims at (and successfully brings) sexual arousal in the audience, then the depiction of sexual desire as disempowering is a counter-intuitive creative choice. However, it is a common trope in contemporary Japanese eromanga (porn manga): in many such works, a character’s sexual pleasure and desire can disadvantage and disempower the character in question and position them in a more submissive role in their sexual relationship with other characters. This paper pays attention to a selection of works of eromanga in the genres of chōkyō (“training” 調教), ryōjoku (“humiliation” 凌辱) and seishin hōkai (“mental breakdown” 精神崩壊), genres where the correspondence between the portrayal of the intensity of sexual pleasure and desire on one hand and the power disparity between characters on the other hand is most notable. I contend that these eromanga reveals an anxiety towards feelings of sexual arousal and sexual desire. However, rather than canceling out the sexual pleasure that eromanga seeks to arouse, the discomforting anxiety, fear, shock and tension ignites more pleasure, as how Leo Bersani and Susanna Paasonen theorize. Through this discussion, the paper tries to discuss how pornography, as a “body genre” that intends to arouse pleasure, inhabits an anxiety about the very pleasure it seeks to depict and arouse. When intense sexual stimulations overwhelm characters in eromanga, the desire that comes from accumulated stimulation could lead to the character’s transformation into a submissive role in the story: the victim submit to their victimizer, and the character’s common sense and rationality submit to bodily desire. The pleasure that these eromanga promises their consumers is a kind of pleasure that could defeat everything, not only socially determined moral standards and law but also an individual’s own rationality. This rationale corresponds to the eromanga’s frequent depictions of taboos including rape fantasy, family taboo and erotification of young girls. These manga are self-aware of the anxiety and horrors in the unrestrained desire they fantasize; in the stories, the character who yield to desire becomes the “loser.” Yet in the end, consumers of eromanga read these works because want do to lose, at least temporarily, to desire itself. Eromanga of the chōkyō, ryōjoku and seishin hōkai genres captures “a desire to lose” – the typical ending where the victimizer always wins are more fundamentally a victory of pornography and desire itself, and these eromanga capture the reader’s desire to lose to pornography and to desire.