Just checked with Pass and Cross, one of the places I've been linking to from my site, since that blog is so unbelievably smart.
Here's the last paragraph of a post that really got my attention; but the piece is summed up with words that are so true in their universality and essential "rightness" that I had to quote them here:
"The truth of the matter is that there's violence and injustice in pretty much every society. The point is to not fall back on "cultural difference" as an easy solution to avoid thinking hard about the causes of such violence and injustice; to resist reducing not easily graspable questions of difference and communication to overgeneralized statements that say nothing in the end; to be vigilant about institutions of power and to come up with creative strategies of dealing with social inequities and oppression."
The funny thing is that she was talking about her experiences being a Korean woman in America, while those words rang so strangely true for me as an American living in Korea. 
To the extent that many Asian women feel dehumanized as they are exoticized – often by white men – into sexualized, raced objects in the US, certain white men complain about being raced, sexed objects here.
Now, before we get into flame wars about the politics of white privilege and power, just hold off banging away at the keyboard – I know, I know. But it's interesting and ironic that some of the processes are, undeniably, the same. And in either case, they can be quite dehumanizing.
As a person who looks at texts, meanings, and symbols, she couches a lot of this in the need to think rigorously – not lazily – about the origins of such problems in terms of "questions of difference and communication" as well as "institutions of power." Similarly, I, as a history/social science guy, think about "structure" in terms of the economy, politics, and specific locations of institutional power.
Re-read these posts (1, 2, and 3), which are varied examples of me struggling with trying to see past just "culture" and get to a more palpable basis of understanding. Even if I don't or can't see everything, it is certainly the process of trying to that is most important. You can probably see in the "En Femme" post (#3 above) that I have the most trouble structurally explaining the politics of the aesthetics of Korean femininity, which is something much more difficult to wrap one's mind around academically. But it's an attempt worth making.
In the end, Pass and Cross said, in much better words than I did, how pointless it is to couch structural problems, the origins of which are far more concrete and materially interested than we would like to believe, in "cultural" terms usually serves to obfuscate the real origins of the problem.
As the famous quip goes, "When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my gun."
The chimeric "problem" of underqualified English teachers and the non-existent "sexual crimes" being chalked up to Western "culture" is a case of this.
And it's an argument I try to stay away from in my criticism of Korea. Of course, there are culturally-conditioned differences in the way large groups of people behave and react to things, but for the most part, even those things are linked to structure and material forces at work within the society.
Whether I'm talking about prostitution, foreign workers, attacks on foreigners, the unprofessionalism of the media, problems in the education system, what have you – I think what keeps my concerns legitimate is the fact that I argue in terms of the structural and the material.
I try not to make vaguely-defined "cultural" arguments – "Koreans just do that because its cultural", which is the same as saying "Koreans do that because they're Korean", which is the same as saying nothing at all, but in offensive and perhaps even racist terms.
I think that's what separates my social criticisms from those that are an exercise in bashing. I try to identify causes and construct reasonable and explanative social theories, as opposed to, "It's because they're Korean that they do that."
That's all I wanted to say. Thanks, Pass and Cross, for crystallizing in much better words, what I wanted to say.
