So what exactly does a contemporary relationship between a gay man and a straight man look like? I don’t know. This is a love affair and it looks like this. Every day we email and text back and forth about who we’re sleeping with, how we’re sleeping with them, and if we should continue to do so (in his case it’s just one girl in Paris who he’s in love with). We email poems to one another (this is less gay than it sounds since we’re both poets, which is more gay than it sounds), we have event nights, non-event nights, and date nights where we get together for really expensive drinks we can’t afford and remix Chrissie Hynde with Camus and (oh my god) our feelings.

It’s really worth reading the whole thing.

I think of him as “the old man” because of how young I was when I met him—I was thirteen—but he was probably not much older than the forty-nine-years-old I am now, if that old, and so he was the perfect age for me to see in him a possible surrogate father. My parents had separated when I was three; my stepfather had recently left us; and I was desperate for some kind of paternal attention and approval. So I was thrilled when the old man one day in late summer did not keep walking after our usual exchange, asking me instead, “When am I going to see you?”

I figured he was lonely, like Mrs. Schechtman had been when she lived in the apartment next to his, and the thought of visiting with him like I used to visit with her made me happy. “Soon!” I answered.

Not too long afterwards, I was on my way out of our building to meet my friends. The old man happened to be walking down the staircase leading from his apartment to the front door, which we reached at the same time. As I went to turn the knob, he held the door shut with his left forearm, maneuvering me with his right till I stood face first in the corner near the mailboxes where the door frame met the wall. Covering my body with his own, he ran his hands beneath my shirt and up the legs of my shorts; he groped my chest and belly, squeezed my butt, cupped my crotch, and he kept whispering hoarsely into my ear, over and over again, “When am I going to see you?”

I had no words for what he was doing, no training such as young children get now in how to scream no! to scare off an attacker. All I could do was stand there till he was finished; and when he was finished, I ran. I don’t remember how far or how long or in which direction, but I ran as if I could leave my skin behind, as if running would turn me into another person. When I stopped running, in the small park across the street from the Lutheran Church, I sat a long time with the knowledge that my running had undone nothing, that my body was still the body he’d touched.

Even if I’d wanted to tell someone—and I didn’t—I was sure no one would believe me, so I pretended nothing had happened. When the old man passed me the next day and said hello, I said hello back the way I always did, forcing myself not to see the ironic twist he added to his smile. After a couple of more times, our hellos began to feel normal again, and I told myself that maybe it hadn’t happened. Maybe he was just a lonely old man who liked to say hello, and as long as he stayed on his side of that hello, I felt—or, to be more accurate, I convinced myself that I was—safe.

Some weeks later, as I sat with my friends in front of our building, the old man came home from food shopping and asked me to help him upstairs with the bags in his shopping cart. I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t. To do so would almost certainly have raised questions for my friends about why I was being so rude, and the last thing I wanted to do was explain myself to them. So I took the bag he pointed to and followed him up to his apartment, where he opened the door and motioned me in ahead of him. The bag was heavy, so I stepped inside, thinking I’d leave it by the door and get out as quickly as I could, but he was too fast for me. As soon as the door shut behind him, he pushed the shopping cart to the side, took the bag from my arms and dropped it to the floor. The cans at the bottom landed with a crash that shook the whole apartment. Snaking his arms around my waist, he undid my belt and unzipped my pants, pushing them down so they fell around my ankles. All I could do was stand there, frozen to the spot where my feet had stopped moving. He took me by the hand and led me to the couch against the wall. He sat down. Looking up at me with a wide smile—I have the distinct memory that he’d taken out his two front teeth—his eyes, at what I imagine must have been the fear in mine, grew tender. “You’ve never had a blowjob before, have you?” When I shook my head no, his voice filled with concern. “But don’t you want me to love you?”

In the silence with which I responded, he took my penis in his hands—I remember thinking his fingers were like a cage—and he told me how good it was, how beautiful and big, and then his own pants were down, and I was sitting on the couch, and his penis, large and purple, hung in front of my face. His voice came from somewhere above me, urging me to play with it, at least to touch it, and I don’t remember if I did—no, at this point, my memory goes white, like the blank space in a video of which a portion has been erased, though I can still feel his hands on the back of my head. Then I see myself walking to the door, unlocking it, closing it behind me, and somehow I am next in my bed, curled in the fetal position, where I stay until my mother calls me for dinner.

The next day, the old man saw me standing by myself in front of our building. He didn’t come close, just stood some distance away and pleaded with me to go upstairs with him again. This time, he promised, would be different. He would move more slowly, be more gentle. I said no, ignoring his further pleas until he left me alone, which he did for the rest of the time he lived in our building. I still nodded in recognition if I was with someone when he saw me—I did not want anyone wondering why I didn’t—but otherwise I did my best to ignore him, and he seemed content to ignore me as well. Eventually, he moved away, and what he’d done to me receded even further into the silence I’d wrapped it in, and I pulled that silence around me like a protective cloak. No one else ever had to know.

The fabric of my silence started to fray when, at nineteen years old, I read Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence. At the time, I was interested in Rich as a poet; I knew nothing about her as a feminist. Indeed, feminism itself was barely on my radar as something with a substantive relevance to my life, and so I was surprised to find myself enthralled and energized by the political and explicitly woman-centered content of what I was reading. Then I came to this passage from “Caryatid: Two Columns:”

[T]aught to view our bodies as our totality, our genitals as our chief source of fascination and value, many women have become dissociated from their own bodies…viewing themselves as objects to be possessed by men rather than as the subjects of an existence.

As soon as I read those words, a small voice in my head began to speak. “But what about me?” it wanted to know. “What about what happened to me?” I sought out other feminist texts and read voraciously, discovering in the feminist analysis of men’s sexual violence against women a vocabulary for naming what the old man in my building had done to me as the violation it was. More importantly, though, being able to name what he did made it possible for me to tell others, and when telling them did not bring the roof of the world crashing down around my head, I found the strength I needed to confront my abuse more fully by going to counseling. In a very real sense, then, I owe to feminism whatever healing I have achieved.

If I stopped here, even those of you totally opposed to feminism would probably be nodding your heads. “Of course you’re a feminist. It makes perfect sense.” Yet to stop here would be to reduce feminism to a kind of self-help ideology, implicitly denying that feminism is also a politics. More to the point, it would be to gloss over the fact that committing myself to those politics has been part and parcel of my healing.

Not too long after I first read Adrienne Rich’s essay, I was working as a summer camp supervisor in New York’s Hudson Valley. The leader of a training session we were required to attend told us he would use the word she as the generic pronoun when discussing how to deal with campers who might choose to tell us that they’d been sexually abused. Since most abuse happened to girls, he explained, referring to both boys and girls as victims would give us a skewed picture of reality, making it difficult for us to respond appropriately. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. It wasn’t just that he so blithely dismissed my experience. What he said seemed to imply that the sexual abuse of boys and the sexual abuse of girls were so radically different in nature that we could not talk about them in the same context. If that were true, it called into question everything I thought I’d been learning from feminism, suggesting that the strength I’d been drawing from that learning was based on a false premise.

My body rebelled at this idea. Each time I tried to tell myself that the session leader was right—because the weight of his expertise made it hard to think he wasn’t—I wanted to crawl out of my skin no differently than I had after the first time the old man in my building touched me. Still, there was no denying that the books I was reading said not one word about my experience. Girls and women were abused and exploited in those pages, not boys, and certainly not men. I’d found myself in Rich’s essay, in other words, as well as in the other feminists texts I was reading, through a process of analogy. To take another instance from “Caryatid: Two Columns,” when Rich wrote about how the values of our culture “equat[e]…manhood…with the objectification of another’s person and the domination of another’s body,” I understood her to be describing, with a chilling accuracy, what the old man in my building had done to me, even though she was talking explicitly about men’s sexual objectification of women.

This analogy only grew stronger as I began to see very precise parallels between the old man’s method of “seducing” me—because that’s what I think he thought he was doing–and the methods for getting women into bed that some of my male friends talked about using. I remember, for example, a dorm room conversation from when I was an undergraduate. The “stud” among us–call him Liam–was talking about the kind of women with whom sexual success mattered to him the most. These were, he said, the women who resisted, the ones who made him work for it, forcing him to prove that he could bend them to his will—I think he actually used those words—because getting them to have sex with him made him feel most like a man. As Liam described how he sized such women up, I suddenly realized that the old man in my building had sized me up as well, that he had to have been watching me before the first time he said hello. I was a shy, awkward and needy kid, so he gave me the kind of attention that would make me feel noticed and that I would therefore want more of. Liam talked about this as the “stage of flattery.” Then, once the old man could see in me a growing desire for his attention, he must have assumed that I also desired (perhaps without realizing it) everything else he wanted to “give” me as well. According to Liam, a woman who resisted at this stage really wanted sex but was afraid of being labeled “easy.” She needed to be “taken,” he said, so she could give up her self control without feeling guilty. Following what I am sure was a similar logic, the old man used the force he thought was necessary to push me past the fear he believed was keeping me from expressing my true desire. How else to explain the question he asked me before my memory goes blank, “But don’t you want me to love you?”

Ironically, this parallel between the two men was comforting. It affirmed for me that there was no reason to believe my experience of abuse differed in any essential way from the experience of a girl or woman whom a man had similarly violated. The session leader had to have been wrong. Yet there was also no avoiding the fact that the feminists I was reading placed me as a man in the same category as the two men I have been talking about. Here, again, from “Caryatid: Two Columns,” is Adrienne Rich:

Rape is the ultimate outward physical act of coercion and depersonalization practiced on women by men. Most male readers…would perhaps deny having gone so far: the honest would admit to fantasies, urges of lust and hatred, or lust and fear, or to a “harmless” fascination with pornography and sadistic art.

I was fascinated by pornography; I had fantasies that combined lust and fear; and it was impossible to miss the cynical accusation in Rich’s use of the word “perhaps.” More tellingly, though, and damningly, I had to admit that when Liam explained what it took for him to feel sexually like a man, I could not help but measure myself against the standard he set. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, and I wasn’t having sex, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t sometimes make me feel inadequate. However, it was only after I met a woman who rejected me because I was not “man enough” in precisely Liam’s terms that I began to understand how fully the sexual values to which he subscribed were also values I had in me, whether I wanted them or not.

I met “Ling” through one of her suitemates, “Denise,” who sat next to me in the class I was taking on Shakespeare’s comedies. The three of us spent an afternoon talking and joking in the library when we were supposed to be studying, and we hit it off so well that soon I was walking across campus a couple of times a week to hang out with them and “Naomi,” the third woman with whom they lived. Sometimes, if I stayed too late, I’d sleep on the couch in their suite and go back to my own dorm in the morning. One such night, Ling and I stayed up talking on that couch. I don’t remember a single thing we said except for the fact that she told me about her experience emigrating as a young girl from China to the United States, but I know I felt good as I walked back to my dorm the next morning. I liked Ling a lot, and I hoped that our talking might lead to a romantic relationship.

The day after that, I saw Ling on campus walking with Naomi past the library. I called out to them and ran over to say hello. Instead of saying hello back, however, they started mocking me, calling me “little boy” and “coward.” I couldn’t imagine they were doing anything other than joking with me, so I started to laugh with them. When I tried to ask Ling how she did on the test she’d had that morning, though, the two women backed away, laughing even harder and holding up their hands to tell me I shouldn’t come any closer. I was confused. I called that night, but Denise told me Ling wasn’t there and that it would probably be a good idea if I didn’t call again. Ling had been very insulted that not once during the time we were talking on the couch did I even try to kiss her. I called a couple of more times after that, hoping I’d be able to tell Ling how much I really did like her, but the one time I got her on the phone she was so clearly not interested in talking to me that I stopped calling. I neither saw nor spoke to her again.

I was heartbroken. More than that, though, I was angry and ashamed. I replayed the whole night over and over in my mind, trying to figure out which raised eyebrow or touch on my arm or significant gaze I should have understood as Ling’s cue that it was time for me to kiss her. I just could not see what she clearly thought should have been obvious. I tried to imagine how the night might have gone differently, creating a scenario in which I leaned over and kissed Ling gently at the edge of her mouth, as if I’d been aiming for her cheek and missed. She sat back, looked at me for a long moment, and then, of course, kissed me in return. Each time I played this scene in my head, however, my anger and shame only increased. I still didn’t understand how I was supposed to have known that Ling wanted me to kiss her. As my sense of inadequacy grew, the sting of Ling’s mockery grew as well, and I started to think that maybe I was indeed no better than the weak, cowardly and ineffectual little boy she and her friend had told me that I was.

Once again, though, my body rebelled, and a nausea rose in me. Instead of making me want to crawl out of my own skin, though, this nausea was accompanied by a rage that propelled me past Ling’s skin and into her body. Now, in the scenes I played in my head, I saw myself “taking her” the way Liam had described “taking” women who were afraid of seeming too “easy,” except I didn’t realize I was following Liam’s script. Then, once, as I imagined myself putting my hands on either side of Ling’s face to hold her still while I kissed her, I had a sense memory of the old man in my building putting his hands on the back of my head to pull my mouth towards him. I was mortified. I spent the rest of that day alone, trying everything I could think of to twist what I had imagined into a shape that was not what it was: precisely the kind of rape fantasy that Adrienne Rich had written about. The fact that Ling might truly have wanted me to “take her”—whatever “taking” might have meant to her—was beside the point. What mattered was that I’d imagined myself “taking her” out of rage, to prove I was a man, not in response to anything I knew about Ling’s actual feelings or desires. In Rich’s words, I had “equat[ed my]…manhood…with the objectification of another’s person and the domination of another’s body.”

I swore I would do everything in my power to unlearn that equation.

At the heart of my feminism, then, is a paradox. On the one hand, as a survivor of male sexual violence, I stand with women against the culture of manhood which produces that violence and which the violence in turn perpetuates. On the other hand, as a man, I am—I have no choice but to be—implicated in that violence. The challenge with which feminism confronts me is to make sure that I never allow myself to stand on the same side as my abuser. Meeting this challenge has not been easy. It is often uncomfortable to call other men out on their sexism; and it can be similarly uncomfortable when someone calls me out on mine. Perhaps the most difficult thing, however, has been resisting the temptation to wear my sexual abuse as a badge of difference, as if having been forcibly penetrated by another man—because I am convinced that what I cannot fully remember did in fact happen—had somehow emptied me of the manhood I was trying to prove in my fantasy with Ling, the same manhood that Liam valued so highly and that is at the root of male sexual violence.

Because I have been coerced into the position that this kind of manhood usually reserves for women, in other words, it is easy to feel that my relationship to this manhood is essentially the same as a woman’s. Yet whatever else may be true about the fact that I was sexually abused, the social and cultural context in which that abuse exists does not portray either the boy I was or the man I am as a sexual object in the way that it pervasively portrays women. Nor am I subjected to the daily depredations of misogyny and discrimination, individual and institutional, that women experience because of their status as sexual objects. Finally, because I am a heterosexual man, there is no escaping the fact that both the pleasure this objectification is designed to deliver and the advantages it is supposed to confer are meant quite explicitly for me.

It is, in other words, as if there are two voices speaking within me: the voice of the man who is trying to own up to and change the culture of male sexual violence and the voice of the man who, as that culture’s victim, feels like he has nothing to own up to. Integrating these two voices has been the defining challenge of my life, personally, professionally and creatively. I called my first book of poetry The Silence of Men because I was breaking the silence in my life that had resulted from keeping these two voices separate. More, I hoped my poems would speak to and for men whose lives were shot through with a similar silence. Writing essays like this one also lets each of the men inside me have his say, allowing me to speak about what the old man in my building did to me, while still doing justice to the complex relationship between who I am because of what he did and the man I have been taught I am supposed to be.

Feminism showed me how to connect the old man’s inhumanity to the inhumanity of what I have been taught; and feminism is the only politics I can name that explicitly commits itself to a world in which that kind of inhumanity is no longer acceptable. That is why I am a feminist man.

Cross posted from The Takeback.

First, The Daily Show on at least one Fox Network host’s insistence that no one on that network ever compares people on the left to the Nazis for rhetorical effect:

Second, a link to Yad Vashem’s Persian channel–I could not find the embed data–which hopefully will serve as a counterweight to the kind of information circulating in Iran about the Holocaust as shown in this video from the opening of a Holocaust Cartoons Expo in August 2006:

And third, this TED video of a talk by Hanna Rosin, author “The End of Men,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, “which asserts that the era of male dominance has come to an end as women gain power in the postindustrial economy.”

As a guy, I try to appreciate it when someone points out my “male blindness,” even if it’s sometimes hard to hear. Although I used to identify as a feminist, I’ve started to feel like there’s some problems with that label. I think a lot of issues, like domestic violence, are both women’s and men’s issues, and “feminism” kind of makes it seem like it’s about the women alone. Part of the reason it’s hard to hear about “male blindness,” as a man is because it can force one to accept that a) they have been living a privileged life, b) they may no longer be able to enjoy those privileges guilt-free, and c) they have to figure out a new way to be. That all can be tough. I don’t want to equate that effort with the struggle of women in abusive relationships in any way, but I think that there needs to be a way to frame and reinforce the journey from misogynist to better male. If a woman leaves an abusive relationship, she’s a hero. If a guy stops being abusive, it’s good, but there’s no neat cultural narrative to describe that and normalize that. This is a problem I think, and it’s a problem among men, and there’s a part of this that’s an issue among men only. I just feel like the term “feminist” has a lot of baggage associated with it, and while I admire and respect many feminist thinkers, I don’t know if that label really captures the collaboration between men and women on making work and love the way I want it to be.

Our Creed

The Takeback is a collective of diverse-minded, like-hearted males who each look at popular culture (music, faith, literature, politics, etc.) through a pro-feminist or male liberationist lens.  We see culture as both the problem of and the solution to oppression, and The Takeback as a tool to reexamine societal norms and shift the conversation to empower those of all gender identities.

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Our Manifesto

Take Back vt. /tak bak/  1. to make a retraction of (withdraw).  2. To regain ownership of (reclamation)

To Abnegate.  Forswear.  Recant.  Renounce.  Repudiate.  Abjure.

The Takeback is most significant because it carries dual meanings.  In one instance, it means to retract something after thoughtful consideration.  Masculinity, or more specifically an abhorrent version of hegemonic masculinity, is responsible for disrupting the flow of commonality, community, and connectedness.  We can never fully take back (withdraw) all we’ve done to oppress the voices of others, but we can start to own up to our part.

Simultaneously, take backing also implies a regaining of something lost or stolen.  Alternative voices, like those heard in this blog, have only existed on the margins.  It’s time that we take back (reclaim) a masculinity that has been hijacked by those seeking to control marginalized people, especially women and gender non-conforming people.  But, we must always acknowledge the power of our words and our responsibility to use them for empowering others.  That is why we started The Takeback.

The Takeback is a meditation on the significant and the superfluous, the critical and the contrived, the tantalizing and the trite.  This is not your daddy’s blog (unless you are in elementary school).  We are advocates, artists, soldiers, counselors, athletes, politicians, entrepreneurs, parents, and teachers.  We are social critics, arm chair-anthropologists, believers, skeptics, free agents, free thinkers, street nerds, poets, and shameless self-promoters.

As we attempt The Takeback, we expect the push back.  No subject is off the table.  Music.  Politics.  Fiction.  Sports.  Religion.  Music.  Personal experience.  Family.  Consumerism. (oh, did we mention music?)  All we ask for is civil discourse.  We want you to be amused, informed, aghast, perplexed, persuaded, and convicted.  More importantly, we also want you to challenge, discuss, reflect, and change.  We invite you to participate in The Takeback.

I encourage you to check it out.

A few minutes after they left, laughing and waving and calling out anyigeseyo, goodbye, an old woman wearing traditional Korean clothing passed by. She had a cigarette in her mouth, glasses on her nose and her hair was pulled back into a tight bun. She walked with her hands clasped behind her; and her back was bent, as if she were carrying something heavy; and, as if she were lost in deep contemplation, she took slow, deliberate steps, clearly not in a rush and clearly assuming that people would make way for her. She got about four of those steps past where I was standing and stopped. She lifted her head and I could see that she was muttering something to herself. Then she turned around, her mouth still moving, and walked straight towards where I was standing. She stopped in front of me, looked me up and down, muttering what I thought at first was gibberish, since it sounded like neither Korean nor English, but after fifteen seconds or so, I began to make out words like “tall,” “handsome,” “strong” and then “American.”

She moved a little closer and put her hand on my bare forearm, a gesture to which I had become accustomed from riding the subway. Koreans often have less body hair than white people and so the hair on my arms and on my chest, which was visible if I was wearing an open-necked shirt, was a constant source of fascination. Wherever I went on the train, older Korean women–who, because they live in a culture where age is venerated, can do pretty much what they want–would sit next to me and stroke the hair on my arms, smiling and chatting amiably with me as they did so. This woman, however, when she was finished with my forearm ran her hand up to my bicep and gave a quick squeeze; then she laid her other hand flat against my stomach and moved it down quickly to cup and pat my crotch through my jeans, smiling and nodding her head as if she were evaluating me and was pleased at what she was finding.

This all happened so quickly that I had no time to react, and since she was standing directly in front me, there was no way for me to get away from her without pushing her, and she was so small and so fragile looking, and I did not want to make a scene, so I continued to stand there; and then she was looking up at me, still smiling, and her eyes were bright, without pretense, though they held also an impish mischievousness, and she asked me in a slightly accented English, “Are you American?” Surprised that I was able to understand her, I hesitated for half a second before answering, and she put her hand on my arm and asked again, “Are you an American?”

“Yes,” I said, and she tightened her grip on my arm just a little bit. “Why you here alone? Come with me. Room-cafe around the corner; I will pay for you.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a very thick wad of bills.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I am waiting for a friend.”

“But it’s no good you out here alone,” she insisted, giving another gentle tug on my arm. “Really, I will pay,” and she again showed me the money in her hand.

Room-cafes were just what they sounded like: cafes with private rooms where men went to be “entertained” in ways not so different from the way Mr. Park and I had been entertained in Miari. I knew which room-cafe the old woman was talking about since I’d walked past it many times on my way in and out of the market, though I’d never gone in. It was called Sing-Sing. Once, when I was coming home very late at night, after the cafe had closed, the women who worked there were sitting outside, smoking and chatting–some of them were eating kim bop–when one of them, a tall woman in a tight neon green dress, with nail polish and eyeliner to match, called out to me, “Hey! You like what you see?” Her companions laughed. I smiled and kept walking.

The old woman held up her wad of money one more time. “No,” I answered again. “Maybe next time”–the polite thing to say–“I really need to be here to meet my friend.”

She let go of my arm, but she didn’t walk away. “Are you a soldier?” She sounded just like the woman who’d chased me on Chong-no.

“No, I’m a teacher.”

“A teacher!” The woman’s face lit up as she put her money back in her pocket. “Teach me some English while you wait your friend?” She took my hand and started to walk towards the market. The change in her manner and her tone–she was polite and deferential, in stark contrast to the almost demanding tone she took in her insistence that I let her take me to the room-cafe–also reminded me of the woman who’d chased me on Chong-no, and my curiosity got the better of me, so I let her lead me where she wanted to go. She stopped to point at the different fruits on a stand that we passed–apples, grapes, pears, oranges–and asked me the words for them in English; then we stood in front of a cart on which the merchant had very carefully arranged alarm clocks, blowdryers, hair curlers, electric shavers and other small home appliances. After that, it was a clothing stall, where she asked me the words for pants, shirt, belt and underwear. Finally, she picked up a package of women’s socks. “Will you buy these for me?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, taking them from her. I hadn’t forgotten about the money in her pocket, but I’d started to like her, and I wanted to do something nice for her. I also felt suddenly a little bit like one of those young men in the fairy tales who meets and is tested by the old hag, who is really a witch or sorceress in disguise, who, depending on the story, either rewards the young man’s kindness or punishes his cruelty. So I paid the 1,200 or so won that the socks cost and handed them over to the woman. She turned the package over and over as if she no longer recognized what it was, and I realized that she had expected me to say no. “Do you smoke?” she asked.

“No.”

“Good! Do you drink?”

“Sometimes, but not very much.”

“Good! Come sit here with me.” She pointed to an empty space on the steps in front of a closed store. ” You know, I lived in America. Once. In California. During the war. Soldiers call me mamasan.” She didn’t say which war, but I guessed it was the Korean war, and I knew from the little bit of hanging out I’d done in Itaewon, the part of Seoul where the American army was stationed, that if the soldiers had called her mamasan, it meant she’d been a madame.

We talked a little while longer. She asked me about my life back in the United States, about where I lived and worked in Seoul, about the kinds of Korean foods I liked. She told me she had a daughter with whom she lived and she asked if I would like to have dinner with them that night. By now, I was completely disarmed, and I thought it would be a very interesting experience, and so I said yes. She stood up immediately and started leading me away from the market. I had a brief moment of anxiety when I realized I had no idea where she was taking me, but I set that aside and walked quietly beside her for about five minutes or so, until she looked at me out of the corner of her eye and smiled slyly. “Maybe next time, you and I enjoy in bed together,” she said.

I walked in silence for a few more steps as I tried to decide whether or not she was joking with me and how to respond if she was; but then I realized it didn’t matter. I no longer felt safe going with her to a part of Seoul with which I was unfamiliar and so I decided to “remember” a call I was expecting that night from my mother in America. I needed to be home to get the call, I explained, because my mother and I had some important business to discuss. The old woman looked disappointed. She took out the socks I’d bought for her, removed the cardboard backing from the package and wrote down her phone number. “When you want, you call me. We have dinner. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. We told each other goodbye and I started walking back in the direction from which we’d come. I turned once to look at her again, but the street had become suddenly crowded and I couldn’t see her. I looked at the piece of cardboard. She’d written “dinner” and then a phone number, and then “Love, Mamasan.”

I didn’t want to go back to my apartment right away, so I walked instead to the Lotte World department store. I knew some of the people who’d worked on the indoor amusement park and roller coaster that everyone was talking about, and I’d been meaning to check it out for some time. Since I hate roller coasters, though, I did not ride it. Instead I wandered around the store a bit, until I found on one of the top floors a large fountain around which people were sitting. I bought myself a strawberry ice cream and took a seat at the water’s edge, eating slowly and thinking about the old woman whose phone number I had in my pocket.

I was staring off into space, not looking at anything or anyone in particular, but a woman sitting with her daughter on her lap on the other side of the fountain must have thought I was looking at them because she nodded her head and smiled. I nodded and smiled back, just to be polite, and the woman’s daughter left her lap almost immediately and started walking towards me. When she reached the spot where I was sitting, she climbed without a word into my lap and sat there gazing silently at my face for about ten or fifteen seconds. Then, still without speaking, she reached behind me for the water in the fountain, trusting the arm I raised to keep her from falling. When she sat back down, she opened one of my hands, palm up, and held her fingertips above it, letting the drops she’d gathered drip onto my skin. When the last drops had fallen, she climbed down to return to her mother, never once glancing back in my direction. The mother stood up, took her daughter’s hand, smiled at me, nodding one more time, and then led the girl into the elevator, which carried them down into the rest of their day.

My day took me next to dinner in the restaurant where I first practiced reading hangul, the Korean alphabet, by ordering each time I ate there a different item from the menu that was posted on the wall. Two of my colleagues, Tom and Gavin, were already eating when I walked in. They invited me to join them, which I did, and we decided that we’d meet later that night at the Gilbert Standbar, which was also in the Semaeul Shijang, a few doors down from the room-cafe the old woman had offered to take me to. I arrived at the Gilbert about fifteen minutes late, but my friends were not there, and so I sat by myself at Ms. Park’s station–she insisted on Ms. and not Miss–ordered a beer and some fruit and settled in to wait. My friends never showed up, but that night at the Gilbert turned out to be, in some ways, a fitting ending to a day in which an old woman grabbed my crotch in public and a little girl who was a complete stranger sat in my lap and dripped water on my palm.

A standbar is what we would call today, here in the US, a karaoke bar, though since this was in the late 1980s, before digital technology made karaoke jukeboxes possible, the music to which patrons paid to sing along was live, provided sometimes by an entire band and sometimes by a single keyboard or piano player. As far as I know, the term standbar–I don’t think it’s much in use anymore; a google search turned up practically nothing–comes from the fact that there are bar stations, or “stands,” arranged around the room at which sit the hostesses whose job it is to entertain the customers, who are almost always men. This entertainment includes pouring drinks, serving food, going up on stage to sing when their customers do and dancing blues, slow dancing. The women are also often available for sex–though, as it was explained to me by my Korean friend, if the suggestion for sex comes from the woman, you don’t have to pay for it.

The one or two standbars to which my Korean friends had taken me reminded me of a cross between the more extreme excesses of the disco era and the stereotypically sleazy Asian “girly bars” that are so familiar from the early James Bond movies. The Gilbert, however, was more of a neighborhood place. There were no disco balls or flashing lights; the hostesses dressed very casually–jeans and a button down shirt, for example–as opposed to the tighter, glitzier often more revealing outfits the hostesses wore in other standbars; and there was, in general, a much more laid back atmosphere. In fact, my colleagues and I learned after we’d been going there for a while that it was the place where the men and women who worked at other sex trade establishments came to relax.

This difference, of course, was one of degree not kind. The same things that went on at other standbars went on at the Gilbert, only more quietly and discretely; and, most importantly to me and my friends, no one made a spectacle out of us because we were westerners. The hostesses were not constantly asking us for (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) “private English lessons;” the other patrons were not constantly coming up to us to buy us drinks or practice their English. We were able, in general, just to hang out, drink a few beers and sing a few songs, just like regular customers.

Ms. Park was the hostess at whose station we always sat, and, over time, she and I became friendly. My Korean was better than that of my colleagues, and so I could make very simple conversation, about the weather, for example, or food; about our jobs–she was very funny when describing the men who’d sat at her station whom she didn’t like– and a little bit about my life in the US. She told me very little about herself, though we did talk about books; she liked to read and she was fascinated by the fact that I was a poet. She introduced me once to a man who did not come to the Gilbert regularly, but whom she seemed to know pretty well, telling me he too was a poet. He gave me a copy of one of his books, though I lost it a long time ago, and I cannot now remember his name.

Over time, I began to realize that whenever Ms. Park danced blues with me–just because I would have been perfectly happy not to dance with her did not exempt her from doing her job–she stayed in my arms a few beats longer than the end of the song, which is what happened on this night, but then, she stayed there even longer, gazing at me and grinning a satisfaction she offered to share when she asked if she could come to my apartment after work. I wanted her in that moment as well, and so I said yes. I gave her my address and phone number and we went back to her station. Waiting for us, however, was a thin, balding man in a crumpled gray business suit and thick-framed nerdy glasses. As soon as Ms. Park sat down, he commanded her to fill my glass, not from the bottle of inexpensive beer that I’d ordered, but from the bottle of Chivas that he had in his hand. This kind of behavior was out of character for the Gilbert, as was the fact that he did not ask Ms. Park drink with us, and I was immediately uncomfortable. I looked at Ms. Park, but her face was frozen in her best customer-service smile, betraying nothing of what she might be feeling.

The thin man toasted me as if she weren’t there, waited till my class was empty and then pointed at Ms. Park with a finger that was unusually thick, given how skinny the man was. “Do you like her?” he asked, not deigning even to glance in her direction. Because I knew where the conversation was headed, I did not answer him and told Ms. Park that I wanted more kolbengi. She got up and went into the kitchen, and I tried as hard as I could, while she was gone, to let the thin man know I was not interested in talking to him by focusing my attention on the very drunk, immaculately groomed silver-haired man trying to sing John Denver’s “Country Road” without falling over onto the hostess who was standing under his shoulder to prop him up.

The man with the Chivas bottle did not take the hint, however, and he fell silent as well, sitting with closed eyes until Ms. Park returned with my food. Once she was sitting down again, he leaned over and said quietly in my ear, “Isn’t she pretty? Don’t you like her?” When I still didn’t answer and kept my eyes focused on the silver-haired man, who was now stumbling back to his seat, my uninvited and unwelcome companion put his hand on my arm and said more loudly, “She has beautiful labia.”

Still I said nothing; still I would not look at him.

“Don’t you understand?” He was not quite shouting as he pulled from his pocket a wad of bills almost as thick as the one the old woman had pulled out of her pocket earlier in the day. “Korea is a paradise for men! Here!” He waved the money in my face. “You can have her if you want.”

I realized at this point that I had to say something, but I also understood that whatever I said had to be calculated not to escalate the situation, and so instead of saying what I wanted to say–some version of “Stop talking about her like that and get the fuck away from me!”–I said instead something that would get him to leave me alone, while allowing him to save face, “Maybe next time. Tonight, I am very tired and I just want to drink by myself.”

My words had the desired result. He looked at me, looked for the first time at Ms. Park, gave a snort of disgust and walked back towards his table just as his friends were coming over to pull him away.

For the rest of that night, Ms. Park refused to meet my gaze, but each time I went to the Gilbert after that, and in all the time before I left Seoul, she continued to dance with me the same as always; even as I watched her belly swell gently and then flatten out again over the course of three or so months, she danced with me a little closer and a little longer than the other men; and sometimes I saw flashes of the smile she gave me when she asked if she could come to my apartment, but she never brought that possibility up again, and neither did I. And we talked just as we always had, though she was more revealing about herself than she had been before, telling me often about the man who’d promised to marry her. All he needed, she said, was enough money to buy a place for them to live, and she said he’d told her that he didn’t care if his mother disowned him. She was the woman he wanted.

I have no idea if this man really existed, though I hope he did, and I hope he kept his promise and that Ms. Park was able to stop working at the Gilbert and be, simply, happily, his wife. I hope she has children and that they have brought her great pleasure. I hope all this, but I know the odds are against it being true, that she is more likely to have had a very difficult life; and so right now, as I remember Ms. Park, what I choose to remember is how deeply she smiled when she asked if we could be together, not because of anything having to do with the sex that didn’t happen, but because I could see in that smile that the thought of being with me made her happy and it’s more painful than I want to feel right now to remember her any other way.

Soon after we got off the highway–we were in an area of Seoul to which I had never been before–we pulled into a large parking lot. I could see three large houses, each with a lit porch. When I asked where we were, all he would say was, “Miari,” and he motioned with his head for me to follow him. As we got closer to the houses, I saw that the porches were filled with women wearing hamboks, the traditional Korean dress. Each house had its own color, purple, green and yellow. Mr. Park led me towards the purple house, and as soon as he stepped up onto the wooden floor of the porch, one of the women jumped up to greet him, throwing her arms around his shoulders and placing a happy kiss on his cheek. She looked very young–I found out later she was eighteen–and she led him by the hand, chattering loudly and gleefully in Korean I could not understand at all, behind an older woman who showed us to the room where we would spend the evening.

Very sparsely furnished, with just a low table, some floor mats for us to sit on and a space heater, the room was painted an industrial yellow that was cracking in some places, and the tiles on the floor might have come from a hospital or a high school cafeteria. As my friend and his companion made themselves comfortable on the mats on one side of the table, he nodded to one of the mats on the other side. As I took my place opposite them, the older woman who’d brought us to the room, smiling sideways at me with what I can only describe as gleeful mischief in her eyes, placed a platter of fruit and some beer between us. Mr. Park’s companion, who told me her name was Ms. Ham, opened the bottle and poured, first for Mr. Park and then for me. She asked me in a slightly accented, not-too-stilted English where I was from, how long I’d been in Korea, what I was doing there and a little bit about my life back home. Then, with a sly tilt of her mouth and one eye on Mr. Park, she asked me, “Do you like to fuck?”

Her tone was so matter-of-fact, so apparently without guile, that I answered with only the slightest hesitation. “Sometimes,” I answered. “Do you?”

“Sometimes.”

Just then, there was a knock on the door. Mr. Park said something in Korean and then turned to me. He explained that they had brought a woman for me and that if I did not think she was pretty enough, I could send her back and they would bring another one more to my liking. Not knowing what else to do, I nodded my head. Mr. Park said something else in Korean, the door opened and the same older woman stood their with my companion.

“Is she pretty enough?” Mr. Park asked me.

“Yes,” I said, having decided that I would answer this way whether I thought she was pretty or not.

He nodded his head at the older woman, who backed out and closed the door. My partner bowed slightly–her name was Ms. Cho–took a seat to my right and immediately refilled my beer. It turned out that she spoke no English and so Ms. Ham continued in her role as mistress of ceremonies. Spearing a piece of fruit with a toothpick and placing it delicately in my friend’s mouth, then nodding to Ms. Cho to do the same with me, she looked directly at me and said, “Tonight we will enjoy each other.” A good place to start, she suggested, was with a song. “Do you sing?” she asked me.

“A little.”

“Will you sing for us?”

I sang Summertime, and then she sang a Korean folksong, and then Mr. Park sang, and my partner did as well, and in between the songs we drank and ate, and the women flirted with us, puckering their lips for us to kiss them, running their hands up the insides of our thighs and, in Ms. Cho’s case, reaching into my shirt to stroke my nipple. When Ms. Ham saw me give a little gasp of pleasure, she smiled and asked if I’d ever had sex with a Korean woman. I told her no–which was true at the time–and she told me that she’d heard American men liked Korean women because their vaginas were so tight. She’d never been with an American man, she went on, and she wondered if what she’d heard was true, that we all had exceptionally large penises. Would I, she wanted to know, take my pants off so she could see for herself?

Just then, Mr. Park said something in Korean that I couldn’t understand. I assumed he had seen that Ms. Ham’s question had made me uncomfortable and told her to ease up a bit because she stopped talking, got up and turned on the space heater. We drank a little more as the room got warmer. Then, Mr. Park spoke Korean again and Ms. Ham began to get undressed. Ms. Cho sat frozen by my side. Ms. Ham stopped undoing the top of her hambok, gave Ms. Cho a look of what I can only describe as compassionate urgency and with a nod of her head urged my partner to follow her example. Ms. Cho turned her head quickly to look at me and then locked her eyes on the ground. I started to protest that it was not really necessary for them to get undressed, but Mr. Park leaned forward a little bit and spoke again, this time raising his voice, and I didn’t need to understand what his words meant to know they had contained a threat.

“You’ll have to excuse her,” he said as Ms. Cho joined Ms. Ham in disrobing, neither woman looking up as they did so. He nodded towards Ms. Cho who was now sitting naked with her back to the wall, hugging her knees to her chest with one arm so her breasts were covered, while placing the crumpled fabric of her hambok in front of her that nothing else was exposed either. “She’s only sixteen and has been here just a few months.”

Now it was my turn to freeze. If she was that young, the odds were she’d been trafficked. It was, of course, entirely possible that the same was true of Ms. Ham, but Ms. Ham had been playing her role so naturally and with such good humor, and she and Mr. Park–who clearly was one of her regulars–seemed so genuinely to like each other, that the possibility she’d been brought to Miari against her will had not crossed my mind. I was angry, confused and not a little bit disgusted with myself. The only thing I could think to say was that I wanted to leave, and I stood up, ready to walk out by myself if necessary.

Mr. Park stood up as well and reached across the table to touch my arm. “Richard, please sit down and let me explain.” Reluctantly, since I realized that even if I did walk out, I had no idea where I was or where I would go, I did as he asked. The women breathed an obvious sigh of relief.

If we left now, Mr. Park told me, not only would the women not get paid for the night, but they would likely be blamed for our leaving, which meant they would also be punished and have to pay a fine, or perhaps even be beaten. I suggested at least that we ought to let them put their clothes back on, but he explained further that when the “show girl” came in a little bit later, if the girls were not naked, she would report them and the same consequences would very likely apply. I sat back down–what else, really, could I do–unable in my guilt even to look at the child still cowering next to me.

Fortunately, in that it relieved me of having to figure out what to do or how to behave, the showgirl came in almost immediately after I sat down. Smiling and without any introduction, she hiked up the skirts of her hambok, took an egg from the tray she had placed on the edge of our table when she entered, and inserted it into her vagina. She kept it there for about ten seconds, caught it in her hand as she let it fall out and in one, smooth, obviously very practiced motion, cracked it on the edge of my class and stirred it into my beer with a wink, insisting I should drink it “for stamina.” I half-expected her to try to make that happen by raising a glass and toasting me, but without even the smallest pause for dramatic effect, she picked a bottle-opener up from the tray, wrapped the handle in some cloth, inserted it where she had put the egg, and used it to open two fresh bottles of beer, which she poured for Mr. Park and myself into the two clean glasses that were also on the tray. (Ms. Ham very unobtrusively removed the glass with my beer-egg mixture in it to the other end of the table.) Once again, I was expecting a toast, but, again, without pausing, the showgirl picked up from the tray a long stick, wrapped one end of it, just as she had done the bottle opener, and put that end into her vagina. Then, using a match to light the other end, which was covered in some kind of flammable material, she hiked herself over to Mr. Park and lit his cigarette with the flame dangling from her genitals. (I don’t smoke, or she would have done the same for me.) Finally, she dipped a calligraphy brush in ink, wrapped and inserted it as she had done the other two implements, asked me my name and how to spell it, and then used her vagina to write “Richard” in script on a long piece of butcher block paper she’d brought for the purpose.

We applauded, but she barely stopped to acknowledge that we were acknowledging her. She gathered her things quickly and efficiently–I guess she had other shows to perform that night–and left as unceremoniously as she came, except that she made sure to place the paper with my name on it directly in front of me so I would know to take it home as a souvenir. After that, the highlight of the evening clearly finished, Mr. Park and I sat with Ms. Ham and Ms. Cho for a few more minutes, chatting about I don’t remember what, and then Mr. Park nodded his head. We stood up, said goodbye and walked out–leaving the paper with my name on it where it was–while the women got up to put their clothes back on and clean the room.

In the car, Mr. Park was all smiles. He asked me if I’d ever seen anything like that before, and I answered truthfully that I hadn’t. A small look of victory passed across his face when I said that, and I knew why. On more than one occasion, when he and I and some of his friends had been hanging out in a coffee shop or hotel cafe trying to figure out what to do, either he or one of his friends had said, “I think Richard wants to have sex tonight,” and I had always said no, that I wasn’t in the mood, adding, so as not to offend the man who had made the offer, that maybe we would do go next time. I knew that my refusal was a source of disappointment for Mr. Park, and maybe for his friends as well, for whom the offer to take me to have sex was a gesture of real friendship, just like it had been for Mr. Lee. Getting me to experience Miari had been Mr. Park’s way of showing me that he and his friends had been right all along, that I really did want to have sex, that all I had to do was give myself permission to enjoy what Korea had to offer in this way, and I am sure he believed that “next time” I would gladly go with him and his friends to have the sex for which he was hoping, I am sure, that my visit to Miari had whetted my appetite.

More than that, though, I think Mr. Park’s smile meant that he felt he’d put me in my place, proved to me that I was not as different from him and his friends as I pretended to be, though I imagine that he would have used the words better than rather than different from if you’d asked him–because I think they understood my constant refusal of their offers to take me to places like Miari as, in my mind anyway, an assertion of my own moral superiority. Yet I’d never thought of myself that way. It was true that I always turned down their offers to take me somewhere to have sex, but I would have been lying had I told you that I was not tempted, very tempted, to say yes, especially during the period when I did not have a lover in Korea and the loneliness and I felt missing my girlfriend back in the States was particularly acute. I said no, in other words, not because I thought I was morally superior to Mr. Park and his friends, but because no matter how much I might have been tempted to give myself over to the pleasures of paid female companionship, I did not want to allow myself to give in to that temptation in a situation where the availability of the companionship they offered to buy for me depended in no small measure on the coercion of women like Ms. Cho and terms of employment such as those under which she and Ms. Ham worked.

Would I have said yes to them if the situation were different? I honestly don’t know, though of course I did, tacitly, say yes to Mr. Park when I didn’t ask him to turn around and take me home after I realized what kind of place Miari was. In truth, I almost did, but I also did not want to embarrass or insult him. He was my friend and I knew he believed he was doing me a favor by bringing me somewhere he thought I was either too embarrassed or ashamed or otherwise hung up about to go myself. To be fair to me, cultural differences being what they are, I did not know if our friendship would have survived my telling him to take me home (though now I realize it probably would have), but it was also my desire not to insult him, not to make a scene, that allowed me to pretend I really had no choice but to follow him into the house. Making my friendship with Mr. Park the issue, in other words, allowed me not to have to face the fact that I was curious about what would happen, that I did wonder what it would be like to be served by women whose job it was, as Mr. Lee had said, “to please a man.”

I am not sure that I had any specific expectations of what the experience would be like, but I know I did not expect it to be alienating in the way that it was. Especially after I found out how young Ms. Cho was, but also before, there were moments when I had the feeling that I was hovering over the room, watching my body say and do things that did not belong to me. I remember having this experience specifically when Ms. Ham tried to get me to take off my pants and then, again, after the women had gotten undressed, when I had to face Ms. Cho as she refilled my beer glass after Mr. Park ordered her to do so. I’d like to say these experiences were alienating because they forced me to be someone I wasn’t, someone I didn’t want to be, and yet–despite the at least partial truth that explanation holds–there had also been moments earlier in the evening when I’d felt exquisitely centered in myself, when the sexual banter, the seductive glances, Ms. Cho’s touch, and her willingness to let me touch her, all became the sources of pleasure and, as importantly I think, of fun that it was their function to be.

Those moments of centeredness revealed to me the possibility of a sex industry that does not exploit the people who work in it in the ways that Ms. Cho, Ms. Ham, the showgirl and all the other women who worked in Miari were being exploited, but so what? The existence of that possibility does not change the fact of my participation in their exploitation. More to the point, it does not change the fact that, as a man, there was almost no way I could escape participating in their exploitation, not only because Miari and other places like it existed for my benefit whether I  visited the or not, but also because, as I said at the end of Part 2, to have male friends–or at least to have the male friends that I had–was inevitably to patronize the sex industry, because even when these men did not go to such places to have sex, they went to bond over the bodies of the women they paid to be their companions.

On another night, for example, two other friends of mine, Mr. Kim and Mr. Jung, invited me out to a disco not far from where I lived. As soon as we entered, a greeter spoke with them briefly and led us away from the dance floor to an almost invisible corner table. Soon after we sat down, a waiter appeared with a platter of fruit, some bottles of beer and three women–Ms. Jo, Ms. Yoo, and Ms. Hwang–whom he presented very formally, lingering to make sure we found his choices acceptable. Ms. Hwang and Ms. Yoo took their seats next to Mr. Kim and Mr. Jung respectively, while Ms. Jo made herself comfortable next to me. The initial discussion was in Korean spoken much too fast for me to follow, which Ms. Jo tried to make up for by paying attention to me physically. She made appreciative noises as she ran her hands over my biceps; she teased with her fingers at the hair on my arms and my chest and kept tickling her palms by rubbing them against my beard, giggling like a young girl as she did so. Then, Mr. Jung looked up from something he was saying to Ms. Yoo and, indicating Ms. Jo with a nod of his head, said, “She’s pretty, isn’t she? You know, she isn’t wearing panties.”

Before I could even think how to respond, Miss Hwang laughed and whispered into Mr. Kim’s ear something that broadened the grin on his face into a fell-fledged smile. “She shaves herself,” he told me. “Do you want to feel it?”

Everyone was laughing, including Ms. Jo, and I was blushing, but when I looked into their eyes, I could see they were not trying to embarrass me. Rather they wanted me to know that this was why we were all there, to flirt and to play, and that if I wanted to go further, to do what came “naturally” with a woman like Ms. Jo at my side, that was why we were there too.

At that moment, the DJ began a set of slow music, what the Koreans call “blues,” a chance for couples to dance close, touching each other publicly in ways their culture otherwise frowns upon–or at least frowned upon when I was there. Ms. Jo smiled invitingly and led me to the dance floor, where she at first held her body a respectable distance from mine. As we found each other’s rhythm, however, and began to move more smoothly to the music, she drew closer, and I inhaled her scent, allowing myself to relax against the shape her body made against mine. I was, I suddenly realized, achingly lonely, missing my life and my lover in New York City more than I had thought. Ms. Jo was beautiful, compliant, extremely eager to please and ineluctably there. Of its own accord, my body began to reach for hers, but while I could see in the smile she gave as she felt me harden against her that she would have taken my money to take me into her body, her eyes were empty, revealing in her parted lips and almost perfectly white teeth nothing more than the mask of trained acquiescence that her job required her to wear. The obvious absence in her face of any real desire for me made my own desire for her feel shameful.

I could have had Ms. Jo anyway, of course–no one who meant anything to me would ever have had to know–but to do so would have been to do more than purchase a woman. It would have been to sell out the complexity of my loneliness. Prostitution wasn’t the issue for me at that moment; intimacy was, the way the “paradise” of men’s entitlement depends for its existence on the warping of our separateness, the yoking of male heterosexual desire so exclusively to women’s bodies that the interior emotional and psychological complexity of any given man’s desire can be reduced in a heartbeat to the need for a woman’s body into which to release himself. Ms. Jo, or any of the other Ms. Jo’s who might have stood in her place, had been mine to pay for even before she sat down beside me. I took her hand and led her back to our table, made excuses to friends about suddenly not feeling well, and walked out alone, relishing my solitude in the touch of the cool night air.

ETA: Click here for an article from March 2000 about a campaign to clean Miari up.

“Hi!” I said. “Were you talking to me?”

“I love you,” she answered. “I love you.” She took the first two fingers of her right hand and pushed them slowly in and out of her mouth. I turned and walked quickly away.

Running to keep up with me, the woman appeared at my side. “Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m just walking.”

“Just walking?”

“Yes.”

Upon hearing this, she wrapped her arm around my waist, laid my arm confidently along the contour of her hip, looked up at me with a smile I can only describe as angelic, and said, “You, me, fuck-fuck, all night, real cheap!”

I smiled back–what else could I do?–took her arm from my waist, said, “No, thank you,” and set off more quickly in the same direction.

“No t’ankyoo!” Her voice was high-pitched and mockingly flirtatious as caught up with me, put her arm back where she thought it belonged, and offered again to fuck me all night, any way I wanted, for “real cheap.” When I again said no, she started nudging me with her hip towards the side of a nearby office building, mimicking me all the while, “No-o! Please go awa-ay!” I pushed back just hard enough to make her let go of me and turned down the first side street I came to, almost falling over an old man sitting on the pavement, his stock of nail clippers and other assorted knickknacks spread out neatly on the pavement in front of him. She was still behind me, however, so I turned left and made two quick rights, desperately hoping I was walking in a circle that would lead me back to the main street. I don’t know how many different streets I took trying to lose her, but each time I looked over my shoulder, she was behind me, half running, half walking, and still promising me the night of my dreams.

Finally, I’d had enough. I stopped as if to catch my breath and she jumped at the opportunity. She wound her arm yet one more time around my waist and started to recite fractured versions of the titles of pop songs that were old twenty some odd years ago when this all took place. “Everybody need somebody. Are you lonely this night? I fall in love with you, mend your broken heart! Help you make it through the night!” With each new line, she tried to embrace me with her other arm, which I kept pushing away, until I grabber her wrist and pulled her into a small alley between the two nearest buildings. At first, her face lit up with triumph and anticipation, but then, as she felt the tightness of my grip–enough so she would know I was serious, but not enough to hurt her–her eyes and mouth began to widen with fear. Towering over her, I pushed the words out through clenched teeth, “Go away! Just leave me alone!” Then I started back in the direction from which we’d come.

“Are you a soldier?” The voice behind me was self-effacingly polite. I stopped walking. “No, I’m a teacher,” I said, and it was as if my answer triggered a switch in her brain, for her behavior changed instantly. Without looking at me, she asked if I wanted to stop in a coffee shop for something to eat. She offered to show me around Seoul, to help me learn Korean. She said something about where she lived, or maybe she was asking about where I lived, I wasn’t sure. All I could think was that she was not someone I should trust, so I started walking again, ignoring the new found politeness with which she continued to follow me, until she slowed down, touched me on the lower back in a gentle, almost wistful farewell, and headed off in the opposite direction.

Miraculously, I was able to find the Chong-no subway station within a few minutes. All through the ride back to my apartment, however, that last, sexless touch haunted me, making me wonder what I’d been running from. I’d been assuming, of course, that the woman was a prostitute–certainly she was willing to prostitute herself–but it was also possible that she’d been hungry and poor and desperate, that she’d seen in me an opportunity to put a decent meal in her stomach and did, was willing to do, what she thought was necessary to make that happen. I wasn’t second-guessing my decision not to go with her–I did not know Korean at all yet, and I certainly did not know the culture well enough to know what I would have been letting myself in for had I stopped to spend time with her, sexually or otherwise–but I was wondering what I’d been scared of, because the truth is that I’d run the way I did, in part anyway, because I was scared.

Not for my physical safety, though I recognize there were any number of ways she (and accomplices, if she’d had them) could have been planning to ambush or intimidate me into giving her my money. Rather, I was frightened by the explicit and public and inescapably naked way in which she’d propositioned me. I didn’t want people to know I was the kind of person whom prostitutes approached like that, but what I learned on Chong-no, what I felt viscerally for the first time in my life, is that–whatever else may be true about who I am–my body marks me as precisely that kind of person. More to the point, my body is not something I can run away from. I ran, in other words, not only because I didn’t want what the woman on Chong-no was trying to sell, but also because I didn’t want to face having to reject her, because the fact that I could reject her meant the privilege of having her was already mine.

Still, it would do justice neither to my experience nor to what the reality of that woman’s life probably was, to stop here. For while it was, and most probably still is, true that to be a man in Korea is to have access to the vast “playground” of the Korean sex industry, the indigenous version of the playground exists almost entirely behind the doors of the establishments where Korean sex-workers earn their living and is governed by rules of decorum that render the spectacle of a woman chasing a potential customer down a crowded avenue in the middle of a weekend afternoon all but unthinkable. In contrast, according to figures compiled by the Embassy of the Republic of Korea, during the time I was in Seoul, 18,000 South Korean women were registered as “club women” for United States military bases. Spend just a few minutes in an area where these women work–when I was there, Itaewon, where the 8th Army was stationed, would have been the best example–and you’ll see that the way they do business has more in common with the stereotypical 42nd Street streetwalker than the typical woman who works in a Korean-oriented sex establishment. What I ran from when I ran from the woman on Chong-no, in other words, was only the privilege of being a man, but also what it meant to her that I was mi-gook saram, an American, and the way she propositioned and chased me needs therefore to be seen as reflecting her expectations of me and my culture at least as much as it might reflect the values of hers.

The tradition of the kisaeng, or courtesan, within which the Korean sex trade is most properly understood, at least in historical terms, has its roots in a way of life very different from the one that gave rise to the streetwalker. The traditional yangban, or Korean gentleman, governed his polygamous household according to Confucian rules of decorum that determined everything from the way he spoke and ate his meals to when, how often, and even how, he had sex. The kisaeng house provided men with a refuge from this and the other pressures and responsibilities of being the man of the house. Trained not only as hostesses, but also in literature and the arts–Korea’s most famous woman poet, for example, Hwang Jin-hi, was a kisaeng how lived in the fifteenth or sixteenth century–the kisaeng offered a stress-free evening of female companionship and camaraderie that would have been impossible within the strictly hierarchical relationship a man had to maintain between himself and his wives. Without explicitly excluding sexual favors from their services, in other words, the kisaeng were not engaged primarily in selling their bodies, a difference from western prostitutes that it is important to keep in mind.

Much in Korean society, of course, has changed since the time of Hwang Jin-hi, and the very quick thumbnail sketch of the kisaeng I have just given you necessarily simplifies the history and the nature of what is in fact a complex Korean social institution.¹ Nonetheless, the cultural framework within which the Korean sex trade exists–or at least existed when I was there–still resembles that of the original kisaeng houses. Contemporary Korean men go to room salons, stand bars, song-in discos–they may be called by different names now, but I imagine they still exist–and all the other places where women are available at least as much to be entertained as to have sex. To socialize with Korean men–this, too, I imagine has not changed much since I was there–is eventually to find oneself in such a place. A story or three about that experience coming in parts 3 and 4.

1. Songs of the Kisaeng, a book of translations of kisaeng poetry, offers a more fully fleshed-out but still accessible introduction to the kisaeng, along with some insight into what the life of a kisaeng was like, at least as they depicted it in their art.