(Source: Soompi)

Sorry for the slight delay this week, but I thought that I’d delay publishing until most of my readers were back home from their New Year trips!

1. Korean Films to Get Racier

As reported by Robert Koehler here, the Supreme Court recently “ruled in favor of the import and distribution of U.S. film Shortbus, annulling the “restricted screening” rating imposed on the movie by the Korea Media Rating Board….Restricted screening virtually means a film cannot be screened in regular movie theaters. Thanks to the court’s ruling, Shortbus can be screened in cinemas.”

Given that “the controversial movie graphically portrays non-simulated sex scenes,” then I concur with the Chosun Ilbo’s opinion that “Korean films are likely to feature more vivid depictions of sex from after the ruling.” But while images or depictions of genitalia or pubic hair were previously illegal in Korea (outside of traditionally defined art that is), the internet has long rendered access to uncensored pornography a moot point. So how is this ruling at all significant, especially in a feminist sense?

Well, this may sound like a bit of a leap at this point, but despite their stereotype of consensus and passivity, Korean adults have actually long complained that the current restrictions leave them feeling as if they’re being treated as children. In the same vein, as you read about the events of the past week and a half below, please bear in mind that much of what I describe could have been considerably ameliorated or even prevented by Koreans acknowledging that sexuality, particularly female sexuality, is not suddenly turned on like a light upon one’s wedding night (nor just as suddenly turned off after a women’s first pregnancy either). This ruling then, if it’s too much to say is an indirect recognition of that, is at least a step in the right direction, potentially with a great impact on people’s mindsets (source, right: Jeff Kramer; CC BY 2.0).

2. First Korean Man Convicted of Spousal Rape Commits Suicide

This was big news at the beginning of last week of course, but as I’ve already provided commentary on the conviction and then on the suicide itself though, all I really have to add to the links in those posts are this one providing brief translations of Korean opinions on events, and Baltimoron’s analysis here, who notes that, unfortunately, the Korean Bar Association is still opposed to recognizing marital rape as a crime.

Having said that, I must admit that I was still quite shocked to learn that marital rape wasn’t even a crime here. In my defense though, neither did Michael Hurt either, who’s been blogging about similar issues for much longer than I have. But rather than rendering any previous observations of his on the subject moot however, in fact this new information strengthens them really: consider these two passages of his on the UN’s measurements of Korea’s Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) in 2001, written in 2006 and 2004 respectively.

The countries were all ranked in a 2001 UN study according to standard of living (Human Development Index or HDI) and that GEM stat. Funny thing was, Korea was one of the countries that had a higher standard of living, but whose GEM was waaaaay off from that ranking. You see, most developed countries in that study had numbers that kind of made intuitive sense, with GEM rankings that kind of matched – not in a direct correlation, but generally – the overall economic and political development of the country

Not Korea.

Here are Korea’s peers in the 60’s to the end in the 2001 study. On the left is the HDI number, to the right of the country the GEM.

• 75 Ukraine 61
• 88 Georgia 62
• 30 Korea 63
• 130 Cambodia 64
• 48 United Arab Emirates 65
• 96 Turkey 66
• 99 Sri Lanka 67
• 120 Egypt 68
• 139 Bangladesh 69
• 148 Yemen 70.

And as he put it two years earlier, here’s what a HDI of 30 but a GEM of only 63 implies:

…the US is ranked 10th, Japan is ranked 44th, Thailand 55th, Russia 57th, and Pakistan 58th. The only other countries that actually managed to score behind Korea were all places in which women’s inequality is overtly and sometimes even brutally enforced; in ascending order of GEM rank: Cambodia, where domestic violence is not even legally a criminal offense, starts the slide down at 64th. The United Arab Emirates, where a man can still legally take up to four wives, is next, and Turkey, where “honor killings” of women who have had the audacity to be a victim of rape are still often murdered by male relatives, takes 66th place. Sri Lanka follows, with Egypt, Bangladesh, and Yemen bringing up the rear, last out of of the countries measured.

3. Protest Against Advertisements for Brothels in Major Korean Newspapers

I’ve been a big fan of utilitarianism ever since I was an undergraduate, and so regardless of the abstract ethical rights or wrongs of most issues, I do tend to weigh on the side of whichever provides “the greatest good for the greatest number.” So while their are many reasons I am pro-abortion, by far the main one is the simple fact is that if it is made illegal then a great many women will die at the hands of backyard abortionists. Similarly, Korea provides a compelling argument for the legalization of prostitution, for the women themselves are definitely the primary victims of the inconsistent and arbitrary ways in which prostitution laws are applied here. And what better symbol of those than advertisements for illegal brothels…from the website of a newspaper which often castigates prostitution on the front pages of its print edition no less? As KoreaBeat explains, who translated some examples:

Back in November a group of Korean feminist organizations came together to protest what they called “the practice of the top media outlets in Korean society of allowing illegal activities on their internet homepages,” specifically prostitution. Here’s a great example of what they were talking about: a couple of articles written about the new “full salon” system by prostitution aficionados and published in the adults-only online section of the Chosun Ilbo, which I will never tire of noting is the nation’s most conservative major newspaper. If you click through to the link you will find photos of men engaging in straight-up debauchery with Korean women.

Unfortunately, I can’t find a good online introduction to the whole convoluted history of Korean prostitution (something I should get on to writing then), but if you’d like a primer on the debacle of the current laws then I recommend scanning the numerous posts on the subject at The Marmot’s Hole, starting in 2005-6, and for good summaries of the colonial and postwar period I recommend this post at Occidentalism and especially this one written last week by Gord Sellar, who’s done the hard job of finding specific links and whose writing style is very accessible too.

(Update: Among other things, this 2005 Korea Journal article entitled “Intersectionality Revealed: Sexual Politics in Post-IMF Korea” by Cho Joo-hyun does provide a good primer on {relatively} recent prostitution laws)

4. Baek Ji-young Receives Award

A victim of a sex video secretly made of them by her former manager and boyfriend, I have a lot of respect for Baek Ji-young (백지영), who came out fighting against the double-standards applied to her when he rather vindictively released it publicly in 2000 (see here and here for the details, and here for her manager finally getting caught and jailed last year). But she has made a respectable comeback since then, and although her career will never reach the heights it could have without the scandal, for her sake and for the, hell,  sheer symbolism of it I’m very happy with any success that she does have. Hence I am inordinately pleased to report here that she won the “Song of the Month” award for her single Like Being Hit By A Bullet at the Cyworld Digital Awards on January 21st (source, right: One Asian World).

Unfortunately, regardless of all the above, I don’t think it would have been a good idea of any Korean celebrity to reveal two days later that:

At one point I was meeting 8 guys at once. Not necessarily dating, but comparing.

Oh well.

(Update: As Gomushin Girl rightfully points out (and I should have), it’s important to place the above comment in the appropriate context. For the reasons I explain here, as Koreans tend to be too scared to ask each other directly for a date then they engage in a whole host of blind dating arrangements instead, making them much more open to and likely to engage in them than most Westerners are (yes, regardless of the wide variation in that amorphous mass known as “Westerners” too). So while 8 guys at a time is probably on the high side, my distinct impression is that many Korean blind “dates” are often little more than coffees with the opposite sex: no big deal really, and quickly forgotten about. So really, the above in no way implies she was *cough* octuple-timing anyone, sexually or otherwise!)

5. Forced Prostitution of 16 Year-Old By Peers

Unfortunately just one of a string of similar cases in recent years involving teens as perpetrators and/or victims; for the details, see here. Naturally, a good first step towards preventing such incidents would be to provide sex education – to which I can thank personally, for instance, for learning that “no means no” and that what female porn stars profess to like on the screen isn’t *cough* usually what women tend to like in real life – but given that many Koreans seem reluctant to accept that even unmarried 20-somethings have sexuality – the case of #1 in this post being a rare and welcome exception like I said – then it will still be quite some time before they accept that Korean teenagers have sex too, despite the overwhelming evidence of it.

(Update: And again, this journal article provides a great deal of information on the first of that “string of cases”,  a gang rape case in the small rural town of Miryang (밀양) in 2004. By coincidence, I used to work there the year before)

6. Korean Star’s Cellphone Hacked By Own Agency

It turns out that actress and model Jun Ji-hyun’s (전지현) phone was “cloned” by her agency, allowing them to eavesdrop on all calls and text messages, and what’s more that this was the norm for the Korean entertainment industry rather than an exception! For the details of the case and for the slave-like contracts see here and here, and below I provide (some of) the Korea Herald’s editorial “Virtual Slaves” of the 23rd (otherwise you’d have to pay for access):

The alleged cloning of actress Jeon Ji-hyeon’s cell phone brought to light the serious breach of privacy suffered by many Korean celebrities.

The fact that her agency, Sidus HQ, may have had Jeon’s phone cloned to monitor her phone calls and text messages gives an insight into the darker side of the entertainment industry.

Markedly unequal contracts signed by entertainers and their agents are nothing new. They are labeled “slave contracts” because they relegate almost all authority to the agents at the expense of the entertainers’ rights.

Entertainers who hope to make it big find it hard to refuse such contracts because it is difficult to launch a career in the entertainment industry without powerful agencies behind them

Jeon signed up with Sidus HQ more than 10 years ago when she was in high school. There were rumors that she may not renew her contract, which expires next month, because she was unhappy with the agency for intruding on her personal life.

It is speculated that Sidus HQ may have eavesdropped on Jeon’s cell phone to check if she was in contact with other agencies.

The Seoul police said it was investigating whether Sidus HQ had cloned other stars’ phones. “We suspect this may have been the agents’ usual way of controlling celebrities.”

Celebrities complain that their agents control their lives excessively. One popular singer recently said that her agent constantly calls her to check her whereabouts. Of the 350 celebrities questioned by the Fair Trade Commission last year about “slave contracts,” some 200 said that they were forced to report on their whereabouts even when they were not working. More than 100 said they had virtually no private life.

To help you put that into some sort of perspective, recall that Korean celebrity culture is the polar opposite of that of most Western countries, with stars, particularly female stars, generally being held to much higher moral standards than the public as whole, and so any complaints about their slave-like contracts are not at all compensated by all the normal perks of fame. Moreover, I’d wouldn’t be surprised if the widespread sexual exploitation of female stars has little changed since Jackie Lim’s experiences back in the mid-1990s also.

7. Celebrities No Longer Allowed to Advertise School Uniforms

(Source: Unknown)

Even if you work at a public school here, you might be surprised to learn that Korean students don’t actually buy their uniforms directly from their school like I did in the UK, Australia and New Zealand (it’s a long story), but that in fact for any specific school there’s a range of companies competing to sell their brand of its uniforms to students, complete with their own individual stores and with sometimes marked differences in quality and price. It’s not an obvious point aspect of life here though – I only discovered it by chance after five years here – and other than the fact that having students spending extra to have better uniforms than their peers somewhat detracts from the whole point of them, I didn’t really know what to make of it. Even getting teenage girls to pay attention to their “S-line” like in the advertisement at the top of this post isn’t all that significant…or at least, not when children are encouraged to do the same thing.

So it was with interest that I read that under the orders(?) of the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (MEST), star endorsements of school uniforms – a natural niche for the members of teenage girl bands – were to be terminated come February when existing contracts expired, with the aim of lowering costs for consumers. Is it related to the economic climate, or would it have come regardless, someone at MEST coming to the same conclusions that I did? If anyone is interested then I’ll try to find more information in Korean, but in the meantime for the English blog with the most information on that, see CoolSmurf here, and if you’re into that sort of thing, there’s literally hundreds of comments on the move available on that blog and others here, here, and here too.

(Update: In the comments to the post at Coolsmurf, author Alvin Lim links to a good Korea Times article here that explains how the school uniform industry works, and the problems parents were beginning to have with the prices)

(Update 2: Paul of his “개 밥에 도토리 / An acorn in the dog’s food” blog provides a good potted history and round-up of links on the issue of Korean parents and the prices of school uniforms here)

8. Protests Against Disabled Teen Being Returned to her Sexual Abusers

Finally, as noted by KoreaBeat back on the 14th, a mentally-disabled teen was returned back to her abusers (who received light punishments), because there was literally no one else to care for her. I wonder what happens in similar cases in other countries? Here is the follow-up article on protests against the decision.

(Source: Carolyn Speranza; CC BY 2.0)

Three news reports to start this series with, in order from the most negative to the positive. All are originally from the Korea Times, here, here and here:

1. Textbooks Hit With Gender Bias Accusation

By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter

Textbooks for primary school students have been accused of containing illustrations that could create a gender bias.

Male characters appear about 30 percent more often than girls in textbook illustrations and are portrayed as main characters, according to a paper coauthored by Prof Kwon Chi-soon of Seoul National University of Education and Kim Kyung-hee, a teacher at Euncheon Elementary School in Seoul.

”Male characters play important roles in many cases while female characters often play passive roles,” the research team said in the paper. ”Children are vulnerable to the biased role models and textbook writers have to remove those sexual stereotypes.”

The paper said men are depicted as a president, politician, judge, doctor and university professor, while women appear as a teacher, nurse and bank tellers.

Male characters play the main roles about 60 percent more often than their counterparts in textbooks, it said. In social studies textbooks, male characters appeared twice as often as females.

But textbooks for domestic affairs and arts have more female characters than male figures in their illustrations, the paper added.

As a teenager in the early-1990s in New Zealand, I remember reading some school social studies textbooks making much the same points about New Zealand science textbooks of the late-1970s, after which they were (presumably) thoroughly updated. On the one hand this just goes to show how far behind Korean institutions are in their knowledge of and/or concern about gender issues (see more on that here) but on the other it may well presage belated moves to correct that, recent immigration, for instance, leading to an end to Korean school textbooks extolling the virtues of ethnic homogeneity and maintaining pure racial bloodlines (no, really) in 2006. So, although this highlights a problem, surely at least acknowledging that a problem exists is an important and necessary first step? Especially in Korea, where so much is routinely swept under the carpet for the sake of saving face?

Or so I thought before I began writing this post: now that I have, I’m somewhat less optimistic, as I’ve just discovered that the changes to the sexist depictions of gender roles were in fact already supposed to have been made in the 2007 editions! Sigh. Were they been made or not? Were they originally so bad that the recent editions criticized above are in fact the improved versions? If any readers are interested in finding out, please let me know and I’ll do some further investigating, but in the meantime if anyone wants to read more on the subject then here, here and here are some journal articles putting gender roles in Korean textbooks into comparative perspective for you, here and here are two articles explaining why textbook revisions in general are so problematic in Korea, and finally here is Michael Hurt’s convincing visual explanation of where some of Korean children’s stereotypes about race come from.

2. President Lee Calls for Job-Sharing

By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak called for wage cuts Thursday to create more jobs, one day after a government report showed the country’s employment market shrank for the first time in over five years, according to Yonhap News.

“The most urgent issue on our hands is to create jobs for the heads of households,” the President was quoted as saying at a meeting of the Emergency Economy Management Council. The presidential body was set up last week to paddle the country out of the economic crisis.

Lee suggested the government promote “job-sharing” among workers, according to the presidential office spokesman.

“I believe we should think of ways to promote job-sharing by cutting wages,” Lee was quoted as saying by spokesman Lee Dong-kwan. The President added that wage cuts would prompt employers to hire more workers.

The remarks come one day after the National Statistical Office said the country lost 12,000 jobs last month, marking the first contraction since October 2003.

Unless you’re familiar with my thesis topic, then the inclusion of this article here will probably make little sense, but — with the proviso that I’ll have to go to the original Korean source(s) to confirm that that was indeed what he said — if accurately translated, that otherwise innocuous-sounding statement of Lee Myung-bak’s that I’ve highlighted above may have huge long-term implications for Korean feminism.

In a nutshell, this is because it echoes similar statements during the “IMF Crisis” a decade ago, when women were the first to be laid off by Korean companies, under the explicit and oft-repeated assumption that they would be provided for either by their father if they were unmarried (Koreans generally live at home until they’re married), or by their husbands if they were. Being such a comparatively recent entrant into the labor market, and in an environment where women were still overwhelmingly expected to quit their jobs upon marriage or becoming pregnant, then the latter especially would be targeted, to the extent that many desperately kept their marital status a closely-guarded secret from employers, and doing so became a theme of many popular dramas a little later.

My thesis is specifically about how women’s anger at this fundamentally changed Korean women’s perceptions of their ideal Korean men, ultimately giving rise to Korea’s own distinct brand of metrosexuals, but in terms of Korean feminism as a whole the strong reaffirmation of the men as breadwinner and women as homemaker mentality arguably put the cause of women’s right back by at least a decade. Or to be more precise, put them in stasis: not that it’s the only indicator that should be considered when looking at the last decade, but I do think it’s telling that, according to my copy of Working Korea 2007 by Kim Yoo-Sun of the Korea Labor and Society Institute, the gender wage gap shows a slow but steady improvement in the two decades before the crisis, with women making 45% of what men made in 1980; 48% in 1985; 53% in 1990; 60% in 1995; and finally peaking at 64% in 1998…only to stay there for next 8 years. Unfortunately nothing says that like the graph itself, with the straight diagonal line up from 1980 to 1998 and then a virtually horizontal line from 1998 to 2006, but I haven’t been able to find a similar graphic on Korean government websites, nor do I recommend users installing the numerous ‘ActiveX’ programs I reluctantly acquiesced to just to be able to see any statistics at all. I did however, find this corroborating evidence on the English version of the Ministry of Gender Equality website:

As far as I know, so far employers are not again targeting women for layoffs in the recent financial crisis, and while it is certainly severely affecting the Korean middle-class as a whole, I don’t expect the crisis to be remotely as bad as that of 1998. Moreover, the Korean labour market fundamentally changed as a result of that crisis, in the decade since Korea going from having the largest number of job-for-life, male-breadwinner salaryman-style jobs in the OECD to having the most irregular jobs instead (see here), a huge change that has meant that – even though Korean women do still have the lowest labor participation rate in the OECD – families with dual incomes are now the norm rather than the exception, which, combined with there being virtually no political support for working mothers, has meant that the Korean birthrate has plummeted to being the world’s lowest. So it is certainly ominous that, despite this new reality, the Korean president still seems to see women’s economic – and thereby political – empowerment not as something fundamental to a modern, democratic and capitalist nation-state, but instead as almost superfluous to requirements, to be denied to them with every downturn of the economic cycle. In hindsight, given his statements around the period of his election victory, kind of predictable too: see my posts on those here, here, and then here in chronological order.

Despite the potential doom and gloom though – remember the jury’s still out on the current crisis’s effect on women, and on Lee Myung-bak’s specifc remarks –  ironically it will actually be a huge boon to my thesis. One problem with attributing any social change anywhere to a backlash is that, no matter how plausible it may be, how to find direct evidence? Given how tightly constrained Korean women were (and still are) in any open public criticism of men after the IMF Crisis, then even women’s magazines of the period are unlikely to have had any scathing editorials on the subject. But today, in 2009? If I’m right, then I’m very confident that as you read this at least some female netizens will have picked up on this, and be writing all over forums that, well, Lee Myung-bak can go fuck himself…all examples of which will will take pride of place in my bibliography!

(Update: see here for Korea’s gender wage gap worsening in 2007, and here on it also being the biggest in the OECD)

3. Court Convicts Man of Raping Wife

A husband who forced sex on his foreign wife has been convicted of rape, the first time that marital rape has been recognized by a local court.

To date, courts refused to acknowledge marital rape ㅡ a non-consensual sexual assault in which the perpetrator is the victim’s spouse ㅡ because it contradicted a law stating that a husband and wife were mutually responsible for faithfully responding to a request for sex from one another. In 1970, the Supreme Court did not uphold a guilty verdict in a similar rape case.

The Busan District Court sentenced a 42-year-old husband to 30 months in prison, suspended for three years, on charges of raping his 25-year-old Filipino spouse.

In the ruling, Judge Go Jong-joo said, ”the accused infringed upon his wife’s right to have sex or not. Even worse, he frequently used a blunt weapon to threaten her when she refused his request.”

According to statements in court, the husband threatened his wife with a gas gun and a knife.

The man first met his wife through a Seoul-based international matchmaking agency in August 2006 and they married that year. He was indicted in July 2008 after coercively having sex with his wife, who resisted citing her ongoing menstrual cycle. The man appealed the case.

The United Nations said in 2006 marital rape is a prosecutable offense in at least 104 countries worldwide.

To which Tom Coyner provides this excellent commentary, which I can’t really add to:

[This] article raises a lot of questions of what is afoot here.  First, a ruling of this sort is way overdue.  Last year there was a scandal when a Vietnamese wife of a blue collar Korean jumped to her death from her apartment building, but her family strongly believes she was pushed given recent phone calls, letters, etc.  The man walked away unpunished.

In any case, one naturally wonders if this punishment of spousal violence will apply to Koreans wives.  The good news, of sorts, is one no longer sees public wife beating as once did thirty years ago.  But one can only shudder when thinking of what happens in the home.

But getting back to Filipina-Korean marriages, according to a Filipina friend of mine who has lived in Korea many years, the general reputation among Filipinos here is that only one in ten such marriages are viewed as being successful.  Often the problems can be traced back to language problems.  But in any case, drunken wife beating is a common problem.  My friend knew a separate story of a Filipina wife being pushed out a third floor apartment window by her Korean husband.

Another problem is that Koreans are primarily concerned in finding a wife to produce children.  After the offspring are produced, the wives are essentially discarded.

Finally, another sad aspect of this travesty is that the wives are often better educated than their husbands as a result of their families having invested a great deal to ensure their daughters get good and even advanced educations.  Naive expectations include in having their daughters marry someone of a more advanced country, their daughters will fulfill their dreams.  Apparently such dreams, much more often than not, turn into nightmares upon arrival at Incheon.

If you haven’t heard of Tom Coyner, then I highly recommend checking out his website and signing up to his Korean Economic Reader emailing list here; the above comes from that, so obviously it is not just about economic issues.

Update: Unfortunately, as today’s editorial in the Korea Times makes clear, the notion of spousal rape still has quite a few legal hurdles to overcome before it is definitively considered a crime by the Korean legal establishment, let alone by the Korean public.

Update 2: As I reread the report today, I began to have concerns that the issue of spousal rape might get sidelined as an issue of Southeast-Asian immigrant wives rather than of Korean women as a whole, and Baltimoron of the Left Flank blog argues that unfortunately all signs point to this so far.

Update 3: It appears that the Korean husband committed suicide on Monday. For more information, see here.