It takes two to Tenga... or maybe just one. Chris Randle explains.
“I actually really love taking, you know, the guy who says ‘I’m a real man!’ and saying to him: ‘Maybe you’re a woman,’” the Japanese cartoonist Gengoroh Tagame told me. Anne Ishii, who produced The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame with Graham Kolbeins and Chip Kidd, has noted how this bara manga challenges stereotypical notions of Asian masculinity, but the audience for Tagame himself was remarkably broad, enticed perhaps by his gender-scrambling fetishism. That following became large enough that Ishii and Kolbeins decided to launch MASSIVE, a line of licensed bara apparel: tank tops with bound musclemen, flexing snapbacks, beach towels covered in beatific hunks. For the latest collection, they’ve partnered with Opening Ceremony, which is how a sex toy wound up in my mailbox.
The ritualized sadomasochism of Tagame’s comics makes the cartoonist something of an outlier amongst bara artists. Jiraiya, whose work is featured on all the new MASSIVE items, specializes in more typical images of fraternal buffness. I cherish his first sweater for them, where two huge men floating through the atmosphere grin at each other flirtatiously. People ask me if they’re celebrities, or elements of some obscure Drake joke. The same illustration appears on the Tenga Double hole cup Opening Ceremony managed to get across the Canadian border. It was the first masturbator I’d seen that didn’t resemble some background prop from Videodrome. What’s erotic about realism, anyway? The more “convincing” the sex toy, I find, the harder it is to imagine those lines thickening a longed-for cock, or the swelter of one particularly fleshy slit. Fantasy dies of verisimilitude. With the abstract Tenga design, you might be fucking any body, or not quite fucking at all.
Harry Mathews’s book Singular Pleasures spies on 61 disparate characters mid-masturbation, “the only universal form of sexual activity,” describing a few of the funny or desperate or curious things we do to get off: “A man is masturbating as he contemplates a finely brushed poem by Wang Wei, seated on a straw mat in his garret in Mukden. An 'ascetic sensualist,' he has striven all his life to unite in one moment of revelation the pleasures of poetry and masturbation. On this warm spring morning in his sixtieth year, he senses that the sublime fusion may finally be at hand.” The MASSIVE Tenga cup is double-ended, one “bitter” and the other “sweet”; did I have a partner who could use it at the same time, OC asked? I did not, poetic as that might be.
In the event I failed to realize that, if you open a disposable sex tube out of bovine curiosity and then replace the cap, the lube can still dry out—no issue after a little material/mental improvisation, picturing a certain thick body in thin filmy red. But, I loved that image of people fucking it simultaneously, as if the two Jiraiya boys were distracted by motions just beyond the frame, doubling themselves so intently that other distinctions collapse. “You are what you fuck, and what fucks you is you already, by tacit admission.” Amongst the hulking
“I actually really love taking, you know, the guy who says ‘I’m a real man!’ and saying to him: ‘Maybe you’re a woman,’” the Japanese cartoonist Gengoroh Tagame told me. Anne Ishii, who produced The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame with Graham Kolbeins and Chip Kidd, has noted how this bara manga challenges stereotypical notions of Asian masculinity, but the audience for Tagame himself was remarkably broad, enticed perhaps by his gender-scrambling fetishism. That following became large enough that Ishii and Kolbeins decided to launch MASSIVE, a line of licensed bara apparel: tank tops with bound musclemen, flexing snapbacks, beach towels covered in beatific hunks. For the latest collection, they’ve partnered with Opening Ceremony, which is how a sex toy wound up in my mailbox.
The ritualized sadomasochism of Tagame’s comics makes the cartoonist something of an outlier amongst bara artists. Jiraiya, whose work is featured on all the new MASSIVE items, specializes in more typical images of fraternal buffness. I cherish his first sweater for them, where two huge men floating through the atmosphere grin at each other flirtatiously. People ask me if they’re celebrities, or elements of some obscure Drake joke. The same illustration appears on the Tenga Double hole cup Opening Ceremony managed to get across the Canadian border. It was the first masturbator I’d seen that didn’t resemble some background prop from Videodrome. What’s erotic about realism, anyway? The more “convincing” the sex toy, I find, the harder it is to imagine those lines thickening a longed-for cock, or the swelter of one particularly fleshy slit. Fantasy dies of verisimilitude. With the abstract Tenga design, you might be fucking any body, or not quite fucking at all.
Harry Mathews’s book Singular Pleasures spies on 61 disparate characters mid-masturbation, “the only universal form of sexual activity,” describing a few of the funny or desperate or curious things we do to get off: “A man is masturbating as he contemplates a finely brushed poem by Wang Wei, seated on a straw mat in his garret in Mukden. An 'ascetic sensualist,' he has striven all his life to unite in one moment of revelation the pleasures of poetry and masturbation. On this warm spring morning in his sixtieth year, he senses that the sublime fusion may finally be at hand.” The MASSIVE Tenga cup is double-ended, one “bitter” and the other “sweet”; did I have a partner who could use it at the same time, OC asked? I did not, poetic as that might be.
In the event I failed to realize that, if you open a disposable sex tube out of bovine curiosity and then replace the cap, the lube can still dry out—no issue after a little material/mental improvisation, picturing a certain thick body in thin filmy red. But, I loved that image of people fucking it simultaneously, as if the two Jiraiya boys were distracted by motions just beyond the frame, doubling themselves so intently that other distinctions collapse. “You are what you fuck, and what fucks you is you already, by tacit admission.” Amongst the hulking
The Hotel Paisano where James Dean, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Dennis Hopper lived during the filming of the movie Giant. Evan gets the James De
