Sometimes Consented Actions Still Hurt

The given articles contain a variety of positions which makes it difficult to argue merely against or for them as a whole. From what I’ve gathered, some of the main issues consist of: Japan’s moral guilt for allowing comfort women, whether or not comfort women were slaves or hired prostitutes, the Japanese military’s active involvement in establishing comforting women, and what should be done today to compensate and/or reconcile with those who were comfort women. I want to specifically look at the second issue, whether or not comfort women were slaves or hired prostitutes. In the article “To all the women around the world, be strong!”, Kim Bok-dong gives a brief  account of her time as a comfort woman for the Japanese military in World War II. She describes the physical pain she went through during her time (such as not being able to sit up at the end of the day) and the social and emotional pain she experienced after the war had ended. Even worse, Bok-dong says she was “forced into sexual slavery” indicating that she had no consent in becoming one of these comfort woman. However, would it really have mattered if her position as a comfort woman were consented or not? Wouldn’t she still have had the physical pain? Wouldn’t she still have had the memories and social repercussions of being in such a position? While I understand that forced sexual slavery has its own pains that are far worse than consented prostitution, pain was there consented or not.

Perhaps this is a qualm more with prostitution in general, but I think such sexual behavior is extremely dangerous to both males and females. Firstly, having a “comfort woman” system further emphasizes the object-value men put on women. I believe putting a price on something as intimate as a sexual behavior both devalues and impersonalizes the person who it is with. While the man might leave physically “satisfied” and possibly less eager for sex, it completely deconstructs the personhood of the woman. The future implications of this could run deep into the rest of the soldier’s life; whether that be relations with his wife or family relations in general. Secondly and more importantly, the woman on the prostitution end is physically and emotionally scarred for (at least according to Bok-dong’s account) for the rest of her life. Having numerous sexual partners in one day and thousands over the span of a few years simply is not healthy. While this is a topic perhaps best for a full paper and not a blog post, my main point is that prostitution, especially in the case of comfort women, is harmful whether or not it is consented. The prevention of rape and murder on the part of the soldiers lies with changing the minds of the soldiers, not using women to satisfy their physical desires.