Andre’s Reviews > Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan > Status Update

Of course he ends this book with the claim that he is right about the social constructionist thesis. And he does that by claiming that Japan became homophobic because of adopting western ideas. Apparently he ignores all the examples from before that he himself had shown that were against nanshoku for various reasons, in fact these "New" reasons from the west sound pretty similar to the old Japanese ones.

His hypothesis on the lack of male on male blowjobs is basically: It has to be there to keep some seperation between the sexes and keep something exclusively heterosexual. But considered how much he got wrong before and how contradictory he is, I don't think there is much to it. After all, if it was basically about submission and dominance we should find it at least performed by male prostitutes.

Oh, so when Confucian and Buddhist authors say something negative about women, he doesn't believe it, but when literati write something pro his own stance, he does belief it. Due to things like this, I can't believe this guy, absolutely not. He is just unreliable by this point.

The author once again mentions his astoundment when men who are the insertee role among the kabuki actors enjoy the inserter role when they have sex with women. Considered that most actors came from destitute families, most of them would be straight, so naturally they would prefer to fuck women instead of being fucked by men. Is this author really so dumb?

When the author once more claims that there was no stigma attached to homosexual passivity, I don't believe him. There are too many contradictions in his argumentations, too many cases where he seems to ignore his own sources and too much double standard. In short, this is in my experience a very typical study of non-western "homosexual" behavior.

Oh the law doesn't say anything about unnaturalness of nanshoku... but why? Could it be that even very bad things were considered natural? And btw. with the intense association of nanshoku and violence in the Tokugawa era (and apparently before), especially among the samurai (including rape and parents not letting their boys out), the author canm sugarcoat this as much as he wants, this sounds really really bad.

PS. One of the critics of nanshoku confirmed what I suspected earlier: The kabuki actors come from the lowest families as well, not just the prostitutes, and I doubt that this is coincidence.

What he writes here about the arguments against Nanshoku (nature, social and financial effects etc.) doesn't sound like such a tolerant society, even what he writes in the chapter on social tolerance doesn't sound that good either. It might be better to ask more why such brothels were tolerated officially after all instead of claiming Japan was so tolerant. It doesn't sound much different from Europe actually.

" Similarly, most Japanese of the Tokugawa period probably viewed sexual desire (iro ) as a force that might become focused upon either women or men."
What men? And he stated earlier himself that popular attitudes are unknown, he simply assumes that what literati claim or do is true for the wider society. And only when he gets to the criticism of these practices does he use the term pederasty again.

The end of this "chapter" on egalitarian relationships is so typical for this book. First the author acts as if these things were common, for some reason, and tolerated and all, but his last statements about how rare they were and beyond most men's imagination and so focus on boys, completely belies this assertion.