Lately we've heard a lot about internet censorship, how we should be protected from terrorist content, pornography, etc. It's not about harmful content, it's about keeping information from the public. If the internet is gone, the government can lie like hell and we won't know what else to believe. Theres a lot of stuff on the internet that just isn't true but theres also a lot of things that we should know. Anything negative said against Bush could be censored, whether it's true or not. We don't need to protect kids from the internet, it's the parent's choice what they want their kids to see. Most kids learn everything from their parents anyway. ...and what about this terrorist BS...people don't need the internet to make bombs.

They already have access to our houses since the "war on drugs" or in other words war on private property, which is against the constitution. They want to take away our freedom of speech...what else do we have to lose after thats taken away? Don't you see where this is going? Slowly by slowly their creeping up on us and taking away our freedom. The reason people are so dead about it is because it happens so slowly, look at Nazi Germany, isn't that how they operated. Things changed very slowly, until one day they woke up and found that they were backed into a corner.

None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.

Goethe

(Number 5 of 7 Pictures of the Wondergirls on this Chinese porn site, found a whole three minutes after typing "Wondergirls" into Yahoo Image Search. Sorry to those of you who have regrets about the picture suddenly appearing on the screen in front of all of your students and colleagues, but, as you shall see, that you have those regrets at all neatly demonstrates one of the points I'll be making!)

This post is a direct response to the second comment left by Chris in my last post on the Wondergirls. While I still think that he has deeply mistaken views about the Wondergirls and the issues they raise, I also think that a great number of people probably share them, and so it is worth me devoting a post to specifically addressing some (though not all) of his points, rather than losing my arguments at the end of a long line of comments that few people would bother scrolling through again.

Before I do, I must apologise in advance to Chris if highlighting what he said word for word here feels like a personal attack on him. But I don't know how to avoid that.

Look More Closely

Fortunately for the sake of warming up readers up, we can start with something simple:

James, I don’t know how to convince you of Daegu high school girls’ clothing habits, but when out downtown on a weekend you can’t walk 10 feet without seeing a young woman who is obviously under 18, wearing high heels and/or a short skirt. Even when we took our high school students to the Busan Aquarium for a field trip, my very own students dressed much the same as some of the WG. You’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

This may sounds facetious, but I'm afraid that I really don't think I can be convinced without photographic evidence.

I've put both videos up again below to stop people have to scroll between posts: in the first video certainly, the quasi-uniforms that a couple of the girls are wearing would be a strange sight in real-life. but are still within the boundaries of appropriateness and good taste. I never actually said that they weren't. I don't think many school students are wearing shorts as high as those orange ones between 0:14 and 0:17 though, but I'm willing to concede that there may be some, although I've never seen any myself.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.507395&w=425&h=350&fv=]

But none of those observations apply at all to the second ad:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.507397&w=425&h=350&fv=]

To paraphrase Bulgasari, bizarrely, if the ad to encourage voting was indeed re-fashioned to sell teenage sex instead, then the ad wouldn't need to be changed much visually. To mention its features in order of least suggestive to the most, there are: none of the shirts being tucked in; two of the girls wearing suggestions of waistcoats, one of which is more akin to a crop-top considering it starts just underneath her breasts; and that one looks to be wearing a skirt but is in fact wearing an extremely high and tight pair of shorts with the pattern of the skirt. And don't get me started on the dancing, or what any of all this has to do with voting.

Certainly, two girls are wearing clothes not dissimilar to normal school uniforms, and I think that when combined with the quasi-uniform patterns and designs of the other girl's clothes, certainly would give the impression of normality with just a casual, single viewing. But repeated viewings and pausing reveals that 3 of the uniforms are anything but, and not at all like what you'd see at any Korean school, whether in Daegu or anywhere else.

Cultural Relativism?

Second point is perception. You and many others find the WG clothing and dance overly suggestive, while myself and many others do not. Who’s to say who’s correct? You say one of the girls strokes her breasts, I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestingly blase manner....

I won't insult Chris's intelligence by saying that he doesn't know what cultural relativism is, but let me refer readers to When One Culture's Custom Is Another's Taboo by Barbara Crossette (New York Times, March 6 1999), to my mind a classic on the different but related and relevant subject of how "do democratic, pluralistic societies like the United States, based on religious and cultural tolerance, respond to customs and rituals that may be repellent to the majority?". It's also very short, well worth spending the 5 minutes it would take to read in its entirety. But for now, let's consider just this: 

But going more than half way to tolerate what look like disturbing cultural practices unsettles some historians, aid experts, economists and others with experience in developing societies. Such relativism, they say, undermines the very notion of progress. What's more, it raises the question of how far acceptance can go before there is no core American culture, no shared values left.

Many years of living in a variety of cultures, said Urban Jonsson, a Swede who directs the U.N. children's fund, UNICEF, in sub-Saharan Africa, has led him to conclude that there is "a global moral minimum," which he has heard articulated by Asian Buddhists and African thinkers as well as by Western human rights advocates.

"There is a nonethnocentric global morality," he said, and scholars would be better occupied looking for it rather than denying it. "I am upset by the anthropological interest in mystifying what we have already demystified. All cultures have their bad and good things."

Murder was a legitimate form of expression in Europe centuries ago when honor was involved, Jonsson points out. Those days may be gone in most places, but in Afghanistan, a wronged family may demand the death penalty and carry it out themselves with official blessing. Does that restore it to respectability in the 21st century?

(bold added)

(Number 2 of the aforementioned series)

I hope that reference doesn't make Chris rehash accusations of Orientalism against me, because the point I gained from that was that there are standards and limits that can not be crossed by the glib defence that him and I, and by extension Koreans and Westerners too, have merely different, but equally valid perceptions of what is and isn't sexually suggestive. Somewhere out there, there are divisions between innocent and sexually suggestive that the vast majority of humans would agree upon, even though there will always be some individuals and groups of people that don't for various reasons, and I think Gord explains very well why in this particular instance Koreans themselves do not see the Wondergirls as sex symbols.

But while they have limited exposure outside of Korea, the rest of the world does see them that way. Pictures or videos of the Wondergirls are certainly still some distance from child pornography, but then the first picture above especially and the place where I found them in particular give at least one demonstration of what's being done with them and what non-Koreans consider them as, and that should at least give pause to the people who still protest that they're nothing more than, say, innocent fashion shoots. And remove the Korean element from them, and the first thing most people familiar with the topic would say is that both photos above look like they're from a Japanese schoolgirl photobook.

I'll grant that despite my saying that there are limits to what 15 year-olds should be able to do and wear on national TV, it's still a grey area and there are indeed issues of freedom of expression to consider too. But in Japan, the refusal of legislators to draw more specific lines between supposedly artistic pictures of underage girls in school uniforms and swimsuits and child pornography, for instance, led to nearly two decades of "art" photographers constantly pushing the boundaries, ultimately ending up last year with U-15s and even preteens in variously:

• their lingerie
• g-strings
• shoestring bikinis or whatever they're called, with only the smallest of triangles covering their nipples
• doggy-style poses
• swimsuits stretched tightly over their labia while they're on a gyrating chair simulating the "cowgirl" sexual position, their genitals sometimes only 10cm away from the camera.

All still technically legal because the law only prohibited nudity. It was only with those latter, most recent cases that legislators finally and belatedly stepped in and started making prosecutions (as I discuss here). I'm not saying that this will inevitably happen in Korea, Japan has a long pornographic tradition that Korea lacks for one, but not drawing lines between innocent and sexually suggestive dancing and photos at earlier points in Japan did ultimately lead from swimsuits to in-your-face child pornography there. So while sexually suggestive photos and videos of 15 year-old girls on TV will not lead to child pornography in themselves, unchallenged they certainly are a significant potential step in the same direction. And that is why the Wondergirls matter.

This is also connected to what Chris says later:

So far all I’ve seen regarding this issue from blogs like the Metropolitician and now the Grand Narrative are emphatic but nebulous statements that there is most definitely some correlation between the rise in popularity of wonjo gyojae and the increased sexualization of young women in Korea, OR that the WG are inappropriate because they might lead to REALLY bad things like that 6-year old girl who was really wearing next to nothing for no reason at all and dancing wayyyy more suggestively than the WG do in that youtube video. This is like when George W. said that gay marriage should not be allowed because, well if you let two men or two women get married, what’s to stop people from marrying their dogs or washing machines?

Chris does mention other factors behind the rise of wonjo gyojae/원조교제 than Korean teenagers' increased sexualization as represented to me by the Wondergirls phenomenon, and these are all just as valid, but the absence of hard evidence for a correlation between, say, a future increase in teenage prostitution and the emergence of Wondergirls phenomenon, doesn't mean that they can't at least be a factor either. Even if they end up being 100% responsible, I'm not sure that hard evidence of a correlation that would satisfy Chris would even be possible, and am open to suggestions. But Chris seems to be saying that the absence of hard evidence means that media images of teenagers aren't a factor in teenage prosituion at all, and that's clearly not true. It would though, be difficult to accept if you didn't view the above ads as sexual at all. Here is some extra evidence, although I sense that for some people there will never be enough:

Forced Sexualization, Cause and Effect

Actually, the second part of that original comment is the most revealing:

You say one of the girls strokes her breasts [in the first video], I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestingly blase manner....

Sure, she's not working in a strip club, but her hands definitely go over her breasts, albeit very quickly. And I can't imagine that there is a single woman in the world who wouldn't make the same, really very unnatural gesture without knowing exactly what she's doing. In that girl's case, that she's doing so in "an uninterestingly blase manner" is spot on, and suggests two possibilities:

1. That she knows what she's doing and why a woman would do it, but her youth and sexual inexperience means that while she knows the basic mechanics of the gesture, she doesn't really know how to pull it off in a more sexually appealing manner (ie, smiling, looking in the viewer's eye, maybe licking her lips).

2. That she doesn't know what she's doing, and is only doing it because she's being specifically told to do so by the producer of the video, and it's thus to her it's just another, uninteresting part of the video to be gotten over with. And judging by the other moves that the producer got her to which weren't in the video, then I'd say that this explanation is much the more likely. See 3:02-3:32 of this video which shows the making of the commercial too:

My ass that that's "just dancing". Well, her ass rubbing against the big letter G at 3:26 to be precise. Why did the producer want her to do that? Maybe, just maybe, to use her ass to titillate male viewers, thereby helping to sell the product? Heaven forbid!

On a final note, and going back to the notion of hard evidence for links between the Wondergirls and other issues, I recall that there are a pair of orange books about Korean feminism sitting in most English sections of Korean bookstores which I've been meaning to buy ever since I started writing so much about Korean women's body images several months ago (I don't know the names sorry). I didn't buy them earlier because they were full of mostly postmodernist waffle, but I desperately want one of them now because I recall that one essay in it discusses how Shim Mina/심민아's (a.k.a "Miss World Cup 2002") unconventional means of gaining public attention meant that, years later, it become perfectly acceptable for women to wear such revealing clothes in public, starting with similar national sporting events and increasingly outside of them too.

This is an example of supposedly "nebulous links" being more concrete than they first appear, and in this case may well have even provided part of the background to what the Wondergirls do being considered acceptable by Koreans. So I'll try to find and buy the book soon.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

The Streisand effect is a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples are attempts to censor a photograph, a file, or even a whole website, especially by means of cease-and-desist letters. Instead of being suppressed, the information sometimes quickly receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks.

They should have known better.

To assume that companies are marketing these drinks towards under aged drinkers I think is improbable. Take a look at this from a marketing perspective.

Marketing is an extremely well thought out process with a lot of money being invested into it. Target markets are taken into deep consideration. The idea that there are people sitting in an office targeting their product towards a societal group that cannot legally buy their product seems like a massive waste of corporate dollars.

Yes teenagers are buying the product, but how exactly are they getting their hands on alcohol? Through adults who can legally purchase these drinks, fake I.D.'s and lax liquor store staff. Instead of attacking the companies themselves, take a look at how they're getting their hands on the product.

Yet again it is like blaming Marilyn Manson for murders rather than looking into the true causes of the individual's motives. A lot of blame without much to back it up.

The target market selection process involves dividing society into groups in order to project your product onto them and encourage them to purchase it.

If you were a marketer, would you concentrate your product on a smaller proportion of your market potential that is legally unable to purchase your product? Would you do this in favour of the larger proportion who legally can buy your product and doing so would mean a larger profit and less to deal with ethically on your own conscience? Minors wouldn't even be considered part of the market potential, because they technically don't have the purchasing power. It would be like advertising roller-blades to the legless.

It doesn't even make good business sense!

I assume a retort to my argument would be somewhere along the lines of pointing out that these drinks are colourful, hardly taste like alcohol and look like way too much fun - just like that Tooheys commercial with the large blow up people dancing around to Tom Jones.

That commercial was banned because it was apparently targeted at minors. No thanks to the lyrics: "Just help yourself..." which apparently insinuated being naughty and having a taste of alcohol, even though you're too young!

I love that ad - almost as good as the Carlton Draught "It's a Big Ad" ad.

These crabby people who think the business world is full of money-sucking demons seem to think that just because they are unable to have fun then other adults are incapable of it also. Alcohol is supposed to be fun. That's why those drinks are bright and tasty.

Adults are attracted to these things too!

So please, before you go blaming the wicked world of capitalism, concentrate on just how exactly these children are buying alcohol and take a closer look at the laws - specifically the Australian law that allows minors to drink on private property as long as they are in the presence of an adult. Hell, every under age party I went to as a teenager involved everyone standing around drunk on the front lawn while the police stood out the front helpless because they couldn't do a thing. They dealt with the intruders and the brawlers instead.

OK, here's the Carlton Draught ad, just for you (OK, for me):

http://thisdevilsworkday.wordpress.com/

The first thing you have to think about, when doing underground work is, who can you trust? This applies to software as well. Generally speaking: You can always trust the Open Source Community, hence Open Source Software (OSS). So I strongly recommend using Linux (Debian or Fedora or CentOS) or Solaris. Otherwise: Stick with your current OS which is propably Windows. Still, you need to get some OSS - especially Firefox (webbrowser), Thunderbird (e-mail client) and WASTE (secure Peer-to-Peer Network). You may as well get TrueCrypt. This is a software that is able to encrypt your whole Hard Disk (or just parts of it). This is especially useful, if you're blogging/writing from shared or pupblic computers, where you have to use a Flash Drive (see the mentioned article for more information on that), so you can encrypt the whole drive.

Let's start with Firefox: Download  Version 2.0.0.13 (stable) or Version 3.0b4 (beta but actually very stable) and install it. Then navigate to Firefox' addon-page to install the TOR-Proxy.NET Toolbar (hint: you might want to install some other privacy-related addons). Just click the green "Install" Button and FF will download and install the addon all by itself. After restarting FF, download and install the latest TOR Version from either the programmers site or any of the listed mirrors. After installation finished successfully, test your settings by going to this website. If everything went right, your IP should now be hard to track down.

With TOR activated (you can easily switch TOR on/out via the Tor-Addon), go to gmail.com and register a free mail account. For sign up, don't use any information, that could be traced back to you and choose a common name of a person living in the US, Germany or any other country with loads if internet users. To give an example: peter.oberthaler@gmail.com (fictious) from Dortmund, Germany. You can even choose a ridiculous name only a teenager would choose life gummistiefel@gmail.com (fictious) from Frankfurt, Germany (gummistiefel would mean s.th. like wellingtons). Than go back to the addons page and download/install FirePGP  and Keyscrambler

What do they do? Keyscrambler encrypts your Keystrokes at the lowest possible layer, so most (software) keyloggers trying to record your account informations (...) will send useless data to their masters. This applies to text, typed into a web page only though!
FirePGP is an ecryption software as well: It adds strong encryption capabilities to your gmail web-account. Since it can be a bit confusing to new users, I'll guide you through the installation procedure of FireGPG and Enigmail for Thunderbird (for writing of longer messages and off-line writing):

Donwload Thunderbird, Enigmail and gpg4win. Install gpg4win to the default directory. After installing  Thunderbird by simply running the .exe-file, fire up Thunderbird and configure your account .Go to Tools -> Addons and click "Install". Now navigate to the file called enigmail-x.xx.x-tb+sm.xpi and click OK. After restarting Thunderbird, you should see a new Menu entry: OpenPGP. Explore this new menu! There should be an entry like "Key Management"->"Generate new keys". Choose your gmail account, choose a strong passphrase (and remember it!) and click Generate Key. (If you want real strong encryption, you can change the keysize to 4096 in the advanced-tab - this makes more sense, if your counterpart using this strong encryption as well!)
I also recommend creating a revocation-certificate.
Now that your encrypted mail account is set up, you can install FirePGP:
Just click the "Download- FireGPG"-Button. If Firefox prevents the website to install an addon, change the preferences to allow the FireGPG-website to install the addon. Restart FF and enjoy your new FireGPG-Buttons, when writing a mail via gmail's web-interface!
Even though, that makes you feel secure, be cautious what you write - your friends computers can be compromised,...Furthermore make sure, to log out from gmail (not just close the window) for google will keep track of your activities if you don't.

The next thing, we'll do, is installing anti-virus-software! For free AV-software I recommend using avast, AVG or avira, Ad-Aware and Spybot. What you definitely would want to install is Spybot! When you first install it, immunize your system (spybot will aks you for that the first time you fire it up). Under "mode" choose "Advanced" - there you'll find the section tools: there you have a file-shredder, management tools for the registry (like what programms are started at system start-up) and a list of running processes. Make sure, you check for updates and check your whole system every week. Spybot will definitely detect so called tracking cookies. While usually not dangerous, they can be very dangerous if your doing something illegal or your government's cencorship is after you.

Now go to wordpress.com and register a free blog with the gmail address you just created. Now you can start blogging. As can be seen from previously posts, some Iranian underground bloggers use blogspot but I'd still recommend wordpress both because of security concerns as well as simply the blogging itself.

But that's not it! While this may be fairly safe, we want to be as safe as possible. Ethan Zuckerman wrote, you should use a simple text editor and eraser or ccleaner for blogging and writing e-mail. I think, this is not the best idea for you can easily forget to cclean or erease the files. Either, you never save the files - just post them - , or you use TrueCrypt. The first one, is presumably the easier one, but not possible, if you intend to post rich media, like sound files or videos. Posting videos or sound files to wordpress is hard anyway, so I came up with this solution (if anyone knows a better solution, or thinks, what I'm saying here is just crap - please add a comment!!!):

Download and install TrueCrypt (make sure, you read the instructions) and set up an encrypted disk. This can be part of your local hard drive, an external hard drive or an USB stick (notice, that any files lying where you want your encrypted disk to be will be overwritten, not encrypted). Mount the encrypted disk and save your media files into that disk. They will automatically be encrypted. Make sure, that you clean all traces of the media files (with ccleaner or whatever you have - simply deleting the files wont help!) From there, you can upload the media files to megafileupload, rapidshare or wherever you want (just make sure, TOR is enabled and you use FF to upload (not any software like the diino client). If you know of a free online storage solution, where you can directly link to the file that's great but always be carefull with their privacy policies! Now you can wirte your posts (with any text editor, that doesn't save your files anywhere but the location you specified (notepad). Than go online and copy paste the written text into the online text edito and create links to your files (or embedd them if possible). One trick to enhance security: change post time stamp, so your ISP cannot track you down by checking post time against the time you are connected to the TOR network.

Still: Read the original post by Ethan Zuckerman!

I'll cover WASTE another article!

I have previously mentioned the documentary Indoctrinate U, film by conservative Evan Maloney on the censorship of free speech on campus in my post, Indoctrinate U, a Movie Everyone Should See. Today the movie is available for download on their website Indoctrinate-U.com for a small fee. The film is also being screened at select campuses nationwide, so if it is not being shown near your university, which is likely, you really should download and watch the film. While I find it to be very conservative in its agenda, and some of the incidents it talks about our murky, like the case of Ahmad, the Kuwaiti student who was attacked for being pro-American, most of the documentary is well-put together and makes a compelling point on how free speech and intellectual debate is being suppressed in our college universities. So go and download it already!

- George W. Bush

November 2005, Capital Hill Blue