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Quotes
Concerning the Size of Genitalia in Shunga.
[...] “Over-sizing of the
organs is a feature of shunga, but they are not
depicted as universally large. More realistically sized ones
appear, mostly on younger people or on the very old.
Shunga
abet the fantasy of the adult male who wishes to imagine himself
larger than a youth to compensate for the latter’s greater
potency and stamina and also still safely distanced
from dotage.
In point of fact, there is little
real evidence of Edo-period women’s fetishization of penis
size, nor indeed of males’, who never seem to have mentioned
it as a source of pride; boys were
rented
on the basis of their ‘chrysanthemum seat’, not their
phallus.”[...]
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Timon Screech.
( – Sex and the Floating
World, Erotic Images in Japan 1700-1820 )
[...] “Probably the most
striking elements in Japanese erotic images is the giant,
XXX-large size of the genitals. Men are depicted with proudly
erect penises that look like long, thick
poles and consequently the women
are given huge vaginas to accommodate them. Obviously, these are
not realistic dimensions, and some people even attribute the
relatively low
number of pictures depicting
fellatio within shunga to these exaggerated dimensions:
how on earth is an artist supposed to draw an act of fellatio
when the man’s penis is so grotesque
and the woman’s mouth so
small ?
There are theories that genitals
of these dimensions match the size of the heads, giving them
equivalent status, or that every detail of the genitals can be
well observed when magnified
to such a degree. However,
this is more a clever device intended to focus the viewer’s
attention on the genital area, the main point of interest. More
importantly, shunga (and therefore also the size of the genitals)
must be seen as representing an artist’s fantasies.
Occasionally, artists allowed their imaginations to run wild,
and there a few prints that only depict the genitals in extreme close-up.
Therefore, as shunga do
not represent reality, we cannot consider them as true
representations od Edo-period sexuality. On the other hand, they
can be seen as one aspect of Edo- period sexuality, and research
into shunga can contribute to a complete image of the sexuality
of this period”.[...]
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( Inge Klompmakers – Japanese erotic prints, shunga by
Harunobu & Koryusai )
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