Of Commercial Sex and Gratuitous Littering in Seoul

The area around Gangnam Subway Station is crowded with people and cars, the air is bad, real estate prices are sky-high, and stores open and close with numbing regularity: A restaurant becomes a real estate office becomes a juice bar becomes a vape shop, and so on. This odd place is where I have lived and worked since February 2009.

My friends in the USA and the Philippines often marvel at how clean Korea appears to be. Well, yes and no. I get aggravated by the many smokers who think nothing of dropping cigarette butts on the sidewalks and streets. And night owls leave all sorts of detritus on the benches of the park around the corner. I guess they figure somebody else will clean up after them, and it’s true.

Far worse, however, are the sex-oriented cards and leaflets strewn everywhere seven mornings a week. When the sun goes down, guys on scooters fling those cards randomly on street after street. The leaflets, 6 inches tall and 4 inches wide, are even more ubiquitous. They are dropped or thrown on the street in large numbers, handfuls at a time; the intersection of Gangnam-daero 78-gil and Teheran-ro 4-gil caught my attention one morning last summer because I could scarcely see a tiny bit of concrete. There appeared to be hundreds of these sex leaflets fouling the ground. More recently, I saw a huge pile of them across the street from our office building. Somebody had taken it upon him- or herself to gather them, making one Seoul street-sweeper’s job easier.

Not to get all Greenpeace and save-the-planet on you, but scooter-drivers and their employers seem to give no thought to how many trees are being sacrificed to produce those leaflets which cover our streets night after night. Obviously, other forms of advertising are tossed about in the same way—but not as aggressively and not in such number.

Here it is necessary to address one facet of that most sensitive of topics, S-E-X. Despite being technically illegal, open prostitution was allowed in Yongsan, Cheongnyangni, Miari and a few other places in Seoul until recently. A Korean friend and I undertook a strictly educational visit to Suwon’s red-light district a few years ago, interviewing a prostitute about her life and the choices she had made. As with her, I try not to be too judgmental of this supposedly victimless crime.

The leaflets, all of them, feature an attractive and buxom young woman in a provocative pose. Maybe she’s wearing a bikini or she appears to be taking off her top or she has a lollipop in her sultry mouth. While they do not come right out and say that it’s money for sex, they dance around the issue in such a manner that the import cannot be misunderstood. Lonely men with money to waste may—and apparently do—follow up on these offers, as a phone number is prominently shown. Come-ons are often presented under the guise of “massage.” The customer can make a reservation in the masseuse’s home or quarters, or she may go to his place or to a love motel or another agreed-upon location. Korean brothels per se may no longer exist, but the song remains the same as Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant used to sing.

My friend Yong Yoon helped me decipher a couple of these leaflets today after lunch. One advertised the availability of 150 girls, all of college age, on a 24-hour basis. The quid pro quo interaction is limited to drinking, kissing and fondling if the customer is cheap or timid. If he is willing to pay more and is vocal about his desires, the woman presumably satisfies them.

A third-floor Thai massage emporium is located no more than 200 yards from where I work. Also close by is a seemingly high-class hotel that has people coming and going all the time; the valet men stay busy. A now-defunct place called Bobo’s had to be a sex club of some sort because I used to see strange goings-on just outside of it. None was more disturbing than the time I witnessed a young woman in high heels and a miniskirt getting forced into a taxi. Where she was being taken and how complicit the taxi driver was, I would not venture a guess.

Finally, I wonder what the average Korean female thinks when she walks by and sees all those discarded sex leaflets. Mr. Yoon and I talked with a lady named So-hyeon whom we have known for a couple of years. “What is your opinion?” we asked her. “Does this stuff bother you?” One such leaflet was, conveniently, no more than 10 feet away. So-hyeon looked at it with a measure of disdain. Although I do not consider her the most politically aware person, the kind who might use “gender” as a verb, she clearly found it offensive. “Fifty percent of women hate it, and the others just try to ignore it,” she said.

This speaks for itself…