Eiken: Ecchi Comes to the US Mainstream

It's not what it looks like! (No, it's exactly what it looks like.) Vidcap from "Eiken."

Now appearing on my website is a review of Eiken, a Japanese anime of the type known as ecchi anime in the US. (In Japan, ecchi means the English letter H, which in the case of anime means hentai, adult anime, in other words, ecchi and hentai are synonyms.) In the US, ecchi means sexually-oriented anime aimed at teens -- no hardcore imagery, not really any softcore imagery, but the anime are typically about sex and nothing else, and typically include lots of events which look just like sex but aren't really sex at all, which deeply embarrass the eminently embarrassable male protagonists. Blushing virgins, every last friggin' one of them, with a penchant for winding up with their faces in women's crotches for perfectly innocent reasons. There are also some fairly explicit fantasy sequences (see above).

Yah, I know. Makes no sense. But it's fun.

Anyways, for a long time ecchi have been available in the US on a 'those who know' basis, i.e., on sale at some video stores and online. But I haven't seem them on cable TV until I saw Eiken on the Encore Action Channel awhile ago. I thought it was a momentous enough moment to take note of. Not that anyone else has.

Check out my review, with caps proving just how naked and sexy Eiken and other ecchi can be, at this link.

Dominance By Other Means

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Saving Grace's Envelope-ripping bondage scene

"Saving Grace" is an FX Network TV series that stars Holly Hunter as a hard-living police detective who drinks hard, parties hard, and in a certain episode, winds up cuffed naked to her own bed while being sexed up by an one-night-stand pickup, much to her delight. Normally TV and many movies use a lot of tricks to make such scenes less fun to watch -- dim lights, quick cutting, camera angles that show you a lot of pillow and not much flesh, that sort of thing. Not so "Saving Grace."

Check out this article illustrated with caps from the episode and also images from comparable scenes from "Law and Order SVU," "Birthday Girl" and "Spun."

Wonder Woman's Bondage Secrets

The Golden Age years of Wonder Woman comics, when it's creator William Marston had full control are just FREAKY. There's no other way to describe it. Lesbian bondage a-go-go! This is an actual panel from a Golden Age Wonder Woman comic, and there are MANY other similarly freaky panels from those days. Would NEVER have gotten past modern censors.

Practically everybody knows that in her early days, Wonder Woman was a major lesbian bondage babe. She was into the tying up. She was into the being tied up. And so were ALL the women on Paradise Island. No men to tie them up, so whatcha-gonna-do? Rather than just repeat this bit of rather stale news, I've written an article that digs deeper -- looks at how she became a lesbian bondagette, the conditions that let her creators get away with what is undoubtedly the most blatant lesbian bondage theme in the history of comics prior to the 1990s and maybe just plain ever. I also take a look at Wonder Woman's bondage competitors and wrote a treatment for story about a visit by Wonder Woman and Batman to Transformation Island (where Wonder Woman and her pals reform female criminals through the magic of loving domination and lots of chains. (This is canon, folks -- really!)

The article has tons of illustration (I'm going to eschew illustration in my blog, keeping things clean, y'know.

Here's a link to the Wonder Woman article.

What do conservatives mean by "personal responsibility"?

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