Sunday, June 12, 2011

Faith, Hope and Chastity

Chastity Belt

For the past couple of months, Charles from KTLIT, Andy from Seoul Art Fiend/Concrete Experience Magazine and myself have been gathering together every couple of months, sitting on the floor next to a computer and babbling about all sorts of topics for the Korean Culture Report podcast.

We'll be recording the next one sometime very soon and will be discussing Daehangno's Lock Museum among other things. I toddled down there yesterday for a quick gander at their superb selection of locks, latches and other antiquated key based oddities and encountered the above specimen. An honest to goodness real-life Chastity Belt, this vicious looking thing is known as a 정조대 in Korean. I'm not sure if they were ever used in Korean society or whether this one has been brought in from foreign climes, however a brief search on the internet revealed a rather surprising piece of (possibly incorrect?) information:

"In August, 2002, Korean clothing manufacturer Intarsia briefly offered a line of lockable womens' panties, ostensibly to prevent spur-of-the-moment sexual assaults."(Source)

The world we live in truly is an odd sort of place. I'll be sure to lock my door tonight.

4 comments:

Charles Montgomery said...

LOL,

I also.. sort of cringing.. took a photo of that.. er.. "artifact."

Anonymous said...

That is the most gruesome device I have ever seen in my life.

Suzy in Seoul said...

Never existed in Korea; probably a European one.
But the lock panty from Intarsia is true. Gawd, it (deservedly) got so much flak at that time because it was placing "responsibility" of keeping one's virginity and chastity on women, as if getting raped was the victim's fault for not going through enough precautions. They stopped selling those pretty quickly.

Paul Ajosshi said...

Thanks Suzy, I suspected that might be the case. Thanks also for confirming the existence of the Intarsia lock panty. Unbelievable.