Why I love smug Western liberals:
The Anti-Prostitution Law has certainly reduced the strength of the sex industry in Korea, and helped the lives of many women and girls in the country.
The law has been much discussed overseas, and countries such as Norway and Iceland are now following the lead of countries like Korea and Sweden in understanding prostitution as violence against women, and as incompatible with a gender equal society.
My dinner conversation with Chung-ho reminded me, however, that the tentacles of the sex industry are long and persistent. The insidious culture of the sex industry, so entrenched in Korean society as well as my own, will take many years to extract from the conversations, habits, and thoughts of men.
The criminalizing of prostitution as violence against women is a good start in prizing the hold of the sex industry on culture.
Extending the reach of the Anti-Prostitution Law to the actions of Korean men abroad, as well as to the profit seeking activities of Internet mail-order-bride agencies, would be the next step in rooting out the influence of the sex industry on the lives of Korean men and women.
Just as the sex industry continually reinvents and transforms itself to regain its foothold in society, so the Anti-Prostitution Law must evolve to stay one step ahead of its foe.
Jesus. Leaving aside for the moment that the only thing the Anti-Prostitution Law seems to have really helped is the quality of service at massage parlors in Australia, Canada and the United States, I have to wonder, what’s next? The criminalization of marriage and heterosexual sex as violence against women, too?
25 Comments
Be-yotches like this won’t be happy until they can lock up our equipment.
You didn’t quote the best lines of all:
“Do the conversations of Korean men often feature discussion of prostitution? Is prostituting women so accepted by Korean men that they can openly describe their exploits to each other?
Since the introduction of the 2004 Anti-Prostitution Law in Korea, the opportunity for Korean men to openly discuss the sex industry, or at least use women in prostitution, has declined.”
That has to be one of the funniest things I’ve read from clueless, PC feminist in ages. It almost makes me feel like I’m back at university.
I thought she was going to end up having sex with the couple.
What a lousy ending…
Well, there are actually people pushing for that. What a planet!
It is funny how the piece virtually oozes the writer’s moral superiority over her student. I hate those types.
Even her use of language… ugh. Take, for example, the insistent use of the verb “to prostitute” with men as subject and women as object. Are we to believe that the johns were holding a gun to the prostitutes’ heads?
I’m not even in favor of prostitution, but these language games make me sick.
Robert,
tell it like it is, brother!
Smug liberals?? What about the 2X4 up the ass conservatives who hate recreational sex? I’ll bet they’d like to see an end to the business of selling sex.
I have little patience for them, either. In this case, however, the individual is a Western liberal, not Jerry Falwell.
“I’ve recently arrived in Korea…”
This says it all. She is absolutely clueless. From what Robert quoted, I was assuming she had never been to Korea before.
what exactly makes her a liberal? I’m a liberal and I don’t agree with a word she said.
aren’t you simply using liberal as a pejorative here?
The US version of “liberal” would be called “leftist” on the rest of the planet. When continental Europeans attack American-style “liberals,” they are actually against what most Americans would call economic conservatives.
I predict this femi-nazi won’t last six months in Korea. Anyone else care to hazard a guess?
“aren’t you simply using liberal as a pejorative here?”
In politics, is there any other way it should be used?
#13,
You obviously aren’t Canadian.
Being a ‘conservative’ is as low as you can go in Canadian politics, so low that the current conservative party in Canada is an ‘alliance’ of 2 different parties (well, really 3) and all they could manage was a minority government… the first time they’ve ‘won’ an election in nearly 20 years.
I wonder how many viewers came here after googling in search of tentacle porn…
Damn, I find myself increasingly disliking labels like “liberal” and “conservative” (or “Korean” or “Gyopo” or “foreigner”). They are sometimes convenient/efficient descriptions, but like most generalizations tend to be imperfect and easily distorted.
Not only does a term like “liberal” have a different - arguably opposite - meaning - for some as Andy mentioned, but who really fits the description? I know some self-described liberals who probably have more in common with right-wing survivalists in that they hold a similar laissez faire attitude about the role of government in their lives. Not all liberals are pro-choice, militant gun control advocates, or staunch supporters of gay marriage.
At the same time, there are many conservatives - registered Republicans included - who have never been happy with the role of the religious right in the party. Many Republicans don’t like to be lumped in with the neocons, etc. Some are pro small business and wary of big business and free trade. More than a few are gay.
Anyway, I don’t care for much of what this woman wrote - she does come across as having recently arrived at Incheon International for the first time - bit I suspect many women on the right of the political spectrum would view prostitution in an equally grim, judgemental light. (There might be an different tone to the smugness, but it would likely be present all the same.)
Wow that article was ridiculous…does this woman know nothing about human nature, or is it all just one big assed theorem to her? Her Ph.D. says a lot–too much fucking time in school, then she goes and sees a few towns in the Phillipines of all places, and her heart bleeds.
She needs to read up on HIV transmission and legalized prostitution, what happens when it’s legalized, etc, etc.
As long as humans struggle for power over one another (i.e., for the rest of eternity), prostitution will exist in some form, and where there is prohibition, there’s profit, and the harder the prohibition, the more the profit, and the more cold-hearted pimps are going to get to earn a buck.
What you said about labels. I have conservative views on some things and liberal on others. That’s why I hate and like to annoy those who claim to be solidly in one camp and all those in the other deserve death. Like it says somewhere in those ‘good books’, all things in moderation. Drugs, religion, guns, sex, politics, nationalism, ad nauseam. Screw all who think they have The One True Way in this world of billions.
@15
That’s exactly what I thought of when I first saw the title. It’s a weird metaphor to choose for an article on Asian sexual deviance. It might have been better to say “the rods of the sex industry are thick and strong.”
Meh. Many women on both the left and the right of the political spectrum can be counted upon to take a dim view of prostitution, but it’s not really about men at all. Criminalization of prostitution is about privileged women controlling other women.
In other words, hey sister, leave a girl be.
Please put down those evolutionary psychology books, Brendon. Many women, like many men, oppose the legalization of prostitution simply because they’ve been brought up to view it as a social evil that exploits women. I believe a majority of legislators in this country are men, as are nearly half of registered voters, so it’s hard to pin laws banning prostitution on “privileged women.”
Personally, I support legalized prostituion. I recall reading several years ago about a performance artist who literally lined up 100 men to have sex with her, a perfectly legal act every one. If, however, she had taken one penny from any one of those men, then the act would become illegal. Que estupido.
Wow, a lot of you really seem to have the knives out for this woman. Yeah, she’s obviously quite superior in her tone and attitude, but isn’t she trying to bring some justice to an industry rife with human misery? Even if her head is in the clouds, seems to me her heart is in the right place.
I read the article assuming the author was American, but to my surprise she turned out to be Australian. I’m a supporter of legalized prostitution, but I thought the article wasn’t too bad. (Badly written, maybe, but not bad as in she doesn’t have a clue.)
It’s not like Korea is her first time out of Oz. She’s spent time in both the Philippines (in the trenches with working girls) and Thailand, where opportunities for women are not particularly good. I mean, can you imagine being born poor in the Philippines or Thailand, and watching your daughter go off to make money selling her body? That would hurt.
I doubt that I’m explaining my position any better than Sweet Caroline did, but I am glad that economic reality in the southern part of Korea allows women to freely choose to be a working girl or not. I have no use for anti-prostitution laws, or any other laws dictating behavior between consenting adults.
I hope that opportunities improve for women in the Philippines and Thailand so that they, too, can have a free choice economically to be a working girl in a bar, office, or factory. I think Thailand will be there in a few years, but the Philippines will take much longer.
Disclaimer:
This is not a knock against the Filipino people, who could teach the average American a whole lot about generosity.
#23. Opportunities do exist. Many bar girls leave Isaan (the Northeast) to work factory or hospitality jobs in Bangkok or the resorts. However, they when they see their sisters and friends pulling in as much as a qualified engineer makes in a month working on their backs, the temptation is too great.
What the author of the article in question fails to realize is the multitude of different forms of prostitution that exist in Asia. Taking the simplistic view that debt-bondage style prostitution is the alpha and omega of the issue is lousy social science, plain and simple. I’m not denying the existence of DB, but in other cases where women (or men for that matter) enter into the profession as free agents working for themselves no amount of legal sanction is going to help nor ’save’ them.
P.S. Has anyone ever heard the structural violence argument she is hinting at used outside of a campus or Trotskyite reading room?
“Even if her head is in the clouds, seems to me her heart is in the right place.”
I disagree. She is a good example of those rancid do-gooders who would make things worse, often much worse, for those they claim to want to help. How she extrapolates from her host’s knowledge of the term ’sucker’ to make sweeping generalizations of how men think, is one example of the scary thought processes of such feminazi types. And her claims that the Anti-Prostitution Laws in Korea are working and that other countries are studying Korea’s example? Haha, is she kidding, or what?