In the wake of Gochu-gate, police will begin a crackdown on, well, indecent exposure at live music cafes and nightclubs around the country. Police apparently believe that things have gotten out of hand at university area clubs, such as the ones near Hongik, and some downtown nightclubs that hold weekend “Sexy Dance Contests” in which winners receive large cash prices for taking it all off.
Those in the indie music scene, however, are not happy about his, accusing police of unfairly targeting a whole cultural scene just because one group decided to act like buttheads on national TV.
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The frustrating thing about what passes for the left in Korea is that while they like to man the barricades at every minor provocation from the Japanese or unfortunate accident on the part of the USFK, attacks on freedom of expression such as this will likely attract very little interest.
Really, jesus. As if the Police have nothing else to do other than go around and be a censor.
This is more important than enforcing traffic laws, and cracking down on human trafficking.
Who said this was a “liberal progressive” government?
They want to crack on lewdness, the room salons in ????? are awaitin’
Korean young women’s attire is the epitome of exposure, although I, for one, wouldn’t necessarily consider it indecent.
Mayor Lee Myung Bak says something needs to be done about the behavior at Hongdae, and now you have it. Of course the police have better things to do, but Lee is running for president so what are they to do?
Mayor Lee Myung Bak and the others responsible for this “crackdown” are the worst sort of hypcrites and fools. As Kimbob points out, there are so many other things that need attention than the public enforcement of morals, especially since the mayor has none.
Oranckay is right, the mayor is staging PR stunts for his presidential run. His office is paying the Discovery channel about $400,000 to do a show on the stream restoration, and look for more such antics in the weeks to come.
Couldn’t the police be making better use of their time and energy by going after what would seem to be an almost limitless supply of crooked politicians and businessmen? Well, come to think of it, the offenders in question would almost certainly gain early release when the next 8.15 amnestly rolled around. How’s that for morality and decency? I’m all for them doing more in the areas of traffic safety and human trafficking too, outside of the cosmetic “crackdowns” that accomplish little in the long-term, aside from making people like me (and, I suspect, more than a few Koreans) increasingly cynical about their country.
This reminded me of a comment made recently about the string of GIs acting bad. But, more specifically, it reminded me of what it was like being in Korea my first year.
I came to Korea, in part, because of a great group of Korean grad and non-students who were in France learning French while I was studying there. They told me a lot about Korea, and of course, they gave me the rosy view. They also gave me the conservative view, and they were more conservative, at least outwardly, than many of us non-Asians in the international dorm….
So, I was very suprised at how much prostitution and sheer variety of prostitution places there were in Korean society as, after about 6 months in, some of my long term students (adults 20 -50+) began clueing me in about the real Korea. And I started to know what a “room salon” was and why my students were so adamant I not go to get my hair cut in the places that had the American style red, white, and blue barber’s poles in front.
Later on, I got to where I would go out with some younger Korean adult students to the nightclubs. These were usually not college students, and we didn’t go too often to the university clubs, but I remember the first time I went to a Korean only night club where a lot of university students were. I thought, “OK. Now I’m getting to see more of the real Korean contemporary society.”
So, this news made me think of that and a comment on the GIs behaving badly that mentioned among the acts he had seen by his fellow GIs off post was bumping and grinding to simulate anal sex, and he had no problem understanding why Koreans were disgusted by such behavior.
Yeah. I find it disgusting too. But, it ain’t exactly limited…..
It reminded me of that first night at the Korean club with mostly univeristy students. In a dance contest, one guy turned around away from the crowd and was doing something and not really dancing. The girl he was dancing with didn’t seem to know what was up either, then he turned around and was dancing — he had taken his arm inside his shirt and stuck it through his undone zipper and was flopping it around under his boxer shorts that were now poking through the hole — to simulate having a mammoth Kochu.
I didn’t make the sign of the cross or cover my eyes in holy dread, but I thought it was stupid.
Most of the other people there, however, got a big kick out of it and laughed hard…..
If you don’t make an effort to get to know Korean people and don’t make an effort to get around in Korea with Koreans, there is a whole lot you miss. And I’m sure with my horrible hakwon teaching hours, even though I was in country for many years, there is still not a small amount of regular Korean culture I never got to witness.
I think, from my experience, those who are in country one year and out — like most hakwon teachers or GIs — usually leave without a whole lot of a clue about what they didn’t get to see…..
This is an article I found on Slate which, while unrelated to the issue of kids in Hongdae, I thought talked about the same phenomenon we regularly have here in Korea everytime some TV star shows up in a sexy video, or more recently, when people “swing” on the Internet, when Hongdae punks drop their pants, or when Hongdae party girls put white guys on their dance cards.
Moral panics rip through cultures, observed sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972, whenever “experts” and the “right-thinking” folks in the press, government, and the clergy exaggerate the danger a group or thing poses to society.
Immigrants have been the subject of moral panics, as have alcohol, jazz, comic books, sex, street gangs, rock, video games, religious cults, white slavery, dance, and homosexuals. But in the United States, moral panics are most reliably directed at illicit drug users. No exaggeration or vilification directed their way is too outrageous for consideration.
The rest of the article is about side effects from crystal meth use. Of course, this is not meant as any kind of covert endorsement of meth use on my part.
Except for the exploding meth labs and the crazed addicts that will steal your car or shoot you for the money for a fix, meth is 100% harmless. My parents had some squatters running a meth lab right next door, and I’m happy to report it didn’t blow up even once.
Go, Slate! You tell ‘em!
Meth use is down (at a US national level) for two years now. And yet NBC news has run with meth stories for, what, two weeks now. Dumb.
Don’t know why, but general people’s general opinions about public health everywhere (not just Korea) are pretty damn dumb. Fans, fainting, contraceptives, drugs…
BTW, I don’t think that a web mag as notably stuffy and culturally conservative as Slate (owned by Microsoft even), is going to cavalierly dismiss the risks of methamphetamine use, which are anyway very widely known. The article only attacks media coverage of one particular symptom found in meth users- rotten teeth, which in reality is probably not caused by methamphetamine use itself, and then cites it as an example of “moral panic.” We have plenty of it here as well.
지금부터 끝까지, forever baby~
If it’s long enough and hard enough, it in decent.