By Caroline Norma
I've recently arrived in Korea as a language student, and last week was lucky enough to be invited to a local's house for dinner. My new friend and host, let's call him Chung-ho, speaks English, but his wife doesn't.
Nonetheless, they both generously invited me over, which I enthusiastically accepted as my first chance to see a Korean household. Chung-ho and his wife had gone to great effort and expense in preparing the night's dinner.
The first dish on the menu was freshly chopped, still-wriggling octopus tentacles: the Korean delicacy sannakji.
As tolerant as I'm trying to be of the customs of my newly adopted country, sannakji was far outside my Western eating habits, and I had to decline to eat it. My two friends were disappointed of course, but the meal continued smoothly with the compromise that in lieu I ate an entree of sashimi, while they ate the sannakji.
The conversation was lively with Chung-ho valiantly interpreting both ways so that we could all understand the dinnertime talk. I felt apologetic that my Korean skills were still in their infancy compared to the English of both Chung-ho and his wife.
There was, however, one part of the night's conversation that Chung-ho didn't interpret for his wife. An exchange arose between him and me over the night's centerpiece: the sannakji.
Chung-ho asked me what the English word was for the suction caps on the octopus's tentacles that were latching onto his chopsticks as he raised them to his mouth. Lacking knowledge of the technical term, I ventured the word `sucker.'
Chung-ho responded that surely the word `sucker' was slang, because it had also a sexual meaning. I conceded that, yes, it definitely wasn't the right term, but that I wasn't aware that the word had a particularly sexual meaning _ outside the school playground at least.
To my surprise, Chung-ho then earnestly told me that a friend had told him that prostitutes in the Philippines used the word.
Chung-ho wasn't aware that I'd actually spent three months as a volunteer with a community group that assisted women in bar prostitution to exit the sex industry in the Philippines.
From my time working in the sex tourism towns of Angeles and Olongopo, I coincidentally happened to know immediately what Chung-ho was referring to. In the Philippines sex industry, the word `suckee' describes oral sex.
I knew exactly what Chung-ho was talking about, but for the sake of his wife who wasn't party to our exchange I feigned ignorance, and the conversation quickly moved on.
Whether or not Chung-ho's knowledge of the term `suckee' came from firsthand experience of prostituting women in the Philippines, the fact that he recalled the word so quickly _ more easily than the vocabulary of other topics of conversation that night _ led me to later reflect on the exchange.
I wondered about the context in which the lingo of a foreign sex industry might have entered a conversation between friends. Do the conversations of Korean men often feature discussion of prostitution? Is prostituting women so accepted by Korean men that they can openly describe their exploits to each other?
Since the introduction of the 2004 Anti-Prostitution Law in Korea, the opportunity for Korean men to openly discuss the sex industry, or at least use women in prostitution, has declined.
But my exchange with Chung-ho reminded me of recent news items describing the scandal of young Korean men prostituting women while abroad as English language students.
Traveling to countries like the Philippines and Thailand, it is was already obvious to me that Korean men had been participating more and more in sex tours in recent years. The rising number of mail-order-brides from Vietnam and China coming into Korea suggests that some of this sex tourism might also be for the purpose of trafficking.
The Anti-Prostitution Law has certainly reduced the strength of the sex industry in Korea, and helped the lives of many women and girls in the country.
The law has been much discussed overseas, and countries such as Norway and Iceland are now following the lead of countries like Korea and Sweden in understanding prostitution as violence against women, and as incompatible with a gender equal society.
My dinner conversation with Chung-ho reminded me, however, that the tentacles of the sex industry are long and persistent. The insidious culture of the sex industry, so entrenched in Korean society as well as my own, will take many years to extract from the conversations, habits, and thoughts of men.
The criminalizing of prostitution as violence against women is a good start in prizing the hold of the sex industry on culture.
Extending the reach of the Anti-Prostitution Law to the actions of Korean men abroad, as well as to the profit seeking activities of Internet mail-order-bride agencies, would be the next step in rooting out the influence of the sex industry on the lives of Korean men and women.
Just as the sex industry continually reinvents and transforms itself to regain its foothold in society, so the Anti-Prostitution Law must evolve to stay one step ahead of its foe.
Caroline Norma is a Ph.D. candidate in the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is currently studying the Korean language at Seoul National University.