ASSUMING MANHOOD: PROSTITUTION AND PATRIOTIC PASSIONS IN KOREA(1).

"Korean Men! Rise! Korean Men! Rise!"

The Korean beverage market is saturated with male tonics. A 1999 TV commercial of one such tonic(2) featured a gigantic bottle of the drink making a thunderous landing onto the city, upon which toppled buildings become erected, together with throngs of Korean office men's arms raised to the sky, cheering in unison to the male voice-over, "Korean Men! Rise! Korean Men! Rise!" The theme of rise from ruins in national and commercial propaganda has been prominent following the "IMF crisis," a local interpretation of the Asian economic crisis and its effects on Korea. Together with the slogan "Glory and Might" (wip'ungdangdang) in its print-ads and a poster featuring a naked athletic male body, the advertising campaign offers the promise not only of male virility but also reinvigoration of national honour through the revitalization of the male body.

In spite of this popular concern with male prowess, dominant discourses are highly repressive and moralizing towards sex. In the public arena, forms of sex deviating from the moral ideal of marital sex is readily controlled and suppressed.(3) Public discussion of sex in the late 1990s continues to focus largely on the sanctioning of sex within marriage.(4) However, statistics have shown that Korean men's use of prostitution is a prevalent phenomenon.(5) A series of reports assert that there are around one million women engaged in the Korean sex industry, amounting to as much as 20 percent of all women between the ages of 1529.(6) My findings suggest that these contradictions have to be understood in terms of three powerful but conflicting discourses on sexuality and masculinity in Korea; namely, Confucian traditions and morality, the military culture, and Christianity. These three discourses, as diverse in origin and doctrine as they are, find common expression in the building of a Korean nation through the discipline of morally, physically, and spiritually superior individuals, and invariably inscribe individual bodies onto the grand national project.

Research Background

Research on prostitutes' clients has been scanty in the social sciences. While prostitutes are studied as deviants and/or victims (Pateman 1988; Barry 1981; Dworkin 1989), clients are often missing in the picture or assumed as a kind of "non-person" (Hart 1998). The reluctance to identify clients as a subject of research perpetuates certain assumptions about the essential nature of prostitutes' clients, reinforcing the idea of a "natural" male sex drive that has necessitated prostitution. It should be recognised that men's use of prostitution is as much shaped by social and cultural processes as prostitution as a trade, and deserves equal rigor in its examination.

Studies of prostitution that actually try to include an examination of clients' perspective have largely focused on Western men's use of prostitution as a compensation for feelings of inadequacy according to the dominant form of masculinity.(7) O'Connell Davidson (1998: 165-8) found group patronage of prostitutes, which functions as the "ritual reinscriptions" of manhood, bizarre because of "the absence of personal sexual desire or erotic interest." Yet she fails to explore why prostitution has been identified as the site for such reinscription, and how the rituals work to enable the seemingly bizarre performance of something "personal and intimate" with total strangers.

Studies of men's sexual consumption in Asian cultures are chiefly limited to that of Japan and Thailand. An important revelation in Allison's (1994) study of salaried men's patronage of hostess clubs on company expenses is how male consumption of femininity and female sexuality may be an institutionalised practice. Fordham (1993, 1998) further illustrates how sex with prostitutes should be considered in the context of the entire male rite--the competitive drinking rites concluded with sex with prostitutes should be treated as "one homogenous male ritual dedicated to the constitution and public demonstration of masculine status and potency" (Fordham 1998: 98). My findings also show that male peer group rituals in Korea are essentially a process of giving legitimacy to the expression of desires and the constitution of a virile masculinity. The male ritual culminates in a collective transgression of the dominant moral code that further enhances the solidarity of the male group.