Content area
Full Text
Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations. By KATHARINE H. S. MOON. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 240. $16.50 (paper).
Six million American soldiers served in Korea between 1950 and 1971, and upward of one million South Korean women worked as "sex providers" for them in the "camptowns" that sprang up around U.S. bases, says Katharine H. S. Moon in Sex among Allies. The scope of these sexual contacts means that the image of each society held by the other is very much shaped by sexual conduct and relationships, she argues. But Moon demonstrates as well that conflict over prostitution played an especially pivotal role in U.S.-Korean relations in the early 1970s, when the authoritarian rulers of South Korea feared withdrawal of U.S. troops under the Nixon Doctrine. South Korean leaders, in rhetoric that eerily recalls the suffering of the "comfort women" who served the Japanese during World War II, sought to mobilize these prostitutes as "personal ambassadors" to Americans, seeking to instill in them the idea that they were performing patriotic acts in meeting the sexual needs of foreign soldiers and thus encouraging the U.S. army to stay in the country.
Moon, a political scientist, has written a model work of intemational history. Her archival work draws from both U.S. and South Korean military sources, buttressed by interviews with middle-level military officials from both nations. Historians will be particularly interested in the nuggets Moon has unearthed in U.S. military reports as early as 1965, which pessimistically reviewed the prospects of reducing military prostitution because of its economic importance to South Korea and because many American officers believed that such "fraternization" made GIs more...