South Korea: Where Prostitution Fixes Everything

I’ve pondered before on the Koreans’ relaxed, if generally unspoken attitudes regarding the world’s oldest profession. For an illegal industry nobody seems too concerned about concealing it. Rather, the Koreans as a whole appear curiously adept at simply not noticing what they don’t wish to see, and meanwhile there seems to be no shortage of customers, or service providers working out of the room salons, hotels, noraebang, barber shops, coffee deliverers, universities… pretty much everywhere (hey, those plastic surgeries and Prada bags aren’t going to buy themselves).

Of course, South Korea isn’t unique in embracing this industry. After all, pussy, to put it bluntly, is a very valuable commodity (just ask any young straight Chinese man) – personally I can understand why prostitution is such a massive global industry. From an economic standpoint it is kind of logical if one is so inclined, or has no other means, to generate income selling the one thing that can be sold repeatedly.

In South Korea, money and status are prized more than in most places (that I’ve been at least), and various statistics suggest massive numbers of young Korean women have worked the trade in one way or another, both at home and abroad. Still, I was somewhat surprised recently by one of my students’ attempts to secure a better grade (for the record, I work at a university – the young woman was of age… just).

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised, considering how devastatingly handsome I am (and possibly also the fact that a great number of South Korean universities have no official policies regarding cheating, plagiarism or academic fraud of any kind). Anyway, this was new to me.

I was replying to my usual small batch of end-of-semester emails, explaining that unfortunately not all students can receive a grade of ‘A’ (no matter how much they might ‘want one’), and that being too drunk is not generally considered an entirely valid reason to skip finals, when I received a follow-up email from a student pleading for a grade change because she thought her final grade of ‘D’ was unjustified (she’d actually earned an ‘F’, and that only because ‘F-‘ doesn’t exist).

What I found surprising about these emails was their very existence (in that the young woman had no apparent qualms about outlining her proposal in writing), and also the quality of her writing, which did little to suggest I had been anything less than generous by giving her a final grade of ‘D’.

Of course, perhaps I just have an overactive, somewhat dirty imagination and completely misinterpreted what I was reading. Feel free to judge for yourself…

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