This story has really stuck in my head over the last few days. My initial reaction was that the Koreans were being pigs. But then I thought about it, and thought about it, and now I’ve changed my opinion.

The council members here are Koreans from Gyeonggi. The site is the Nike company headquarters in Portland, Oregon.

Regional council members’ angered an international sports goods maker through making sexually explicit gestures during their visit to its headquarters abroad. The politicians quickly tried to explain themselves, claiming “difference of culture’” as an excuse, but businessmen in the United States called for an apology and prohibited the council members from visiting them again.

According to the Chosun Ilbo, the incident began when seven members of Gyeonggi provincial council visited the headquarters of the world’s largest sports utilities maker Nike in Portland, USA, early March as part of their efforts to forge ties between Korea and the US. While there, two council members reportedly touched the breasts and private parts of a female statue. Witnesses said they even tried to put their hands in the statue’s crotch while giggling. This left many of the workers there feeling horrified.

I love the scene here. These Korean bureaucrats are on some useless “goodwill” tour of Nike, a company that hardly upholds a golden standard of conduct in the business world, and the group comes across a statue of a naked woman. The Koreans start making silly jokes. The Nike employees are “horrified.” 

It’s dumb, sure. Tell them to knock it off and move on to the rubber soles. Better yet, express that you’re embarrassed by their actions. My guess is that they’d stop immediately. 

But I think to go so far as to report it to the media and publicly humiliate these guys is over the top. I doubt this is a news report picked up by the local beat writer for a Portland paper. This is something that Nike had investigate, have meetings about, write up reports for the press, and then hand to the media. Obviously Nike thinks it’s making an important point about what is appropriate conduct pertaining to sex and art.

Yet wander around downtown Portland and tell me if you see any statues of naked women. Tell me if there’s a park like the one pictured up top (taken from the blog Gusts of Popular Feeling) and the one below. Then turn on any TV in Portland and tell me what you see. It’s likely you’ll see some kind of gyrating on a female body in the name of selling soda or lampshades.

I’m not saying that one view is necessarily right and another wrong. What different cultures find appropriate or inappropriate behavior in regards to sex is murky at best. At the end of the day it’s Nike’s turf and they can conduct themselves however they want, but this strikes me as awfully prudish.