I'll admit right up front. I have an extensive anime collection, and there is hentai in the collection. These range from live-action titles that simply use a lot of nudity and are sold as anime because they are dubbed versions of Japanese live-action movies. The "Tokyo Blue" series is an example of this.

Then there is "anime" anime that is sensible, for the most part, tasteful, and conveys a plot of some sort. The F3 series, and the Cutey Honey series are examples of these.

Then there is the lude, crude, and socially unacceptable kind of hentai, which generall depicts women as the sexual objects for rapacious men, aliens, or demons. If there is a plot, it is submerged, and the sexuality of both genders may have special or super powers. "LA Blue Girl" and its sequel, "Lady Blue" are examples of this.

Then there are hentai productions that are just plain STOOPID. There's almost no other way to classify these poor specimens of hentai. If you've seen "Co-Ed Affairs", you know what I am talking about.

I have all of the above in my collection of anime. Also, I am in the process of building a new website loosely based off of the Luna Foundation, called "The Luna Foundation After Dark".

So, I am speaking to you as someone who owns hentai, both in still pics and on video, and as a webmaster running a hentai site.

I got interested in this issue even before I started work on LFHQAD. I am a person who is interested in how the rights of of-age citizens of this country are evolving, and I like watching how a facet of a culture is taken by the culture as a whole.

It is interesting to me that anime fans complain about hentai in the same way that some mainstream citizens of the populace of this country complain about anime in general.

I maintain that as long as you are not a sexual deviant that you should be able as an adult living in what is still supposedly a free country to buy hentai and watch it in the privacy of your home. I also believe that should you decide to download pictures or movie clips from the Internet, that's okay too so long as it is not done in a place that specifically prohibits such activities. (The local college here, for example.)

The first part of the hentai issue concerns just the issue I kinda fleshed out above with the mention of "adults" and "of-age citizens". What it comes down to, and this spirals into my views on dubbing, is that parents have rights and responsibilities concerning their children.

Parents have the right to bring up their children how they choose. They have the right to instill whatever social or moral views they wish, and they have the right to protect their children from social or moral views that they do not agree with. This is why you see so many parents choosing to home-school their children.

However, with these rights, there comes responsibilities. Parents have the responsibility to ensure that their children remain physically healthy, well-fed, etc. Parents also have the responsibility to back-up what they do in terms of their rights. In other words, once the law is set down, parents have to enforce it.

I lived with my aunt for five years, and one of the first things I noticed is that she was incredibly weak on discipline. She would get a report card from my cousin, and it might have a few low grades. Well, she would say that he was not allowed to have his friends over until the grades improved. She never stuck to this.

How this pertains to hentai is this...if parents decide that they don't want their children exposed to something, they have to take an active role in preventing that from happening. It is not enough to rely on the V-Chip in the TV, or the Net Nanny system on the computer, or rifling through the kids' room looking for the NIN CDs.

Parents should be involved in their childrens' lives. Kids should be aware that mommy and daddy are not simply the person from whom money and food and the house grow. And while parents should try to reach out to their children, they should not let that get in the way of good old-fashioned discipline.

What all this means to parents is, you get to sit down with your children and make surfing the Internet an interactive experience not just between the child and the computer monitor. Make it a fun experience, and if they hit a site that is questionable, it's your call right then....not later when you're rifling through the bookmarks or browser history listings.

On my end of the deal, I should do things to make parents aware that the site they are entering contains stuff that they may not wish their children to see. If you pay a visit to my fanfic archive, you'll see an example of how I do this. While I do not, and in fact, CAN NOT police my site to see who goes to the hentai fanfics, I do what I can to make sure that everyone who does go is warned that they are entering a hentai area.

In the constructing of LFHQAD, I am selecting pictures that I consider to be of good quality. However, it is not the job of hentai webmasters to babysit their users. Some sites have a membership system, others do not. Either way, the most we are required to do as responsible webmasters is warn people about the content of the site. After that, it is up to the parents.

I judge hentai on its individual merits. Some of it is artistic, some of it is lewd. I am also familiar with the argument that hentai and pornography are both degrading to women. I simply believe that all hentai and most pornography does not fit those parameters. You are free to disagree with me if you wish, and I'll even post your points of view if you can respond in a civil manner.

However, I know where to draw the line between my responsibilities as a hentai site master, and those that rightfully belong to the parents.

Artemis

Editorial: Exploring Hentai, Part 2