What? Pepper Spray again, I hear you shout. Oh yes indeed, pepper spray again. You may recall that only two blogs ago I spoke about how a young girl in my class had been given pepper spray and how I loved the stuff even though I had
"Never been pepper sprayed or pepper sprayed anyone".
Well that statement was true at the time, but only half true now. Because last Sunday I pepper sprayed a good friend of mine, and it was all that I could have hoped and dreamed it would be. He yelped, he ran, he winced and he cried hot peppery tears.
After moving apartments with my co worker Jenny who was being stalked by a low level sex pest, she also invested in some pepper spray and it turned out that my friend Eric had always wondered what being pepper sprayed would feel like. It therefore seemed an ideal opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and fulfill a life long ambition for each of us.
I got to pepper spray someone and he got to be pepper sprayed. There really are no losers in such a scenario, only winners. It was a huge victory for me and one firey shot in the eye for all those people who no doubt felt I didn't have it in me to temporarily blind a friend for no good reason. It was also a winning situation for Eric who will never again have to face the ignominy of admitting to others that he has never been pepper sprayed in the face. It was even a win for our friend Jacks who filmed it all and laughed as heartily as you might expect a man to laugh when he sees two friends achieve one of their lifes goals together.
It was a fine ending to a fine week and if I was a more pun based blogger of prose, I might be tempted to say it spiced things up a bit in Daegu. But I'm not that sort of blogger, so I'll just say that there's nothing quite like causing a friend immense pain on a Sunday afternoon. I politely asked him if he had ever been bottled or beaten with a bar stool, and whilst he admitted he had not, he felt that it was not the time or the place to further our breaking of social boundaries and achieving of personal goals. Fair enough, another time perhaps. Although if anyone in Daegu can find me a taser, then Eric is definitely getting electrocuted.
But moving away from such family fun, I have to sadly address a more serious and somewhat sinister story that any of my friends out in Korea will no doubt already be well aware of. That is a feature that ran on one of Korea's major TV networks called MBC only a few weeks ago. The short segment was called "The Shocking Reality About Relationships With Foreigners".
What it consisted of was a long list of wild accusations about how westerners come to Korea to prey on Korean women, give them HIV, impregnate them and steal their money. Clearly, my friends and I were fucking furious to see this on national television, as it makes our favourite hobby of victimising Korean women substantially more difficult.
There were of course a few holes in the argument, and I'm not talking about those that I put in my condoms to ensure the creation of HIV riddled infants. Rather holes in the entire piece of "journalism". For a start every foreigner working here has to pass a HIV test. Being HIV negative is on the face of it a good thing, but I can only imagine it is a real drag if you're off around Korea trying to give people HIV.
The other major problem with the ludicrously xenophobic and frankly racist drivel masquerading as an expose, was that the "victims" they contacted were just women who had dated a non Korean man, and when asked said "No I'm not a victim", to which the voice over said "Many of the victims lie about their experiences".
Brilliant.
It made many feel concerned about how they were viewed here in Korea, but noticeably it did not seem interested in the notion of Korean men dating non Korean women...what's that MBC, a sprinkling of good old sexism to compliment the racism?
It is grossly unfair to represent foreign men as dangerous and irresponsible, anyone would think we were hanging around drunk in the streets assaulting each other on camera for a laugh. I can tell you now, if anyone from MBC had the nerve to suggest such a thing to me, I'd pepper spray them in a heartbeat and have Jacks film it.
Despite such uproar, I was far from concerned because a few days before myself and my friend Cooper Trooper had been out for a meal and drinks with two Korean victims...ahem...I mean women. They obviously trusted us just fine, but little did I know that rather than being viewed negatively I was about to get a quite glowing endorsement.
The following day, I was tagged in a photograph on Facebook with the girl I had been entertaining with my sparkling wit and array of funny faces. I noticed that several of her friends had commented on the picture, in Korean of course. So intrigued I copied the first comment into Google translate and read:
"Wow, foreigner. JACKPOT!"
That is frankly the type of response I expect everywhere I go from now on. To be fair, I am somewhat of a catch now I think about it, but in my infinite modesty, I'd perhaps never considered myself to be a prize worthy of the "Jackpot" status. Perhaps more of a "Second Prize in a Village Fair Raffle" kind of guy.
But I was wrong. I am a fucking jackpot. Provided she doesn't mean jackpot in a monetary sense of course, because if she thinks I'm wealthy, she is going to be as disappointed as someone with a jackpot winning ticket who is then handed the second prize from a raffle. A raffle that occured at a modest village fair no less.
Nevertheless, I felt a surge of confidence at being bestowed such a high accolade, even if it did objectify me as a trophy, and I vowed to behave accordingly and prove prejudice wrong. I would be a paragon of virtue, a refined English gentleman who would prove MBC wrong and the random girl on Facebook comments absolutely correct.
Then Eric said "I'd like to know what it feels like to be pepper sprayed".
Fine, you win this battle MBC.
