Re: Geishas and Whores
Over at JapanSoc.com I came across a curious and rather odd rant by Atlasien over at (curiously enough for her post) RealityCheck.org. It’s a delightfully titled piece; “Geishas and Whores.” Now, for most of us in the West, when we think of idealized Asian beauty we think of the geisha. A lot of us are also carrying with us a misconception brought back from the immediate post-war period by G.I.s that “Geisha girls” (read: prostitutes) are synonymous with geisha. They aren’t.
The author, ironically enough for an educated Japanese-American woman, is coming from a strictly Western view of what Geisha are. First off they are not prostitutes first and foremost, if at all. Entertainers though they may have been and sought after through the centuries by men of all stripes and shades, they were and still are thought of as symbols of feminine purity. This idea that they were simply high end call girls is entirely ignorant of the rather complex nature of the “floating world” in which prostitutes lived and where geisha were thought of as something to aspire to.
Simply speaking, prostitutes and geisha didn’t even inhabit the same areas of town in the past. Prostitutes in present day Tokyo during the Edo period were restricted to the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters, a den of legalized vice, STDs and shattered dreams. Women who worked here had short and often sickly lives. Tragically, the wives of men who frequented this place paid the price for their husbands’ infidelity in the form of disease. The women who worked in these areas were little more than sex slaves and had lives far removed from that of the fabled geisha of Gion. A simple wikipedia search of Geisha would’ve shown the author that there were quite a few types of “performers” who merely aspired to the image of the geisha. Furthermore, why is it that Shimabara was the pleasure quarter of Kyoto, while geisha have always been found in Gion? As I said before, history shows us that they were from completely different places and were completely different sets of women.
If I may say so the author is coming from a place of cultural confusion and down right ignorance. Turning the canons onto Western men and women who have fixations, of one kind or another, on the geisha is nothing more than an attempt at pushing some sort of weird white guilt trip on people who, though they might trivialize the geisha’s talents by focusing on their looks, genuinely admire geisha for what they are. By categorizing that admiration as some sort of white culture theft while comparing the geisha to working at a strip bar, disassociating herself from her own culture and completely misunderstanding the actual nature of the geisha’s role in Japanese society past and present the author is competing in a bizarre sort of cultural/racial blame game that can only result in ugliness if taken seriously.
All of this in the name of feminism? Try again sister.
Dare I suggest that the author’s eagerness to share her own ignorance on the matter does more harm to Asian women as a whole than does the admiration Western men and women, not to mention others from around the world, have for the geisha?
But then again what do I know.. I’m just a slightly overweight white guy. /sigh







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