Historical Perspective

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I recently ran across this article online about "the booming Japanese rent-a-friend business."

Lots of people are kind of freaking out about it, which prompted me (again) to be a little sad about how we, as a culture, teach history. Paying people to play what we might otherwise think of as intimate roles in our lives is not a *new* phenomenon.

Keeping a courtesan in the court of a French or Engish king, something people did for centuries, was (at its base) just a fancy system of paying someone to be your girlfriend. Numerous cultures have positively ancient traditions of paying mourners to weep and wail in funeral processions, which is just paying someone to pretend to be your friend under another another name. Wealthy Victorians (and people of other eras, as well) routinely paid young women to travel with them as "companions," filling a role somewhere between that of a servant, a friend, and a dutiful (adult) child. On the slightly seedier side of things, "escort" services have long been a big business in many cities and, again, they're essentially just a set up where you can pay someone to be your date - aka to play your girlfriend/boyfriend so you don't have to go to a social event alone.

Certainly there's value in being realistic about humans' universal need for connection and regularly asking hard questions about places and trends where we find a breakdown of the 'natural' healthy family and social environment. But I can't help but think that, in relation/comparison to other historical trends, this is a pretty normal development. (Food preparation and consumption, for example, followed a similar trend - it began as something done within homes and relationships as a natural outgrowth of caring and traditional family structures, and evolved into the generic, anonymous, paid-for service industry it is now.)

It's a pity that we spend so many years in school and have so much free (at least right now) access to online resources of every description, and our pool of shared cultural and historical knowledge is still so shallow that people can't recognize the reincarnation of an age-old idea. Once again, I am grateful to have been blessed with parents who taught me to love reading from a young age, so that I got exposed to a diverse array of ideas and realities that I would otherwise never have encountered!