Geishas and Whores
While I’m not “sex-positive” I don’t reject all the theories, and I have sympathy with a lot of sex worker activism, so I do want to say this: lumping in all sex workers is bad, and so is splitting them all apart. It’s elitist and deeply nasty to say “I’m the nice clean expensive sex worker, not like those low-class dirty whores.” All human beings should be valued the same. But different people in the industry happen to have different experiences. I wouldn’t call myself a whore for working there, or claim that I know what it’s like for all sex workers, although I suppose I was on a kind of whore continuum.
One thing I noticed that while the environment at the strip club was pretty racist, it wasn’t any more racist than the racial hierarchies at the regular restaurants I was used to working in. And this brought up a question I still wonder about today. Do the actions of Asian-American women have any impact at all on our sexual stereotypes? Does it matter if we look or act whorish or geisha-ish or virginal or nonsexual or work in the sex industry or refuse to work in it? Or will the predominantly white media continue to import and circulate our images, reading into them whatever gets them off, regardless of our reality and our choices? The thought of such powerlessness is really sad.
Many white men (and to a lesser extent, other non-Asian men) have an obvious, direct sexual interest in controlling these images. In the case of Asian-American men it’s more complicated and involves interplay between assimilation and opposition stances, between race and sex, between power and powerlessness. For example, what’s the effect on the psyche of an Asian-American man consuming Asian woman fetish pornography designated for a white male audience? For any Asian-American, male or female, gay or straight, developing a healthy sexual self-image can be a horribly difficult battle.
But the weirdest piece has got to be white women. You would think they wouldn’t have a stake in this dynamic, but the most ardent geisha-worshippers seem to be white women who identify with geisha. They want to remake themselves into treasured objects. They want to steal a sexuality that’s already stolen. The project of arcane knowledge mastery, of transformation, of “becoming”, gives them sexual excitement.
If you think I’m making this stuff up, go to a website called immortalgeisha.com then click on “About Us” then “The Face Behind.”
These women need to realize what they’re doing and who they’re hurting. They’re just as complicit as the anonymous man who shouts a pornographic joke at a young, vulnerable Asian-American girl. But we’re not real to them. Our images provide so much more satisfaction than our reality.
To make a long story short, call me a cranky prude and an inauthentic Japanese all you want, I don’t give a damn about geisha. If you’re sexually obsessed with them, hey, whatever, I’m not going to tell you how to run your sex life. But don’t pretend it’s some kind of noble homage. It gets you off. And you need to distinguish fantasy from reality. If shoes happen to be your thing, do you go to Payless, tell the clerks how to position the shoes and then start masturbating in front of them?
Own up to your fetish and at least try to be responsible about it.
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