Japanese host clubs, where female customers can pay to spend time with the male hosts, have somewhat simplistically been advanced as the answer to hostess clubs, exhibitions of women's increased spending power and more equal role in society. The relationship is not that simple, however. First, even if we buck the convention of understanding hostess clubs as sites of (il)licit socializing and instead see them as sites of social reproduction (see the section at the bottom of the linked page), as Dwayne Dixon urges, that very work of social reproduction, supposedly her natural task, actually jeopardizes the hostess's social standing. In Dixon's words, "Even as the hostess critically maintains the assemblage and flow of corporate capitalism, they are, of course, jeopardizing their own position within gender hegemony. In working at the affective nexus of sex, gender, and money, they live along the perilous, risky fault line/panic site where they may become another (bad girl) sign of familial disorder and collapsing social futures" (Dixon, Women Serving Men). So the host club would only be the 'answer' to the hostess club, or a space to empower women if 1) the hostess club were actually recognized as the problematic space for women it is and 2) if it neutralized the unequal burden of affective labor set upon women, while the men provided the affective labor in return. However, this construction is only a fantasy.

The host clubs are a relatively recent phenomenon which, it has been argued, were enabled by women’s increased spending power and independence after World War II. While similar in concept to the infamous Japanese hostess clubs, host clubs differed in their emphasis not on the power of capital and commodifying sex, but a new kind of intimacy—they trade on capital exchange for (pseudo) romance, or gijiren’ai.

However, despite the apparent shift in power dynamic—women operate as the consumers rather than the consumed—the host clubs essentially reinforced the prevailing gender logic in Japan. According to Takeyama, who writes on the subject, romance “both veils and privatizes gender hierarchy” (Takeyama 207). While women in the host clubs possess financial power, they are still forced to act and represent themselves according to the Japanese feminine ideal within this space, in order to retain the attention of the host, who has many other customers. Thus, although the hosts cater to the desires of their customers, they also exert a subtle power over them. Both by presenting their relationship as special and meaningful and by suggesting that each individual customer is integral to their success and well-being, the hosts put their customers in the position of the caretaker, which they justify as a result of women’s motherly instincts (Takeyama 207). The women defend themselves and their autonomy in this setting by saying that any decisions to purchase services, give gifts, etc. are their own individual choice. However, one patroness says that because she could “not numerically express her value as a woman” she was “projecting herself onto her host” by spending money on him to increase his standing in the “sales game"--thus, even if the decision is autonomous, it is still influenced by social constraints (Takeyama 208). Furthermore, the women who go to host clubs conventionally choose to act according to typical female roles and furthermore perceive their worth by projecting it onto the success of their host. Finally, many of these women are hostesses themselves, and only go to the host clubs as an alternative to their typical job of providing affective labor to men; then, in the host clubs, they do the same. In The Great Happiness Space, a documentary on Japanese host clubs, several of the female patrons interviewed admit to turning to hostess clubs or even prostitution to support their habit of going to host clubs, or in order to lavish attention on their favorite hosts. And thus collapses the idea(l) of the host club, in which women are able to spend the money they make with their newfound economic capital on their own emotional satisfaction, as a space of female empowerment.

Furthermore, although Takeyama says that the convention of non-penetrative sex, which is a common outcome of host club relationships, is transgressive of the gender norm, I would argue that it is only more subtly insidious. This is because, although it does subvert the convention of male conquest, or in Takeyama’s words because it differs from the perception of “normal” sex as “heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and non-commercial,” it does not allow the possibility of female conquest; female desire and sexuality are not only seen as taboo, but even worse, as hardly a possibility (Takeyama 210-211). Her argument sublimates female desire by reducing it to desire for companionship and romantic satisfaction, again surrendering to stereotypical female roles; Takeyama writes as if women do not want penetrative sex, as if female desire for penetrative sex is wrong or invalid because it involves an automatic surrender to a man, and thus forwards the typical gender binary in the same way says that the host clubs themselves do.

This leaves us with the question: what is wrong with female sexuality?

Works Cited:

Dixon, Dwayne. "Women Serving Men: Hostess Clubs and a Geneology of Gendered, Affective Work." Endless Question: Youth Becomings and the Anti-Crisis of Kids in Global Japan. Scalar. Accessed 29 April 2015.

Takeyama, Akiko. "Commodified Romance in a Tokyo Host Club." Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan. Ed. Mark J. McLelland and Romit Dasgupta. London: Routledge, 2005. 201-215.