Just a friendly reminder...

The "scandal" involving 방송인 A양 (a celebrity being euphemized as "Ms A") and her apparently grade-A arsehole of a jilted ex-boyfriend has been grabbing headlines. Just about any guy (or girl) who tries to trash the reputation of an ex by releasing sex tapes or nude photos deserves a smack down of the first order.

There may be exceptions made for a particularly egregious ex who has done something so horrific that it transcends all ethical considerations, but I honestly can't think of anything that bad right now. And that certainly isn't the case with the Taiwanese-American ex of this Ms A, who is hell-bent on destroying her in the public arena, so it's a moot point.

Anyway, I have no interest in finding out the identity of this woman nor searching for the video in question. But I did think it would be a good opportunity to rerun my own public service announcement on the sex tapes and dirty pics of ourselves we know and don't know about.

* Be warned: The two discussions at the above Marmot's Hole links include a lot of people talking about their porn-watching preferences. I guess if you're reading this post at all, that probably won't bother you too much, but if you're one of those people prone to yelling "TMI!" a lot, odium alert. 

...

Well, I guess it's no more angry sex with my running partner in a café restroom for me, then.

Question: What do the following have in common?

• Drinking coffee
• Drinking soda
• Blowing your nose
• Straining on the toilet
• Being startled
• Getting angry
• Having sex
• Exercising

Answer: They are all potential triggers for brain hemorrhaging.

Explanation:

The rupture of a brain aneurysm is a relatively rare event but, as it causes bleeding in the brain, that event is a potentially devastating one. Now researchers have attempted to identify possible triggers for such ruptures, also known as hemorrhagic strokes, finding that sex, coffee and losing one’s temper -- among other things -- may raise the risk.

Such ruptures begin with aneurysms, which are weak spots in blood vessels in the brain. Under stress, those weak spots can rupture and lead to hemorrhaging, or bleeding. But it wasn’t clear what activities put people at the most risk of a resulting hemorrhagic stroke.

Now before you give up any or all of them, read their suggestions:

“Reducing caffeine consumption or treating constipated patients with unruptured [intracranial aneurysms] with laxatives may lower the risk of [subarachnoid hemorrhage]. Although physical exercise has a triggering potential, we do not advise refraining from physical exercise because it is also an important factor in lowering the risk of other cardiovascular diseases.”

That plus anger management.

This is the artwork I got when I image-googled 
"angry sex with my running partner in a café restroom."

... and this. I'm guessing that bloke on the bottom
is at minimal risk for a brain hemorrhage. 

...

"Pairing party" in Hongdae gives some people the vapors

I've long described Korea as the country that invented Don't Ask, Don't Tell. That is, it's perfectly acceptable to be homosexual as long as you keep it to yourself.

To a large extent, this compartmentalization is a larger reflection of Korean culture's utilitarian attitude toward sex in general, including the heterosexual variety. Scratch below the surface and there is a pragmatic realization that sex is something people want to do and need to do, including those who are unmarried or married to someone who does not sexually satisfy them, but there is a cladding that protects — even inoculates — the rest of society that simply doesn't want to know about it (or shouldn't know about it).

This was manifest in the ubiquitous red-light districts just a side street or two removed from major train stations that had later transformed into shopping districts, the wink-wink cultural acceptance of extramarital sexual relations (but not really affairs) through room salons, etc. Adult prostitution is de facto legal in South Korea, and there is widespread acceptance of the idea that it is not really cheating if you're not in love with the person you're having sex with (e.g., the room salon girl).

Meanwhile, there has been a consistent — but not always successful — effort to keep those in high school or younger out of these places, either as customers or service providers. (And lest anyone think I'm condoning or even glorifying the practice, I want to make clear that it was built on the backs of women who were often kidnapped, duped, or otherwise coerced or physically forced into the business, including recently women trafficked from other countries like Russia and the Philippines, and it is good to see various government agencies trying harder and harder to curb that.)

Whiskey, tango, foxtrot, Kushibo?!
How can you post pictures like that?!
Well, devoted reader, it's in the Chosun Ilbo,
and if it's in the Chosun Ilbo, it's A-okay.

Until recently, sexuality in Korea was not so in-your-face, but that started to change with such movies as Yellow Hair (left) in the late 1990s, with its lengthy sex scenes that heralded an era where casual sex, premarital sex, and extramarital sex were all so normative.

So it shouldn't surprise anyone that a club in Hongdae, whose bar district earns its bread and butter from providing opportunities for casual sex, would offer up an event like the "pairing party" or "mating party" advertised in the lovely artwork above and below, where they promise to pay for your one-night stand.

From the Korea Times:

Who would have ever imagined a club that promotes sex exists in the supposedly conservative country of Korea? This absurd idea is happening in the middle of one of Seoul’s most popular areas, Hongdae, according to chosun.com Friday.

Posters advertising one-night stands at a club are found on Hongdae streets.

This club even offers to pay for the drinks and motel fees if clubbers find their partners for the night, encouraging people to actively engage in sexual activity.

But see, here is the problem. The organizers of this 짝짓기 파티 (jakchikki means pairing, and doubles as a euphemism for mating or coupling), by publicly advertising and formalizing their activities, have breeched the appearance of propriety in this society where conservative sexual mores are still commonplace. They have violated the Don't Tell part of this unspoken social contract.

[source]

It matters little that they pierced the veneer in Hongdae (which, by the way, is nearly engulfed by a residential area). Marring that facade is still a social faux-pas or even, depending on its severity, a crime. We saw this a few years ago when English Spectrum publicized their infamous Hongdae party (right), a move with led to the launch of Anti-English Spectrum. And granted, while that outrage was fueled by more than a bit of racism and sexism, at its foundation was anger that the apple cart that everyone knew not to touch had been upset.

The sin here is that the broader public is being made aware of all this, and the club probably ought to have known that, if it is run by Koreans. But then again, a lot more SoKos no longer really care for the archaic and quaint old rules governing expressions of sexuality. Or tattoos. Or marriage. Or whatever else your parents or grandparents have firm ideas about.

Some would ask how the club can make any money by offering, as the Korea Times says they're doing, to pay for the drinks and motel costs of the clubbers who manage to hook up with random strangers, but I think what they're trying to do is create a brand: we are the club to come to if you want to get laid tonight, even on the other 360+ nights a year that we're not holding this type of event.

And that's like printing money.

New and improved fruitcake

Today, December 27, is apparently National Fruitcake Day (and just in time for the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell — rimshot!). And in honor of today being National Fruitcake Day, all of today's stories will be written in fruitcake.

Okay. Obviously Kushibo did not get a sophisticated sense of humor for Christmas. But the National Fruitcake Day angle has an interesting twist to it: Korean bakers are introducing Korean-style fruitcake into the mix of doorstop-like blocks of dried fruit in a heavy cake.

From the Orange County Register:

There are at least two options for your Fruitcake Day festivities, and they both landed on our shore in 1985.

Your first option is for those of us (OK, the majority of people) who don't dig the sticky several-pound mass of dried fruit and nuts bought in round tins printed with holiday pictures.

Friends, we give you the Korean fruit cake, a delightful dish of sponge cake, custard and fresh fruit, layered up on a platter and covered with whipped crème. It's like the gussied-up, grown-up version of strawberry shortcake, with the addition of pineapple, kiwi and mandarin oranges.

At the Manmi Bakery in Garden Grove, Anna Yi sells two sizes, at $18 or $25. The cake is not specifically designed for Christmas, but rather for special occasions, like birthdays, she said.

"Each store has different kinds," Yi said. "Ours is more like an American-style. Other bakeries have a French style."

The French style has more fruit inside, but just a bit of fruit on the top of the cake, looking more like a Western-style cake, she said.

The cakes are not traditionally Korean, said Sejung Kim, assistant director of the UCLA Center for Korean Studies. The cakes grew popular in Korea in the 1980s, when people fell in love with the whipped cream icing, she said.

The story goes on to describe steam-baked Butterfield farm cakes, which sound really appetizing. When I'm back in OC, shall probably check out both. I've never been a big fan of Korean-style bakeries, some of which have dry and bland cookies and cakes, but I do like the moist, custard-filled cakes you find.

Now Manmi says they don't sell these as Christmas cakes per se, but back in Korea (and Japan and much of the rest of East Asia) this is exactly what people buy for Christmas (what some say is part of the destruction of Christmas in places like South Korea or Japan, where its newfound character as a second Valentine's Day has derisively earned it the nickname Sexmas... a pun that works in Japanese and Korean if you replace the Chinese character for 성/せい, meaning holy, with its homophonous counterpart meaning sex: 聖誕祭 replaced by 性誕祭, if I'm putting that together properly).

Back in the 1990s, there was one of those social commentaries that likened people to some person or object in order to illustrate a point. In this case it was women as Christmas cakes, with the date in December corresponding to their age. Around the 22nd or 23rd, it may be a little early but some people are buying the Christmas cake (bear in mind that this is Korean age, so we're talking 20 to 22). Around the 24th, lots of people are buying. By the 25th, that's the Christmas cake's last chance to be bought, because no one buys a Christmas cake from the 26th on. Yes, that's why a lot of women felt freaked out about being an old maid by the age of twenty-five, with many of them rushing off into a marriage to the least worst guy they could find.

I say women are like New Year's cakes... [Kushibo ducks]

Sex volunteers?

Steve, a commenter at The Grand Narrative, mentioned an article in the Joongang Ilbo I had missed about so-called "sex volunteers." These are people who volunteer to have sex with disabled people who might otherwise have no sexual outlet:

While director Cho Kyeong-duk was studying in Japan in 2004, he came across a nonfiction book with a provocative title: “Sex Volunteer,” by Kaori Kawai. It was based on two years of interviews with physically disabled people in countries from Japan to the Netherlands, about their sex lives and the group of people who, as the title implies, volunteer to sleep with them.

It reminded me of something I had read or heard in English a few years ago, about a man in Japan who is paid to take women's virginity. The women who use his service are largely thirty-something women or older who just never ended up having sex for one reason or another: A typical case would be a person who was saving it for the right person who never came along, and now at this "advanced" age, the virginity has become a burden that might turn off someone they would rather not scare away.

The JAD article immediately reminded me of a very minor character in the movie Fight Club. Though she's not "disabled," the woman dying of cancer tells her support group (attended by Ed Norton's and Helena Bonham-Carter's characters) that now all she wants to do is get laid and she makes an offer for anyone who will listen. Finally, she's removed from the podium.

While it might be a throwaway scene in a pop film, it's a real issue for a lot of people. Just because you're in a wheelchair or bed-ridden doesn't mean your libido shuts off. In public health and medical sociology, elder care is a major topic, and one key element is that your physical needs continue, a point driven home to me as I have two elderly relatives who are in nursing care facilities who are as randy as ever, but with no sexual outlet. In fact, it is their lack of sexual expression that leads to their sometimes inappropriate behavior in the form of ill-timed remarks that are really an expression of their horniness.

And who can blame them? It's not their fault they are paralyzed or have Alzheimer's... or were in an accident or have cerebral palsy or whatever. It's society at large that wishes they weren't so inconvenient to have around, shovels them off into facilities where they won't be so prominently visible, and then complains and gets grossed out when these people turn out to be people.

Okay, rant off. The JAD article actually gets into a movie about these so-called "sex volunteers":

Using a fake documentary format, the 123-minute film tracks the story of three people - college student Ye-ri, cerebral palsy sufferer Chun-kil and a priest — who are brought up on prostitution charges. Ye-ri said she was not paid to have sex with Chun-kil nor was she his girlfriend, instead calling their relationship volunteer work.

As the film unfolds, a female reporter interviews groups of people like the ones Cho met, from a priest who hands out sex aids to the physically challenged to a man who secretly operates a group of sex volunteers online.

Asked to explain where the boundary between fiction and nonfiction falls in the film, Cho said, “I added two characters: the priest and Ye-ri’s mother [who helps prostitutes leave brothels]. Except for those two characters, the film is based on truth.”

Cho has “no idea” how many real sex volunteers there are in Korea. “I just talked to a few people, and they don’t represent the whole sex volunteer community,” he said.

Apparently the film is getting some recognition:

Everyone told him his movie would flop, but Sex Volunteer has actually been invited to many international film festivals including the 2009 Montreal World Film Festival and the 2010 Singapore International Film Festival, Cho said. The film even won the Humanitarian and International Jury award at the Sao Paulo International Film Festival last year. The film was also certified as an art film by the Korean Film Council in the same year.

Still, the project has met with a mixed response among activists for the disabled here. Koo Ja-yoon, a former counselor at the Web site Pureun Ausung for the Disabled, said Cho’s film might spread the misconception that sex volunteers are common, which is not true.

Well, when you deliberately choose a salacious title, you shouldn't be surprised when people respond primarily to that.

I'll try to look for this film. I'm curious how it ultimately depicts the disabled, with whom Mr Cho says he spent considerable time in order to research this topic. Movies like Oasis sometimes do a good job of humanizing those on what society has deemed the fringe, but when non-disabled are playing the disabled parts, it's easy to get into caricature or other forms of misrepresentation.