Occasionally I’ve run into people who have trouble understanding the concept of being sexually attracted to drawn images. In terms of anime fandom, this often comes in two forms, either disagreeing with a certain character design style or disagreeing with the very notion that anime characters look human enough to even warrant attraction. The latter appears to happen with people unfamiliar with anime and its depictions of sexuality, while the former, which I want to focus on, seems to occur when people from different areas of fandom encounter each other. “I don’t know how you could find Sayla Mass hot,” the Evangelion fan might say to the Gundam enthusiast, who will then fire off that Ayanami Rei is too anorexic and not like a “real woman” at all.

Some of the contention comes from the changes in prevailing trends in anime and manga art styles. For example, younger fans might not understand why other older fans think a certain character is “hot,” while the older fan may see newer characters and accuse them of looking freakish. And neither side is “wrong” in this case, their preferences are just different. Who’s to say which is closer to “human attractiveness?”

And so all of this recently got me thinking about the very concept of depicting humans sexually, and just how subjective it can be. Particularly, it reminded me of classic Japanese erotic woodblock prints known as “shunga.”

Artist: Miyagawa Isshou

Though they clearly do not look like anime or manga characters from the past fifty years, the women in shunga do share something in common with modern erotic stories such as Bible Black in that they all have faces which could not possibly exist in reality, but are still rendered depictions of a beautiful face concurrent with the trends of the time.

The other thing shunga has in common with erotic manga is that both are clearly designed for masturbatory purposes. I’ve intentionally chosen an image that’s relatively tame, but a trip to the NSFW wiki entry on the subject will make the “utility” of shunga that much more obvious. While you’re on the page , you might also notice that it’s not only the faces that are “unrealistic;” over-sized genitalia for both men and women and torsos contorted at angles physically impossible are common. While photographs did not exist in that period, they could have very well drawn people in more realistic poses, and yet they chose not to.

If you’re attracted to anime characters but at the end of the day look at shunga and think, “Man, I have no idea how anyone could find this hot,” then I think that can be a very good thing. On some level, it means that you can relate to those who have trouble with the idea of finding certain character designs sexy (or even the idea that drawn images of humans can be sexy at all without being photo-realistic) and so at the very least promotes a degree of understanding.