Selling Songs And Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian And Kamakura Japan

Selling Songs and Smiles explores female sexual entertainment ("songs and smiles") during Japan’s Heian and Kamakura periods, examining the gradual construction of a transgressive identity ("prostitute") for women engaged in the sex trade. Over some four hundred years, the character and public image of sexual entertainment was shaped by growing restrictions on female sexual activity and increasingly negative views of the female body—themselves the result of socioeconomic change in society at large. Although it is possible to paint a picture of the general decline in the status of women in the sex trade, there were also ambiguities in how they were regarded by society in the very oldest extant references to them in historical sources. Using essays, diaries, legal documents, stories, and illustrated stories, this original and distinctive work unravels social attitudes toward female sexual entertainers and examines changes in their trade and the treatment they received at the hands of the court, the bakufu, and religious institutions. Marriage was not firmly defined in Heian times, and female chastity not especially valued. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to develop concepts of sexual transgression, and there were no terms that can be translated as "prostitute" or "prostitution." Women who provided professional sexual services for the aristocracy did so in conjunction with entertainment such as singing or dancing and in most discourse formed an occupational rather than moral category. The comparative sexual freedom in which the sexual entertainment trade developed began to change, however, even in the late Heian period. Buddhist concerns over clerical celibacy cast shadows on female sexuality, and the authorities’ need to maintain order impelled efforts to control sexual activities that might endanger the social order. By the mid-Kamakura period, women who traded in sex but not necessarily song and dance began to attract the notice of authorities, leading to tentative efforts to define the sex trade as transgressive and to limit the rights of its practitioners in certain areas. Trades once controlled by the women themselves came under male supervision. Nevertheless, before early modern times, sexual entertainment was never made illegal, and in comparison to premodern China or western Europe, its practitioners were only slightly stigmatized.Compellingly argued and stylishly written, Selling Songs and Smiles challenges several prevailing interpretations, most notably the organic connection posed by scholars between shamans and sexual entertainers. Based on her exhaustive research into multiple types of primary sources, Goodwin views women involved in the sex trade neither as entirely social marginals nor artisans situated within normal societal bounds. What emerges from her study is the complex and often contradictory nature of the Heian and Kamakura discourse on sexual entertainment.