PY Kim Conant, the American Geisha of Sex Secrets of an American Geisha fame, has posted about family and relationships with one’s significant other How to Make Your Man and Your Relationship as Your Highest Priority which has given impetus for a number of reactions . . her piece covers a bit but the central seems to be about intimacy renewal and stating that the relationship with one’s husband has to be the highest priority over everything else in one’s life . . . work, family, kids, stuff . . . for some reason – many of them good ones – her statements about kids needing to sometimes take a back seat to a woman’s relationship with her husband has stirred up some controversy. Some folks have a mental head picture like that of a woman telling her kid to wait for some cold medicine because daddy needs a blow-job or something as mundane as that. One commenter does make an interesting comment about how it’s interesting Conant goes by the "American Geisha" moniker as in Japan a man’s manager often has primacy at his wedding, even before family, and that so many men and familes put the company first . . . the development of the real geisha or modern hostess being to supply comfort and female (non-sexual) companionship to men who have been transferred miles away from their families, living separate lives from their wives and their children.

To me that’s a real good point . . . but I believe that is why she is hitting the idea of the "American Geisha" . . . which is based more upon a cultural stereotype rather than the traditional/historical reality of geisha. When I first stumbled across this myspace, I thought it odd that a Korean-American woman would be using the geisha idea too but then I found it odd that a bunch of Chinese women would be playing geisha in a movie or that Spanish women will sometimes play Chinese, Japanese, or any ethnic group in between. However, when we step back and deconstruct it as a cultural icon that has been changed in the process of viewing from one culture to another, it does make sense when understood in the new context. The point the commenter makes is powerful and true . . . but the "American Geisha" is not the traditional geisha, rather she is a creation of the mind that so many Westerners have that any Asian woman who is even halfway honest about sex somehow is privvy to all sorts of Exotic Eastern Sex Secrets on how to please men.  Conant is developing a metaphor for what is essentially similar to the recent Surrendered Wife movement with the addition of sexual mystique into the mix, a geisha who does marry and foccuses not on client’s but upon her husband.  The metaphor falls a part in a number of places, but still serves the purpose Conant has set for it . . . a marketing edge but also an idea construct.  In practice, the folks who are adopting the Gorean approach are probably going even further into the mix base the surrendered wives, even further past the postmodern geisha, all the way to the kajira which become very different relationships from the contemporary modern feminist expectation but feminist in other ways.

Like Japan where it was remarked that many women dream of having an "American" husband because they are envisioned to be gentler and more loving with women, in many Asian countries there is a view of Western relationships that is very different. On more than one occassion, a woman taxi driver will ask my wife about our relationship (thinking I don’t speak Chinese) only to praise how lucky my wife is to be married to me since I don’t beat her.

One thing about cross-cultural marriages is that male-Westerner to female-Asian tends to survive better than male-Asian to female-Westerner in part because of the Mother-in-Law problem. Western women have a very difficult time adjusting to familial expectations on that particular power construct.

As to family . . . Joseph Campbell said that "when the child is born, the parents become as if dead . . . because the rest of their lives are spent nurturing that new life" . . . I don’t feel dead and I don’t feel that my relationship with my wife has sufferred because of it but every "major" decision we’ve made about where we live, what car we have, etc., has been with our daughter’s development and welfare in mind. However, rather than feeling it as a burden, it just seems like a natural part of who and what we are. For a parental zombie, I still get to play PS2 often enough.

I do believe it is very important for husbands and wives to recharge their intimacy and rekindle their romance (I teach classes on that subject) and to realize that they are very important to one another. I suspect that was part of Conant’s real point before commenters took it to another less positive direction.

I do get taken aback by folks here who put their jobs first before family. To me, family is first and that includes husbands, wives, parents, children. Wife is primary in certain contexts and children in others. I couldn’t imagine living apart from my family but I see people do it all the time. Their values and priorities are different from my own but they may be valid for them . . . but not for me.

All the best,
Brian