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No sex please, we’re Korean
By Andrei Lankov
May 4, 2003
It happened some 10 years ago. A colleague, a foreign student of Korean
literature, was taking part in a seminar in a Korean university. During one of
the sessions, she referred in passing to some of the sexual scenes in a classic
novel.
The remark had unexpected consequences. A Korean scholar angrily replied that
there were no references to sex in the classical novels. Indeed, they could not
possibly be there, since such novels had been written by chaste and pure
individuals from the past. The professor even suggested that my colleague had
been misled by additions made by unscrupulous modern publishers, who were
obviously influenced by debauched Japanese or Westerners. The colleague smiled
politely: she had read the original 18th-century manuscripts, and knew only too
well that the novels did indeed include a number of explicit sex scenes.
Until recently, the media and academia here insisted that the country had
always been a stronghold of chastity and strict sexual mores. Over the last
decade, though a surprising turnaround has occurred. While members of the older
generation feel immense pride in the alleged near-absence of sexual references
in the culture, younger journalists and academics are now eager to prove that
there was a thriving sex culture here. Old erotic paintings once hidden in
museum vaults are now proudly exhibited to the general public. The classic
novels are published in their most explicit versions, and studies describe
sex-related artifacts from the past and insist that once upon a time, Korea’s
sexual culture surpassed that of China or Japan.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Korea during the Chosun Kingdom
(1392-1910) was a very puritan society where sex was not discussed openly. In
this regard it was similar to China, yet much different from less-inhibited
Japan. Westerners tend to believe that China was a land with a sophisticated
sex life, fed by English-language translations of Chinese sexual treatises.
However, these books were written during earlier stages of Chinese history. In
Late Imperial China (say, after the 14th century) authors of sexually explicit
texts faced censorship and, at times, legal prosecution. Neo-Confucianism, a
particularly moralistic brand of Confucianism that came to dominate China and
Korea some 500 years ago, was quite hostile toward eroticism.
This does not mean that all erotic arts were suppressed, however. Throughout
the outwardly restrictive Chosun era painters still depicted ``frivolous’’
topics and people still read sexually explicit literature, despite the best
efforts of the censors.
Nevertheless, the sexual mores were quite strict, at least in regard to women,
who had to remain virginal until marriage and afterward were expected to be
unconditionally faithful to their husbands. A decent woman was expected to
commit suicide if raped, preferably before the rape actually occurred. A widow
had to remain faithful to her late husband, although many folk stories lead us
to doubt that this was always the case, because widows and monks are the most
lecherous characters in Korean lore.
Neither the collapse of the Chosun Kingdom in the early 1900s nor the end of
the colonial regime in 1945 changed this situation in any significant way.
Premarital sex remained a taboo for women, at least those middle-class or
farming families (the urban poor were less restricted). Prostitution became
much more common, but the centuries-old tradition of concubinage was outlawed
and wiped out by the late 1950s.
Premarital cohabitation, almost the norm in most Western societies since the
1970s, was condemned by public opinion. Cohabitation and illicit sexual
liaisons were considered crimes as recently as 1994, although the laws were
seldom enforced.
Unlike women, men occasionally had affairs, but their partners were usually
women on the margins of society assumed to be promiscuous: waitresses in tea
houses, hostesses and so on. Nevertheless, the average male still rarely had
extramarital affairs _ at worst he would choose to visit a prostitute.
All this began to change in the late 1970s when the sexual revolution began to
have an effect here. But that is another story.
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