Anne Allison’s Nightwork looks at the world of the high priced hostess club in 1990’s Japan.  Her questions are simple, but bring out some deep answers.  Why do men frequent hostess clubs?  What is the purpose of corporate entertaining?  Why do corporations entertain their employees and customers at hostess clubs, rather than other venues?

Allison comes up with some surprising, but reasonable conclusions after having worked in a high priced hostess club herself for four months, and interviewed large numbers of male customers, female hostesses and mamas.

One of the answers is that men don’t go to these clubs to engage in sexual activity with women, or to find sexual partners.  They are instead participating in “heterosexual, homosocial” behavior – their heterosexual banter with the hostesses ultimately functions to bond the men who participate together in a kind of mutual experience.

Another answer involves the effect this behavior has on work – the entertainment of this kind helps corporations to reward their employees for loyalty, give them incentives to stay later than they might otherwise at work, and bond them closer to the corporation than even to their families.  The men are entertained, and feel their value to the company has increased because of the amount the company is willing to spend on this entertainment.  The company gets loyal workers who are in essence on the job all the time.

In the last analysis, Allison uses a late capitalist analysis heavily grounded in Marx to point out that the hostess club functions as a locus where everything is reduced to capital relations.  The entertainment is not just about flirting with women, but functions on another level as a means to show how much the company is willing to pay to entertain its elite male employees.  The hostesses are not really potential sex partners for the men, but paid employees whose job it is to engage in conversation that makes the men feel like men, and ignores their inadequacies and imperfections.  The fact of paying for this service bonds employees to the company ever more closely until their tether is abruptly cut at retirement.  Allison discusses this in terms of a Lacanian “lack” – the use of money to provided entertainment in this tantalizing way always promises satisfaction, but always leaves the men not completely satisfied, wanting more, in an empty cycle.