Ruth Barraclough
Introduction
In one of the permanent exhibits at the Seoul Museum of History (Soul Yoksa Pakmulkwan) kisaeng or traditional courtesans are commemorated as part of the history of modernising Seoul in the twentieth century. Photographs, postcards and costumes of kisaeng from the 1910s and 1920s are displayed alongside pictures of the grand ornamental brothel-restaurants in downtown Seoul where they were employed, such as Myh ngwhlgwan (House of Moonlight). This beautifully curated exhibition reminds us of the importance of kisaeng to the cultural and economic life of early modern Seoul. Yet, in a Museum devoted to a history of the city, with permanent exhibits on ‘The Culture of Seoul’, ‘People’s Life in Seoul’, and ‘The Development of Seoul City 50 Years After the Korean War’ kisaeng were the only members of the sex industry commemorated. All those whores and hostesses and street-walkers of rapidly industrialising Seoul were nowhere to be seen. In reality, South Korea’s rapid industrialisation from the 1960s to the 1980s was accompanied by a huge informal economy specialising in sex, liquor and male bonding. Towards the end of military rule, in 1989, it was estimated that one in four women were employed in clandestine ‘sex businesses’ (Kim 1998: 109—10, n. 4) While those women are nowhere celebrated or their professional skills admired, recently there has been a fad of kisaeng appreciation in South Korean popular culture. Alongside movies and television dramas, academic and popular history books feed this kisaeng boom. The recuperation of kisaeng as repositories of treasured Korean traditional culture, and of the former ‘comfort women’ as sexual victims of colonialism and war, is a late-twentieth century phenomenon. For much of the century they had pursued a livelihood with the stigma of their labour intact.
For over one hundred years the sex industry has been one of the largest employers of women and girls in Korea. The industry is complex and endlessly inventive: vulnerable to economic crises yet sustained by a ruthless capacity for adaptation and change. This chapter is a history of sex work in modern Korea which begins by examining the first modern brothels of the early twentieth century and ends with an account of the economics of sex work today. Throughout this chapter I use the term Korea to refer to the entire Korean peninsula during the Choshn Dynasty (1392—1910), to colonial Korea under Japanese occupation (1910—45), and to South Korea (or the Republic of Korea) from 1945 to the present (on sexuality in North Korea, see Kim in this volume).
Male prostitution is discussed only briefly in this chapter, not because it does not exist, but because sources other than anecdotal accounts are hard to come by. The historian Carter Eckert explains that a ‘modern trend toward concealing and disremembering’ homosexuality has left us with a severely abridged understanding of the history of same-sex love in Korea (Eckert 2009: 244). Yet evidence of an economy of male homosexual love that thrived during the Choshn Dynasty, not only within wealthy households but embedded in structures of advancement in the elite bureaucratic state exist in a variety of literary ephemera: letters, poetry and opinion pieces (Eckert 2009: 235—46). In contemporary Korea established prostitution areas like Itaewon and the environs of the large international hotels have female, male and cross-dressing sex workers selling their professional services to a domestic and international clientele. Even in the absence of oral histories or autobiographies by male sex workers that might inform us about their lives, it can be concluded that male prostitution in South Korea thrives as an illicit industry subject to the insecurity implied by irregular, clandestine labour.
The old term for prostitution in Korean, maech’un, literally ‘selling spring’, uses the euphemism for the sexual urge, spring (ch’un). This is cognate with similar terms in Chinese and Japanese as discussed in other essays in this volume. The older term ‘selling spring’ hid the critical role of the purchaser of sexual services, and a woman who sells sex was referred to as maech’unbu. Korean, like English, has a long history of adopting euphemisms to conceal and beautify the violence of these transactions involving the buying and selling of sexual services. These concealments and inducements are of course for the benefit of the market and clients’ sensibilities so that while the language of buying sex can be decorous, the language of selling it teems with pejoratives: from galbo (street walker) to ch’ang (whore), from which the word for syphilis (ch’ang pyong) is derived. While maech’un is still widely used in Korea, recently the term songmaemae has been adopted. Songmaemae translates as the buying (mae) and selling (mae) of sex (song) and was coined by feminists seeking a value-neutral descriptor for sex work which includes the roles of both client and sex worker. When in 2004 the South Korean government introduced changes to the legal status of the sex industry (an issue discussed later in this chapter) the law they introduced was called Songmaemae Tukbyolbop or Special Law on the Sex Trade. It incorporated clients and brothel proprietors, as well as sex workers, within its legal ambit.