Mediating the good life: prostitution and the Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1880s–1920s

This article examines how the Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union, in the name of promoting liberty and rights of women in their relations with men, constructed hierarchies to ascribe value to themselves through moral condemnation. The JWCTU used extramarital sex as a political issue to strengthen the position of the legal wife in the household as opposed to the concubine and prostitute. Their efforts to prohibit Japanese women from going abroad as prostitutes, while understood as an attempt to end a system of slavery that violated the inherent rights of Japanese womanhood, was actually a desire to regulate the behaviour of the poor. The JWCTU based its moral reform agenda on the importance of premarital chastity, strict monogamy and the obligation to work for the good of the nation. Its construction of prostitution as evil represents an important strand in the history of the relationship between prostitution and family as a socio-political issue in modern Japan.

Why Australian men pay for it

Shows Australian men justifying why they pay for sex and prostitutes with no consideration of the exploitation of the sex worker.

Occupational health and safety among commercial sex workers

The concept of occupational health and safety (OHS) for commercial sex workers has rarely been investigated, perhaps because of the often informal nature of the workplace, the associated stigma, and the frequently illegal nature of the activity. We reviewed the literature on health, occupational risks, and safety among commercial sex workers. Cultural and local variations and commonalities were identified. Dimensions of OHS that emerged included legal and policing risks, risks associated with particular business settings such as streets and brothels, violence from clients, mental health risks and protective factors, alcohol and drug use, repetitive strain injuries, sexually transmissible infections, risks associated with particular classes of clients, issues associated with male and transgender commercial sex workers, and issues of risk reduction that in many cases are associated with lack of agency or control, stigma, and legal barriers. We further discuss the impact and potential of OHS interventions for commercial sex workers. The OHS of commercial sex workers covers a range of domains, some potentially modifiable by OHS programs and workplace safety interventions targeted at this population. We argue that commercial sex work should be considered as an occupation overdue for interventions to reduce workplace risks and enhance worker safety.

Sex in Japan's globalization, 1870-1930: prostitutes, emigration and nation building

Based on archival research undertaken in Japan and Britain, Mihalopoulos offers a new perspective on the relations between gender hierarchies and the political economy in a newly modernized Japan. The industrialization of Japan in the late nineteenth century coincided with attempts to establish new trade links abroad. The peasant class were sent overseas as ‘free labourers’ in a state-sponsored programme that also sought to maintain traditional codes of behaviour and morally acceptable forms of work. This study examines the particular impact of these restrictions on Japanese prostitutes abroad and reveals how the freedom offered to the poor by the state was limited and highly selective.

An exercise in good government: Fukuzawa Yukichi on emigration and nation-building

Fukuzawa Yukichi penned a series of articles from 1884 to 1896 on why the Japanese must emigrate and settle abroad. Most striking is Fukuzawa's opposition to any legislation preventing the movement of Japanese subjects abroad, including rural women who migrated with the purpose of engaging in prostitution abroad. According to Fukuzawa, the challenge facing Japanese government policy makers was not at what point do you say "no" to poor rural women migrating abroad, but the opposite, at what point should you say "yes."

An empirical investigation of hypersexuality

The aim of this study was to investigate the nature of hypersexuality and the personality factors associated with the desire for and experience of high frequency sexual behavior. Participants in the study were 69 male and 93 female university students. Respondents reported on their desire for and experience of masturbation, oral sex, sexual intercourse, pornography, indecent phone calls or letters, prostitution, exhibitionism, voyeurism, as well as providing self-report measures which evaluated their levels of state and trait anxiety, depression, obsessive and compulsive symptoms and fear of intimacy. The results demonstrated that subjects who engaged in high-frequency voyeurism were more depressed than low-frequency voyeurs. Respondents in the high-frequency sexual deviant desire and behavior groups appeared to have more obsessive-compulsive symptoms in comparison to the low-frequency deviant sexual behavior and desire groups. Increased psychopathology was not associated with high-frequency non-deviant sexual behaviors and desires. This finding raised the question of whether labels such as sexual compulsion and addiction are merely pathologizing illegal sexual behavior.