I came away no wiser or better informed than when I started. But I did find some eyebrow-raising art to share! And so, here it is. What in the hell is a potgirl? A potgirl (or potboy, less often, or sometimes even a pot-futa) is a person modified by unspecified magic or technology to remove their limbs. They are installed in a pot or similar container that maintains them, alive but perfectly helpless, again by fantastical means. It usually appears that most of their body has been discarded. Their sex organs, however, often seem to have been ludicrously enhanced or even rearranged for display and easy access.

One of the things I went looking for was potgirl backstories. Are these people cursed by vengeful wizards? Kidnapped by lustful nanotechnologists? Cheerful sex-workers with access to easy body-mod tech? Well-made sex toys with no sentience at all? Anyway, I came up short. A lot of this art comes out of the hentai/doujinshi world, and if there’s literature with it, I can’t find it or read it.

You might well be wondering “What is the appeal?” I can puzzle out several angles there. First and most obvious: BDSM and bondage appeal. “If I tie them up well enough, they can’t even struggle when I fuck them.” Sexual power like that appeals to lots of people. Likewise helplessness, on the other side. The jar becomes the ultimate bondage, maybe?

Closely related: what an objectification trip! Here the objectification becomes utterly literal. Note that while objectification can be misogynistic, it need not necessarily be so. On a “chan” site I can’t link because of the hostile malware in the ads, some anonymous shitposter wrote:

They purely exist to be fuck, sucked and groped, boiling a woman down to what they really are, a pair of tits and 2 holes.

Obviously, that guy is a dickhead. He doesn’t see the humanity in women. But then, very next post:

This, except I’m a dude getting off to the thought of being someone’s pot boy toy.

Fortunately for the hopeful pot boy toy, the artists out there have got him covered.

Based on some of the other potgirl and ladypot artworks out there, beyond basic “bondage sex” and objectification fantasies there is a lot of fanservice going on. I showed you Princess Peach in a pot already in this post. Now her regal charms are eternally accessible to her many fans. There’s also what looks like a lot of pure revenge and sadism, where the point of the artwork seems to be the distress of the potted victim. My theory here is that the artist, or perhaps some commissioner, is working out notions like those of the channish shitposter I quoted:

If you know of any detailed writing about the potgirl porn phenomenon, please leave a comment! I’d love to know more about it.