Social Context
Women described as "yellow cabs" can often be observed in so-called "border regions" consisting of highly transient, ethnically and culturally mixed populations. One scholar studying the "yellow cab" phenomenon listed the Roppongi district of Tokyo, United States Forces Japan bases in locations such as Yokosuka, Yokota, Misawa, Iwakuni, Sasebo, and Okinawa as possible locations in Japan, and Hawaii, New York, and the West Coast in the United States.
Sources disagree as to the question of power in these relationships. One argument analyses the phenomenon in terms of consumer patterns: the women are in the financially superior position due to the strength of the Japanese yen and their own disposable income, and are using their power to purchase sex; one such woman even described her foreign boyfriends as "pets". The opposing argument puts the phenomenon in the context of a larger "romanticization and eroticization" of the West and specifically of English speakers by Japanese women, and asserts that it is actually the Western men in such relationships who have power. However, the phenomenon is not limited to the West; some women also seek out local tour guides in Bali and Thailand as "holiday lovers".
Women engaged in these activities sometimes assert that it is no more than a female reflection of the much larger phenomenon of Japanese men's sex tours to foreign countries; some scholars agree with this self-assessment, bluntly referring to such women as "female sex tourists". In terms of the women and their relation to Japanese society, some authors describe the women's taking-on of foreign partners, especially men of African descent, as "socially, economically, and politically liberating" and a threat to Japanese men; others point out that the pursuit of foreign men was neither a permanent rejection of Japanese patriarchy nor of Japanese men themselves, and that many women engaged in such relationships eventually went on to marry Japanese men.
Read more about this topic: Yellow Cab (stereotype)
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or context:
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)