The Marmot’s Hole

Today’s contribution to the English Chosun’s Something Completely Different section is a sordid affair of porn, money, cops and the Great White North:

The Cybercrimes division of South Gyeongsang Provincial Police Headquarters has for the last few days been reducing several young women in their 20s to tears. These women were called “porno jockeys.” Just a short while back, these women received the perverted love of countless male Internet users through their Internet porno broadcasts. Once their families and the rest of the world learned what they were really up to, however, the tears gushed like waterfalls.

Their Internet porno broadcasts showed real men and women having real sex in real time. Usually, the first halves of the broadcasts involved scenes of people having sex, while the second halves were often reserved for the individual female porno jockeys to show off their individual, well, “skills.” Those involved in the recent police exposure included four Internet porno broadcast station administrators and 72 actors and actresses. In fact, most of everyone active in the domestic Internet porno broadcasting was included.

We have the sad tale of Ms. Yu, a.k.a. “Strawberry” (Korean: Ddalgi):

Ms. Yu (26) is well known to Korean Internet users by her “stage” name of “Strawberry” (Korean: Ddalgi). She was part of the first generation of Korean Internet porno broadcasting. Yu made the rounds in the porno world; after graduating from high school, she was a nude model, solf-core porn (Korean: ero yeonghwa) actress and an Internet jockey for an adult broadcasting station. At first she made between W4 million and 5 million a month, but riding her fame, she has grossed as high as W13 million a month. In the last two years, she’s made W160 million in performance fees alone.

A police official said, “I know that Ms. Yu sent most of that money to her family.” He said that when Yu was arrested, she asked police not to tell her family what she did specifically. As police investigations picked up steam, she was caught after returning to Korea for the first time in two years.

Now, I couldn’t seem to find too much of Ms. Yu’s material out on World Wide Web — all I could do was dig up the one to your right (and there are more over at this man’s blog), and some other ones (not great, but not work safe either) here. If you find anything better, feel free to link to it in my comments section.

Who would involve themselves in such sordid (and lucrative!) work?

36 porno jockeys — 25 women (including Yu) and 11 men — were arrested. Most of the men had worked in nightclubs or other entertainment establishments, but they also included those who had been movie extras or language students in Canada. More than half the women were either from the red-light districts or “Internet jockeys” — people who do not engage in sex on the ‘Net but present lewd images of themselves. The rest of the women were simply those responding to Internet advertisements.

Those who were recruited through the Internet were usually given “rigorous” camera testing. According to a police official, “Men and women had real sex in condos outside of Seoul, and this was filmed… Based on the film, their acting, expressions and voices were comprehensively judged.”

Now that’s an effective employment system — see if the candidates can actually do the job rather than simply looking at which university they graduated from. The chaebeols should take note.

And where was this smut produces? The back-allies of Cheongnyang-ni? Itaewon’s Hooker Hill? Try Canada:

The work place for those talented individuals who proved their skills through the tests was not Korea, but abroad. The stage was Canada, a nation Koreans can enter without a visa. The business minds behind these ventures would rent entire houses in the sparsely populated suburbs far from city centers. The porno jockeys would live and work there — show time was from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. (Korea time)

Even here, though, the first month was a “period of apprenticeship.” This was to see if one could bear the “heavy labor” of having sex everyday of the week except Monday. After this period, men’s salaries went up from W3 million to W5 million, while women’s salaries went up from W10 million to W13 million, said police. Police also said the Internet users who signed up for the broadcasts (for W80,000 to W90,000 a month) would ask the actors and actresses to perform every sort of perverted act imaginable.

The police official said, “Porno jockeys usually worked for 3 to 6 months, and women who performed well worked for up to a year… Even through they produced [their broadcasts] abroad, because they are Koreans and they broadcast their material for Korean Internet users, domestic Korean law is being applied to them.”

Fuck the cyber-fascists, what I’d be pissed at is that pay differential — the ladies are making more than twice as much. Granted, I understand that’s the norm in the porn industry, but still, those guys gotta work hard. The Ministry of Gender Equality definitely needs to take a look at this.