Your browser does not support the NLM PubReader view.

Go to this page to see a list of supporting browsers.
The Ewha Medical Journal
Ewha Womans University School of Medicine

Ewha Med J 1989; 12(4):311-317

pISSN: 1598-7450

DOI: https://doi.org/10.12771/emj.1989.12.4.311

Original Article

The Concepts of Sexuality Presented Through Korean Proverbs

Young Sook Park, Kun Hoo Rhee
Corresponding author: Kun Hoo Rhee. Department of Neuropsychiatry, College of Medicine, Ewha Womans University, Korea.

Copyright ⓒ 1989. Ewha Womans University School of Medicine. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jul 24, 2015

Abstract

This study analysed Korean concepts of sexuality presented through traditional proverbs in order to understand the past sexual concepts of Koreans. Out of 2,5000 proverbs, 456 of them are related to sexual concepts.

The analysed proverbs in conclusion can be summarized in three ways as follows.

First, sex has been classified as sex for reproduction among couples outside marriage so resulting in dualistic sexual concepts about sexual function.

Second, the pleasure seeking sexual activity resulted in conflict within the family so that this family conflict lead to the negative sexual concept as sex is dangerous and must be guarded.

Third, pleasure seeking sexual desire for male is regarded to be universal while for female is recognized as a peculiarity. Thus the biased concept of sexual desire has lead to more deep frustration among females.