The Marmot’s Hole

You may recall the saga of Ms. Yu, a.k.a. Strawberry” (Korean: Ddalgi), the very talented young Korean actress who was arrested when she returned from doing Internet porn in Canada. Well, the Sports Chosun has something of a follow-up to that heart-wrenching story. Seems Ms. Yu and her porno friends were sentenced to community service for their crimes. Now, given the quality of Korean porn, some might argue that community service was exactly what the girls were doing before they got busted, but that’s neither here nor there. Ms. Yu and company got to do some Internet youth counseling with patently-annoying sex counselor Gu Seong-ae’s Pureun A-useong and reflect upon the evil influence they’ve had on society. As the photo below reveals, they also got to do the laundry and talk with the residents of “The House of Sharing,” a home for former Japanese military “comfort women.”

The story also discussed the vicious cycle that is forcing more and more Korean “ero” actresses into the evil world of straight-up porn. Demand for “ero” movies — Korean soft-core porn that would have a tough time getting an R-rating in the United States — is drying up. The reason for this is simple — Korean “ero” sucks. Anyway, there are currently about 30 active “ero” actors and actresses, a far cry from the 100 during the heady days of the “ero” Golden Age. Anyway, the girls need to eat, so some of them go into nude modeling, while others go into porn. Some go abroad to places like Japan, and the material they produce there gets imported into Korea through the Internet, further killing the “ero” industry, producing more girls who go into porn. The Korean Wave and Winter Sonata aside, when it comes to porn, Korean-Japanese cultural exchange is mostly a one-way street. Moreover, with improvements in Internet technology, Korean porn professionals don’t even have to leave the country anymore — all they need to do is go to any condo or motel with an Internet connection with two bags full of equipment and shoot their video footage (and for at least half of them, their wads) and send it to Canada or the U.S. in real time, where it can then be rebroadcast into Korea free from the ROK’s relatively strict anti-porn laws, which seemingly dictate that porn can be legally uploaded only at the Sports Chosun or Cheong Wa Dae. Needless to say, none of this bodes well for the “ero” industry, which may be a good thing.

Now, Ms. Yu and friends say they’ve come to realize the error of their ways and look to start new lives with the correct understanding of sex. Some might say — given the quality of their work — that this is a tragedy comparable with Cat Stevens quitting singing after he converted to Islam, but as I stated before, that’s neither here nor there. Like with Cat Stevens, you can download the best of Ms. Yu work via any major file-sharing service to save for posterity’s sake (just search for ?????????? ). Police say, however, that unless unscrupulous illegal porn producers are eradicated, women like Ms. Yu may become “sacrificial lambs” once again, so as technology progresses and the society continues to open up, the need for a social protection fence is more urgently felt than ever before.