The Grand Narrative

(Photo by mookiechan)

In an earlier post, I said that seeing more skin and/or more in-your-face sexual behaviour in the Korean media could be a sign that Korea is genuinely becoming more democratic, and I gave a couple of examples of what is playing on Korean TV screens these days to get hits support my arguments. I admit, I may have gotten interested in this issue because I like T&A as much as the next guy, but I think my argument is actually quite serious.

Let me give you some historical context. This ad of Jeon Ji-hyun’s came out last year but I think is still playing now, and while I think the tea it’s advertising is technically marketed at women who want their bodies to look as good as hers, I have never ever had as burning a desire to drink tea as I did when I saw this ad for the first time. Don’t be scared of clicking the link to a Korean site, or any of the others on the blog for that matter; I searched long and hard to find a video of the ad that didn’t require you to install the dreaded ActiveX to watch it (which most Korean sites require), and actually you’ll be very grateful that I did, for its of much better quality than what is available on Youtube:

Now, my point: if that ad is not in-your-face sex in an overpriced bottle of tea-flavored water, then I don’t know what is. But that was 2006; this following ad was banned as recently as 2004…

…but I think that it may have been unbanned later; besides which, it spawned so many clone ads soon after that I think the Korean censors just sort of gave up. Before that, I think this was the most notorious ad that was banned. I don’t know when it came out sorry, but it looks old:

Admittedly, this historical progression maybe doesn’t seem very illuminating so far; practically every guide book about Korea says that is a very conservative country, but of course globalisation is changing that. Yawn. And the last ad should not be overanalysed, for even in America would it probably be banned on the grounds of good taste, no pun intended. But this is not America, and when it comes to producing risque material, be it of the erotic or political kind, South Korea law is so restrictive that I personally find it difficult to consider South Korea a democracy at all. This is why more skin in the media is so, well, important.

I’m really sorry to disappoint, but this post isn’t going to be a long manifesto about my vision of what democracy is. But I should quickly say that when I claim Korea isn’t democratic, the definition of democracy I have in mind is my own pithy “Democracy is the right to be offended”, a phrase I’ve honed in many drunken rants since I came to Korea. If my drunken rant doesn’t do if for you, then how about Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain in the  June 23rd Economist (my first academic link in this blog!), who says “The freedom to offend is a necessary freedom. Moreover, Islam has flourished wherever there has been a free atmosphere.” How’s that?

I still prefer mine. Regardless, it means, with many qualifications of course, that I am for the right: to burn the American flag for instance, even if it doesn’t really do it for me personally; to walk around with a t-shirt that says “Fuck you”; and for the right to hold peaceful demonstrations calling for the communist/fascist/theocratic/KKK/neo-nazi feminist takeover of the state, regardless of what I think of any of them. As you know, these all sound very American, and even as ‘unlikely’ a source as Noam Chomsky has said that America is probably the freeest society in history ever (not unlikely to me, but I don’t want to lose half my readers digress).

When I was a University student in Auckland in the mid-1990s I remember that the student association one day was voting whether or not to ban a ‘cult’ from campus, and many oh-so-harrowing stories were heard of its brainwashing techniques from former conned cultists. At the time, I was thinking that these ex-cultists were sad spineless wankers, and if banning the cult protected people like them from being exploited by it in the future, they were just going to be exploited by other members of society instead. And I disagreed with banning the group, no matter how crazy they surely were, simply on the basis of some ex-members calling them a cult. Unfortunately, I was a bit of a sad spineless wanker myself at the time, without the 7 years experience of speaking to large groups of pretentious but disinterested Uni students that living in Korea has blessed me with, and more importantly Graham Watson, the most right-wing reviled student politician on campus, felt the same way as me and made a speech about it, and I sure as hell wasn’t going get into the pants of my environmentalist prospects friends by siding with him, so I didn’t (Any interested Kiwis reading, click on his name; I can’t believe he’s still going strong 13 years later!). But back then, the first time I’d really thought about the subject, I still, albeit quietly, didn’t think you could ban a group just because some people thought they were crazy.

So this means today that I’m very much against Holocaust Denial Laws  in Europe. No, despite my shaved head I’m not a neo-Nazi, and I think claims that the Holocaust didn’t happen are about as true as mine is to having a 15 inch penis…My point is that people should be able to look at all the evidence and arguments for the existance of my gigantic penis or the non-existence of the Holocaust and make their minds up for themselves. I’m technically European, and much prefer its’ secularism to the pervasive religiousity that America appears to have (to non-Americans looking in like me), but the fact that you can still be thrown in jail in Europe for expressing your beliefs, however crazy, really embarrasses me. 

In Europe’s defence, except for this important but very narrow topic, and since 9/11 maybe incitements to racial, ethnic or religious violence too, you can still pretty much say anything you like in Europe. Korea too, does have legal restrictions on freedom of speech, but they are far more wide-ranging and arbitrarily applied. There are its libel laws for instance, which are amongst the most restrictive in the world, but which I’m not going to get into here; instead I’ll discuss two things for which you can and people do go to jail here for: first, because of the National Security Law, merely possessing anything written by Karl Marx and/or pro-North Korea; and second, because of the laws on pornography, for being able to see mere pubic hair in a publication or movie of yours, let alone anything else. As for what happens if you print pictures of Karl Marx’s pubic hair? I don’t know, maybe then you’ll be skinned alive. As the pornography is more interesting, I’ll focus on that.

1. Korean Pornography

Lacking a computer until 2002 (stupidly), my then girlfriend and now wife and I were introduced to the joys of Korean porn in the darkest corners we could find in internet cafes, or PC방s  as they are known here (방/Bang means “room”). Usually, the computers had software on them that blocked Korean sites, but Koreans’ English skills being what they were, the software makers didn’t feel the need to block English-language sites. Yes, this sometimes meant some quick and heated Korean conversation practice with the owners shortly before leaving, but we wouldn’t have been there in the first place had been magazines and movies had been to our taste. But…

According to Wikipedia, in Korea pornography “is forbidden from showing penetration of any kind, and genitals must be blurred out.” This is simply wrong, or at best not subtle enough. For like I said, in Korea you can’t even see pubic hair. Yet despite this there is still plenty of pornography, and there’s so many mainstream movies with sex scenes now that they are no longer shocking. Indeed 전도연/Jeon Do-yeon, the South Korean actress who just won the Best Actress award in Cannes, has disrobed in so many of her movies I don’t think she’d raise an eyebrow if she walked topless down a public street. But while the restrictions on porn just make the whole genre very very sad, usually with more shots of the guy’s ass than the woman’s, the actors in mainstream movies have to be applauded, for they have to go through some advanced yoga postures and techniques to, fully naked, simulate sex and maybe quickly get up from it when her husband comes in, the entire time showing nothing more than the woman’s breasts (and maybe her ass too if we’re really lucky).

(Jeon Do-yeon on the right in Scandal)

While Korean porn and movie sex scenes are laughable, no matter how much I am against it at least the law is consistently applied. Even the brands of foods and drinks on documentaries and news programs are blurred out, I guess because that would provide them with free advertising, although it can get a bit pointless misting the logo of a coke can if you still clearly see its a coke can, and if the camera goes into a supermarket then there’s so much frenzied blurring and deblurring and moving blurs that it looks like Edward Scissorhands got hold of some sellotape (link for Generation Y readers). And sometimes the censors do get lazy, and will occassionally blur out nipples for some shows on TV, but when the actors get up and move the blurs can’t follow the nipples fast enough. If the camera angle changes often enough, it’s like watching tennis.

In contrast Japan, where wierd shit is (sometimes all too literally) de rigeur, pubic hair can be displayed, but genitalia must be blurred or mosaiced. My question is, what is the point of this? (Do I really need to say NSFW? And no inferences from the fact that she’s a kogal about my porn-viewing habits please, or from the fact that I know what a kogal is and maybe you didn’t until now) (Update: for some reason you have to click on it, go back, then click on it again to see ‘it’. Sorry) Can somebody please tell me what on Earth the blurs in this picture are protecting us from? No…let me rephrase that…what are we being protected from that is worse or more shocking than what is clearly going on in the picture? Or should I ask who is being protected? I admit, labia and vaginas can be dark, mysterious, albeit seductive places to me, and my penis is a bit of a monster…so is that it? Are they there to scare preteens away from premarital sex in a few years, because they think the friction will make their genitalia vanish in a cloud of mist? Is that why Japanese porn stars always have such looks of agony on their faces?

I mean seriously, WTF are they for??? Sure, non-censored Japanese porn takes up a good percentage of my hard drive is easy to find on the net, but that’s not the point. What was going through the minds of the original lawmakers? I need to keep badgering my Japanese-speaking friend to find the answer for me. So far, all I’ve found on the internet is that the law dates back to the Meiji era.

Yes, I agree that that is probably a good point to end the pornography discussion, but seriously, its difficult to say much more without also mentioning Korean sexual mores, and then there’s the huge prostitution industry, and I plan for the former at least to be the subject of an equally long series of posts as this later. But I should say that all 3 are changing rapidly, especially for old-Korea-timers like me, and the de facto application of the pornography laws, like Korean law in general, can be very arbitrary but is usually quite lax. Recently for instance, I have heard on daveseslcafe of internet cafes that look normal from the outside but inside have private booths, with reclining imitation leather chairs, toilet paper, and with computers that either link to or have on them many porn videos, some of them Western and hardcore. On the other hand, no pun intended, I read I think last year that all the seedy video stores that sell porn are closing down, as only old men that are too embarassed to ask their sons how to use the internet still rent videos from them. Which is probably why the government announced a few months ago that it was blocking access to some 200 foreign pornographic websites. On daveslcafe again, initial reactions were along the lines of “Two hundred? Is that all? What good will that do? There’s probably more than 200 on pregnant lesbian midget fisting alone,” but then people realised that the 200 would be US-based Korean language sites aimed at paying South Koreans who lacked domestic alternatives. 

Meanwhile, bearing in mind that adultery is rampant but illegal here (Taiwan too; I wasn’t suprised about Mexico though), police have busted: the owners of online swapping/swinging sites, despite all the participants presumably not minding about their cheating on them; an obscene photo-sharing site, where the legal rationale was a tad desperate; and finally, want to close down my favorite drinking establishments, where its not entirely sure there’s a law that lets them do it, a minor and temporary inconvenience. All this, despite illegal brothels and room salons with at least semi-nude girls being at most a 5min drive from virtually every apartment building in Korea.

Yes, perhaps I’m ranting again. So in case you’ve missed the point I’ve been working towards, it is that: when a country effectvely has ‘moral police’ shutting down businesses and websites based solely on their own arbitrary-defined protection of the public good, then if what’s legally acceptable to be shown in magazines and on the internet and TV is so close to what is legally acceptable in pornography, then constantly pushing boundaries are indeed crucial.  

Which is why studying why this was not allowed on TV…

…but had to be redone in favor of this…

…is so important; strange that there’s not more Korea Studies geeks out there, eh? In case I’ve inspired you, that’s 채연/Chae Yeon on the left, and 서인영/Seo In-yeong on the right. Big note of appreciation to POPSEOUL! for the pictures as always.

2. The National Security Law

While admittedly much more important (again a quick intro is to be found here), after all that I confess I don’t have the energy to give the subject the attention it deserves. Given Korea’s Cold War history, I can understand where the National Security Law came from; indeed, most of the books on Korea in my bookshelves argue that anti-communism has been and remains the most fundamental ideological component to the South Korean state. But it’s 2007 for Chrissakes….

…and my fantasy of technological, BladeRunneresque South Korea is sufficiently there in reality that I am still here after 7 years. With my fantasy intact, its very easy to forget, or not care, that the National Security Law still exists. But however much I’d like to, I can’t: because it’s not just a legal vestige of an earlier era, not longer paid attention to; like the intro said, 100 people a year are jailed here simply for expressing socialist, communist, or pro-north Korean beliefs. Okay, harsh, but North Korea does have one of the biggest standing armies in the world and nukes you say. Quite true. That would produce a certain mania. But in practice, rarely are those prosecuted genuine threats to national security. Instead, the law is blatantly used to prosecute pesky union-leaders. I distinctly remember reading an article a few years ago, but haven’t been able to find after a day of looking, about someone who was arrested solely on the basis of having Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto at home; I’ve had a pristine unopened copy of the former in my house for a couple of years now, and should this blog raise the state’s ire, technically that alone could be used to at least deport me if not throw me in jail. No wait, this blog alone could do it.

Overseas, so still not sufficiently paranoid? Try typing “fuck” into the search button of Naver, one of the South Korea’s biggest online portals. You can’t; you need to provide proof that you’re over 18 (19 according to confusing East Asian age systems). Okay, so that protects kids, its not that bad. Sure, but just try to get an anonymous email account to bring about the revolution of the proletariat at, say, the Korean Yahoo site, and again, you can’t, for you always need to provide your national id number to use Korean email sites. That’s bad enough in itself, but Koreans, not knowing anything else, are used to this and accept it as natural. As far as I’m concerned? It might as well be China.

Living here? Then you’re well aware of how convenient it is to be able to prosecute leftists on a whim, as Korea has some of the most heated and violent labor-relations in the world:

I’m sure that the guy in the black hood, no matter how justified he was or wasn’t in his actions, would have been relieved to know that his skull would soon be cracked open by this friendly character: 

For riot police are our friends. I should know: they visit my street every month or so:

Taken on June the 27th from the pedestrian bridge, and on 28th from my verandah. Another coup for James the budding photojournalist, yes?

(Update 30 July: I couldn’t resist it at the time, but I gave riot police too bad of a rap here (no pun intended); see here for a more nuanced account of the riot polices’ behaviour in demonstrations and protests these days) 

If you’re still not convinced about the seriousness of how undemocratic South Korea is, then: a) if you’re in Korea, I could really do with some of the drugs you’re on, please give me a buzz; and b) just read up about the Korea’s nordpolitik Sunshine Policy of the past 10 years, which has ensured that, for the sake of avoiding an economically-devestating (to South Korea) collapse of North Korea, South Korean politicians can give North Korea billions of dollars of aid, extol it’s virtues, and fly to its joint development zone Kaesong/개성공업지구, where North Koreans can happily work in its hotels for no money. Meanwhile in case you have forgotten, if ordinary Koreans do the same, they can and do get thrown in jail.

Finally, here’s Kim Jong-Il, after another successfull round of South Korean politicians bending over backwards to: give his citizens military food aid; criticising UN reports that describe his gulags as hell on Earth; and not raising so much as a cough as it acquiesces in other countries returning North Korean refugees to be tortured at home. 

I’m sorry, even I would concede that that’s maybe that’s too much skin. Here’s a unique shot of 전지현 to compensate:

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