What are these for? I am so confused. Are they just plastic collectible butts? This is so problematic on so many levels.

I'm pretty sure they're just collectible plastic butts.

Yep.

Where are the men's butts! :D

Cat is slang for vagina and also reminds one of how catty females are. Active as in sexually active. Interesting collection, I wonder if there are already feet ones. If there are any of men butts they'd be in a gay store.

Perhaps cat meaning pussy cat? Anyone, anyone?

Plastic hip collectors? Now that's odd!

From the links where these are sold: Didn't think we forgot about all you lonely Otaku out there did you?

From Wikipedia: Otaku (おたく or オタク?) is a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime and manga.

And

The term was popularized in the English speaking world in William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru, which has several references to otaku. In particular, the term was defined as 'pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit'.

Sounds about right.

Oh, and another example of a pathological techno fetish w/ a social deficit might be found here:

http://www.huntingforbambi.com/

Not sure if that one has been posted before. You could apparently really buy the videos (not any more), but they were staged and people did raise genuine hell when it first appeared. Snopes covers the history and timeline of it.

There is a big market for collectible figures in otaku circles. Some of it has dribbled down to the West in form of designer vinyl toys like the Kubricks.

There are tens of thousands of figure series in Japan. Most of them are normal depictions of the characters of manga, anime and videogames, or just plainly cute: Bleach, Rozen Maiden, Monster Hunter Pig, Dragon Quest Monsters.

Some play to otaku fetishes in a titillatingly cute way, like collections of girls in maid uniforms or anthropomorphic personifications of machinery: Costume Party Maid Cafe, Konami Mecha Musume.

And some are more definitely in the erotic genre, even more than the disincarnated torsos from the above post. Heisei Democracy is a weblog that features this last kind of fanservicey figures quite often.

While in Japan people of all ages and sexes are consumers of manga and anime (and there are quite innocent figure collections of pretty much every series you will have heard of, from Sailor Moon to Naruto -- even figures of the high school Naruto alternate universe characters featured in one of the credits of the anime series), the otaku fringe, and specially the figure-obsessed otaku, are still disproportionally male and hormonally-overloaded, so a significant section of the figure market caters to this niche population. Hence the erotic themes.

Oh, and about the "cat" thing: Cats in Japan are viewed as adorable balls of fur, and it is quite common for "mischievous but cute" female characters to have some cat-like characteristics, from doing the :3 (look sideways to see the emoticon) smile (like, um, this) to full-fledged catgirl/ kemonomimi status.

We do have a post about Hunting for Bambi:

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/01/10/hunting-for-bambi-that-is-women/