TENRPO 텐프로: THE STORY OF HIGH-END PROSTITUTION IN KOREA 

By Angela Kim

Source: 일요시사 Ilyosisa

Mihee미희(pseudonym) first entered the sex industry through her friend who brought her to a high-end salon, a front commonly used as a meeting place for clients and tenpros, Korea’s high-end call girls. That night, Mihee, a strikingly beautiful masters student, was offered US$1000 by a man simply to sit down and drink with him, a man whom she had never met before. Just as she was leaving, the madam of the “salon” offered her another US$1000 and a part-time job at the salon. In just one night, Mihee had earned two thousand U.S. dollars, twice the monthly allowance she was getting from her parents. That night she could not fall asleep easily, for she knew that the financial burden of supporting her masters was proving too difficult for her parents, and after weighing her options for a few days, she decided to work part-time at the salon. 

Once she started, what began as a part-time position turned into full-time employment as Mihee slowly developed a spending habit that trapped her into a cycle of credit card debts from her extravagant lifestyle and late night drinking and serving clients. On top of her regular salary of US$30000 per month, being a so-called “ace” – the most highly sought after type of tenpro – came with additional privileges as she increased her client base. Regular clients would soon become “sponsors” who would pay for apartment rent, expensive cars, and luxury items. Many of Mihee’s colleagues were college graduates who went into the business thinking that they would quickly make easy money and get out. However, because they often ended up spending most of their earnings on expensive fashion items and plastic surgery to keep themselves in demand, they only managed to either break even or become indebted to the madam, bound to the salon for the foreseeable future.

Although the story of Mihee focuses primarily on the story of one ex-tenpro, Mi-Sook Park’s account in the Monthly Joongang hints at a much larger and highly institutionalized social construct looming behind many other women involved in sex industry in Korea. While the practice of sex work is nothing new in our world, it is hard not to notice the extent to which tenpro has become available for the general Korean public; and one inevitably asks the question: why has this phenomenon become so pervasive? 

Tenpro (Koran for “ten percent”) are a special kind of sex worker conceptually defined and imagined as women who are intellectually and aesthetically in the top ten percentile of all women, similar in concept to a high-end escort of the United States. Because of the exclusivity and secrecy that surrounds these exceptionally beautiful tenpros, this glamorous business had been veiled from the eyes of the general public. Only recently, with the spread of this business practice and heightened interest in this topic, a few former tenpros like Mihee have released detailed first-hand accounts of their lives. 

According to a research conducted by the Korean Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, an average of 49 Korean men out of 100 are predicted to have had used some sort of sexual service, despite the fact that prostitution is illegal in Korea. Additionally,  research conducted by the Korean Women’s Development Institute indicates that prostitution amounts to approximately 1.6 percent of Korea’s GDP, or 13 billion US dollars. When we compare this figure to that of America’s, which is currently estimated to be 14 billion dollars, or less than 0.1 percent of its GDP, we see that an average Korean man spends 16 times more than their American counterparts on sexual services. 

What struck me the most about tenpro was the level of institutionalization involved and the pervasiveness of this phenomenon in the Korean society. According to another article written by an undercover journalist, there are eleven hierarchical classes within the Korean sexual services industry: tenpro텐프로, tencape 텐케이프, hi-jjum-o하이쩜오, jjum-o쩜오, club클럽, semi세미, public퍼블릭, soft-pool소프트풀, hard-pool하드풀, hardcore하드코어, and karaoke가라오케in descending order of price range and the quality of the girls. This method of classification helped turn entertainment once reserved exclusively for the top tier of society into a public pastime by making more affordable derivations of tenpro services. These days, it takes just a few clicks on the Internet to lead would-be patrons to a host of shady websites that advertise employment opportunities at tenpro salons. Fronts for sexual services businesses such as karaoke, bars, salons, and motels, among other places, have become almost ubiquitous in the Korean urban landscapes. At this point, it becomes impossible not to wonder how and why this phenomenon came into being. 

As a student of East Asian Studies and a Korean who has spent most of her youth in Korea, I see the sudden rise of tenpro culture partially as a reactionary movement against a structural economic force. In a mere fifty years, Korea has risen out of a devastating war that had claimed over a million lives and established itself as one of the leading economic powers in the world. However, as the Korean economy matured, the lauded double-digit GDP growth rate dwindled into the single digits and finally, to its current state at less than two percent. Lack of growth has meant a decreased opportunity for success, and in a society that has traditionally been male-dominant, this has translated into a smaller chance for women to rise above their current socioeconomic status. Additionally, in the 1950s, an abrupt transition from feudalism to capitalism due to U.S. intervention disrupted traditional Korean values and existing class structures. No longer were people bound by the class they were born into; rather, a new system of gauging one’s social status based on monetary gain was put in place while disrupting some of the existing social values of honor, pursuit of knowledge, and humility, which used to be associated with the elite class. Upper-middle class status was suddenly “up for grabs” for anyone who could display a certain amount of wealth, the frenzy around result-oriented pursuit of monetary gains began. Keeping up the façade of a wealthy and successful person therefore encouraged consumerism and further created a materialistic social norm that made it imperative for people to display their status through physical indicators such as money, education level, houses, clothes, and other material goods. 

In this context, tenpro starts to make sense as a byproduct of a hyper-exhibitionistic and materialistic society. For tenpros, the job provides not only easy and quick monetary success but also other corollary benefits such as luxury items, trips abroad, and expensive cars that help them establish the exterior of a high-class elite. From the perspective of consumers of these services, tenpro is another way for them to reaffirm their power and relative position within society. The “quality” of their women indicates how much power and prestige one holds in the society because it shows that he is able to afford an expensive and exclusive product— in this case a woman. In the end, the sex industry is able to thrive because it offers something more than just sex. Otherwise, why would there be such an elaborate hierarchical structure based on the quality of girls and their price ranges in the Korean sex industry? Just like the way the rich will own a Ferrari and not a Nissan, those with money and power need to create distinctions from the rest of society in order to empower themselves. It is this mentality feeds very well into the hyper-exhibitionistic and material driven society of modern Korea. And the end result, as I see it, is the unusually high consumption of tenpros, which have become another capitalistic venture through which both parties get to live out their “successful” lives.