No Sex Please, At Least Not in the Way You Think

It’s been over two months since I filed my dissertation, and it’s about time I started getting some work done. It’s not like I don’t have things to do; I’ve plenty (preparing for my class, writing my conference paper, working on a journal article, etc.)—it’s just that I’m in that zone of…I don’t know. Laziness.

To add fuel to the fire of my laziness (is that...even possible?), my recent reading materials have come from the local city library rather than the university library. And you know just how much I love books I can rustle up at the city library...

My first batch of books included those on the practice of jijitsukon (事実婚), the assertion that Japan ought to "single-ize", and the background to the increasing number of men not marrying. (I justify the selection of these books by saying they're related to Japan, gender, and marriage (=research-related).) 

Coupled with the YouTube video my friend forwarded me about "no sex in Japan", these texts made me think more seriously about the complicated nature of marriage, family, sex, and all sorts of other things that become tangled up in those practices. The rumor that Japanese people don't have sex is a total lie—of course they have sex, for crying out loud, just maybe not in the heteronormative, monogamous way that people normalize. The aging and dwindling population is tied up with changes in the marriage institution and costs/benefits of childbearing, of course, but they also have much to do with racist immigration policies and labor practices that economically disadvantage workers regardless of gender. And the social and psychological factors that make it difficult for people to establish longterm relationships while simultaneously making them feel like they have have do so—embedded in changing shapes of the family institution, these factors only complicate matters.

As my four-year-old niece would say, what a mess. While several solutions have been proposed and implemented already—make it more viable for women to stay in the workforce, make marriage less patriarchal and conservative (both politically and culturally), enable "foreigners" to make a decent living in Japan—I get this vague feeling that things aren't really...working. Gee whiz, maybe if I get my act together I can make this a future research project, to justify all the energy I'm spending thinking about it.