I moved to Korea in August of 2012.  During my time here I have been impressed by many aspects of the Korean culture.  One aspect is the kindness I have received from so many warm-hearted, thoughtful, and generous Koreans (friends and strangers alike).  It was my experience with authentic Korean kindness that led me to be surprised by one of Korea’s darker sides: their sex industry. 

Like the sex industries of North America, Europe, Asia and other parts of the world, Korea’s sex industry is large, profitable, and pervasive.  But unlike other cultures, many Koreans seem to deny the existence of the industry itself.  Despite the fact that sex is being sold in their communities, near their homes, and near the schools, too many often turn a blind eye to this part of their world.  

Korea’s silence about their sex industry is unhealthy and dangerous.  I think it is time for Koreans to start talking more about their sex industry and what the effect that industry has on individuals and the culture as a whole.

Who am I?

What gives me the right to make sharp, though possibly accurate, judgments about Korean culture from my limited observations of its sex industry?  Well, nothing.  I’m not an expert.  I’m just a guy with an English degree and an opinion.  But my opinion is based on objective observation and plenty of research. 

You cannot walk two minutes in most Korean cities without seeing signs that read “massage” or “anma” or “norebang”.  Are all of them fronts for sex businesses?  Absolutely not. But according to the Wall Street Journal, “more than 100 businesses [including massage, anma, norebang, bar, and more] can be found in the one-kilometer radiuses of the city centers of Seoul, Busan, Ulsan and Gwangju that sell sex.”  That is to say that, even if all the massage, anma and norebangs do not sell sex, many of them do.  This is a fact I learned rather awkwardly…

My awkward education.

I played competitive volleyball for 15 years.   I stopped playing several years ago because of the chronic back pains the sport caused me.  Due to this pain I started visiting a massage therapist on a regular basis.  When I came to Korea in 2012 I knew I would need to find a good massage therapist. 

It was my third or fourth week in Korea when I decided the pain was too much and I needed to get a massage.  I noticed a street in Samsansdong with several signs reading “sports massage” in Korean.  I decided to check one out the next day. 

At 2:30 pm on a Saturday I entered my first Korean “massage” parlor. It was like no massage parlor I had ever been to.  It was dark.  It smelled of an odd mixture of mildew, fruity air freshener, and baby powder.  And there were none of the usual hallmarks of a massage parlor: candles, aromatherapy displays, plants and flowers, or those silly miniature ponds that have their own perpetual motion waterfalls.  But I figured, “maybe this is how they do it in Korea.” 

I asked how much a massage cost.  The woman behind the counter pulled out a calculator, typed a few keys, and I read “220,000”.  I was confused since I heard 120,00 was the most I should expect to pay.  The look on my face must have expressed as much because the woman pointed to it again and said something in Korean, which I guessed meant “standard price”.  What she said next turned my confusion into downright embarrassment: “Way-gook.  Condom.”

Thinking I might have stumbled onto the only shady massage parlor in Samsandong I tried another one across the street.  But when the same thing happened there I realized Samsandong was not the place to go for a massage.

I eventually went to a place near the cluster of love motels across the road from Taehwa train station.  It was recommended to me by a female expat friend, so it seemed safe.  And while I visited that place several times (I eventually found a professional sports massage place near Hogye) with no overtly sexual incidents, the masseuses there would always at some point during the massage ask if I had a girlfriend, if I was lonely, why I wasn’t out with a girl that night, all while telling me how handsome and sexy I was. 

I always wondered if they were just flirting, or if they were feeling me out for an “extra” service.  I hated wondering that because I felt like I was demeaning them by considering that possibility.  But it was impossible not to wonder since my walk from their massage shop to the bus stop went past the love motels that were literally littered with business cards depicting large-breasted women in bikinis along with a phone number to call if you wanted sex. 

 Why don’t you see what I see?

             I’m an objective kind of fellow.  I did the math.  The massage parlors in Samsandong, the love motels with prostitute business cards sprinkled on the steps, the seemingly legitimate masseuses making barely veiled passes at me.  It became very obvious to me that sex was being sold in Ulsan, and it was being sold nearly everywhere.  Once that became my understanding, I started to see these clusters of massage parlors, anmas, and love motels all over Ulsan, Busan, Daegu and every other city I visited.  I knew they weren’t all sex operations, but I figured that even if only half of them were, there were still tons.

             I grew up in Philadelphia proper.  I have traveled in Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the US.  I have been offered sex by street prostitutes in China, the Philippines, Philadelphia, and Mexico.  South Korea isn’t special because it sells sex or because it has a dark underbelly that people do not often talk about.  What makes Korea unique is how it tries to hide that underbelly in plain sight while denying its existence altogether.

             And this is where my objection with Korean culture’s stance on its sex industry started.  When asked, almost every Korean I talked to about the Korean brand of “sex for sale” either minimized the issue—saying it was something only degenerate single middle-aged men or foreigner businessmen do—or denied its existence all together.  “Prostitution is illegal,” they would say.  “But that’s an anma, right there!  And that’s a hagwon next to it,” I would counter.  Only to hear again, “yes, but prostitution is illegal.” Why don’t you see what I see…

 The truth about sex industries.

             Sex work is an age-old profession, an age-old product, and an age-old disgrace.  Where there is sex work there is poverty, abuse, drug use, disease, and often despair.  I am sure there are some sex workers that are content with their lives, and a handful that are even legitimately happy and financially successful.  But the reality of the pain and suffering that these industries cause is well documented.

Apparently there is a common belief among many Koreans that prostitutes and other sex workers chose their profession freely.  Many Koreans, especially women, seem to think that sex workers chose their profession because they like sex or don’t want to work hard at real jobs.  But this belief is too simplistic an answer to the nuanced, complex question of why women enter, or are forced into, the sex industry.  When one considers the unfortunate, desperate, and often dangerous realities of sex industries it is easy to doubt the simple belief “they want to sell sex for money.”

According to the Prostitution Research Institute report: “it is profoundly unjust to declare that prostitution is an acceptable job for some women.  [The majority of sex workers] are poor and started selling sex as underage teens. Prostitution is an intrinsically abusive institution and women stay poor in prostitution (although lots of cash passes through their hands on the way to pimps, salon managers, bartenders, taxi drivers, casino hosts and other predators).

             An Equality Now report stated: “At least 20.9 million adults and children are bought and sold worldwide into commercial sexual servitude, forced labor and bonded labor.”

             Michelle Bachelet, UN Women Director and the former President of Chile reported to the UN: “an estimated 80% of all trafficked persons are used and abused as sexual slaves. This human rights violation is driven by demand for sexual services and the profit that is generated. The commodification of human beings as sexual objects, poverty, gender inequality and subordinate positions of women and girls provide fertile ground for human trafficking.”

The comfort women of Korea; the 12-year-old Filipino and Thai prostitutes forced to perform humiliating sex acts on foreign men; the Eastern European teens trafficked to North America, Western Eurpoe, Japan, and South Korea thinking they were being hired as waitresses or hostesses yet are pressured, and often forced with drugs, violence, and/or threats to engage in sex for money transactions.   All these women can attest to the deplorable, painful, hopeless nature of the sex industry. 

Mahatma Ghandi famously said, “a nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members."  Koreans need to admit and accept that sex workers are usually poor, are largely powerless, are often abused, are sometimes slaves, and are generally severely limited in their ability to improve the quality of their lives.  Until Korea starts treating the helpless, unfortunate, and “weak” sex workers of their nation with care, compassion, and charity, Korea will not be able to call itself “great” on the global stage.

Other countries and their sex industries.

             Whether it is in North America, South East Asia, Russia, or wherever, there is usually a level of honesty about a culture’s stance towards sex work.  The general public seems to be willing to acknowledge the truth about the sex industry.  Popular culture is a great indicator if this phenomenon. 

In the United States, crime/detective television dramas in the US regularly have their sex industry’s worst characteristics at the center of their plots.  Additionally, television, film, music, and stand up comedy regularly prove that the public accepts the reality of the sex industry by the way strip clubs, prostitutes, sexually transmitted diseases, and pornography have become entirely acceptable subjects for jokes and parody.  

In the Phillipines, the public’s acceptance of the sex industry is displayed in a different fashion.  There, prostitutes walk the streets of popular bar and restaurant districts eliciting sex for money.  In many of their clubs and bars one will find dozens of prostitutes ready to sell their bodies for money.  But what one does not find there is any resemblance of resistance to these “illegal” practices.  China is very similar to the Philippines in so far as prostitution is illegal yet their sex workers often boldly and fearlessly search for customers in popular bar and restaurant districts.  

But in Korea it is different.  Despite being able to find several different forms of sex for sale in many neighborhoods and local communities, many Koreans steadfastly deny the existence of the industry itself. 

But maybe that denial is understandable.  If sex can be easily purchased in most Korean communities, it would follow that someone is buying it—the establishments would not continue to operate if no one was buying their product!  And if it is being sold in large quantities, isn’t it likely that men we know are buying it?  Is it possible that many of Korea’s fathers, uncles, brothers and sons are buying it regularly? 

Is it really that common?

             Sadly, it seems the answer is, “yes.” 

             Googling “Korean prostitution” yields a wealth of articles, essays, reports, blogs, and forum posts.  While some are anecdotal and devoid of reputable sources, the amount of information that comes from Korean government agencies themselves is shocking when you consider how at peace many Koreans seem to be with the “fact” that prostitution is illegal.

             From the International Business Times: “the government admitted [the sex industry] accounts for as much as 4 percent of South Korea’s annual gross domestic product -- about the size of the fishing and agriculture industries combined…The South Korean government’s Ministry for Gender Equality estimates that about 500,000 women work in the national sex industry, though, according to the Korean Feminist Association, the actual number may exceed 1 million. If that estimate is closer to the truth, it would mean that 1 out of every 25 women in the country is selling her body for sex.”

             One growing underground corner of the sex industry is teenage prostitution.  From Al-Jazeera: “An estimated 200,000 youths - at least 60 per cent female teenagers - roam the country's streets. About half have worked as underage prostitutes, according to the latest government figures.”

             But Al-Jazeera’s report did not stop at teenage prostitution: “The prostitution problem in South Korea continues to stump authorities. An estimated 1.2 million women are believed involved in the business - or about 20 per cent of all South Korean women aged 15-29.”

             The Korean Times cited a study done by the Korean Institute of Criminology: “…The study…revealed that one in five men in South Korea buy sex more than four times a month and 4.1 percent of women in their 20s make a living as prostitutes.”

             While one might hope that Korea’s sex industry has withered over the last decade, a Wall Street Journal article published in 2014 rebukes that notion: “This fall marked the 10^th anniversary of a sweeping anti-prostitution law in South Korea [but] despite the law’s successes in red-light zones, the country’s sex trade continues to flourish underground, say people who follow the industry.”

Facts are facts.

             Even if half of the aforementioned studies are outdated or inaccurate, that still means that: about two percent of the country’s GDP comes from the sex industry, that one in ten Korean men purchase sex more than four times a month, that two percent of Korean women in their twenties make their living selling sex, and that 10 percent of Korean women aged 15-29 are involved in the sex industry in some way or another.  And when you consider that South Korea is the 27^th most populated country in the world, yet it has the 10^th most prostitutes, there is no denying that the sex industry is huge here. 

The Examiner offered this harrowing report: “it might come as a surprise that [Koreans] are actually the biggest sex tourists in Southeast Asia. The Korean Institute of Criminology concluded that Korean tourists outnumber all other nationalities in terms of the frequency of their visits to prostitutes.”  Additionally, “The U.S. State Department's annual report on human trafficking also confirms that Korean men are the main client for child prostitutes in Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands.”

             What is the relevance of Korea’s position as the main clients for child prostitutes in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands?  When one considers that “an estimated 80% of all trafficked persons are used and abused as sexual slaves”, it shows a level of disregard for basic human rights by Korean men that is alarming and terribly upsetting. 

Making sense of all this.

             So, what do we know?

            First, we know that prostitution exists here in Korea.  Second, we know that it is sold in places near our homes, schools, churches, etc.  Third, we know that many Koreans passionately deny the existence of, let alone the pervasiveness of, the sex industry here.  Fourth, we know that there are sex industries in every country and culture.  Fifth, we know that it is not a small industry, it is not fringe, it is very big, very profitable, and there are many millions of Koreans involved in it.  Sixth, but not least, we know that Koreans are most prolific sex tourists in Southeast Asia.

What do we do now?

             I want Koreans to start talking about their sex industry.  I want schools to be brave enough to talk about this subject inside their classrooms so that their students make an informed decision about whether they want to accept the injustices of the sex industry or not.  I want to see a movement born in Korea that sees people demanding the sex industry is acknowledged and discussed because the sex workers are human beings with basic human rights that are often being ignored and abused. 

I want to see the sex industry talked about because Korea’s place as the king of Southeast Asian sex tourism makes it clear that their men are on the wrong path.  I know too many wonderful and kind and intelligent Korean men to foolishly think all Korean men are evil or bad.  But the fact that many Korean males are frequent users of Korean prostitution, while having a worldwide reputation as being prolific sex tourists, suggests that Korea’s males do not value women, their bodies, or their rights enough.

These often poor, often hopeless, often abused workers are sisters, daughters, and mothers.  They have hopes and dreams.  They are someone’s best friends from childhood. They are someone’s ex-student. 

             If the aforementioned statistics are even close to being true, there is a high probability that, of the 600 or 700 girls I have taught since I arrived in Korea, anywhere between 60 and 120 will exchange sex for money at some time before they turn 30.  That is heartbreaking.

Open your eyes, open your heart, and start talking…

Koreans cannot recognize the humanity inherent in their sex workers if they cannot even recognize they exist in the first place.  These women deserve our compassion, our consideration, and our support.  Koreans are far too familiar with the pain and suffering that Japan caused many helpless, young, innocent comfort women during their occupation.  It is a crime against those women to ignore similar injustices happening right now.

Speaking about teenage prostitution in Korea Shim A-ra, a counselor at the United Voice for Eradication of Prostitution, says “the most common way teenage girls become prostitutes is for boys or men in their 20s to trick them into selling themselves.”  Shim, described the case of an 18-year-old runaway prostitute she had counseled:

“Three weeks after becoming romantically involved with a young man and moving in with him, he and seven friends gang-raped her.  Their intention was to sell her to other men, but she contacted an older woman friend…who helped her escape to a shelter for underage runaway prostitutes.”

One would hope that in a country where prostitution is illegal there was not a need for a “shelter for underage runaway prostitutes”.  Sadly, even teenagers are not safe from the prostitution that “does not exist” here. 

It is time to stop denying.  It is time to stop pretending.  It is time to stop ignoring.  For my students’ sake, for your children’s sake, it is time to start talking honestly and openly about the reality of Korea’s sex industry.