What is Ahegao?
In the last few years, I’ve started seeing the word “ahegao” in the context of various kinds of hentai porn. I learned from context that it meant something like the English phrases “O-face” or “cum face” — as in, “He showed her his cum face, she showed him her O-face” — but I’ve been vague on the details. I’ve also seen it explained as the stylized face of somebody who has been “fucked silly”.
Wikipedia confirms and clarifies:
Ahegao (アヘ顔) is a term in Japanese pornography for an exaggerated facial expression of characters (usually females) during sex, typically with rolling or crossed eyes, protruding tongue, and slightly reddened face, to show enjoyment or ecstasy. The style is often used in erotic manga, anime (hentai), and video games (erogē).
One point not captured by the Wikipedia article is that an ahegao face is often paired with a V-shaped two-fingers-up hand sign, that we in the west might parse as a V-for-victory gesture or the “peace” sign. This is a common gesture by photographic subjects in Japan, and is often seen in ahegao porn as well. But if you see a double V with an ahegao face, that combination may additionally have ironic or parody connotations.
Once I dialed into the notion of “ahegao” and started watching out for it, I quickly came to understand why I had more-or-less failed to notice it previously. I don’t associate a sharply-protruding tongue with female orgasm, and I’d be more likely to say that someone’s “eyes rolled back in their head” during a good orgasm than that their eyes had crossed.
This is, I think, a matter of cultural convention. I’ve seen a fair bit of Japanese porn in my time, but it hasn’t convinced me that Japanese women look or behave as differently during orgasm (pornified or not) as the ahegao conventions of drawn Japanese hentai and manga might suggest. As an artistic convention, though, it works if the viewer understands it; and that seems not to be an issue.
Ahegao is enough of a thing that it’s become a standard keyword and/or tag in porn searches. You can even filter-search for ahegao cams on a big webcam service and find hundreds of results. To me that means the ahegao-style orgasm face has become its own fetish, which like any fetish is then sought out in various sexual contexts. My suspicion, completely unsupported by data, is that watching and jerking off to a lot of porn that uses this visual convention makes the visual convention into a sexual trigger in its own right. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! A lot of visual fetishes seemingly work the same way.
Image credits, top to bottom: The ahegao-faced woman with eleven hearts is by the artist Yaksha. The manga hand-job one is by Gorugonzora. The two cum-covered cuties flashing double peace signs are by an unknown artist. The double-peace-sign manga honey exuding love hearts is by Skeb. The peace-flashing blonde with the pointy tongue is by Kotori Mizuminato. The collared and sticky ahegao beauty is by Xfour. And the one with cum on her glasses is by Fumizuki Misoka.
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