From the Brothel to the Body

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This dissertation argues that the Japanese debate over prostitution regulation between the 1870s and the 1910s saw a fundamental shift in the construction of male sexuality as a political tool. Before the turn of the century the Protestant Christian "abolitionists" and the brothel-keeping "regulationists" who debated Japan's system of licensed prostitution did not describe erotic desire as an inherent property of male bodies; rather, both camps asserted that men did not experience erotic desire unless they visited brothels. On that shared understanding, the two sides debated whether desire itself was desirable: while abolitionists argued that desire harmed society by training men to use women as tools for pleasure, their opponents argued that the experience of desire stabilized male psyches.