Gossip-girl Im Kyung-Hwa was still under the impression that HIV could be transferred via accidental spittle splashes while people infected with HIV have conversations with "normal people."
Park Mi-Ran said something along the lines of, "It's not just homosexual people. Lots of innocent people are being affected by AIDS now."
5 comments:
AHHHHH, head slam on wall.
What is sex education like over there? I feel like I've asked you this before but I'm still in disbelief about a lot of this.
The problem is that sex education is really fucking close to nonexistent. There's this huge gap between what the conservative older generation wants to believe about sexuality in Korea, and the reality. Prostitution is cheap and easy to access for anyone who looks over 18, graphic and sometimes violent pornography is free and easy to access for anyone who wants it.
Duh, right? It's called the internet. But the problem is that teenagers and pre-teens come at all this porn with basically no preparation for it, because the conservative older generation prefers to believe that it's not necessary - that no one has sex before marriage and that teenagers aren't curious and aren't going to imitate what they see. Unprotected and uneducated teenage sex, teenage pregnancies, and teenage rapes -especially gang rapes- are all growing.
There's this wild gap between what's available to everyone and what's appropriate to talk about - it would be an EXTREMELY liberal thing to even mention sex in conversation, but when you go outside you can see cards with naked women with stars over their nipples and vaginas EVERYWHERE. On the road, on the sidewalks, stuck in the windows of the car you give your children a ride to school with.
And people think it's okay to ignore it. Like sending these two conflicting and unconnectable messages (Don't have sex until marriage! Look at these prostitutes - aren't they hot?) isn't going to confuse children and teenagers and produce terrible results.
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2879587 This article is decent, but I can't believe something written in 2007 is the most recent result produced from searching "sex education in korea."
http://koreabridge.net/post/dire-need-sex-education-south-korea-james-turnbull I hear there was a severely flawed article up earlier this year about how we should educate teenagers more so that they know sex is bad for them - but I guess at least it recognized that the current level of sex education isn't cutting it.
The information quickly required verification of being 18 years or older (which is easy to enforce in Korea because so many sites require people to input their national identity number) to read the article (which contained a study about sex and it's physical and mental results in teenagers). Which is so ironic, because the same policy isn't even close to enforced on a ton of porn websites.
Don't even get me started on STD and HIV education. Too many people think the only people who have HIV (or any other STD) are foreigners. WHICH IS OBVIOUSLY A HUGE LIE.
And besides being a lie, it encourages the stigmatization of Koreans with sexual diseases and prevents them from receiving the information they need.
Stephen Fry said something that I loved about how sexually/socially conservative societies (he was speaking specifically of Roman Catholicism) are so manifestly obsessed with sex. I quote:
"The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese. And that, in erotic terms, is [insert your favorite example] in a nutshell."
This sounds like the same old superstitious bullshit--masturbation makes your bits fall off, pornography consumption is a sign of deviance, homosexuality is a choice, monogamy is natural--although, the prevalence is admittedly disturbing. Hopefully there is information available to the kids, if not from parents and schools?
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