6 Seoul: Peering Behind Closed Doors

INN AND OUT

If a guy at a booking club gets lucky, though, he might get a phone number. If he gets really lucky, the new pair might head off to a love motel. Young Koreans generally live with their parents until they get married, and your typical apartment in Seoul is small, putting everyone in the family in close proximity. This means that Korean couples, both young and old, are forced to get creative when they want to get carnal. One way they do this is by utilizing Seoul’s many love motels, places where cheap rooms can be rented by the night or, if you’re all about efficiency, by the hour. Most love motels feature décor not dissimilar to a standard low- to mid-range hotel. (And they function just fine that way too. Solo travellers and groups of friends often make use of them, thanks to their low rates and the fact they’re always located near bus and train stations.)Others, however, up the ante with mirrors on the ceiling, round beds, or Jacuzzis. And in addition to the standard complimentary toiletries, you’ll typically find condoms and lube in the bedside nightstand.

In Seoul, love motels cluster around universities and nightlife areas, but they do what they can to give customers as much privacy as possible. Their parking garages are always half-covered by dangling ropes or rubber strips to prevent anyone spotting you as you walk from your car to the entrance. And for those who blush easily, it’s possible to use certain love motels without ever interacting with another human being. Some places offer check-in via touch-screen kiosks, and elevators typically have a box where you can anonymously drop your room key when you’re done. No more walks of shame.

STAMINA BOOSTS

If the prospect of a night at a ‘love motel’ fills a guy with insecurity, before heading to a booking club he might go down to the banks of the Han River. There he’ll find Noryangjin, Seoul’s biggest fish market, where men and women in wellingtons auction off tunas at 3 a.m. and chop up tiny octopi to be eaten raw, while the tentacles are still moving. Could any place be less sexy? And yet, at any given time there are likely to be men here getting themselves in the mood.

Korean cuisine has several foods believed to have sexual benefits; they’re typically not considered aphrodisiacs, but tools to boost men’s virility, or ‘stamina’ as Koreans tend to describe it. One look at the offerings at Noryangjin and you’ll know why. Spoon worms, or gaebul in Korean, are burrowing marine worms that look exactly like flaccid penises. Ergo, they’re often called penis fish. Ergo, they must be good for your penis, or so the reasoning goes. Hollow, these too are typically served alive, cut into sections that resemble dick rigatoni. Only slightly less unappetizing are hagfish, which look like an eel crossed with a penis. Also like a penis, they emit a slimy substance used to help them slip into orifices, though hagfish do this in order to feed on the innards of other fish. Hagfish, at least, are cooked. If you’re looking to last longer but don’t have the stomach for Noryangjin’s offerings, there are other stamina foods available. Dog meat is thought to do the trick, as is beef tripe soup and grilled eel. Or, for the really squeamish, there’s Korean ginseng. And unlike the others, ginseng actually boosts performance, as researchers at the University of Guelph proved in 2011.

GOING DOWNTOWN

In the middle of Seoul’s downtown are Tapgol Park, the city’s first modern public park, and Jongno-3-ga (pronounced ‘Jongno-sahm-ga’) subway station. These now form the edge of the city’s main tourist district, but the area used to be the capital’s nightlife hub, and the area had a wild reputation, so much so that, according to Joe McPherson, a local food writer and tour guide, there used to be a verb, ‘to jongsahm’, which basically meant to go out drinking and whoring. Jongsahm-ing sometimes got violent, and the area is thought to be haunted by the ghosts of murdered prostitutes.

The neighbourhood also has much more pleasant stories, though. Several decades ago, the government wanted to widen a road here, but wasn’t too keen on offering local business owners fair compensation in return for demolishing their shops. In retaliation, the business owners built Nakwon Arcade, a multi-storey building arching over the new road. Buskers found that the underpass had excellent acoustics and began congregating there. This led to a club district springing up in the surrounding alleys, several gay clubs among them, forming the city’s first gay district. For a long time Nakwon-dong’s (‘dong’ meaning ‘district’) bars, saunas and theatres were the only places that the city’s gays could comfortably congregate. Its importance even earned it, too, a vocabulary entry, as 1990s Seoul’s gay subculture of casual relationships came to be known as ‘Nakwon-dong culture’.

GULP

It’s not often that a commercial can change a country’s attitudes about gay and transgender people.But in 2001 a TV advert had just that impact in South Korea. The advertisement was for Dodo cosmetics, and it begins with a close-up of a plunging neckline. The camera then pulls up and back to reveal a beautiful woman in a completely dark room. She’s dressed all in black, sitting regally upright, one hand resting on the other in her lap, mimicking the Mona Lisa’s pose. Her face hints at a smile, and from somewhere the slightest breeze brushes her hair. Then the camera approaches her face. Slowly, she leans forward and swallows, revealing an Adam’s apple.

The woman in the ad was Lee Kyung-eun, who, twenty-six years earlier, had been born a boy in the Seoul suburb of Seongnam. From an early age Lee identified as female and in the 1990s she underwent sex reassignment surgery. She was working in Japan when she was spotted by a talent scout. The Dodo commercial was her first big break, and she went on to have a modestly successful career in singing and acting, choosing the stage name Harisu, a play on the English term ‘hot issue’.

Harisu was South Korea’s first trans entertainer, and the year after the Dodo commercial she became just the second person in the country to legally change their gender. In 2007 she married the rapper Micky Jung, and in 2009 she opened a transgender club in Seoul’s posh Apgujeong neighbourhood. Despite conservative Korean attitudes about gay and transgender people being slow to change, Harisu’s convincing femininity forced people to question their assumptions and helped advance the country’s gay rights movement. How convincing? Dodo actually had to digitally enhance Harisu’s Adam’s apple for their commercial.

COWGIRL

On the night of February 6, 1982, a crowd formed outside of Seoul Theater, one of the city’s oldest cinemas and just a couple of blocks from Nakwon-dong’s gay scene. The country was under the rule of a military junta led by Chun Doo-hwan, and it was only a month earlier that a night-time curfew had been lifted. This was the first movie to receive a late-night screening since. Seoul Theater’s largest hall could seat 1,500, but the cinema sold 5,000 tickets for that evening’s screening, and in the mad rush for tickets the throng broke the box office windows. The crowd was there to see Madame Aema, by the director Jung Im-yeop. The film, the story of a woman who flits from affair to affair while her husband is in prison, was the most iconic of numerous erotic films produced in the 1980s. Up to that point, Korean film had been resolutely chaste, but this loosening of the reins (and pants) wasn’t the result of any artistic liberation. According to Kim Sang-cheol of the Korean Film Archive, while other topics faced government censorship, the racy and the risqué was encouraged as an outlet for the public’s oppressed desires and as a distraction from the government’s human rights abuses. The only censorship Madame Aema received, in fact, was in its title. As for most movies of the time, Madame Aema’s Korean title was written in Chinese and translated as The Woman Who Loved Horses. In Korean, ‘horse’ can have obscene connotations, and for the government that was just a bit too much. They changed one of the Chinese characters so that the title had the same pronunciation, but a different meaning: The Woman Who Loved Hemp.

Madame Aema’s popularity led to twelve sequels, the last released in the early 1990s, making it the longest film series in Korean history.

LATE BLOOMERS

Madame Aema and the other erotic films of the eighties – movies with titles like Between the Knees and Prostitution – were likely far more effective in raising libidos than, say, hagfish, but artistically they left a lot to be desired. What they did do, however, was bring female sexuality front and centre for the first time in Korean film. As the film critic Kang So-won wrote, ‘Films such as Madame Aema and Eoh Wu-dong introduced female characters who daringly challenge the Confucian patriarchy and male-dominated society – as the subject of their own desires.’

Though they probably didn’t aim that high, the eighties pulp films opened the door for Korean directors to address the topic of sex in more artistic and controversial ways. One of those films that broke new ground and courted controversy was Park Jin-pyo’s Too Young to Die, which was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. The movie stars the septuagenarian couple Park Chi-gyu and Lee Sun-ye as themselves and tells the true story of their late-life romance. Both previously widowed, Park and Lee discover a chance for love that they’d assumed had passed them by. Together they also rediscover sex, and the film’s explicit scenes, though frank and honest, initially saw the film all but banned by the Korea Media Rating Board.

Another Korean film to make an appearance at a major festival, this one at Sundance, was Vegetarian, by Lim Woo-Seong. A young housewife is plagued by nightmares that cause her to be repulsed by meat. Her husband thinks she’s coming unhinged, and she drifts into a relationship with her brother-in-law, an artist who begins using her nude body as a canvas on which to paint flowers in an exploration of the link between art and sexuality.

BED ROOMS

Seoul is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, making privacy hard to come by, and so an entire culture has developed around the bang, or ‘room’. There are PC bangs, internet cafés for online gaming; board game bangs for board games; and DVD bangs for watching movies. The bang’s temporary privacy means it’s also ready-made for sex, in all its sellable varieties. There are kiss bangs, if all you want is to make out and maybe cop a feel. Daeddal bangs – an abbreviation of ‘daeshin ddalddali’, or ‘instead of masturbation’ – sell hand jobs, and Ibssa bangs, literally ‘mouth wrap rooms’, sell what you think they sell.

These are just a couple of species in the vast kingdom of semi-hidden places where sex is for sale in Seoul. There are also room salons, where groups of men go to drink, sing karaoke, and receive the lavish attentions of hostesses. For women, there are host bars, or ‘ho-ppa’, as they’re often called here, a play on ‘oppa’, the term of endearment that girls use for their boyfriends. The more chaste can go to talk bars and pay for the privilege of having a beautiful girl talk (and only talk) to you. Massage parlours might actually just be for massages, or they might not. If a man visits a barber’s shop where there’s only one barber’s pole spinning outside, he’s just getting a trim. If he visits a barber’s shop with twin poles, there’s a good chance he’s paying for a happy ending too.

If you go to Seoul nightlife districts or, especially, the area around the Gangnam Finance Center and look down, you’ll get an idea of how much of the rest of the city’s sex trade occurs. Littering the pavement like confetti are business cards featuring scantily clad women and a phone number. Johns will rent a room in a motel, call the number, and a girl will be delivered to them, evading any police scrutiny.

RED LIGHTS OUT

One of the few places in Seoul where sex is out in the open is a dingy neighbourhood northeast of downtown called Cheongnyangni. For decades it has served as a transportation hub, linking the provinces with the capital. Significantly, this meant that during the Korean War the U.S. Army used it as a staging area for troops on their way to the front lines, and where army grunts go, houses of ill repute follow.

Cheongnyangni 588 – its prosaic name comes either from the local address or the number of a bus that used to run here, depending on whom you ask – is one of Seoul’s only remaining red light districts.

Tucked between an upscale department store and a Catholic hospital, the district fills several back alleys with long buildings – part storefront, part stable. Girls sit in small front rooms, clutching Hello Kitty pillows or absentmindedly thumbing their phones, before disappearing into a bedroom with a customer.

Technically this is all illegal thanks to a 2004 law that criminalized prostitution, but Korea is nothing if not hypocritical about sex. A survey done by the Korean Institute of Criminology said that fifty-six percent of Korean men have visited a prostitute, and there’s generally a don’t ask, don’t tell attitude about the sale of sex. So Cheongnyangni 588 stays open and the police cruisers keep driving past, ignoring what they see. What moralism and legislation can’t stop, though, economics soon will. The district is set for demolition next year to make way for a pair of sixty-five-storey skyscrapers.

ON THE INTERNET, NOBODY KNOWS YOU’RE A DOM

This lack of privacy reinforces a culture where opinions of others carry a lot of weight, and when it comes to sex, overt displays of sexuality or any deviance from sexual norms are frowned upon. It can be intimidating expressing one’s unique tastes anywhere, but, as a young Seoulite explained via email, ‘It’s more unlikely to happen especially in Korea where most people are so conscious about how they’re considered by others.’

The closed doors of the various bangs provide space for those expressions, but, this being Korea, arguably the most wired country in the world, the internet has proven to be an even bigger liberator. Websites called ‘cafés’ have made it easier for Koreans with alternative tastes to meet, hook up, and express themselves without fear of judgement. And in a country where frank talk on sex is severely lacking, these online communities – whether for S&M, swinging, or guys who fancy BBW – also have an educational function. The young Seoulite I spoke to, a member of a BBW ‘café’ who prefers to remain nameless, said that some people ‘might not have known without the internet that the particular terms explaining themselves existed. This makes a big difference. Knowing the fact that there are quite a lot of people who have the same taste is very important in the sense that they don’t have to worry about if they are so strange.’

Besides the various smaller ‘cafés’, one of the biggest online venues for erotica in Korea is the website sora.net, where individuals trade pictures, discuss sex, and arrange hook-ups. Just don’t try visiting it in Seoul without the help of a proxy server. Pornography is illegal in South Korea, and if you try to access the site directly you’ll be met by a message from the Korean Communications Standard Commission informing you that the site is blocked.

GOOD COMPANY

Sitting in a forest valley in northern Seoul is one of the Korean capital’s most beautiful complexes. Nestled among pine trees and bamboo groves, Gilsang Temple feels ancient, but is in fact one of the youngest temples in the city, dating back only to 1997. Before this, the complex was Daewongak, one of Seoul’s last and most exclusive gisaeng houses, where the country’s most powerful men came to relax and do business. For influential men in Korea, whether royalty or politicians, businessmen or celebrities, women employed to service them have always been one of the perks of power. But perhaps even more important than sex is the ego-stroking these women provide, and nobody was better at this than the gisaeng. Gisaeng are frequently compared to Japan’s geishas, but there are several important differences. For starters, you won’t find any gisaeng wandering the back alleys of Bukchon, like you will see geishas in Kyoto’s Gion; the tradition is all but lost. For much of their history, the gisaeng were also property of the state, meaning they enjoyed none of the high status some geisha did.

Providing sexual services was part of the gisaeng’s function, though for the most prominent this was limited to a single sponsor, if it happened at all.

By far the gisaengs’ main attractions were their charm, intelligence, and wit. Like geisha, gisaeng were well educated, trained in fine arts, poetry and music, and they had a notable impact on early modern Korean art.

Many of the most prominent singers, dancers and actors of the 1920s and 1930s began their careers as gisaeng. The women also played a significant political role. Because of their frequent meetings with a wide array of powerful men they were an invaluable font of political and military secrets, and it’s safe to say that more than a few times the tide of Korean history turned on the whispers of a gisaeng’s lips.

THE DARK PRINCE

If you’re royalty, this is the sort of thing you can get away with. Up to a point. Beginning in 1392, the Joseon dynasty ruled the Korean peninsula for some 500 years. That’s a long time, and it would take some exceptionally bad behaviour to make yourself indisputably the dynasty’s most notorious member, but that’s exactly what Prince Sado did. As a young child, Sado was promising, intelligent and obedient, but as he entered adulthood he began displaying increasingly worrying behaviour. He drank huge amounts of alcohol and organized orgies, scandalizing the court. He would leave the palace dressed in the clothes of a commoner, disappearing into the city for long periods of time, no one knowing what he did during these excursions. He flew into fits of rage, killing royal physicians, translators, servants, and concubines. He raped court ladies and attempted to force himself on his sister. He claimed he had visions of the God of Thunder. And because his elder brother had died before he was born, he was also first in line to assume the throne. Clearly this was a problem. Yeongjo couldn’t imagine handing the kingdom to his son, so there was only one choice: Sado had to die.Sado was quite plainly insane, and many scholars now place the blame for his mental illness squarely on his father, an insecure, domineering figure who likely deserved the title ‘World’s Worst Dad’. There’s also a very plausible theory that Sado was merely caught on the wrong side of a court power struggle, his misbehaviour subsequently exaggerated to discredit him and his faction.

But whatever the truth, the story only ends one way. Because he couldn’t kill his son with his own hands, Yeongjo ordered Sado to climb into a wooden rice chest.

The chest was then nailed shut and left out in the July sun on the grounds of Changgyeong Palace, Seoul’s most beautiful. It took Sado eight days to die.

SECRET BOOK

In the same neighbourhood as Gilsang Temple is one of Seoul’s most renowned museums, and inside the museum is a book that’s an official National Treasure. The book, the Hyewon Pungsokdo, contains thirty paintings that are the world’s finest examples of choonhwa, a genre of folk and erotic art little-known outside of Korea, particularly in comparison to neighbouring Japan’s shunga.

The paintings in the Pungsokdo were all done by Shin Yoon-bok, an eighteenth-century artist better known by his pen name, Hyewon. Hyewon was one of the most gifted artists of his day and trained at the Dowhaseo, the royal painting institute, but his penchant for painting choonhwa got him kicked out. What separates choonhwa from similar Chinese and Japanese genres is its lyricism, with background landscapes frequently taking up much of the canvas and any sexual activity often relegated to an inconspicuous corner. Choonhwa also tend to be humorous, with a strong mischievous streak. Hyewon’s most famous painting, Scenery on Dano Day, depicts young men peeping on four women bathing in a stream. Peeping was a common theme in Hyewon’s work; so were gisaeng. Nothing Happens in the Gisaeng Chamber shows a man casually propped up in a window frame, gazing out at a high-class lady walking by, acting as if nothing at all is going on. Meanwhile, a gisaeng prepares to slip her hands underneath the blanket on his lap. And as Hyewon well knew, sex isn’t limited to the young and the human.

In A Widow’s Lust in Spring, an old woman sports an amused smirk as she watches two dogs go at it, while next to her a younger woman, her daughter perhaps, throws her an exasperated and uncomfortable sidelong glance in the manner of teens everywhere.

Like so much else of Seoul’s sexuality, though, to see it you have to know when and where to look. The Hyewon Pungsokdo is kept in the private Gansong Art Museum, open just twice a year.