Virtuous and Sexy in the 60’s

(After a lecture entitled ‘Virtuous and Sexy: Making National Subjects in 1960s North Korea, Lecturer David Shuster, Seoul, July 2018).


It seems it wasn’t enough
to be a revolutionary woman
Confucian style in North Korea
nose picking, spitting girls
no longer fitted the narrative

a journalist seeing Marilyn’s
photo, a nude torso, the 
tip of her nipple exposed
recognised the raw moral
force of such beauty

she became a heroine
foreshadowing the metoo#
North Koreans despised
her objectification, while
adoring her physicality

how to harness this Yukch-emi
and yet suppress the libidinal
urges it might evoke – a new
etiquette of virtue arose from
the tip of Marilyn’s nipple


carry a gun why not and work
in the field, but stop when
you can to strengthen your
7 separate parts, for the
Ideal proportions of virtue

A State-run magazine was
offering tips for augmenting
breasts and buttocks, exercises
to become virtuous and sexy
while remaining chaste 

that Marilyn was both revered
and pitied … she would not have
wanted their pity … but I imagine
she might have loved the by-line
of strength and raw moral force

to know she inspired a new
kind of cinema, the circus
where the female form
could be admired from a
lustful chaste position

Hollywood tricked Marilyn
they said and instead the
trick was rearranged deftly
for all to agree about the
inner and the outer chastity


beauty was strength
and strength was sexy
if you eliminated lust
which of course you must
to get the perfect harmony

It was odd, to be listening
to this, in Seoul, this idea
that women should be
beautiful, as if a novel
Communist conspiracy

I see the surgery altered
faces of the South, girls
on trains their crotches
in the face of seated suits
unmoved, reading phones

has libido been removed
by stealth across the
border, are these women
perfecting something
for themselves entirely

Marilyn’s bare nipple,
her nude shoulder,
her wet skin, kneeling
figure, a strange and
almost ancient haunting