No matter how amazing the subject matter is, there always will be a nerdy stigma surrounding the genre, whether you like it or not. Trying to defend yourself while talking about watching anime is already a tough task, but if you are a fan of any of these anime, life gets much much harder. They are either incredibly silly, bizarre, overly racy , or just plain dumb. Sometimes one show can be all of those things! Anime is a strange medium where weird stories can come to life and not all of them are the best, to be honest. If you have ever watched any of these anime series, you simply know you could never watch them with anyone else, because they are just so ridiculous and embarrassing.
The word ecchi has been adopted by western fans of Japanese media to describe works with sexual overtones. In Japanese, the word ecchi is often used to describe a person's conduct, but in western fandom, it has come to be used to refer to softcore or playful sexuality, as distinct from the word hentai , which connotes perversion or fetishism. Hentai was introduced in the Meiji period as a term for change of form or transformation in science and psychology. In this context, it was used to refer to disorders such as hysteria or to describe paranormal phenomena like hypnosis or telepathy. Matsuzawa calls it a period characterized by a " hentai boom ". In , the magazine Shukan Asahi reported that a woman who was groped by a stranger in a movie theater reacted with "ara etchi yo" "hey, that's perverse".