I'm following the SF Chronicle's damn good job on this topic, albeit with the critical eye that I have from living and breathing this stuff here in South Korea, as well as by more some more focused research in having done my own report on this for The Korea Herald, and teaching this in a course called "Social Issues in Korea" at Waedae's Korean Studies summer session.
I also blogged about this in the post right before this one (Part 1).
This post is inspired by and follows the SFGate's ongoing series on this issue, the second part of which I am responding to here. You should really read that before going any further here.
And the pictures they are publishing are amazing. I made a decision to not publish any of my own pictures, for fear of breaking Korean "right to one's image" laws (which don't exist in this form in the US), but since these are pictures in a major news venue, I'll consider them on the public record, and am balancing the social good it will do to versus the relatively slight increase in the chance that the people in the picture will come to feel any repercussions from it. This is a question for the SFGate reporters, not me.
It's a freedom that is welcome, and again, is what the outsider brings, for better or for worse. And it reminds me of just how much of an insider I've become, if only because I am subject to Korean law regarding what I publish now.
Regarding the story of You Mi and her being the victim of sex trafficking, this is surely a tragic case. But it brings up some interesting questions that many familiar with this industry are likely already asking, but perhaps hesitant to ask, given that they often find little room for purchase between the puritanical zeal with which Americans (myself included) tend to go at muckraking for the sake of social reform and the more Korean way of looking at problems as being most odious only if they cause obvious and embarrassing problems that interfere with social relations and the smooth workings of society, however that is defined.
Put another way, Americans tend to want to define the problem, identify the transgressors, and then discipline and punish. And in the American context, the US is just getting the gritty and odious result of a much more complex and historically/culturally embedded "social problem" in Korean society.
Here, there is no single "deceiver" and an "innocent" victim. It is a multi-layered problem that must take into consideration the fact that sex and the commodification of women's bodies in Korea is so commonplace and in-your-face that it even becomes difficult to notice it.
In my look at this "social problem", I theorize not a clearly-defined point from which there is "abnormality" and a point that is "normal", but rather a gradated scale between black-and-white absolutes in which most of the "problem" sits squarely in the middle as a multi-shaded area of gray.
What does that mean?
In the grocery stores, scantily-clad women hawk wares in the same way that you might see highly-paid models in the much more puritanical US wear at an industry trade show. Here, they hawk razors and discounted laundry detergent.
Or bread – as bakers wearing miniskirts, fetish socks, and platform sneakers.
A miniskirted baker?!
Or home theaters outside of a shopping mall.
Selling electronic wares.
In Korea, girls in uniform help hawk everything imaginable that one can buy – even in places in which most of the clientele are female. Many Koreans say to me that this "isn't sexual" – and I would have to agree – because the commodification of the woman's body in Korea has become so everyday, so mundane, that it hardly seems unusual, hardly seems offensive, could barely even be described in sexual terms.
Grocery store "doumi" – an assistant.
But yet, does it not make scenes such as the one below all the less psychologically jarring? What the prostitute is selling may be much more obviously sexual, but the non-chalance with which they do it is jarringly similar, the blank, unplussed stare of the sexually commodified wage worker.
Yongsan red light district.
So, in the way I see it, the temporary "crackdowns" that we see going on in Korean society generally find themselves gone after a month or two, when the cameras go away and the show is over. Right after the 2004 Special Anti-prostitution Law went into effect, I went to Yongsan to see the actual situation.
To my slight surprise, I had a sinking suspicion that this could not truly be so, not so quickly and cleanly, not in Korean society – where, as I argue, the "social problem" exists only insofar that it interferes with smooth social relations and/or is embarrassing.
So I asked the two policemen patrolling the area if this would really be "it." They chuckled, "Come back in two weeks. Everything will be just like it was." And so it was.
"Crackdown."
In the United States, the lines are much more clear – at least to the extent that public spaces are not tolerated to be known places for prostitution. Can you imagine most city blocks and even some neighborhoods in suburban Chicago, a middle class neighborhood in Pennsylvania, or even a hip part of Manhattan being awash with room salons, business clubs, barber shops, and massage parlors, along with the more downscale "ticket" cafes, neighborhood "play houses" (단란주점), and the extensive red light districts sprawling throughout every minor and major city in the United States?
For some reason, it is a tolerated part of the culture here, a fixture of the play spaces of the city. Even the most hardcore Christians don't rally around these areas and get try to stop their operations (not as if I feel that would be productive or desirable) as much as they simply (and quite aggressively and hence, ineffectively evangelicize in places such as Myeongdong or Itaewon, which I guess are associated with the sins of mass consumption and the influences of dirty foreignicity. (Don't you love making up words?)
Whether it is because of the sheer scale of the industry and its place in everyday culture, or because it has actually not occurred to the hardcore Christians here that there is a "whole lotta sinnin' going on" – it does speak to how deeply embedded the sale of sex is in Korean life.
The door menu reads "$80 for card, $70 for cash."
America has its problems, but the prevalence of sex work and its pervasiveness in the culture isn't one of them. Talk about the issue of race, and we have a whole other conversation, but – as in the case of Korean prostitution as compared to the United States, we'd be talking apples and oranges. Two different countries, different historical circumstances, different cultural backgrounds – these all don't make for much of a meaningful direct comparison, and doing so would smack of some serious ethnocentrism, anyway.
No, in order to talk about the sex industry in Korea, one must learn to address the issue in terms of Korean expectations of justice, morality, and societal fair play. Yes, I do believe much of those things are universal, but my basis for judgement or moral condemnation (when I have it) isn't based in illusions of "universal truth." Even such things must be tempered with a prudent look at how such "universal" ideas find peculiar and unique expression in this particular culture.
And we're not talking about the silly question of "cultural relativism" as it applies to whether it's "right" to "allow" people to have clitoridectomies performed in certain African cultures. What I am talking about is speaking to the problem as it manifests in the particular way it has in Korea to look for solutions that will work – not just the solutions that feel the most morally satisfying or expedient to someone on the outside.
This is a struggle I've had to deal with as I've been partially offended, tempted, and changed by the ever-present lure of sex that never existed when I was an nerdy American kid who never had to choose between anything other than moral absolutes.
"Inside."
For me, as a heterosexual male with a strong, self-described sense of "morality" – this struggle has defined my need to put this on camera and scream to the people busy acting like they don't see what, to a male, is literally proffered to you as a part of male culture in a way that many women – even and especially Korean women who have lived in this society all their lives – find it difficult (and structurally blinded from) understanding this deep, barely hidden world of sin, sex, and temptation that exists beneath nearly every bright and shiny surface of Korean life.
