Resolved: Hentai is sad

Written October 2007

If we wanted other people only for sex, we’d all just masturbate. Forget the effort of meeting people at nightclubs, forget spending evenings out, forget snuggling with them, or getting hung up on them. We’d all just masturbate, because interaction with human beings carries greater emotional and physical risk than masturbation does.

But, obviously, people get into friendships with each other. They pay to have sex with one another. And so forth. There must be another reason why people interact with one another, despite the risks. This reason must be inherent in human interaction.
I mention this because in the case of hentai, the masturbator is utterly removed from people.

There’s no such thing as human interaction, so obviously, this person is missing something other people get.

So, we must ask: what does human interaction get us?

I will begin to answer that question by saying that when I hang out with people I like, I feel a nice little glow. We see a movie, we get some coffee, we sit on Low steps to chat. I enjoy hanging out with them for the sake of hanging out with them. And when we leave each other, I feel that hanging out was good use of my time.

Sex, Adam Sandler once implied, lasts around 8 minutes. Friendships and other relationships last a little longer that. They are more substantial than that. But sex, at least, involves human interaction. If you have sex with someone you like, you’re bound to enjoy yourself as much as you can. The type of lover doesn’t matter--it doesn’t matter if the person is a fuck buddy, or an exclusive lover. What matters is that you’re comfortable with this person—if you’re comfortable.

Therefore, emotional interaction outweighs sexual feeling, even though sexual feeling is pret-ty fucking awesome.

Therefore, hentai is sad because people who love hentai miss out on the warmth of human interaction.