Let me paint a scene of seduction in the Japanese Heian court that’ll surprise you if you’ve
never heard of it.
It’s from the Tale of Genji (源氏物語), the famous novel written during the Heian
Period.
The main character Genji sees a woman and becomes thirsty as hell.
Without warning, he picks her up, literally, and rushes her to a private room.
She’s all, wtf?
In the room, he sets her down and she’s frightened.
Understandable.
Genji requests that she sleep with him, but she flat out says no.
Genji doesn’t quit, and tries different ways to coerce her verbally.
She denies him again and again, enduring his different strategies and arguments, but after
a while, she relents and they sleep together.
Alright that’s it, that’s the scene.
Now to us, what Genji did was kidnapping, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and maybe
even rape.
Some scholars claimed that what he did was wrong even by Heian standards.
But other scholars disagreed, saying that Genji’s behavior was A-Okay by Heian standards.
And then they killed each other.
I’m leaning towards this latter group.
Remember that the Tale of Genji was written by Murasaki Shikibu (紫式部), a female
writer.
Her main character Genji is portrayed as the good guy throughout the story, someone to
root for.
He’s the hero.
It’s weird that she would make him good in everything else, but a monster to women.
There’s gotta be another explanation.
And there is.
And you know, it may be the most mind blowing thing I’ve learned so far while researching
Heian culture.
Heian love was different.
So you’re not dumb, you know that what a society finds physically attractive changes.
Turns out what we find emotionally attractive also changes and differs across cultures.
Like if I asked you what you find attractive in a partner, besides my face, you may bring
up positive qualities like intelligence, ambition, or confidence.
For the Heian upper class, they would say something you wouldn’t expect:
weakness.
For us, at least in the West, love is usually tied to the emotions of happiness and admiration.
We fall in love because bae has positive qualities that we admire, like beauty or intelligence
or the ability to recite the words of all the great houses of Westeros.
But people in the Heian court usually tied love to the emotion of pity.
They often fell in love because Heian bae has some negative qualities that made them seem
pathetic.
Yeah go ahead, pick up your brain pieces.
A typical seduction technique was to show that you were vulnerable, weak, powerless,
so that the other person would feel pity or compassion for you.
It made the other person want to protect you and nurture you.
And that turned them on.
For example, there was a story where a man fell in love with a woman mainly because she
was suffering under an evil stepmother, and he just wanted to protect her.
This was true for men and women by the way.
A man would show off his weakness by shedding tears when he dropped his fan.
This idea of love wasn’t unique to Japan either.
The Chinese at the time had similar ideas.
Weakness in women aroused desire.
There was also some research in the 90s which implied that the Chinese actually placed pity
under the category of love.
I would love to hear from Chinese people in the comments.
Do modern Chinese people think of love this way, or is it similar to the West?
So how does this make what Genji did okay?
Well, he was playing what I call the Heian Seduction Game.
And knowing their idea of love, you can probably guess that the seduction game was delightfully
ridiculous.
Okay so first base was Aggression.
The man initiated the encounter using a small, SMALL, amount of aggression.
Genji’s small amount of aggression was, yes, him forcefully picking up the woman and
taking her into a private room.
This act made the powerlessness real for the woman, giving her a need for safety.
It gave the man the opportunity to protect her, even though he caused her distress in
the first place, and the thought of her helplessness turned him on.
Second base: Persuasion.
In this stage, the physical aggression disappeared, they didn’t believe in forcing themselves
on women.
Instead, the man tried to persuade her to sleep with him, using words.
It became a battle of wits.
The lady was socially expected to deny his advances.
If she liked him, she would offer token resistance, she didn’t want to seem easy.
Now their idea of token resistance didn’t mean half-hearted wink wink resistance.
No, their token resistance would’ve probably seem to us like resistance, straight up denial.
“No” did not mean no in the Heian seduction game.
So how did a man plead his case?
He’d usually try to guilt her into it, or make her pity him.
He’d say something romantic like,
“Oh, I would die if I can’t have you,
you don't want me to die do you?”
Okay so it could get persistent.
Now if the woman wasn’t interested, she had two main strategies.
One. She could keep saying no, but it could get tedious.
He expected it.
She had to really stick to her guns to get it through the guy’s thick head.
I wanna point out that men did believe that it was wrong to coerce a woman into sex,
but they didn’t see this persuasion stage as coercion.
It was just a part of the game.
Two.
A better strategy was to be indifferent, to become passive.
Meaning don’t respond.
Now this is risky.
If she made it seem like she was frozen with fear, it would’ve been worse than Strategy One.
Weakness was attractive, it might’ve ignited the fire of desire in the man, or he might’ve
mistaken it for consent.
But being passive and confident, like an immovable object, was a good way to say “Eff off.”
And finally third base: Success!
Third base was when she conceded to his desires.
Yeah this is the last base.
Look, I chose the wrong analogy okay, what do you want from me?
So you see women actually had the final decision in the bedchamber.
Although it’s fair to say her decision was susceptible to coercion.
Going back to our story in the beginning, the next morning, after Genji bedded the court
lady, she wakes up and reflects on the previous night.
She doesn’t regret it.
Instead, she laments that she may not get to meet Genji again.
This shows us that her denials the previous night was part of the game, it was token denial
instead of actual denial.
Wait.
Wait do you hear that?
It’s the sound of one of my videos blowing up the past week, I’m pretty stoked.
We got a lot of new people.
Hi new person.
Stay awhile and binge watch the other videos, I hope you’ll like them.
Two more Emperor patrons ascended the throne this week, all hail rika and Zach.
At some point we gotta do a battle royale or something.
Also thank you to the new patrons Amer Kawar, Richard Moore (we need more people like him),
Robert Palatchi, and Logan Stevens, who is obviously Wolverine.
Alright much love and spread the knowledge!