I must have lived a sheltered life. By chance, I recently stumbled across references to tentacle sex, tentacle porn, and even tentacle rape, which apparently have been a motif in Japanese art for a long time (and continue to the present).

I put “tentacle sex” into Google and back came 64,000 hits. Who would have thought? Certainly not me.

In fact, the famed 19th century Japanese illustrator Hokusai made a woodcut print of a woman being ravished by an octopus. You know Hokusai from his famous Great Wave of Kanagawa print, but not everyone knows that one.

Most everything you want or need to know about this subject can be found at this Wikipedia entry. It also has the Hokusai print, links to modern pornographers who use the technique to get around Japanese censorship laws, and even some parodies. Scroll down to the very end to find the link to a blog where a woman explains why the idea of it turns her on.

Oh, and here’s another site with some more information. There’s a lengthy discussion of how the tentacled ones behave in nature. Apparently the males cannot tell the difference at first between male and female and act accordingly. The Internet certainly is an educational place.

It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?