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Geisha are certainly not prostitutes these days, as much as they are tourist attractions and corporate entertainers, and technically speaking they weren't prostitutes in the old days either... but they were entertainers, and every now and then they might have sort of accidentally had sex with one of their better tipping customers, and I'm sure they expected to be raped from time to time by that drunk samurai who won't take no for an answer. The assigned prestige of the geisha doesn't cover up the fact that they were generally sold into the lifestyle and were expected to work for a certain period of time whether they wanted to or not, and were largely exploited by men with money, whether or not that involved sex (which it did, even if that wasn't their main function).
And on another note, there were actually male geisha at one point, hence the word sha at the end, which means person. I'm not familiar with the details, because the male geisha didn't seem to make it to the point in history that geisha women became an icon in Japanese culture.
Anyway, I guess this has gotten kind of OT, it is a great picture and I've never actually seen one closeup either. Kimonos rock, I need to get one.
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I'm swimming in the digital residue of a media-drenched world. It's too cold.
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