Pop Culture dictionary
tentacle porn
[ten-tuh-kuh l pawrn]
What does tentacle porn mean?
Yup, it’s a thing. Tentacle porn is a genre of Japanese erotica depicting humans, mostly women, having sex with otherworldly, tentacled creatures. It’s usually a form of hentai, or pornographic manga and anime.
Related words:
Where does tentacle porn come from?
Humans have had, um, fishy taste in erotica for centuries. The story of tentacle porn begins with a Japanese woodblock print The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, created in 1814 by Hokusai of The Great Wave off Kanagawa fame.
The artwork depicts a woman who encounters two octopuses while shell-diving. In some interpretations, she is letting them sexually arouse her. In others, she is being raped.
Either way, Hokusai’s scene was just the beginning of tentacle porn. As early as the 1980s, Japanese manga and anime artists found practical value in tentacle porn: It allowed them to go around Japanese censorship law, which forbade pornographic depictions of the penis. Penetration by tentacle? Not banned. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The late 1980s–90s saw some tentacle porn in anime, manga, and live-action films, though it was usually meant to be more Cronenbergian in the latter. Then there’s the internet, where fetishists—and the curious—illustrate or watch anime-styled stills or CG videos of tentacle porn. But yeah, we’re not gonna touch the psychology of any this.
Examples of tentacle porn
Who uses tentacle porn?
Of course, many internet references to tentacle porn are, in fact, references to the actual pornography.
Tentacle porn is also a cultural punchline. The Canadians have their politeness, the Scottish have their kilts, and Japan has its tentacle porn.
I blame any pervertedness on my half-japanese side… like really, my people make tentacle porn 🐙
— 🐼 kimiyomarieofficial (@oohsooyum) January 22, 2018
In fact, tentacle porn is generally accepted as a weird thing to be into even outside of discussions of Japanese culture. It’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to be caught watching—especially if you’re, say, an MSNBC correspondent with pretty bad Twitter skills. Hard to live that one down.
Somewhere, in a far away land, Kurt Eichenwald just threw his laptop interrupting his early afternoon tentacle porn session. https://t.co/fPTljgr2n9
— Bill Moran (@BillMoranWins) January 9, 2018
It’s not all funky sex with tentacle porn, though. Glassblowers and other artists who produce tentacled creations are known to share their work with the tongue-in-cheek hashtag “#TentaclePorn.”
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of tentacle porn like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of tentacle porn that will help our users expand their word mastery.