Scribblings of the Metropolitician

"Fetish"

Freud says that objects of fetish are simply things charged with the sexualized memories of early childhood development. For example, he argued, when little tots lock their little Freudian libidos onto Mom, her feet are the parts of her body often in closest proximity. Post-Freudian arguments would more broadly point to fetishized objects parts metonymically representative of the whole – the high-heeled female foot, in this interpretation, is an object given sexualized power by society as the embodiment of something essentially feminine and sexual. The high heel is a both a symbol of the entire sexually desirable female figure herself, even as the object/part itself takes on its own sexualized meaning. Put even more simply, it is a part that represents the whole (e.g. high heel=woman), but has special meaning as an object with meaning unto itself. The high heel is woman or femininity itself, a fact that helps charge the object with its special meaning.

I kinda like this argument the best (and we can throw in some Freud there, too), because if we assume that Korean society in general 1) values women more for their appearance and sexual attractiveness than any other attribute, and 2) their bodies are constantly presented in a quantitatively and qualitatively more sexually commodified way (see previous posts), then we can come to the tentative conclusion that women in Korea are much more fetishized. They simply value, utilize, wear, and purposefully display more of the totem objects of sexualized femininity. Indeed, as we look at the heavy accessorizing that is positively a pastime here on the streets of almost any neighborhood where large numbers of people go, this almost goes without saying, without even need of the long, theoretical argument that I just presented. But we know darn well that if I didn't give it, people would just say that I was talking out the side of my neck. At least you know now on exactly what bases I am resting my assumptions.

Since images of women's fetishization is part of what I'm trying to capture on film, being apologetic for my male gaze – the "fetishistic scopophilia" that I was told during my first film class all heterosexual men possessed – would be counterproductive and downright futile. Of course, sometimes I feel like a big, fat pervert trying to capture the pull of the fetish with my camera, especially since disconnecting my pleasure in the process is impossible; but not taking a picture and regretting it later is a far worse feeling than that caused by an occasional passersby looking at me as if I were a big brown pervert with a camera. And to a certain extent, they're right anyway. As more than just a passive watcher, when I am enabled by my camera, fetishistic scopophilia is in full effect.

So let me drop the academic façade that most people entering into controversial waters tend to hide behind, and let my male gaze guide the rest of this essay, just as it has my camera. Let me break down for you how I see the image of sexualized woman as nothing more than the sum of her fetishized parts. As a person possessing desire for the female form here - whether you are a straight man, lesbian, or gay man who just appreciates pure fabulosity itself – perhaps you might recognize some of the parts that draw not just my own eye, but yours as well. And if they weren't really important, why else would these parts be the object of so much attention, consumption, and presentation? And these are not fetishes I noticed before coming to Korea - some of them are quite learned, and recently so. Freud ain't in effect as much as many of us would have it. As the more contemporary, albeit fictional, psychoanalyst Hannibal Lecter so aptly observed "We covet what we see every day." Let's think about what those things are on the level of fetishistic, photographic detail – from coiffed head to pedicured toe – and see what we come up with:

- the sheen of shiny, straight black hair, like in the Prell™ commercials
- the confident "hair flip," or twirl, or continued absent-minded stroking
- big, black false eyelashes, flitting up and down, up and down
- big, round, black contacts to make doe-eyes with
- shiny peach lip gloss, always reapplied
- the ever-present Korean female "pout"
- the paleness of the classical Korean face, as maintained by whitening powders, creams, and base/foundation Twincake™
- big eyes and noses with European bridges
- French-manicured, slender fingers always formed in poses of feminine delicacy
- upper arms that are similar in thickness to the forearms
- stockinged thighs peeking out from under checkered, pleated skirts
- thin legs in jeans made to look longer in heels reaching out under an overly long pantleg
- the rounded legs of "office girls" in stocking and slippers
- thigh-hi tights like in the old Britney Spears schoolgirl video nobody ever admits to having made any effort to watch
- knee-high tights
- pedicured feet and toes in the barest sandal heels possible, coupled with a high skirt, to create the "near-naked" effect
- heels dangling from suspended feet, twirling in the air
- the "skinny fat" legs that are thin, yet jiggle with each step because of the lack of exercise and likely impact of past eating disorder
- pigeon-toed walking
- overly effeminate hip-swaying and sashaying, a la Ru Paul

Now, I'm not saying that all Korean young women display these totems, or engage in the specific behavior described above. And the fetish elements listed above is not exhaustive. The point is that all of the little fetishes are fairly universal, and are practiced by women in my own culture, as well as other places I have been that have thriving consumer cultures that fetishize women. They are all elements that are designed to catch the male gaze. But what is different is that when I am in America, these fetishes and totems don't occur with nearly the same frequency as they do here. In fact, they occur with a low enough frequency as to mark someone who engages in a large number of these fetishes at the same time as unusual. Here, it's more common, I would humbly argue, than not.

My male gaze is always engaged here, whereas in the States, even on the Berkeley campus, which is supposed to be home to America's weirdest and wild, I can turn it off. Or my gaze isn't activated enough for it to be constantly noticeable. If the fetish signals given off by women were detectable as a tick on a mechanical detector, in America, I would get occasional clicks as I pass by the occasional outright fetishistic display, with rapid buzzes caused by a relative few number of women who've really laid it on thick and heavy. In Korea, the sound emanating from my detector would be more of a constant dull roar, increasing and decreasing in volume and density, depending on where you went. This is how I see Korea as different from America, or most other places in the West I have ever been to – well, besides Italy.

So, I said in a previous post that the very character of feminity is different here, and that it's not a fundamental difference in form as much as it is simply a matter of sheer effort. The interesting test of this idea lies in considering the way men of different cultures visually and physically consume women here. Applying my logic within a sort of self-enclosed set of conditions, like an Einsteinian "thought experiment," let's think about the ever-popular and (from my eye) strangely controversial topic of foreign men who date Korean women.

We know the arguments. Foreign men - especially white, North American men - enjoy all kinds of sexual license with Korean women, alternatively loving and leaving them. Korean women are hapless dupes under the spell of unscrupulous white men who come to take advantage of the cultural capital of their priveleged passports, English native speaker status, white skin, and most importantly - the innocence and trust of the Korean female. What's more, the ultimate evil rears its ugly head as white men "exoticize" and "objectify" Korean women. Oh, lawdy, no! Hide de wimmins!

And I'm not saying that there aren't a heaping helpin' of sleazy foreigners who are only here for life that is not much more than easy money and beaucoup bootay. C'mon. You know who you are. Back when I was here in 1994, 90% of the people I saw in Korea were not much of a step above bail jumpers, straight up. All the money was in Japan (with the powerful yen), Korea was much more ruff, ruff, ruff around the edges, and Korea was still sort of under the radar of even the most ardent Asiaphiles. Contracts were worth not even the paper they were printed on, and hagwon owners did unspeakable things to keep their warm, foreign bodies prisoner. Who, other than a fugitive from justice, would come here? Well, another 5% were the Men in Black, who brought the Bible and a buddy to keep them clean amidst a whole lotta unholy temptation. Then there were the last 5%, of which I was a part, who came in really specific, yet random ways, as part of the Peace Corps in the old days, or the Fulbright ETA program, which was the latter-day reincarnation of that venerable program after it had been shut down in the 80's. There were also a few people who were simply curious, truly open-minded, and simply here for the adventure. I always tipped my hat to that 10% of us who were all here on a mission – whether personal or otherwise.

But don't let all this qualifyin' and dodgin' the issue fool you: the majority of foreigners at the time were male, and the majority of us waegukin were pretty slimy. Nowadays, things are decidedly different, despite what certain "liberal" comrades of mine say about their "motives". I find the perhaps less-than-honorable motives of some members of my gender fairly non-surprising. It's not a matter of a particularly problematic way of looking at Korean women; it's really just a question of the relative amount of social capital that the exoticism of foreignness and Americanness provides.

So, it's not just the heady cocktail of exoticized, racial difference topped off with a spritz of unequal power relations between nationalities - as most detractors of interracial mixing and/or people who are "concerned" about the "power dynamics" tend to imagine in terms of the stereotyped image of the oversexed and predatory, white male English teacher sowing his oats with hapless Korean virgins - but without even going into what I think is often a façade for plain old racist uncomfortableness with seeing evidence of race mixing, there's something else to be described here.

What is more interesting to me is the fundamental way men and women interact here, how Korean "men" and "women" signify themselves as gendered and sexualized beings in this culture. I would argue then, that the white male hagweon teacher with a case of sex on the brain isn't necessarily just looking at Korean women as exotic, racialized objects to be conquered, although that is part of the picture, surely, in some cases. But I think that particular guy is also picking up on the way gendered sexuality and relations happen in general, as well as how they happen in Korea, especially since the signals themselves - the glint of thigh peeking out of a short skirt, the extra curve of the calves created by high heels, meticulously-applied makeup, the ubiquitous straight perm falling around the sides of the face, an affected and knowingly cutesy pout, specks of light caught on gold anklets and hoop earrings, accentuated by the nowadays de rigeur pedicure, along wth myriad other accountrements ad nauseum - are not so culturally specific.

It is certainly not the far more culturally specific charm of a coy, half-hidden smile behind a veil, nor is it the Chosun-era sexy curve of the upturned big toe in a white, traditional shoe peeking out from beneath the skirtline of a pink hanbok. The fetish signs given nowadays are, for all intents and purposes, universal in their meaning. A Korean woman could easily walk down the streets of Paris or Cairo and turn heads, were she appropriately armed with all the necessary fetishistic ammunition. It is important to illustrate that if a western woman wore what Korean women wear back in her home country, the signals would be clear, even if the background contexts are different in terms of relative levels of accepted fetish (e.g. a woman wearing knee socks, high heels and a Britney Spears skirt in the middle of winter in Ohio might get cars stopping, whereas in New York City, she might get just a few ogling stares, and in Seoul at the moment, she would just be part of the crowd.)

My point here is that foriegn men don't necessarily fetishize Korean women differently than Korean men do. They just have more sexual and fiscal capital that results from possessing any or all of the following factors above what everyday Korean men have, namely: white skin, an American passport, being a native speaker of English, and in general being a curio for adventurous Korean women. And let's not forget the agency of the Korean women in this equation, and that it takes two to tango. After living here for as long as I have, in as many places and roles that I have, I would say that the assumption that social and sexual power rise in direct proportion to one another is correct one, and the associated bad behavior that I have seen men possessing a lot of such power has been pretty equally spread across nationalities in the male gender.

Put simply, both Korean and non-Korean men with high degrees of sexual capital, seem to behave equally "badly" towards women. This is why both white English teachers and hunky Korean men with money tend to have the same stereotypes among many Korean women. And if we want to talk - albeit anecdotally - about bad ethics in the sowing of male oats, Korean American men are by far the worst offenders. The KA's I have seen here get the full force of the American power trip, but justified and rationalized by the idea that it's ok, since these are "our" women. In other words, it's ok because it's not interracial. On the part of the the criticizers, sounds like good ol' fashioned race thinkin' to me. In the big picture, there are not bad guys, or good guys. The number of "bad guys" seems to be - at least in part - a reflection of the general state of gendered interaction in The Land of the Morning After. And nobody's less of an asshole just because they're part of the same gene pool. To flip the warped logic of identity politics on its ear - at least the "white boys" have the excuse of being exotifying foreigners. What excuse do Korean and Korean American men have? Is it ok to not receive the same criticism and social derision just because they're "our" women? Or that it doesn't become evidence of the ultimate sin of identity politics – "selling out" – which is often academic-speak cover for more old-fashioned feelings of loathing for so-called "anti-miscegenation." Something to make you go "hmmm."

"En Femme"

This is the first half of an extremely long series of thoughts, which I plan to complete a bit later. But I wanted to get this out there, since I was obsessing over this long piece and letting it sit on my hard drive for days; at that rate, it would never get finished. Here goes Part 1:

After a long time consciously watching Korean women through the viewfinder of my camera, on top of the all but unconscious "watching" I automatically do as a function of male desire - my male "gaze" - it struck me that many Korean women remind me of drag queens. Obviously, I am being a bit facetious, but only a little bit. This observation goes right to the heart of my thoughts about what I describe as the "fetishized femininity" that defines female identity here. I don't mean for my observations, like most of my photography - to be inherently comparative by locating everything in relation to my own life experience in the US or other countries I have visited or lived in. But since the standard Korean defense against any critique of things problematic is comparative equivocation, (the most popular form being "there are good and bad people everywhere," followed by "you have X in America, too!"), I must inevitably begin by invoking the magical protective powers of an explanative, qualifying seque.

BEGIN SEGUE
Every culture/society/country has different problems and issues, rooted in specific histories and informed by various cultural traits and tendencies. America's prosperity was predicated upon - literally built upon - land taken by force and false treaties from people who were already living on it. The quick answer to labor issues and to the too many indentured servants demanding both headrights and real rights was the importation of the cheapest labor you could find: slaves. Make this into a system that utilized race to mark the inherited and permanent status of slavery, and you get a racial apartheid the likes of which the world had never seen. Fast forward a few hundred years, and Americans still have a particular problem with and obsession over race that doesn't affect other people in the world as it does us, in our particularly American way. Koreans discriminate against people of other races and nationalities nowadays, and many viciously so, such that there is now a pattern of racialized discrimination here as well. But for an American to say "Hey - we're not the only ones with a discrimination problem - look at Koreans and Japanese - it's just natural to do it." Naw, brah. Equivocation can't work here, for obvious reasons. The histories are different; in one case the understanding of race has slowly evolved over hundreds of years of a particular history, formed by an racialized economy that created social categories themselves, ones that would be used to regulate every kind of interaction in society. I have opinions about what motivates Korean thinking about race, which my dissertation is partially about, but I won't bore you with it here. I will simply state the obvious when I say that the two cases just can't be compared. The equivocation eliminates the fact of historical, cultural, and just plain accidental specificity. That's the high-brow argument. My low-brow argument is simply that "Two wrongs don't make a right" and what the hell does one case have to do with the other, anyway? Ok - people in other countries do similar bad shit as you do in your own...so? What's the next line of reasoning here? It's a meaningless gesture of defensiveness. So I don't want to see anybody pulling that one on in responses to this piece. Your flawed reasoning has been preemptively struck.
END SEGUE

Whew! Back to Korean women. So we've talked about sex work in Korea. Yes, the oldest profession exists everywhere, any which way it can. We know that gender discrimination exists in most places, but we know that the matter of degree is quite important. The same can be said for something as abstract as the construction of female identity, especially in capitalist, industrialized economies with active consumer cultures. Add in the factors of being patriarchal societies with market-driven mass media that utilize women's bodies as conduits through which to market and sell commodities, notwithstanding the fact that a large portion of the economy deals with the buying and selling of women's bodies as commodities in themselves - and it can be easily argued that there is enough of a common framework of comparison within which to identify and talk about the crucial differences. We wouldn't be talking about the moral question of the high degree of sex work in Korea if this country were still undeveloped, or vastly different from many other industrialized, capitalist democracies. But the case is that Korea is materially and socially like Norway, America, Germany, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, etc. The degree of "development" isn't the same, but the mode of existence is.

At least when Koreans generally favorably compare their country to others, this is the framework they're using; the boast that Korea has the most developed IT infrastructure in the world doesn't get supported with comparisons to war-torn Eritrea or the former Sovet-bloc Republic of Georgia. The comparison happens between such powerful nations as Japan, Germany, and the United States. This is the framework within which differences between how women are socialized becomes meaningful; but again, the point here isn't to equivocate, but to establish the undeniable commonality that enables us to label the degree of sex work in a given country as relatively embarrassing. So if we assume that meaningful differences exist between essentially similar societies, and that certain aspects of such societies can be called - whether in terms of scale or degree - better or worse than others, it follows that we can make assertions about things such as the relative degree of gender discrimination, treatment of ethnic or religious minorities, the quality of public health care, or equal access to decent public eduction, we should also be able to see peculiarities in terms of how people are socialized, and what relationship this might have to the kind of factors that were just mentioned.

And if we look at the way women in general carry themselves here - or the way female identity itself is constructed - there are myriad ways to notice a particularly Korean aspects of the gendered mode of appearance, behavior, speech, and overall comportment. When you look at the social realities surrounding women in Korea - a country sporting one of the highest rates of sex work in the industrialized world, where there are more sex workers than school teachers, where women in skimpy attire promote everything from cars to toothbrushes, and for which the Gender Empowerment Measure therefore puts Korea near the bottom of the scale of 70 measured developed and undeveloped countries alike, right next to countries in which polygamy, "honor killings," and domestic violence is de facto, if not de jure legal - surely this must affect the expectations men have for women, how women see themselves in terms of these expectations, and the creation of general codes of interaction between the two genders.

Surely the expectations placed upon men, the acceptance of aggressive behavior with a "boys will be boys" attitude, solidified with the two years and two months spent in the hazing society of compulsory military service, reinforced in the workplace by a rigid, miliatarized heirarchy, bolstered by the constant and open access to women's bodies as objects of visual and sexual consumption - must have some affect on the way men see themselves as men.

Let me defer to authority and quote the scholar John Berger, from his text Ways of Seeing:

"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves."

So I am arguing that the very character of feminity is different here. It's not so much different in form as it is simply a matter of sheer effort. Korean men often boastingly ask me "Aren't Korean women more beautiful than American women?" I usually begin my reply with a "They sure are!" but before I let them enjoy that assuring feeling of having once again established another aspect of Korean culture that is superior to America's, I continue with, "but who wouldn't be, if American women were so weight-obsessed that they were actually successful in starving themselves into a constant state of being much thinner than their genes dictate, makeup and 3-inch heels were nearly requirements for stepping outside of the house, not to mention the perms, plastic surgery, short skirts, and fashion trends that only barely don't fall into the realm of fetish wear in the States (e.g. the winter season's knee socks w/ heels and pleated schoolgirl skirts)." OK - my reply is usually a shorter version of that. But indeed, if most college-age American girls dressed like Britney Spears-lite, working women were required to wear schoolgirl-like uniforms with skirtlines well above the knee, and plastic surgery were so ubiquitous that it was offered as the first prize in fast food chain contests for high school girls (thank Lotteria for that brilliant idea) - I would have to describe American women as sizzling. Booyah! Back dat thang up! Baby got back!

And it's not that only foreign men notice this and find it a little strange - most Western women I have talked to do as well. In fact, I would think that women would notice even more than men would. An American friend of mine put it succinctly when she said "I never felt like such a tomboy before coming to Korea." On the level of femininity that defines the norm of gendered life here, most Western women I know have given up trying to compete. Just looking at the face-centric emphasis on "cute" - before even getting to the nearly requisite eye and nose jobs, the black contact lenses that make the irises look bigger, the straight "magic perm" and color, the all-too frequent use of false eyelashes - the daily commitment of applying makeup alone requires getting up from 15 minutes to an hour early, depending on your particular level of fastidiousness. Add on the fact most Western women can't even buy brassieres, shoes, or depending on who you are - any clothes at all - in Korea, a lot of women end up feeling like the Sasquatch, hurrying to lumber away from the eyes of the frightened city-dwelling humans who want to capture you for scientific study.

To be continued...

About my stoopid picture...

For those of you wondering about the painful cheeriness of my picture, please don't think me a complete freak. It started as a joke, with me parodying the women taking self-portraits with their cellphone cameras on subways, waiting for the bus - well, just about everywhere. This particular picture was the result of a slaphappy, but inspired moment when was able to successfully (or so I think) reproduce the affected cuteness of the "eoljjang" face pictures for which Korean women have come to be known as specialists. As both photographer and subject - a conceptual overlap that is quite rare, for habitual objectifiers tend to dislike objectfication - I realized that this was actually a specific and learnable skill. With the proper angle and lens length, almost anyone can make their mug look like the "best face" on the block. It just took my peeking out past my usual ascerbic cynicism about mass consumer culture for a moment; as an old friend of mine always puts it, I just needed to "get over myself."

Actually, I am loathe to admit, it was quite fun, and I mug for many a friend's cellphone now. I have gotten quite a bit better at the euljjang shot. I wouldn't say that my face is particularly cute, nor does my body match the lie I can perpetrate with a cellphone camera. By way of defending my dignity, must say that I don't do it with the intent of pursuing the pure aesthetic that defines true eoljjang photography: making myself appear handsome, or fooling others into thinking I am. But there is fun in the endeavor, in attempting to make the most stoopid faces and expressions possible, to try to make
my face look absolutely unrecognizable, or even to use the insane roundness of my mug to make like a strange animation character. You'd really be surprised at how alien you can make yourself appear with the distortion of a high angle and a ridiculous expression. I realized that there is technique involved with taking this kind of picture - I watched in awe as an otherwise quite unextraordinary-in-appearance female friend of mine contorted her face into the most unnatural of expressions as she quite skillfully twisted and contorted her camera-wielding arm and herself into just the right position to take the shot - just one snap would often require a full minute or more to pose. When I got the "proofs" back in the form of the image on the cellphone screen, I was surprised to see a complete and beautiful stranger beckoning back at me. My quite unspectacular friend shot me a smug smirk as I looked back at her in complete surprise at this digital fib floating in my cellphone screen. "Save it," she ordered, beaming proudly. Wow, I said to myself - and communicated to her - I was impressed. She really knew what she was doing.

Korean women have figured something out here - the pursuit of euoljjang as veritable pop art, an evolution in knowing kitschiness that started with Japanese-style "sticker pictures," inflamed by the collective corporate decision to place cameras on cellphones, but really pushed to the level of pandemic portfolio proportions with the convergence of the "dica" (di-gital ca-mera) craze and the all-pervasive Cyworld personal homepage obsession. In combination with the fact that Korea has the highest level of broadband protection in the world, making possible many venues for proudly circulating prime moments of mugging for the camera, the high level of eoljjang evolution is...inevitable. And it has infected me too, but just a bit. I can quit anytime I want. Really.

"Seoul Nights"

A young lady of the evening fishes for customers, stopping two young men strolling through the streets of the Cheongyangni red light district, who are doing window shopping and fishing of their own.

This is a picture that didn't have a chance of getting published. It's not a pretty representation of Seoul, but then, foreigners who already live here know that everything in Seoul or Korea isn't pretty. The picture was actually newsworthy and topical, since I submitted it with a "newspeg" - in the wake of the Korean government's publishing of statistics showing that prostitution made up 4.1% of South Korea's GDP. (The Korean YMCA estimates that the actual number may in fact be higher - at around 5%.) To look at this another way, the industries of forestry, agriculture, and fishing COMBINED add up to 4.4% of the GDP. Put in more concrete terms, the statistic showed that 1.2 million women in South Korea are engaged in sex work right now, which means that anywhere from 1 of 5 to 1 of 10 adult women are presently in the trade. This is positively mindblowing when you consider the number of women over a few decades who might have EVER worked in the industry, especially considering that the role of the sex industry in the economy gets larger as you go back through the decades of the Republic's short, but eventful and problem-fraught history.

And the anecdotal evidence is something most foreigners - especially men - must have noticed very quickly after arriving here. Room salons, "mi-in clubs", 단란주점 (singing and dancing clubs w/ hostesses), massage parlors, saunas, and small hostess bars lining the streets of almost every street in Korea all dominate the landscape - before we even get to the large red-light districts that are in all-but-plain view all over Seoul (and Korea in general). The fact that women's bodies are for sale permeates almost all parts of public spaces. The fact that there are, if the Korean government's own conservative statistics are any indication, more prostitutes in Korea than schoolteachers, should be an arresting realization.

How does this affect men's views towards women in general? How does that relate to the fact that Korea ranks 63rd out of 70 countries measured in the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), which is calculated based on the number of women in actual positions of economic or political power? Just to give this statistic some context, the US is ranked 10th, Japan is ranked 44th, Thailand 55th, Russia 57th, and Pakistan 58th. The only other countries that actually managed to score behind Korea were all places in which women's inequality is overtly and sometimes even brutally enforced; in ascending order of GEM rank: Cambodia, where domestic violence is not even legally a criminal offense, starts the slide down at 64th. The United Arab Emirates, where a man can still legally take up to four wives, is next, and Turkey, where "honor killings" of women who have had the audacity to be a victim of rape are still often murdered by male relatives, takes 66th place. Sri Lanka follows, with Egypt, Bangladesh, and Yemen bringing up the rear, last out of of the countries measured.

Sure, statistics can be misused, but they also provide a useful baseline of comparison, when placed in proper historical context. Another qualification: I am deadly sure that all of the people who would point to some flaw in the way the statistics were made would be the first to wear the rankings with pride were they to paint a flattering picture. If Korea ranks as the #1 country in the world in terms of broadband penetration, it's front-page news; if it is something like holding the dubious honor of approaching the 3rd-highest divorce rate in the world - right behind the US - the statistics must be flawed, or else the causes attributable to the ever-convenient aftermath of that foreign power-created IMF crisis.

So yes, there are more women working nowadays, but are there appreciably more who are actually making key societal decisions? Does the fact that Korea has one of the highest rates of state-supported and protected systems of prosititution in the industrialized world have NOTHING to do with the fact that it ranks nearly the lowest in gender empowerment within that same group of countries?

It's hard to step outside of your own Matrix. Americans have trouble with certain issues that are cogent to our own particular realities, such as the racist stratification of our educational system, our nation's bloody and imperialist foreign policy, or an irrational fear of "socialism" that prevents the richest country in the world from having any semblance of a national health care system. But across the Pacific, I think the hardest thing for Koreans to realize is just how unusually pervasive is the use of women's bodies in the economy. Koreans who view this picture often defensively point out that prostitution exists everywhere, which is true. But we're talking about a matter of 1) scale, and 2) state validation and support of the industry. When it is statistically more likely for a woman to become a prostitute than a lawyer, doctor, or even a schoolteacher - I think the problem is particularly acute. America, my own nation of origin, has its own particular problems; but in terms of scale and character, the problematic link between sex work and women's place in society is one peculiarly germane to Korea.

Welcome - and read me first!

Greetings to my fellow Seoulites and Seoulites-in-spirit!

A lot of you have been with me for a long time, viewing my pictures in Seoul Selection's newsletter and magazine. I've greatly appreciated your comments, many of which have inspired me to take my camera in closer than I would have dared if I felt truly on my own, with no regular viewership to criticize, make suggestions, and egg me on.

It is for several reasons that I have decided to join the netizens if the 21st century and make a blog. It is not merely out of a need to express myself, since I do have a venue where my pictures are being published - but there are some constraints on what I can present within the venue I already find myself. The newsletter and the magazine are under some editorial constraints given by Seoul City Hall, so I have never really been able to let loose with some of the photos that I feel also typify the type of work I do, and the concerns I have. Simply put, City Hall wants us foreigners to see the "nice" side of this city, and by extension, Korea. So the darker underbelly of Korea doesn't get any play.

I can't really blame them. Seoul Selection receives funding from City Hall, so they have other concerns than guranteeing me a wide range of artistic expression. So I am blogging to give my faithful supporters a fuller view of the work I am trying to do, especially as I get down to the final edit of my photo book, which is really, really (!) nearing completion.

So, faithful and encouraging supporters of my ongoing project, in these pages you will get a fuller view of my work and intentions through the pictures you haven't been able to see and the words I haven't had a venue to offer you. I plan to publish a new pic roughly every week, with more frequent bloglike-commentary flowing far more frequently.

Please be long-winded and unreserved in your comments to me. And if there are any questions you've been wanting to have answered, this is the forum in which to post them.

Thanks, and I'll see you 'round the streets of Seoul.