Always the same bad news.
These past few days it's been widely reported on how the current mayor of Tokyo, Hashimoto Toru stated that the use of women as sex slaves was a necessary respite for the Japanese army and crucial in maintaining military discipline.
Presenting the whole issue of comfort women as a measure of direct compensation for the soldiers risking their lives in the war as well as a respite is problematic in a lot of ways. For one, if sex slaves truly were necessary, why is this obviously quite formidable input of the comfort women to the war effort not more widely treated as worthy of compensation?
Claiming that access to sex is necessary in maintaining discipline is obviously firmly based on the notion that men cannot properly function without the regular release of getting to jam their dick in a woman. This same rationale is what's currently used to justify rape. It's the same old story of men just not being able to help themselves when they get too excited (and you shouldn't have worn that dress or passed him on that street if you didn't want to excite him to the point where he just couldn't hold his dick in his pants any longer and it had to fly out and rape you). Still, what I think is truly abhorrent in this whole mess of flagrant idiocy is the idea of sex slavery as a rest for the weary soldiers. I suppose Hashimoto envisions some quaint little shack, where a man might rest his tired head against a warm female bosom. Bathed in the dim light of a candle he would tell her about his family back home, how he wished he was back there, his poor young face would scrunch up in pain at the thought of maybe never making it back. He might sob, like a sad wounded beast. And she would hush him and stroke his head and tell him it was alright, just like his mother did when he was a child and woke up from a nightmare. They would look at each other and feel a kind of universal love that all living things feel toward one another. They would gently make love and shudder at the miracle of being alive. The next scene would show the soldier, now an old man, gazing toward the sea on some cliff, and a disembodied voice would marvel at how he never forgot the respite in the middle of a raging war he found in the embrace of a sex slave. This, I suppose, must be what people like Hashimoto imagine if they ever even bother to think about the reality of a front line brothel.
Sadly, you only need a quick round of googling to see how sex is used as a weapon in wars. It's not sex for the sake of feeling a moments pleasure, respite, or release, and the men perpetrating it are not doing it for the sake of feeling close to another human being so that they might remember they are human themselves and not raging animals, or whatever romantic nonsense. If you want pleasure, wouldn't you rather have a nice quiet (or nasty and noisy) wank while thinking about your darling back home? Or maybe there's some soft-eyed young private who'd jump at the chance of sucking your cock if it might be the last (or even first!) cock he'll suck, because he might die tomorrow? But no. It's rape, and it's not about pleasure but about asserting power, and rape as a weapon is about both demoralizing and dehumanizing the enemy. This is very much a product of the ages.
It's thoroughly fucked up that there still lingers this conservative "elite", that seems to be entirely out of touch with reality, living in their own revisionist fantasy land and quite complacently spewing crazy nonsense. And it keeps happening. Just last year it was the mayor of Nagoya who, when visiting Nanking remarked that a massacre never took place there. It's sad that these people are elected and sometimes even re-elected. While most Japanese are said to acknowledge the factuality of war crimes such as the systematic abuse of comfort women or the Nanking Massacre or insert your war crime of preference here (this, according to Jeff Kingston, is indicated by polling data, but I haven't examined any such data yet), their elected representatives somehow fail to represent them in such an obvious way.
Presenting the whole issue of comfort women as a measure of direct compensation for the soldiers risking their lives in the war as well as a respite is problematic in a lot of ways. For one, if sex slaves truly were necessary, why is this obviously quite formidable input of the comfort women to the war effort not more widely treated as worthy of compensation?
Claiming that access to sex is necessary in maintaining discipline is obviously firmly based on the notion that men cannot properly function without the regular release of getting to jam their dick in a woman. This same rationale is what's currently used to justify rape. It's the same old story of men just not being able to help themselves when they get too excited (and you shouldn't have worn that dress or passed him on that street if you didn't want to excite him to the point where he just couldn't hold his dick in his pants any longer and it had to fly out and rape you). Still, what I think is truly abhorrent in this whole mess of flagrant idiocy is the idea of sex slavery as a rest for the weary soldiers. I suppose Hashimoto envisions some quaint little shack, where a man might rest his tired head against a warm female bosom. Bathed in the dim light of a candle he would tell her about his family back home, how he wished he was back there, his poor young face would scrunch up in pain at the thought of maybe never making it back. He might sob, like a sad wounded beast. And she would hush him and stroke his head and tell him it was alright, just like his mother did when he was a child and woke up from a nightmare. They would look at each other and feel a kind of universal love that all living things feel toward one another. They would gently make love and shudder at the miracle of being alive. The next scene would show the soldier, now an old man, gazing toward the sea on some cliff, and a disembodied voice would marvel at how he never forgot the respite in the middle of a raging war he found in the embrace of a sex slave. This, I suppose, must be what people like Hashimoto imagine if they ever even bother to think about the reality of a front line brothel.
Sadly, you only need a quick round of googling to see how sex is used as a weapon in wars. It's not sex for the sake of feeling a moments pleasure, respite, or release, and the men perpetrating it are not doing it for the sake of feeling close to another human being so that they might remember they are human themselves and not raging animals, or whatever romantic nonsense. If you want pleasure, wouldn't you rather have a nice quiet (or nasty and noisy) wank while thinking about your darling back home? Or maybe there's some soft-eyed young private who'd jump at the chance of sucking your cock if it might be the last (or even first!) cock he'll suck, because he might die tomorrow? But no. It's rape, and it's not about pleasure but about asserting power, and rape as a weapon is about both demoralizing and dehumanizing the enemy. This is very much a product of the ages.
It's thoroughly fucked up that there still lingers this conservative "elite", that seems to be entirely out of touch with reality, living in their own revisionist fantasy land and quite complacently spewing crazy nonsense. And it keeps happening. Just last year it was the mayor of Nagoya who, when visiting Nanking remarked that a massacre never took place there. It's sad that these people are elected and sometimes even re-elected. While most Japanese are said to acknowledge the factuality of war crimes such as the systematic abuse of comfort women or the Nanking Massacre or insert your war crime of preference here (this, according to Jeff Kingston, is indicated by polling data, but I haven't examined any such data yet), their elected representatives somehow fail to represent them in such an obvious way.