hentaiFREEfree: FAQ

About hentaiFREEfree

What is hentai? Different sites have different definitions.
We use the definition provided by Violet Bealer in the H-FAQ:

"Hentai is basically Japanese Animation porn or erotica. It is a sexual fetish, and is a type of erotic art. There are many different types of Hentai, and they encompass all fetishes from lesbianism to beastiality[sic] to tentacle-sex. There are also Hentai stories, (commonly called "Lemons"), to be found on the WWW, and these Lemons almost exclusively involve characters from Anime shows and movies."

The FAQ goes on to compare and contrast hentai with "normal" anime, ecchi, and erotic art in general (all with room for debate).

Some anti-H groups are of the mind that hentai consists only of fan-produced, derivative works involving pre-existing (usually female) characters. This isn't the case; yes, these works exist, but they're not the only ones out there. Hentai is a genre in its own right within anime and manga, which takes many, many forms. It does not focus exclusively on females, either; there is heterosexual and male/male (yaoi; see Aestheticism for more on this) hentai as well.

We recommend The Erotic Anime Movie Guide by Helen McCarthy and Jonathan Clements (Titan Books, 1998) to those seeking more information on professionally-produced erotic anime.

I don't like looking up my favourite anime on a search engine only to find a bunch of porn in the results list, for example, or randomly stumbling upon the stuff in other ways. What should I do about that?
Most search engines will allow you to exclude given terms from a search (if your favourite one doesn't, we suggest you move -- look for instructions on search syntax to find out if you can, and how); we find that excluding terms like anal, tits, xxx, fuck, and so forth cuts down dramatically on the porn count. As for the "randomly stumbling" effect, we can't help you; we'd actually love to be able to reproduce it.

So do YOU like hentai?
The site maintainers do, yes. Contributors and supporters vary in their tastes.

Can you send me some hentai?
Er, no, but we can tell you where to look for it: Resources -> Links -> Hentai.

I don't want to look at that stuff. Are you saying I should have to?
No. We're saying you should be able to choose whether or not you want to view/read hentai, just as much as you should be able to choose whether or not to watch a football game. We're also saying that one should be able to choose to have hentai content on one's web site, or not, and that hentai should remain available to those who choose to consume it.

How can you advocate something which degrades and objectifies [women] / causes violence and rape / etc.?
First, we advocate little more than personal autonomy and education. As we keep saying, if you don't want to look at hentai or other forms of pornography, that should be your choice; the point is that we do not want our choice to be taken away from us, and we do not want to be stigmatized should that choice be to enjoy erotic material.

Second, we don't actually buy the party line that pornography is destructive, as you may have already figured out. For every study which suggests a link between pornography and sexual violence, there is another which does not find such a link. (Japan's sex crime rate is lower than America's; where does most hentai originate?)

The assertion that pornography degrades women as a gender is simply that, an assertion, and one which is usually made without consulting women who voluntarily produce and/or enjoy the material (e.g. CLAMP - a group of female animators, now famous for such works as Magic Knight Rayearth and X/1999, who got their start drawing hentai material and who still enjoy hentai computer games), at that. The assertion becomes particularly ludicrous once you find out what's in yaoi -- the Dworkin-style struggle to label the penis as violence against women physically manifest is difficult, at best, to accept.

As for objectification, how is a character depicted having sex for your enjoyment any different from a character depicted fighting crime, piloting giant robots, or playing with a cabbit for your enjoyment? What makes sex special here? What makes it stand out? We just don't see the problem.

I don't have a web page, but I have a mailing list. Can I send a banner to my mailing list?
We'd rather you didn't send unsolicited binary attachments to people as a rule, and sending something by email which is designed to be a graphical component of a web page doesn't make a whole lot of sense to us. If telling your mailing list who we are and what our URL is would be appropriate, however, feel free to do so.

Where did the banner submission rules go?
Link graphic submissions are closed now, and probably will be for some time. We have more than enough graphics at this point, and are still going through them all. You may still feel free to design your own graphic for your own pages if what we have doesn't suit you, and of course we'd still like to see it, but at this point it won't be included in the library.

Why isn't my graphic in the library?
Either it hasn't been put up yet (for example, the Cosplay section is still being worked on, as are the author-specific pages) or it didn't make the cut (we have rejected several graphics for whatever reason -- too large, excessively bizarre dimensions, illegibility...). Check the "Other" section -- some graphics which haven't yet been categorized are in there.

Why was there such a long gap between updates?
Wednesday, who does the design and routine upkeep work, was juggling a full-time job, a back injury, the AnimeCity Expats project (which required a burst of short-term effort), and sharing the dual-boot PC with two other people. She apologizes for the delays. (There was also a systems outage at the US host; she opted to keep the site down during the final stages of the current build rather than restore a "quick" update which would soon be made obsolete.)