Japan’s female erotic entertainment industrial complex was absolutely banging in the Edo Period.
Everyone’s heard of geishas and brothels and red light districts,
but people don’t talk enough about the male entertainers.
When will men get their day? Today, in this video.
Male prostitution was a pretty big market.
Not nearly as big as its more feminine counterpart, but still of decent girth.
Unlike the female version, the male version was not quite legal, but the authorities mostly tolerated it.
Male prostitution back then was like weed in the United States.
Technically illegal, but everyone does it and the number of people who actually get caught are a minority.
A man in the Edo Period tired of impregnating his blanket could always seek the bed of a male entertainer,
and he had many options.
One of the most popular establishments was teahouses. The other was kabuki theaters
but we’ll talk about those in another video.
Ah teahouses. They didn’t exactly serve tea, but they did quench your thirst.
Well okay, they did serve tea but it wasn’t the point. People didn’t come for their iced matcha milk tea with honey boba.
These brothels were often mixed, with both male and female entertainers,
but there were plenty of teahouses that only had male meat on the menu.
The lives of these entertainers were usually harsh.
The nice makeup and glamorous clothing they wore for their customers hid a world of misery.
Most entered the profession out of desperation.
That great recruitment tool called poverty made parents sell their sons and daughters
into so-called apprenticeships at teahouses.
Some were as young as 7 years old, although that was rare.
These apprenticeship contracts usually lasted 10 years.
The children were indentured servants, paying off their parents’ debts.
They couldn’t even run away, because their penniless parents and siblings would get a knock at the door
from collectors wanting their money back.
These contracts were pretty common even outside the seks trade.
Merchants who needed workers would pay parents to hand over their kids for 10 years or so, training them as apprentices.
Once the boys came to the teahouse, they were fed and schooled in the art of entertainment.
Education at Horny Hogwarts included all kinds of useful skills of seduction such as
singing, dancing, and giving up on dreams.
Over time, naturally, some boys would excel at certain skills. Some became expert shamisen players.
The shamisen held a special place in people’s crotches back in those days.
It was an erotic instrument.
The twang of the shamisen penetrated the ears of listeners, inserting into their heads
sticky thoughts of drinking with prostitutes and sweaty bliss beneath silk sheets.
Some boys were good at juggling, some could drink the whole night, some could make shadow puppets.
One writer talked about a boy who could write words on the wall by spitting water from his mouth.
Ah the old Spit Calligraphy, that’s also my go-to move during foreplay.
Teahouses happily put up posters about each boy and his specialties to entice customers.
They also advertised what role each boy played as: men, women, or youth.
That’s right, entertainers could present themselves as men, women, or youths.
In Japan’s world of pleasure, appearance was everything.
Dressing and acting like men was pretty easy.
You just put on a shaved head hairstyle and an air of superiority over women.
Some boys specialized in being women. They were extreme method actors.
From a young age, they lived as women. They lived with girls, separate from the boys.
They slept in the women’s rooms. They bathed with women. They spoke and acted like women.
They even squatted when peeing. They also stopped pooping because women don’t poop.
Many of these boys likely grew up identifying as women.
And some boys specialized in being male youths. This was pretty easy since they were mostly youths themselves.
The word for youth is wakashu 若衆, and it means a boy around 11 years old to mid-20s.
I have a video about the fascinating lives of wakashu if you wanna check it out.
The sexiest thing about youths to the Japanese public were their forelocks,
that patch of hair on their foreheads.
Forelocks really got people’s juices flowing. Youths were the most popular type of male entertainer.
The ideal male entertainer was 15 to 18 years old.
Over that age, people said their beauty started to fade.
Both men and women spent their money at male teahouses, although most customers were men.
The man-dressed entertainers were usually of older age,
because they looked more like adults or they were adults. They catered to female customers.
The woman-dressed entertainers catered to men,
but once in a while a woman may have slipped beneath their kimonos.
The youth-dressed entertainers attracted men and women,
but the majority of their customers were men.
Teahouses started exposing their apprentices to customers at a very young age, usually before 15.
There were extreme cases of boys as young as 7.
Seks work wasn’t kind on their bodies.
New apprentices who came to the teahouse had to prep for their future as seks workers by expanding their rear tunnels.
They were usually too small to accept any traffic.
So they were told to push certain toys up in there several times a day for a month or so, gradually using bigger and bigger toys.
Hemorrhoids were a common problem, and so were STDs. Basically everyone had syphilis or gonorrhea, or both.
Entertainers hit up merchants for hemorrhoid cream and medicine.
They bought cures for syphilis and gonorrhea that didn’t work.
They bought all kinds of things to support their craft, like lubricants, makeup, and seks toys.
Merchants even sold artificial anii.
Sellers erected a whole market around the adult entertainment industry.
So what services did these entertainers offer to teahouse visitors?
Well, a tea enthusiast could expect a fun night of music, song, or dance.
The shamisen was always a popular instrument. Conversation was important.
And there was something else, oh seks.
As an entertainer, when servicing men, you would dress as a woman or a youth.
Most of the time the customer went for youths.
The customer was always the top, the inserter, and the youth was always the insertee.
This was similar to male-male relationships outside of prostitution,
where the older partner was always the top.
However, in the teahouse, there was one difference.
Even if you were older than the customer, you would still dress like a youth or a woman,
and had to let the customer become the dominant one.
It made sense in this world where appearance was everything.
Normally, in the real world, when a youth became an adult, he shaved his forelock.
A shaved crown was the sign of an adult man.
But in the teahouse world, older entertainers would keep their forelocks for much longer, to look younger and more beautiful.
When seeing female customers, usually the entertainer was the inserter.
What female customers wanted varied, but normally younger ones assumed
the passive role, and older customers assumed the more dominant role in bed.
Customers were not always pleasant.
Entertainers had to sleep with people who smelled or didn’t brush their teeth.
Sometimes customers were violent. Not surprising, with all the alcohol that they drank.
Samurai and Buddhist monks were frequent consumers of youthful flesh.
Whenever a large number of monks came to the city for a conference,
male prostitution prices skyrocketed like Uber rates during natural disasters.
All payments went to the teahouse.
Entertainers under contract usually didn’t see the money they made, or they saw little of it.
Things were not all bad. Some entertainers did it willingly for profit and pleasure,
mostly independent ones not under forced contract.
As a male entertainer, your best chance of leaving the teahouse at a young age
was for a wealthy patron to buy out your contract, because patrons sometimes sponsored
entertainers to become independent kabuki actors slash prostitutes.
This was always an exciting time for the entertainer.
Whenever someone buys out the contract of a teahouse worker, an angel touches itself with its wings.
Many a successful acting career started this way.
If you didn’t know, kabuki theater and prostitution went together like macaroni and cheese, like milk and cereal,
like butter and everything.
Teahouses supplied apprentice actors to kabuki theaters,
and provided rooms for actors to meet with their fans for seksytime.
Teahouse youths worked hard on their acting skills, but almost none of them would rise up enough to be on a theater stage.
Most of them stayed in teahouses for their entire careers.
To learn about kabuki actor-prostitutes, check out this video that may or may not be ready.
We have a new emperor patron this week: Tenshi (天使). Thank you so much I really appreciate it.
We also have new regular Patreon patrons:
Olga Christensen,
Paula Kramer,
MeowMeowKittyPaws oh my god,
and Eric Deans.
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