Masculinity

One thing I find fascinating about Korean culture is the masculinity issue. The men in Korea are definitely dominant - woman are sometimes seen walking 5 steps behind their husband down the street. I heard a story from a guy at one of our camps that when his wife was talking with a Korean pastor's wife, she said that wives in the U.S. have heavenly marriages while in Korea it is hell. I'm sure that is not the true with all people and the younger generation seems to be making some changes, but it is true to an extent. Korean men and boys are also very violent. We had the students write about something they would change about their families and it broke my heart how often I saw writing about how cold the parents, especially fathers, were and how they wished they wouldn't get hit - which probably means spankings, but still hard for a non-corporal punishment pacifist like me to read. In the classes themselves, violence cropped up in an organized way. Whenever the kids would play a game, the Korean helpers would quite naturally propose a "punishment" for the losers. So we'd play a word game and the losing team would get hit on the head, slapped on the arm, or a particularly violent punishment in which the boy being punished (this rarely was done for the girls) would crouch down on hands and knees and then the punisher would pound on the back with both hands several times and then slam into the back of the other kid with his elbow.
This is not meant to totally disparage Koreans. There are many wonderful things about Korean people and they did not require punishments (none happened in my class) but it was interesting for me because while these things showed an overabundance of testosterone, there was a much gentler side as well. It was very normal for boys to touch each other, not just patting the back or slapping a shoulder, but putting arms around each other, patting each other gently on the head or face, even holding hands while walking. Boys who one minute were leaving handprints on their friends the next minute were standing almost cheek to cheek.
The two extremes are just interesting for someone who is used to men being closer to the middle. Not as much violence, but not as much closeness either.