One evening in May 2005, we were sitting on a comfortable sofa at one of our Taiwanese informants’ home in Taipei, watching a Japanese pornographic movie clip that starred an unknown Japanese adult video actress. This clip had been given us by another Taiwanese male informant in May 2004, who had downloaded it at his university. The clip featured a role-play trope between a male ballet coach and his female student.
Salvage ideology
As we have just shown, the clip described here tells the story of how the coach wanted to teach his
female student the real philosophy of art, so that she could succeed in debuting on TV or in a movie
by forcing her to have sex with him. Initially, the female student did not understand the ‘real’
intention of her coach and resisted having sex with him. However, she finally compromised as she
wished to debut on TV successfully. Later, she even realized the ‘good’ intentions of her coach after
being forced to have sex with him. At the end of the story, she thanked the coach for teaching her
‘genuine art’ through sex.
This story succinctly encodes what we will call ‘salvage ideology’ which has been lingering on
over the decades in postwar Japan and in particular in Japanese pornography. This salvage ideology
consists of two mutually constituted elements. The first is men’s domination over women, as we have
seen from the clip above where the coach (man) taught his female student ‘genuine art’ by means of
forced sex so that she could be successful in her performing nonton bokep jepang - Link Website - career. It is in this sense that men are the
saviour of women. The latter should feel grateful to men even though the way they save women might
consist of extreme imposition, violence, or even torture, but these violent means are all forgivable
because they are done to women for a good end. So good ends justify bad means. Implied in this is
the second element of the salvage ideology: women cannot save themselves, but have to rely on men
sexually. Men therefore are women’s saviour.
The legend of men as women’s saviour can also be seen in the register of sex. In the context of
sex, the salvage ideology manifests itself also in two major ways. The first is women’s lack of sexual
agency, in the sense that it is difficult if not impossible for women to achieve orgasm by themselves.