Lee Hee Tae had great hopes for his sexual event, which he boldly billed as South Korea’s” second and largest”.
He envisaged 5,000 viewers flocking to see their favorite Chinese movie actors and actresses, who were being flown in for next week’s function. There was to be a bondage style show, a sex toy show, and some child game, that involved bursting bubbles between person’s body.
But with just 24 days to come, the event was cancelled.
South Korea is known for its traditional approach to sex and adult entertainment. Public nakedness and remove shows are banned, and it is illegal to sell or distribute hard-core sex, though not to take it.
” Virtually every developed country has a sex festival, but here in South Korea we do n’t even have an adult entertainment culture. I want to take the first steps towards creating one,” said Lee Hee Tae, whose firm Play Joker produced legitimate soft-core sex before their tilt to organising events.
A month earlier, children’s rights groups from the village of Suwon, where the event was expected to be held, came out to protest. They accused the celebration of exploiting ladies in a region where gender violence is widespread.
This was not, they argued, a event aimed at both women. The strongly female, scantily-clad marketing suggested solution holders were likely to be largely adult.
The local president condemned the occasion for taking location near a major school and the authorities threatened to withdraw the venue’s licence if it went away. The facility pulled out.
Frustrated, but unmoved, Mr Lee switched places, but a related chain of events played out. The new power accused the event of “instilling a distorted view of sex” and insisted the venue withdraw. Second, Mr Lee found a ship docked on the valley in Seoul. But, following pressure from the government, the ship’s leaseholder threatened to blockade it and slice off the power if its producer allowed the event to go away.
At each change, Mr Lee had to size down the event as passport holders called in payments, costing him hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Almost out of possibilities, he found a little underground club in the glamorous Gangnam neighbourhood in Seoul, that could carry around 400 individuals. This day he kept the site a solution.
But, Gangnam government wrote to every one of its thousands of cafes warning them they may be shut down if they hosted the event, accusing it of being “morally harmful”. But the table stood its surface.
Finally, the day before, the Japanese movie stars pulled out. Their company said the reaction to the event had “reached disease pitch” and the people were worried they might be attacked and yet stabbed.
From his office in Gangnam, Mr Lee told the BBC he was shocked events had taken” such an unthinkable turn”, adding that he had received death threats. ” I have been treated like a criminal without doing anything illegal”, he said, stating that the festival fell well within the lines of the law. There was to be no nudity or sexual acts performed, similar to an event he held last year, which garnered little publicity.
Play Joker has staged attention-grabbing stunts in the past. Last year they had a woman parade the streets of Seoul wearing nothing but a cardboard box, inviting passers-by to put their hands inside and touch her breasts.
Mr Lee says he wants to challenge Korea’s attitudes to sex and pornography, which are stuck in the past.
” The authorities are hypocrites. If you go online everyone is sharing pornography, then people log off and pretend they are innocent. How much longer are we going to keep up this pretence? “
Although popular international porn websites cannot be accessed from South Korea, most know how to use internet VPNs to override restrictions.
The group that protested the original event, the Suwon’s Women’s Hotline, described the festival’s cancellation as a” triumph”. ” Whatever the organisers say, this was not a celebration of sex, but the exploitation and objectification of women, and the sex industry encourages violence against women,” said Go Eun-chae, the director of the hotline that provides support for victims of domestic violence.
Ms Go and other women’s rights organisations in Korea argue the country has a problem with sexual violence that needs urgent attention. ” It pervades our culture,” she said, adding that men had endless opportunities to freely express their sexuality without needing a festival to do so.
Bae Jeong-weon, who lectures in sexuality and culture at Sejong University, said one of the issues with the festival was that it was mostly geared towards a male audience.
” There is a lot of violence against women here, and so women are much more sensitive to issues of exploitation,” she said. In a 2022 survey by the government’s gender ministry, more than a third of women said they had experienced sexual aggression.
” In South Korea we have a history of talking about sex negatively, in terms of violence and exploitation, rather than as a positive, enjoyable act,” Ms Bae added.
In Gangnam, where the festival was eventually due to take place, the neighbourhood’s mostly younger residents appeared divided according to their gender. ” It’s not pornographic and they’re not doing anything illegal, so I do n’t think it should have been blocked,” said a male IT worker Moon Jang-won. But 35-year-old Lee Ji-yeong said she sympathised with the various councils and was “repulsed at the festival for commercialising sex”.
But most agreed that by banning the festival, the authorities had overreached.
” This ban was a decision by old, conservative politicians who want to appeal to older voters,” said 34-year-old Yoo Ju. ” This generation still believes that sex must be hidden,” she continued, adding that young people’s attitudes to sex were shifting, and that she and her friends talked openly about it.
Politics in South Korea is still largely guided by conservative, traditional values and authorities have been accused of overreaching before, stifling diversity. Last year, Seoul city council stopped Queer Pride being held on the city’s main plaza following opposition from Christian groups. The government has yet to pass an anti-discrimination law which would protect both the queer community and women, both of whom face significant prejudice.
The controversy over the sex festival has seen these two issues of sexual diversity and gender equality become entangled, with the organisers arguing authorities were stopping people from freely expressing themselves, and women asserting that their rights were being violated.
The authorities will have to figure out how to navigate this tricky dilemma. Play Joker told the BBC it plans to try again to host the festival in June, only bigger, with Mr Lee claiming to now have several politicians on his side. Over the weekend, the mayor of Seoul issued a statement on his YouTube channel stating the city had” no intention of getting involved in the future”.
Additional reporting by Jake Kwon and Hosu Lee.