Thread by @EllyArrow

Women in #prostitution as represented in hundreds of years old Japanese #folklore. When women in brothels died young and they frequently did, some say they came back: ellyarrow.wordpress.com/2020/01/25/the…

Women in #prostitution in Japan were sometimes said to be foxes, cats or spiders who had transformed into attractive young women to entice men, but at certain times would reveal their true nature, if you looked close. While some were benevolent others might try and eat the john.

One supernatural apparition that according to Japanese #folklore haunts the red light district is the "Kerakera Onna" - the laughing woman. It's often the ghost of woman who died in #prostitution and who returns to torment men who buy women with her incessant laughter.

Another "monster" that haunts the Japanese red light district is the Kejoro. From behind she appears as an ordinary woman, but her face is entirely covered in long tangled hair. Women in #prostitution would sometimes mutilate themselves in order to no longer be attractive to men.

Then there is the phenomenon of "Kosode no Te": These are a dead woman's hands sprouting from the sleeves of her kimono, if she has unfinished business in the world of the living. For women in #prostitution that meant begging for release from their lifelong debt bondage to pimps.

Artists and poets often used women in #prostitution as their muses. They were however evidently close enough to women's lived reality to observe that women were essentially livestock owned by pimps, sold to them as children and dying prematurely of exertion, illness or violence.

#Prostitution is dehumanizing and violent because it presents women as objects existing purely for male sexual satisfaction. For hundreds of years women in the Japanese sex trade were literally sold to men in cages. The brothel windows and websites of today are no less inhumane.

Before contraceptives became widely available being prostituted meant in essence a premature death sentence for women and girls in #prostitution who lived in conditions of abject #slavery. When we discuss the #sexindustry today let's not forget its long and bloody history.

There is a sort of "john monster" in Japanese folklore: Nurarihyon, the leader of all yokai. Certainly Nurarihyon sums up what has always been generally true about johns: Men who purchase women are powerful, yet leechers, often considerably older and... slime.