THE RELATIONSHIP REPLACEMENT INDUSTRY: EGGS, PROSTITUTES, AND SOAPLAND
For a lot of the herbivore-esque guys we spoke to, it still seems like it would take quite a lot to overcome the hurdle of shyness to properly engage in these group dating activities. There were also women who weren’t willing to settle for the restrictions that come with traditional marriages and families. Like women in the United States and Europe and an ever-growing number of other places, they want to have rewarding work lives and careers too. The problem in Tokyo is that people who aren’t interested in or capable of entering a traditional romantic relationship don’t have the alternative of an active casual dating culture like you may find in New York.
Lucky for them, Japan has not only a huge sex industry but also what some have dubbed a “relationship replacement” industry that provides everything from “cuddling cafés” (where clients pay for things like pats on the head, eye contact, and ear cleaning with a Q-tip) to full-on sex robots that are built to last for years.15 I never thought I would say this, but of those two things, having sex with a robot seems like the more reasonable option.
The most popular kind of establishment in the relationship replacement industry is the hostess club, which is basically the latest variation of a long-standing Japanese business tradition where men go to a nice bar-type atmosphere and pay women to provide intimate personal service in a romantic but not explicitly sexual way. The women are like modern-day geishas: They light the men’s cigarettes, serve them drinks, and listen attentively to their conversation, doing more or less what an ideal Japanese wife or girlfriend would do.16 Lots of men stop by these clubs after work, either alone or in groups. To be clear, though, this doesn’t lead to any sexual contact. No nudity or sex happens at hostess clubs. It’s basically like prostitution, but they just hang out with you. I was very confused.
Al, a young expat originally from Baltimore, tried to explain the motivations. “It’s like, I’m lonely, I’m scared of people,” he said. “I need to vent or just have a drink with someone who will listen to me and not judge me. They’re paying for the security. They’re paying not to be rejected.”
Women also go to host clubs, which provide the same service: outgoing men who converse and have drinks with them. Again, this does not lead to sex; it’s purely for companionship. These women are basically paying to hang out with nonherbivore men for a while.
But what about sex? Prostitution of the penis-into-vagina sort is illegal in Japan, and while there is a black market, the Japanese have also developed some creative legal alternatives. One that is quite popular and came up several times in our focus groups was Soapland, where a guy lies on a waterproof mattress and a woman covers them both in soapy water and slides all over him. You can pay extra for additional services like oral sex or a hand job. Soapland, which is just a ridiculous word, does not carry a huge stigma. (On a side note, I would give pretty much anything to have been in the room where the guy said, “I’ve got it! We’ll call it . . . Soapland!”)
Some men told us if they went out in groups of friends, it wouldn’t be absurd for one dude to be like, “Okay, I’ll catch you guys later. I’m going to hit Soapland real quick.” Again, it seems that, beyond the sexual pleasure, Soapland is providing a safe outlet for rejection-free romantic exploits. Why go to a nightclub to try to find casual sex and risk rejection when you can go to Soapland and be 100 percent sure a woman will place you on a waterproof mattress, cover you in lubricant, and then slide up and down your oiled-up body?
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And of course there are straight-up illegal prostitutes. When we pushed this topic, we were surprised at how prostitution seemed much more common and accepted than in the United States. One participant in a focus group was a teaching assistant at a local university, and he told us that his college students often talked to him about their trips to visit prostitutes. It didn’t seem to be a big deal to him. The students might as well have said that they went to get ice cream after class.
Now, admittedly, there are no perfect data on how often men go to prostitutes in different countries. But the best statistics we could find showed that roughly 37 percent of Japanese men have paid for sex at least once, compared with 16 percent of French men, 14 percent of American men, and 7 to 9 percent of British men.17