"Hentai won't transform a "normal" person into a slicing and dicing rapist, nor will it transform a disturbed sex offender into a health, productive member of society. This kind of stuff isn't an "On" or "Off" switch for deviant sexual behavior. It doesn't affect your actions so much as, potentially and quite harmfully, your attitudes. Its influence is insidious, subtle even. If there is, at last, a theory that explains the likely consequences of excessive hentai consumption, it is that of Cultivation. Developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s Larry Gross and George Gerbner's hotly debated social theory explores the long-term effects of modern media on the viewing public, on its general ideologies and given assumptions. Michael Morgan, who joined the Gross-Gerbner research team years later, summarizes the theory as such: Cultivation researchers have argued that these messages of power, dominance, segregation, and victimization cultivate relatively restrictive and intolerant views regarding personal morality and freedoms, women's roles, and minority rights. Rather than stimulating aggression, cultivation theory contends that heavy exposure to television violence cultivates insecurity, mistrust, and alienation, and a willingness to accept potentially repressive measures in the name of security, all of which strengthens and helps maintain the prevailing hierarchy of social power. ("Audience Research: Cultivation Analysis," The Museum of Broadcast Communications; emphasis mine) Hentai as a tool for status quo preservation? Might seem like a stretch, except that, in the lionization of manly power trips, these films cultivate gender identities as rigid as...well, as the pitched tents they inspire."