Finally Some Good Advice
Inside tips to avoid being screwed by teens turning tricks
Most English-language magazines almost never offer detailed advice on how to avoid legal trouble while picking up under-age freelance prostitutes. Thank you, mainstream magazine SPA, for providing Japanese men with the knowledge they need to avoid the usual pitfalls of this completely normal social activity.
In most taste cultures, there seems to be a specific set of laws that are basically viewed as overbearing or ignorable. For Playboy or the film Knocked Up, for example, drug use is a slightly-annoying legal issue but not a moral one. Soliciting underage prostitutes gets similar treatment in the Japanese men’s weekly department. Sure, it’s “illegal” (thanks, PTA!) but it’s not particularly a crime that offends the community. In Durkehim’s language, the punishment is restitutive rather than repressive?
January 23, 2008 at 9:51 pm
To be fair though, SPA is somewhere between Loaded and Razzle in terms of respectability. It’s deliberately written in a cynical (and very dirty) way to appeal to its wide audience of dirty old men.
I think the real issue isn’t SPA writing this article, it’s whether or not there will be recorded cases of men avoiding punishment by using htis guide, and then a corresponding rise in the prevalence of “compensated dating” as word spreads. Personally, i think the vast majority of the magazine’s readership will find it briefly entertaining and then carry on flicking pages. How in-depth is it? Does it offer actually practical advice or is it more along the lines of “don’t get caught lol!”?
January 24, 2008 at 10:15 am
I think there is always confusion that SPA! and Weekly Playboy are for lecherous old men. They aren’t. SPA!’s average reader age is 35. Weekly Playboy is very similar. These are not magazines for older men at all.
My point is not that this information is dangerous to society, but that, for this segment of society, paying underage girls for sex isn’t really a moral problem as much as a pesky legal one.