Sexuality in South Korea
Although men were allowed to have multiple wives, women were expected to maintain chastity and were compelled to remain unmarried if their husbands died.
For instance, chastity of widows was enforced by forbidding the sons and grandsons of remarried women from taking the Gwageo.
Women from lower class had jobs such as mudang, or shamans; folk healer; kisaeng.
Early marriages were often arranged and can be traced back to the Three Kingdoms of Korea period (57 AD-668).
The society commonly believed that a higher age for marriage was associated with inappropriate sexual activity.
Although only three percent of the population has Confucianism as a belief system today, it remains the basis for sexual ethics and criminal law.
[8] Buddhism was used to instruct people to give up all desires, including those related to sex, and sexual activities were forbidden in many sects.
[1] In the Joseon Dynasty, unmarried men and women received a very limited form of sexual education.
In 1968, the Planned Parenthood Federation of Korea (PPFK) has started sexual education.
Books, academic interests, and mass media focusing on sexuality began to increase.
According to two Korean Research Institute on Sexuality and Culture studies done on 1996 and 1997, 37.1% of male students learned about sex from pornography, while 14% learned it from their peers; for female students, 37% received sexual education from peers while 25.7% received it from school.
[12] In one study, 99.5% of male college students reported that they had been exposed to pornography (excluding participants who declined to answer the question), with 99.1% occasionally using it for masturbation.
[13] In 2005, there was a pornographic online magazine named Foxylove that catered mainly to Korean women and reportedly had over a hundred thousand subscribers.
[15] It has been conjectured that the decline in the rate of circumcision was due to the increased availability of new information.
[15] In a survey given in 1997, 44.4% of female high school students reported that they had had heterosexual relationships and 7.5% of the entire group had had coital experiences.
The double standard of relationships [note 2] was hypothesized to cause psychological and physical (especially sexual) stress for females.
[20] A study in 1997 found that 45.5% of female high school students reported sexual harassment, mostly by their male friends.
[20] Currently, there is a prevalent traditional belief that rape is a man's mistake that should be forgiven, especially for victims who had been drunk or wearing revealing clothes.
[25] The Miryang gang rape incident in 2004 provoked controversy due to victim blaming and other mistreatment by police officials.
This mistreatment ultimately led to a 2008 judgment against the police by the Supreme Court of Korea.
[27][28][29] They are raped and physically and psychologically harmed in brothels, businesses, homes, hotels, and other locations throughout the country.
