Came across these photos on a porn gallery website. Without clicking, the photos depict a sex show of at least three women performing various acts in front of men in uniform.
I'm not sure what kind of troops they are, what era this is, or even if all the photos are from the same show (does not appear that way).
Is there any context to this? And in that context, was this sort of thing common at all? Were they sanctioned, ignored, or banned from the group watching?
Ok, so let me preface this by saying that finding out something meaningful about what exactly transpired if all we have to go by are pictures is really, really difficult. Like with a single document, if we have nothing else, knowing what is going on is just... hard.
The only kind of information out there concerning these pictures specifically are a bunch of forum posts, which claim these show a US Army entertainment event but nothing about when they were taken, where they were taken, and what exactly this is. What seems to hold up going by the pictures is that the men shown in uniform are wearing US army uniforms that were issued during WWII and the Korean War.
While I was unable to find pertinent scholarship specifically concerning the culture of sexual entertainment in Korea while in the field, M. McLelland's Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation, Sarah Kovner's Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan, and Rachel Shteir's Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show all make extensive mention that both during WWII, especially on the Philippines as well as in occupied Japan, the live sex show had established itself as common form of entertainment for American service men stationed there. While the general history of the live sex show is more /u/AnnalsPornographie 's department than my own, Kovner writes that despite a lack of official reports, the sex trade and sexual entertainment flourished where American service men were present, especially since in a war torn country such as Japan, women who found themselves in desperate economic situations found that what they could sell the economically powerful occupiers was sex and there were masses of American servicemen who were after short term sexual encounters and willing to exploit the economic and power imbalances an occupation creates to get what they wanted in that regard.
The live shows differ a bit from this. As McLelland describes:
Beginning in 1947, a number of small theaters in Tokyo began to advertise "picture frame shows" that featured scantily clad women posing on stage within wooden frames in imitation of famous nudes from Western Art. (...) Capitalizing on the demand for more graphic sexual entertainment some theater owners began to offer mixed programs that interspersed short "birth control films" with live striptease
He further describes how these shows tended to become more explicit over time and developed into a form of exoticized sexual entertainment where in an almost theater-like play that took into account the various racial prejudices of American Service Men in Japan, they often embraced narratives of Japanese men failing to perform when an actor dressed as a white man would appear to perform sexual acts with the women on stage to their seeming pleasure while the "Japanese men" character was forced to walk off stage or watch in shame. These shows were not just sexual entertainment, they played to the fantasy of Americans in Japan also having defeated the enemy sexually.
What neither of these sources mention is sex shows involving white women. Shteir and McLelland go into detail about the culture of fascination with the "submissiveness" of Japanese women among American service members while Kovner mentions that there were indeed a small number of white women (she counts 13, two of them French and having gone there after the end of Japanese occupation of French Indochina) working as sex worker in occupied Japan because of how coveted their service was among US service men.
It is likely that these photos depict a live sex show that took place somewhere occupied or in the field since it is unlikely such a thing would be condoned in the States at the time. But where exactly, what the exact context is, and who the women are is, I think, impossible to find out wihtout some really really deep research. Suffice to say that live sex shows were a popular entertainment for American Service men both in and after WWII and during the Korea war.
Edited to add:
It is of course, as someone pointed out in a pm, entirely possible that this takes place in the European theater of WWII. The reason I chose to focus on the Pacific Theater and the occupation of Japan, was a.) due to the possibility that this takes place during the Korean War and b.) because the sexual politics of occupation by the US Army are much better researched for Japan than they are for the European theater. Only recently have two books appeared, one dealing with the subject explicitly, one dealing with it as part of a larger narrative of occupation and I simply do not have access to them yet.
Broadly speaking, while sexual politics of occupation in Europe had less of a racist undercurrent than in Japan, it can reasonably be assumed that similar forms of entertainment (sans overtly racist displays) were popular among US Service Men during and after WWII.
Hi, everyone,
This is your friendly reminder that AskHistorians is a place where people with questions about history can get answers from those with expert-level knowledge in the field.
We require that answers be in-depth, comprehensive, and supported by current academic research.
We do not allow speculation, replies consisting of nothing but links, jokes, and...this thread is an inevitable illustration of why we do not allow personal anecdotes.
Rule-breaking comments are removed. If you don't want your post to be removed, don't break our rules. If you can't post without breaking the rules, don't post. Surely you have something better to do with your hands time.
The nature of the subreddit means that the quality answers we're known for can often take awhile to be written and posted. If you have a question about our moderation policy, start a separate META thread or message the moderators in modmail; it is unfair to OP to clutter this thread with off-topic remarks. Thanks for your patience in the meantime, and your mature, sober attitudes towards the social history of sex work.
...on reddit...
...hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
Thanks!
Asaassaassabbabbbbbbb
Asaassaassabbabbbbbbb
Asaassaassabbabbbbbbb