Fetish Cafes Cater to Geeks

Fetish Cafes Cater to Geeks http://www.wired.com/news/culture/sex/0,72749-0.html?tw=wn_culture_sex_2 OL Shabu Shabu Shomuni is a Japanese hot-pot restaurant, but it serves more than just beef and vegetables. Named after a manga comic book and a short-lived '90s TV show about six Japanese "office ladies," Shomuni features an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink menu served by 15 costumed waitresses who start off dressed like receptionists and end up handcuffing patrons to their tables in sexy police uniforms. Shomuni is the latest addition to a growing number of fetish restaurants sprouting up around Tokyo. When maid cafes first started to appear in the back streets of Akihabara around 2000, geeks were finally able to live out their fantasies of being gawked at and served by pretty, submissive girls for a small fee. Since then, Japan's repertoire of fetish restaurants has expanded to include sukiyaki served by ninjas and sushi eaten off of a blow-up doll's naked body. The phenomenon is traveling, spawning maid cafe openings abroad. What's so special about Shomuni, then? "This is the only restaurant where you find servers that give raw strip teases to dining customers," says Yamazaki, the manager of the restaurant. With hand mirrors and binoculars at their disposal, the customers can ask the waitresses to mix them a cocktail, feed them beef from their hands, or strip down to their underwear and change into a cosplay outfit of their choice. At 5,000 yen (about $40) an hour, the cost of eating here is not that different from any other all-you-can-eat restaurant in the bustling Shibuya district. But the mouth-watering effect it has on geeks is incomparable. The girls are all wearing "office lady" uniforms. The traditional Japanese corporate system is designed in such a way that women are not supposed to work for more than several years after college, at which point they usually get married to some guy at the office and are forced to quit. The jobs offered to them are futureless and mundane -- hence the generic title "office lady." Often referred to simply as OLs, these women also suffer from frequent sexual harassment cases by older execs that they can't report. "Men who pay women to gratify their pervy fetishes are not just boors, they're johns," said blogger Twisty Faster, who runs a popular feminist blog called I Blame The Patriarchy. "That these johns get off on symbolically sexually harassing their office mates doesn't exactly represent a soaring pinnacle of human endeavor. "The popular view that strippers are empowered because their degradation is supposedly remunerative represents an unsophisticated understanding of the principles of global male dominant culture," she added. However, the argument can also be made that the institutionalization of fantasies staves off real-life manifestations of it. It's possible that, by getting their fix at Shomuni, customers will feel less inclined to feel up their secretaries the next day at work.