Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry

Takeyama (Staged Seduction), a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas, examines in this striking investigation the gray area between consent and coercion in Japan’s pornography industry. Based on 18 months of fieldwork carried out between 2015 and 2018, Takeyama’s ethnography sheds light on how financial pressures lead female performers to consent to exploitative working conditions. She places the rising numbers of young women in the industry in the context of Japan’s Employment Ice Age, a period of labor deregulation from 1994 to 2004 when tens of thousands of college graduates accepted precarious contract work. The increasing supply of aspiring actors resulted in a buyers’ market in which women competed against one another by accepting lower wages and performing more labor. Takeyama also discusses the knowledge gap between agents and directors, who are mostly male, and female performers, noting that women are usually offered unfair and inadequate compensation. Takeyama’s prose is dense, but patient readers will be rewarded by her refreshing perspective, which picks apart simplistic notions of consent. It’s a provocative and insightful addition to anti-porn vs. sex-positive feminist debates. [em](July) [/em]