The Beat February 2003

What turns you on?

Popular media strongly suggests that culture will influence your answer. For me, that fact was hammered home after viewing several Korean erotic films of the 1970‘s and 80‘s shown late night every autumn weekend on the Orion Cinema Network (OCN) cable station. Those sepia-toned T&A teasers with long-forgotten Korean stars and their body doubles; movies that are not quite hardcore filth but show just enough skin and tight close-ups to titillate sleepless cable subscribers.

Although the titles of these masterpieces of Korean cinema are lost to me, the essence of them lives on, and so do their insights into Korean sexuality. Oftentimes, movies are a reflection of a culture‘s underlying beliefs and values. To the perceptive observer, cinema can reveal a lot about what turns a people on and gets them off -- in this case, a window into the Korean Id -- and the differences with the West are striking. What say we take a look at the story lines of four or five of these softcore gems of Korean cinema and see what observations about Korean sexuality we can draw from them.

Let‘s start with a general theme common to all these films: there are two ideal cinematic Korean female types--those who get raped and those who get paid. Gals are deflowered Madonnas, fallen angels or both. I have never seen a Korean woman in these movies have sex for the purpose of experiencing physical pleasure. The moral: good girls don‘t. And what‘s more, good girls don‘t enjoy it.

Westerners, on the other hand, have an attitude more supportive of a woman exploring her sexuality. Western lads like a woman who shows some initiative. Better not to have to do all the work all the time. And for the gals, the notion of a woman allowing herself to experience sensual delights is empowering. Our culture celebrates the Sex in the City woman who beds men for fun and shuns marriage, but Korean culture lauds the youthful innocence and chastity of a Jang Na-ra, a Korean pop singer and actress on the popular sitcom Non-Stop. A Korean friend of mine said there‘s a slang term for Jang—“Kidult”—because, even though she‘s turning 30, she still acts like a pre-schooler on a sugar binge.

More prevalent in Korean cinema is the image of ’woman as victim‘. Take a country with a Confucian-influenced male-dominated society and mix it with a tragic history of invasion, colonization, and war—and all the raping and pillaging that comes with it—and you get a culture that doesn‘t cut women a lot of slack.

For example, this one movie was a veritable homage to victimization of women in Korean society. The story centers on a disaffected housewife married to a television news commentator. They have no sex life beyond a series of miscues and awkward advances that occasionally end in unsatisfying lovemaking, but more frequently in an uncomfortable insomnia. Why? Because the wife doesn‘t know how to enjoy sex.

Add to that the subplot, which involves a serial rapist with an obsession for the housewife. He turns up at odd moments throughout the film to harass the lovely and frustrated protagonist, and this guy‘s got to have a set of balls on him the size of hot-air balloons because he repeatedly tries to rape the woman after repeatedly getting apprehended by the police. I couldn‘t figure out what in the heck was going on with the Korean criminal justice system? The bobbies catch the guy three or four times, another two times the housewife fends him off from raping her in her own shower, and still he shows up in the grand finale for Le Grand Guignol climax. After attempting to tap dat ass no less than half a dozen times, he catches the housewife on a secluded beach where she finally succumbs to his persistent and unwelcome advances.

That‘s right. In the end, she gives in…partly. There on the grass, lips kissing, hands groping, knees intertwining, the housewife surrenders to her baser desires, but just about the time the rapist is to consummate their ignited passion, the housewife tosses a rope around her suitor‘s neck and strings him up a tree. In flagrante delicto becomes coitus interruptus in a most profound way, giving a creative twist to the phrase “choking the chicken.”

But it doesn‘t end there. The denouement comes with the housewife getting arrested for a murder that to me seemed a pretty open-and-shut case of self-defense. Jeez, if the cops and courts had done their job in the first place, Uncle Pervy should have never been let back out on the street after the first attack.

Which brings us to the next film, a male-fantasy about a middle-aged, lower class Korean dude: a little teapot who was all spout. I had to infer a lot about the odds and ends of the story without the benefit of better language skills, but I believe this guy who emulated certain traits of the standard farm mule had some kind of sexual disorder associated with his monstrous manhood. He gets discovered one night on the roof of a house trying to diddle one of his neighbors. She‘s outside hanging up laundry, and when she bends over strategically to grab up a damp shirt, Long John jumps off his perch next door to plow in his neighbor‘s field.

A whole mess of ajossis come running and uncork Mr. Pipe from the ajumma and somehow, in a section of the movie that was much too confusing for me, the sex fiend gets taken into a hospital where a pretty female doctor puts the guy through a series of tests. The testing scenes are quite amusing. Like some thawed Neanderthal man, Mr. Engorged is kept in an antiseptic hospital room tied to a bed while orderlies come in with various objects of torture to take measurements of Mr. Happy‘s dimensions and capabilities. At one point, the doctors tied a two-by-four to the end of Mr. Johnson and added weights to one side to gauge strength. Needless to say, his pissing stick came close to handling the work of a small forklift.

But his tremendous equipment was only one facet of this complex man; he also was a humping madman who had to prod every woman who got within poking distance when the beast was on him. At first the doctors tried to endure the nightly screams of missile man, but then they began feeding him a steady supply of women as appetizers. But his was a thirst incapable of being quenched. He went through an assembly line of curious ajummas, hookers, and then the hospital staff before escaping to the countryside where he was welcomed by a brothel owner who got the bright idea of marketing this guy to frustrated housewives.

But here‘s the kicker: the guy‘s too big. Every baloney pony rider comes away from the experience so busted open that she can‘t walk, stand, sit or move without feeling a tender soreness in her abdominal region. When he‘s in the hospital, at one point the doctors are sending in women two at a time to feed him, and each one is later brought out on a gurney clutching her stomach and wailing “like a virgin, touched for the very first time.” Quentin Tarantino really nailed that song.

But as much as the Donger was the soul of the movie, the lady doctor was the central character. She finds her patient in the countryside at the brothel, the owner sitting alone in front. He tells the city doctor that the circus freak ruined all the town ajummas and now the owner has no business. Doctor follows owner into the hovel and back to Mr. Flagpole‘s room. At first he greets her with deference, after all, she‘s the authority figure. Then the urge sets upon him and he wrestles with her. She mistakenly believes that if she just stands tall the goon will respond to her natural leadership skills, but it‘s her exposed legs and come-hither lips that capture his fancy. They fight, she loses, and what follows is the longest love scene of the movie. She struggles to fend him off, but he‘s too strong physically, and once he introduces her to his special purpose, she gives herself willingly.

The movie shifts back to a broadcast sound stage and the interview, with the doctor summing up the case of the Elongated Man. Final comments from the commentator, douse the house lights, and then the doctor and interviewer are unclipping their label microphones. The male anchor leaves but the doctor stays seated behind. From both sides of her come two men pushing wheelchairs. The doctor shifts uncomfortably in her seat and then with a great deal of exertion hefts herself into one of the chairs and is pushed out of the studio. Close credits.

What are they trying to say with this film? Well, part of the message is that size matters even in Korean. But in order to salvage the ego of men who are under-funded, the caution to women is that too much of a good thing is… well, too much of a good thing. Show a little appreciation that the man you got now won‘t be puncturing your balloon and making you an invalid.

There‘s a whole litany of Korean films about prostitutes, so many in fact that it should be a sub-genre of Korean movies. I‘ve seen more than a handful that either featured a fallen woman as the heroine, or had a prominent character walking the street. All stick close to the theme of the connection between hard luck and a hard life. There are no Pretty Woman scenarios in stories about Korea‘s working women; Xaviera Hollander has no kindred spirits in Korean, happy hookers just don‘t exist here.

Take this one movie, for example. It‘s a fairly standard treatment of the subject matter. Although it has that 1980s feel, this film was an early 1990s offering before Korean cinema starting making huge strides in quality in the late 1990s. A schoolgirl from the country is sold to a brothel owner in a red-light district in Seoul. Gang-raped by a trio of bouncers as her introduction to her new life in the glass houses, once her virginity is conveniently dispensed with, she goes to work hawking sex for won.

The rest of the film is about life as a prostitute. All facets revealed and no stone unturned: abortion, condom use, venereal disease, endless ’go-stop‘ games, boredom, drunkenness, perversion, and lots and lots of sex with strangers. The young flower is transformed from embarrassed ingénue to savvy sex peddler, all the while losing her soul as a slave to that bedroom rhythm. She runs away in mid-film with a nice boy who pays the fee but never collects on her debt, but she‘s recaptured by the brothel owner and taken out to the country to ply her trade as punishment for her transgressions. She loses friends to AIDS, old age, and time. I can‘t remember how it ended, although I‘m positive Richard Gere didn‘t come out of the mountain mist to make an honest woman of her. Probably closed with the girl, now a seasoned veteran, sitting slump-shouldered on a stool outside the pink-lighted window rooms smoking a cigarette before the nightshift and looking like the dregs of Korean society. In Korea, the glass slipper has slivers, Cinderella.

There‘s no telling what insights about Korean sexuality can be plucked from the last movie reviewed here, but the story is so bizarre that it must say something. This one takes place in olden times, Joseon Dynasty period or thereabouts, and is a tale that‘s pure country. This movie is offered up as the exception that proves the rule, in that here the women are sexually aggressive, but in a weird way.

A scruffy Joseon farmer, complete with topknot, scraggy beard, and white, linen hanbok, is being chased by two rather attractive, mature women in traditional hanbok dresses splashed with primary colors. Both women seduce him, then go to war with one another for his undivided affections. In the films of my youth, the catfight was a male fantasy turn-on, but the Korean version left me puzzling over what constituted a contest of strength for those peninsular country girls back in the day.

Let‘s set the scene. After much unsuccessful grappling with indecision by the farmer, the ladies decide to square up who‘ll be his life mate with a duel in the sun. The women go into the forest with the farmer following closely behind carrying one of those oversized wicker fans that look like palm fronds. It‘s an extra-large version of one of those leaves you use to wrap samgyeopsal.

The group enters into a clearing, one of the women steps up about 20 meters away from a persimmon tree, hikes up her skirt, and then signals to the farmer to start flapping away behind her.

The farmer gets to working up a sweat while airing out the young lady‘s delta of Venus, and just about the time he looks to run out of gas, persimmons begin to hurl themselves off the tree to land in front of the woman‘s feet. Yes that‘s right, the scent of woman summoning fruit was an ancient Korean mating ritual.

Well the second woman has just about as much luck luring persimmons as the first, so the trio goes deeper into the forest to see who‘s more aromatically irresistible to the mountain critters. The first lady‘s only able to stir up some of the birds, squirrels, and tinier woodland creatures, but our eventual winner, the Musk Queen, is able to inflame the passions of a pouncing tiger that frightens away our three rural love contestants.

What does this say about Korean attitudes toward sex? Maybe it‘s a warning to use feminine hygiene products or risk being devoured by a man-eater. Either that, or pederasty is a problem in Asia just like everywhere else.

And the big picture? Well, Korean attitudes toward female sexuality have a ways to go to catch up to the West‘s liberal cultural standards. On the other hand, it‘s a comfort to know we share the same fascination with farm animals.