So let’s start with the obvious: Yes, tentacle porn is very much a real thing. But what is it? Are people actually turned on by it? Would masturbating to it be a humane way to identify whether you might have an octopus fetish?
Before I can answer these complex questions, it’s important to know the origins of this hyperspecific subgenre. After doing some research (in an incognito browser window—being a sex editor has its at-work limits), I can tell you that this form of erotica actually has a long and storied past. But just a warning: What follows is, unsurprisingly, a little bit NSFW. Let’s dive in!
Perhaps the earliest known instance of tentacle porn comes from shunga, or Japanese erotic woodblock carving, an ancient art form and the most cumbersome way to view porn until the advent of the Oculus Rift. Katsushika Hokusai, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century woodblock artist behind the dorm-room staple The Great Wave off Kanagawa (which subsequently gave us this emoji 🌊 ), was low-key super horny.
Case in point: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, a woodblock print that shows a lady going to third base with a couple of octopuses. It’s a stunning example of antique octoporn:
Tentacle Porn Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know
ART Collection / Alamy
Though there’s a lot to unpack here about the ethics of fetishizing bestiality and the nature of consent in fantasy scenarios, it’s interesting to note that the text on the carving suggests that both the lady in question and the octopuses were totally into it.
Also, neither here nor there, but goddess Peggy Olson had a print of it in Mad Men!
Fast-forward a few hundred years. Tentacle porn has persisted, though until pretty recently it remained primarily popular in Japan. Sure, that’s where it originated, but there’s also a semipractical reason. According to Toshio Maeda, a pioneering Japanese erotic manga animator with the enviable nickname “tentacle master”—sorry, he called dibs on it—the appendages were used as a way to flout Japan’s stringent obscenity laws.
In an interview with AAN (reported on Kotaku), Maeda explained that, if his erotic drawings were deemed “too extreme,” his editors could potentially be arrested. Adding tentacles—which “are like hands and legs or like, uh, just body parts, so it’s OK to go there,” said Maeda—skirted the laws just enough. Even now pornography in Japan isn’t allowed to just straight-up show genitalia, which is why it’s often blurred out in live-action porn.
Tentacle porn in its current incarnation has something for everyone—as long as they’re, you know, into tentacles. There’s the animated kind, called tentai (a portmanteau of tentacle and hentai, or Japanese erotic manga), which can feature sea creatures or aliens or robots or really anything else that could conceivably have slithering appendages. There’s also a genre of live-action tentacle porn, which often features slimy puppet tentacles getting all 20,000 leagues up in a real person. In both types the flavor of the action varies wildly. Sometimes it’s done in a way that appears obviously consensual; other times it approximates bondage.
According to clinical sexologist Dr. Eve, there are a few reasons that people might be into tentacle porn. Though she notes that it has its roots in hentai, “the number-one fetish women have is being dominated,” she writes in an email to Glamour. “So I can understand that this ‘tentacle porn’ could appeal to a genre of women—the idea of being tied down [and] dominated is highly arousing.” She adds, “This porn is penis-centric; the fantasy of being penetrated by multiple penises and having all one’s orifices penetrated simultaneously can be arousing for women.”
Still, she says, tentacle porn is a distinctly different fetish from BDSM because BDSM “can only happen between sane, sober, and consenting adults. Tentacle porn does not make this possible as it appears that the thrill is the woman being tied up by this creature, and how do you tell a creature to stop?”
It’s also important to note, as Dr. Eve does, that about 10 percent of the population has a fetish, and that being into something unconventional doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. “Most people never find out what really arouses them,” she says. “The Internet offers curious people this opportunity. And then people who do know but have what they fear is defined as a shameful secret fetish find enormous online support via like-minded community groups.” So thanks, the Internet!
And speaking of like-minded tentacle enthusiasts, there are a ton of tentacle-shaped sex toys on the market. Just look at this coterie of tentacle dildo purveyors on Etsy.
So that’s the long, fascinating history of tentacle porn. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to Yelp tattoo parlors in my area.
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