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from www.blogs.telegraph.co.uk – Porn, porn, porn, porn, porn. Thanks to David Cameron’s crusade against filth, all anyone can think about in Britain at the moment is porn (and the Royal Baby – that’s a big thing here, too). And with so much hardcore smut on my mind, I of course got to thinking – do the North Koreans indulge in this most vile of vices? Turns out, they do.

At first, you might think North Korea is a very puritanical society. Back in the 2000s, a South Korean women’s underwear factory operating in the Hermit Kingdom was nearly shut down after communist officials found that workers were wrapping the produce in paper that featured nearly-nude women. Golly gosh, shock horror! The only way to keep the factory open was to let only female labourers do the wrapping in closed rooms. It gives the impression that North Koreans are all too busy launching satellites and building socialism to waste time on Debbie Does Dallas.

But think again. According to blogger Moon Sung Hwee, one of the few liberalisations that Kim Jong-il (AKA The Dear Leader) brought to North Korea, after he replaced his father as Kim Number One, was a voracious appetite for smut. As is often the case in a hierarchical society, broad social change required a small nudge from the top. According to Moon:

It is known that talking about sexual stuff became prevalent since Kim Jong Il’s visit to Mt. Chilbo in North Hamkyung Province in 1996. During Kim’s visit, a guide described a legend of the husband-and-wife rock. The rock reminds [visitors of] a husband hugging his wife, or having an intercourse for other observers. Kim Jong-Il enjoyed the story. Afterward, every guide where Kim Jong Il made official visit made stories with sexual content and named the place with sexual terms to satisfy Kim. So it became lenient in North Korean society to talk about sexuality in public.

It’s like a tale from 18th century France: the King tells a dirty joke about two nuns in a bath, his courtiers pass it on, the rest of Versailles takes this as a sign that sex is in fashion, and by the end of the year the whole of France has descended into an orgy. In the case of Kim Jong-il, his taste in saucy rocks and his vast collection of Betamax porn set a new trend among the North Korea elite. Moon continues: “Then a flow of porn books published [started]. Literature and Art Publishing Company published secretly the ‘Licentious Stories’ just for party officials. In 2000, even the Central Broadcasting Committee produced a licentious story-tape with its professional announcers and spread it to the officials.” According to Moon, North Korean porn is pretty tame – girls in bikinis or their birthday suits jigging about to disco music, something you can probably see for free in any Blackpool nightclub after 11pm. The main market is the army and party officials, but anyone can rent a dirty video by the hour.

Stories like this that come out of North Korea are always suspect, the country being a great source of disinformation and rumour. But Moon’s piece is backed up elsewhere. According to Gawker, South Korean professor Kim Young-soo claims that “tapered denim, excrement, pornography, instant noodles and TV dramas are among the most popular items in North Korea, based on his interviews with defectors.” [Excrement?”] Former CIA deputy Henry Crumpton once wrote, “I never met a North Korean diplomat who did not want porn, either for personal use or resale.” And another foreign affairs website reports on a North Korean made movie called The Degradation of the Republic (featuring female warriors being humiliated), which was smuggled out of the red regime and sold in Japan.

It’s all fed by three things. A) The same boredom driven lust that make Western men Google search porpoise-based erotica. B) Poverty; a tragic number of North Korean women are being forced into prostitution by the country’s Stalinist economics. And C), the hateful, grisly reach of the personality cult of the Kim clan. Kim Jong-il was thought to have eventually amassed 20,000 porn tapes – mostly American – in his private bunker of shame. Perhaps that explains why he was so rarely seen in public.