How Hosts Flip Gender Roles & Mentally Dominate Women

Dive into the fascinating and often misunderstood world of host clubs in East Asia with Malcolm and Simone Collins on Based Camp. What starts as a discussion on flipped dating dynamics—where women pay for male attention—quickly uncovers the darker realities: addiction, sex work pipelines, and psychological manipulation. Drawing from firsthand testimonials and cultural insights, we explore how hosts create obsessive attachments, why these clubs thrive in Japan, Korea, China, and beyond, but flop in the West, and what it reveals about gender psychology, dating strategies, and evolutionary behaviors. From V-Tuber analogies to debunking red pill myths (like the obsession with muscles), this episode is packed with eye-opening stats, analogies to OnlyFans and gambling, and practical advice for modern dating. If you’re into cultural deep dives, relationship dynamics, or just want to understand why women obsess over “Tumblr sexy men,” this is for you!

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Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today I wanted to do something interesting because I was thinking about the concept of host clubs and for fans not familiar with the host club.

A host club is something that’s very popular across East Asia, particularly well known in Japan, but also in Korea, in Taiwan, Taiwan, in Thailand, and in China. Mm-hmm. And it is a club where women go to sort of, experience dating with guys. And the reason I wanted to go deeper into this is because they are an environment where the typical script that we are dealing with in dating is flipped.

Simone Collins: Right? Men

Malcolm Collins: are hyper desirable and the women pay and simp for the male’s attention.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And I wanted to better understand. How this sort of changes, what it means to date the strategies that are used, what strategies are the hosts using to lock down these women? And as I started to dig [00:01:00] into it, I began to realize that the surface level understanding I had of what a host club is, is entirely wrong.

And the understanding that you probably have of what a host club is, is entirely wrong. So, I’ll drop a little stat on you that might help you or reframe the concept of a host club for you. So if you had to guess for what percent of women that visits HOS clubs is sex work, their primary form of income,

Simone Collins: My understanding is it’s fairly high.

So I’d say maybe 30%.

Malcolm Collins: 80%.

Simone Collins: 80%. I, I heard though that, that getting addicted to host clubs is the pipeline to sex work.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So, host clubs as an industry and the host clubs often manage the female sex work as well.

Simone Collins: Oh, wow.

Malcolm Collins: So the, the men at a host club are sort of like an intermediary form of institutionalized pimp kind of,

Simone Collins: right?

They’re like honey trap [00:02:00] pimps,

Malcolm Collins: sort of, yeah,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The, the, the women go to the host club and, and like, if you’re thinking about the, the pipeline of money for host clubs the hosts themselves are just an intermediary for what is a pipeline that is predominantly female sex work. Given that the, the core income, the money that’s flowing from these women is itself coming from sex work.

So I wanna know, how does this effing happen? How does a woman. End up, and, and a lot of women are fully aware of this as well, starting at a host club, going to a host club and falling into this pipeline, first of all, and I think you, you said something there that’s really important, and it’s something that we’ll get to in this.

It’s host clubs are about creating an addiction. It’s about getting a woman addicted to a host. But what I also learned from reading, because that’s like I wanna read a lot of first person testimonial, not the western patholization of what a host club is, right. And what I [00:03:00] came to understand is that a host club psychologically for the people who engage with it, the women who engage with it, is way, way, way closer.

If, if you’re, if you’re looking at like, what would be an American analogy? Something that you might have experienced with it. Oh, are

Simone Collins: you gonna say gambling addiction?

Malcolm Collins: No.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay.

Malcolm Collins: V tuber addiction.

Simone Collins: What? Oh, interesting. So

Malcolm Collins: specifically, a huge part of the host club is wanting to make your guy like the number one guy in the club.

Yeah, get him to the top of the charts, get him to relevance. Mm-hmm. Very much like the way, if you are unfamiliar with VT tubers, people will have like their oshi or something. Right? Like their, their push. No,

Simone Collins: I didn’t know. So people are playing favorites against v tubers.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so the idea is, is that when you have now this is something that actually comes again from Japanese culture, that even the term Oshi does.

But the idea is, is that you have a group, or not even v YouTuber, YouTubers more [00:04:00] broadly that you are a large fan of and you want them to do better. And to, to outcompete the other YouTubers, the other v tubers. Mm-hmm. In fact, you could say that our job and our relation with our fans is probably more analogous to the relation of most hosts with their guests when contrasted with other American professions.

Hmm. EG. A lot of people, so obviously we don’t have any fans like this. Like we don’t have any fans. And as the gold had actually talked about, whenever a fan tries to give a donation to him of over a certain amount, like a, a push to him of over a certain amount, he always rejects it because these, like bad things can only come from this, right?

Mm-hmm. Like, and he’s says when Female v Tubers have had like fans go crazy and stuff like that, he’s like, they should have rejected the $10,000 donation. You know, they should have known better. Fair enough.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Because often these, when you actually dig [00:05:00] into the, the instances in which you get these really huge payouts and everyone’s like, what’s happening here?

Who’s the, you know, the furry who’s commissioning these extremely expensive furry arts and everything like that? It is almost never a wealthy person. Mm-hmm. It is almost always. A person going into debt

Simone Collins: or very often it’s someone stealing from a family member or something like that. When I hear about these often, it’s that they’ve been stealing from like a, a sick grandmother or something.

It’s horrible.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so, but the point being is that when you, and, and this is first of all, very important to understand in this psychology because you could understand these women as victimized or something like that. When you go in and you start watching a v YouTuber who you really like, right?

Mm-hmm. And you may be aware from the little signs on their screen of the dollar amounts, bing, bing, bin