August 8, 2002
It has happened again. More confirmation that Planet Japan is some sort of Twilight Zone for my sex-life...
Over the past two weeks I met Saya, a new woman whom you haven't been introduced to yet. We went-out on 2 dates. On the second date, we got a little drunk and... we went back to her place and had a surprisingly long and fun romp in bed. She is now lucky Number Thirteen. I'll try to roll this story into the one about Haruna but... my God, this is all starting to get suspiciously weird. On a weekly basis, so many women want to have dinner with me I am having trouble keeping their names straight. (And just for the record, they all offer to split the bill at dinner. I don't even have to hint anything- they just do it by themselves.) Surely, I shouldn't be allowed to have this much fun? Won't the uncompromising laws of probability step-in at some point and cancel-out my good luck?
I won't be able to finish the story until the end of August, for I will soon be winging my way to Guam for 10-days of sun and swimming. (When I come back, Fumiyo will be picking me up at the airport by the way. She's offered to be my airport limo, apparently. Very nice of her.) So, I won't be able to answer any emails until after August 20th...
Anyway, in other news, I think I've spotted another difference between my female coworkers here and my past female coworkers in America. Namely: how they gossip among themselves in the context of sexual harassment rules. Saying that men and women in the U.S. are equally restrained under sex-harassment rules is equivalent to saying that an upper-class homeowner and a homeless person are each equally forbidden from sleeping on park-benches or shoplifting loaves of bread.
Or think about this... say that Wendy has a swimming pool in her fenced yard. On hot days, the kids in the neighborhood love to climb-over her fence and go for a quick dip. Wendy, who likes most of the neighborhood kids, winks at this practice. But one sunny day, Billy is playing in the yard next door. Wendy doesn't like Billy because... well, he's got buck teeth, a runny nose and one time he broke her window with an errant baseball. So... Wendy, being pettily vindictive (and pretty pissed because of her raging PMS at the time), calls his parents and demands to have him punished for trespassing in her pool.
"But I didn't do it! And a bunch of other kids do it all the time, anyway! She is singling me out for no good reason!" protests Billy. Well gee, sorry Billy! Wendy says you did it, and your parents are the type to accept her words above yours! Maybe you need to spend the summer locked in your room until you learn to behave, hmm?
So, keep that image in mind. I should say that a fair number of the women at my old company in America would gather in the staff room during their breaks. While they were in their little gossip-groups, it seemed like they talked about almost nothing but sex. They would gather to discuss their latest escapades, tell off-color jokes, that kind of stuff. You could find out all sorts of things about these chicks just by listening-in. Who's sleeping with who, who likes it this way and that, who is hung like a mule. And they are always so graphic about it, too! Ugh. Classy, ladies. Very very classy.
The men in my old company didn't do that sort of thing nearly to the incredible extent that the women did... simply because if any men dared tell off-color jokes or talked about their sex life, there was an element of risk added to it. Namely: the risk of being severely upbraided or terminated. It is a sure bet that a man definitely couldn't describe his wife's genitals in the workplace... but a woman probably won't see any risk in bragging about what a well-hung stud her husband is. If a workplace can be called sexually-charged, then some of that is certainly due to the women there who feed it. Women can act that way simply because the rules are biased in their favor; a woman will feel unthreatened if she says something about how she likes licking Cool-Whip off her hung-like-a-horse lover's butt. But a man may not have a girlie pin-up in his cubicle or the other women in the office will descend on him, spit slavering from their distorted lips as they denounce his evil soul.
Didn't you know that American women are just as tough as male businessmen... but yet a glimpse of a girlie pinup in a man's office will burn their eyes more severely than a white-hot branding-iron? That's simply an astounding claim, innit? And people wonder why I think American chicks are morons...
But here on Planet Japan, the women don't seem to talk about their sexual adventures so openly during work; both Miles and Mercedes will attest to this. Or perhaps Japanese women hide their sex-gossip at work so well, that no one can overhear it? In either case, they actually have a touch of class. In fact, on one occasion, Mercedes was talking in English about her friend's motorcycle. She said that when he straddles the motorcycle, her friend likes to imagine that he's straddling a beautiful woman. That he likes to feel the hot metal vibrating between his legs. That he describes the ride as 'better than sex' and so forth. She was focusing a lot on her friends' motorcycle-related sexual innuendoes and concluding that men must think a motorcycle is a substitute for sex. What I noticed: the Japanese women around her were polite in listening, yet they did not really say anything either than the most neutral of Japanese responses: 'I see', 'is that so?', 'really?' etc.
They weren't drawn into being participants in a sex-related conversation. As it was a work situation, they were keen to take care of work. I got the distinct impression that they were politely waiting for Mercedes to shut-up about it already.
But I'm not saying that my workplace has all the life sucked-out of it either... one can hear laughter and animated conversations at appropriate times, but it's just not a situation where women can talk about sex but men cannot. Furthermore if I make well-intentioned compliments here, then I am reasonably secure that it will be taken as a compliment and not as a come-on that I could get censured over. Japan has no such overly broad laws which can be easily used as a destructive weapon by unaccountable women for reasons of spite or petty vindictiveness.
Thank goodness for that, because I actually like giving compliments to women.
"Yumiko-san, you look soo good! Did you get your hair done?"
Yumiko cupped her hand over her mouth and nods. "Someone noticed! You like it, Naisugai-san?"
"Absolutely. You look really great."
Yessir, isn't it wonderful that I can say that without any worries?
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