Play by design: The porn-viewing room in Taiwanese and Korean men’s sex saunas

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between play and space through the examination of the porn-viewing room of men’s sex saunas in Taiwan and South Korea. In these spaces, varying notions of play and playfulness are encouraged and experienced. Through an examination of the spatial layout of the room, the content of the videos exhibited therein, and the physical manifestation of the enveloping cultural context, I consider how the intersection of these three elements serve to guide bodily pleasures by encouraging some forms of sexual pleasure over others. If the sauna is analogous to a playground, then the porn-viewing room is a piece of playground equipment that sets out to guide players to engage in acceptable use through its design, without necessarily accounting for the ways in which the equipment can be co-opted for other forms of pleasure. Ultimately, I seek to situate the question of what bodies can experience in terms of sexual pleasure in a specific setting and subsequently consider how the cultural context may influence the forms of pleasures experienced in these spaces.

In the Saunas I’m Either Invisible or Camouflaged: Colonial Fantasies and Imaginations in Sydney’s Gay Saunas

“…They permit , echoing Rivera-Cusicanqui’s notion, Asian men in certain places while actively excluding them from others. As 27-year-old Liao mentioned, “Asians are expected to take whatever is given to them and say ‘Thank you’.” Drawing on Yi’s (2021) argument, that encounters in specific places are “circumscribed by the boundaries of the agreed-upon norms, rules, or rituals of the cultural space” (14), I described how Sydney’s gay sauna scene is structured by race. The saunas follow certain norms and rituals thoughtfully crafted by business owners, and the patrons willingly reproduce them because they are convenient for them in certain situations.…”

“…For instance, Jaspal and Papaloukas (2021) state that the socio-spatial structure of the saunas drives users’ practices and behaviors or attracts a specific clientele—similar to what Slavin (2004) conceptualizes as social space. In his study of the architectural layout of South Korean and Taiwanese gay saunas, Shawn Suyong Yi (2021) concludes that the type of encounters in specific places within the venues are determined by the cultures and their practices; the spaces do not solely define the type of activities happening there, because the agency of people in the spaces can change the rules.…”