Do you know what the most common type of relationship
between men and women in Heian Period Japan was?
It wasn’t marriage, it wasn’t awkward office romances, it was extramarital affairs,
cheating.
The culture encouraged it, and religion didn’t get in the way.
Heian society was a rare sexually free culture, but it wasn’t all fun and came, there was
a dark side as we shall see.
So here’s a question.
Did the Japanese at the time consider cheating immoral?
Give me your guesses in the comments.
Heian marriages were a bit bonkers.
Husband and wife often lived in separate residences, and even if they lived in the same residence,
they often stayed in different buildings.
Today you would see each other’s faces in bed first thing in the morning.
It wasn’t like that back then.
Though that might be a blessing, depending on how many glasses you had at the bar.
No, back then it was pretty easy to avoid each other.
Married couples didn’t seem that close, which makes sense because people often married
for politics instead of love.
The Fujiwara clan famously married their daughters into the Imperial Family, allowing them control
over the Heian court for 200 years.
So the rampant cheating was not surprising.
And boy did they cheat.
Men had more options than George Clooney at your grandma’s book club.
They’d mostly seek out the bed of servant girls and ladies-in-waiting, but they didn’t
stop there.
Casual affairs with married women happened all the time.
Usually the man would enter the lady’s chambers at night, then leave before dawn, no strings
attached.
Don’t worry, guys didn’t have all the fun.
Women also partook.
They didn’t have as many options as the men since they mostly stayed home, but trust
me they were well-acquainted with the D.
The dudes.
It was common for a court lady to have a husband, a main lover, a few secondary lovers, and
a crew of casual lovers.
And when she tired of one of her boy toys, she simply told him to stop visiting and that
was that.
The power dynamic between men and women in these love affairs was pretty balanced.
So did the Japanese in the Heian consider cheating immoral?
Hell no, it was normal.
Not only that, it was expected.
But that doesn’t mean they had the same expectations for men and women.
Seems like some things never change.
A guy was considered a stud if he bedded a whole bunch of women and had many wives.
But a lady who was a huge man-vacuum wasn’t given the same praise.
She wasn’t criticized, not at all, they didn’t see it as immoral, but her social
status didn’t increase with each partner.
So how did this cheating culture come about?
It has to do with their views on sexuality and what some scholars call the Cult of Beauty.
The Heian Japanese believed that men could not control their urges around women.
Women were natural male magnets, you see, and the second a woman did something vaguely
titillating like exposing her sleeve, BAM the man became iron vibrating in her magnetic
field.
They also had no religious hang ups over sexuality.
People in the West tend to associate religion with being neurotic over promiscuity, because
they’re used to the Abrahamic religions like Christianity, but it wasn’t like that
during the Heian.
Shinto beliefs around this time did not see sex as impure.
It was a positive act necessary for procreation, so going around racing your little Michael
Phelpses was fine.
Buddhism had a more complicated relationship with sex.
On the one hand, giving in to any kind of desire was discouraged because it hurt your
chances of achieving Buddhahood.
On the other hand, if you ban all your followers from sex, you’d eventually run out of followers.
It seemed the Buddhist position tolerated sex because it was useful, but it did discourage
the desire for sex.
Now you may be thinking it’s kinda hard to do the deed without desire, to which the
typical response by a Buddhist priest was to take a 10 year vow of silence.
To understand Heian aristocratic culture, we must MUST talk about the Cult of Booty.
Beauty.
They were obsessed with beautiful, elegant things.
Of course their beauty standards differed from ours, but they elevated what they considered
beautiful to the extreme.
Pale skin was beautiful, so they painted their faces pure white.
Dark teeth was beautiful, so they painted their teeth pitch black.
Beautiful things included art, music, literature and yes, love affairs.
Affairs were not the dirty, naughty acts that we see them as today.
They were supposed to be positive and tasteful and included a lot of poetry.
Affairs were yet another form of expressing beauty.
Wordplay was foreplay.
They swapped letters and poems like we swap saliva.
The amount of care they put into the art of seduction was similar to the amount of care
they put into writing poetry.
There was a dark side to all this sexual freedom and the obsession with beauty though.
Because women were innately desirable, people thought men were powerless to resist.
So even if a man forced himself upon a woman, the fault lay with her, not him.
Women blamed themselves.
Oh, how could I be so careless letting him glance my way?
There were no laws against violating women.
Even worse, women were supposed to be passive and submissive.
Being aggressive got you accused of being a demon fox or tengu.
So they had to fight off unwanted advances, but be passive and submissive while doing so.
Yeah, try to solve that riddle.
Now I don’t want you to think Heian men were just going around assaulting women, that
did not happen.
Even though it wasn’t against the law, it went against the social etiquette of the Cult
of Beauty.
Yep, their obsession with beauty actually protected women.
Remember that affairs were supposed to be beautiful.
The man was supposed to woo her with his charm and grace and poetry.
If he just forced himself on her, it became an ugly act.
He would’ve been shamed by his peers.
In a world where everyone was self-conscious af, he may as well have died.
The Cult of Beauty perpetuated itself by enforcing its own punishments and rewards.
The punishment for ugly acts came in the form of shame and being ridiculed by your peers.
The reward for beautiful acts were pride and praise from others.
Here’s something surprising that they considered beautiful:
sadness.
The only thing that Heian elites loved more than being depressed was telling you how depressed
they were.
You had letters where people cried about who suffered more.
Weird flex, I know.
Heian culture encouraged the expression of sadness.
This was beautiful because it showed how sensitive you were.
Like when you bid farewell to a lover, you had to bemoan your pain and grief like the
world had ended.
You could see the Buddhist influence here.
To Buddhists, the world was a place of suffering, and conveying this suffering showed an appreciation
for such a world.
Similarly, if you want to convey appreciation for this channel, share these videos with
someone, anyone.
The goal of this channel is spreading the knowledge about Japanese history to foster
appreciation for Japanese culture and Asian cultures by extension.
To that end, the more you can share these videos, the more it helps us achieve this
goal.
So there’s no new patron this week, sadface, but I’d like to thank our emperor patrons
who are phenomenal, TREMENDOUS peeps.
I’d also like to thank Tercero for doing the research for this video, it’s very helpful.
Alright much love guys, and spread the knowledge.