“Camming” and “Beot-bang“[1]
With the development of digital technologies, online spaces have transformed many aspects of individuals’ lives by creating infrastructures that allow various actors to freely access these spaces anytime, anywhere. The realm of sexual desire and transactions has also expanded and transformed through the mediation of digital technologies. Sanders et al. (2018) propose categorizing various aspects of these sexual transactions as “internet-based sex work,” distinguishing between the use of the internet to promote or mediate sexual services as direct sex work, and sexual activity that occurs online or in a virtual environment as indirect sex work (Sanders et al., 2018: 15). This type of sexual work, known in English as “webcamming” or “camming,” is a typical form of indirect sex work, where sexual services are traded via digital devices without physical contact. The platforms that mediate this work are considered the new marketplaces for sexual transactions (Jones, 2020: 3; Henry and Farvid, 2017: 119).
In South Korea, Beot-bang is a type of “female camming” in which “beautiful” female Broadcasting Jockeys interact with viewers by dancing, singing, and performing sexual acts. But Beot-bang is differentiated from other types of female camming by its more intense nudity and explicit sexual performances (Lee, 2021:1). Beot-bang is also unlike conventional pornography, which is centered on a single narrative in a single video, and is instead orchestrated through various sexual performances on streaming sites with real-time interaction, allowing viewers to collectively participate in the broadcast. Due to these differences in content and specific aspects from traditional streaming broadcasting and pornography, camming has received attention as a new form of sexual transaction globally. However, it has not received significant research attention in Korean academia. In fact, there are no studies of Beot-bang in Korean, and only one study of Beot-bang (Lee, 2021) in English.
Figure 1. The screen when accessed without adult verification. Beot-bang in Korea requires adult verification to attend to the streaming, and even with adult verification, explicit images are not displayed in the thumbnails. This measure is taken to avoid violating Korea’s “obscenity” laws (screen-captured and edited by the author).
Contextualizing the Beot-bang Market
Drawing on new economic sociology to consider markets as social networks, along with a historical-institutional perspective emphasizing the sociopolitical contexts that enable market construction and operation (Chun and Lee, 2023), this work approaches Boet-bang markets as socio-cultural constructs rather than a priori phenomenon. So, in what political and institutional context was the Beot-bang market created in Korea? Although camming is a global industry, the Beot-bang market that emerged in the Korean context, with Korean men as the main audience, has a distinctive character in its own right.
First, let’s take a quick look at the historical context of the Korean sex market in general, within which Beot-bang has developed. The South Korean sex market —direct trade in sexual services, including prostitution—is estimated to be worth around 30 trillion won ($21.6 billion). Given that prostitution is illegal in South Korea, it is easy to assume that much of this trade is in the informal economy. But historically there has been a wide range of both legal and illegal trade, ranging from the Japanese colonial era of state-regulated prostitution to the establishment of brothels for UN and Korean soldiers in the Korean War, later seeing the active promotion of sex tourism as a means of earning foreign currency, and even more recently the expansion of the sex entertainment industry in the wake of international events such as the Olympics (Park, 2011).
Unlike the direct sex trade in South Korea, which has grown by gaining its own marketability in both the legal and illegal spheres, the trade in sexual images has not developed a market of its own, overshadowed by illegal distribution. Instead of the growth of the formal pornography market, the production and dissemination of adult videos imported from Japan and online-based non-consensual videos have accounted for most of the trade in sexual images. For example, from the 1990s to 2016, the website SoraNet operated as a space for users to film sexual scenes without the consent of the other party, post and share them on websites, and distribute sexual images of others without their consent. The operators of Soranet are estimated to have earned tens of billions of won in revenue, but this was from advertising rather than direct transactions. The Webhard Cartel case, which became public in 2018 in the feminist movement, also profited from the distribution and deletion of non-consensual videos, making it impossible for individuals to engage in consensual sexual work or form a formal market.
However, in contrast to the past, where other legal sexual material markets have failed to establish themselves due to the illegal distribution of non-consensual material, Beot-bang has managed to mobilize a large number of participants and remain quite profitable.[2] So how has the Beot-bang market been able to break the long-standing dominance of non-consensual video distribution in South Korea and carve out a niche for itself as a legitimate space for non-face-to-face sexual transactions?
Digital Sexual Violence and the Beot-bang Market
The South Korean Beot-bang market is unique in that it emerged in the context of digital sexual violence. In South Korea, digital sexual crimes have been closely linked to gambling, pornography distribution, and monetization structures using cryptocurrencies. The massive expansion of the Beot-bang market coincided with the public debate on the production and distribution of sexually exploitative videos through Telegram, widely known as the Nth-Room case in 2020 (BBC, 2020), following the collapse of SoraNet in 2015 and WebDisk, a file-hosting service company, in 2018. For example, Webdisk changed its revenue structure to adult broadcasting in 2019 (Dotface, 2022), and the management of GiftM, a web-hard company that distributed the most non-consensual videos in 2018, also moved to adult broadcasting (Chamsesang, 2020).
In the wake of the massive publicization of digital sexual violence—most notably the The Nth-Room case in which chat room operators coerced teenage and adult women into creating sexually exploitative videos and then sold them to chat room participants for large sums of money using cryptocurrency—several researchers have drawn attention to the nexus between digital sexual violence and monetized markets. Sora Kim argues that “digital sexual violence modernizes this ‘woman-trade’ by fixing women’s sexuality in a particular image through images and vastly expanding the range of women that men exchange,” analyzing this in the context of the connection between “digital capitalism and the sexual violence industry” (Kim, 2020: 372). This explains how sexual violence has moved beyond the concept of violence against individuals that violates their right to sexual self-determination to a process of creating a tradable commodity in South Korea.
However, this analysis is limited by the fact that it places digital sexual violence at the center and the emergence of online sex markets as a by-product of this, failing to specifically address the strategies by which online sex markets have differentiated themselves from digital sexual violence and the unique character of online sex markets (Kim, 2020; Kim et al., 2021). What is also missing from these literatures is an in-depth examination of how the process of demarcating between the exchange of the non-commodifiable and the commodifiable demonizes the former while normalizing the latter, and reconfigures and reinforces standards of illegality and legality. It is therefore necessary to question the tensions, collaborations, continuities, and discontinuities that are created when illegal and legal markets are constructed in relation to each other.
Opening the Black Box of the Market
Approaches in science and technology studies (STS) illuminate the relationships between specific devices of the open market and the technologies that enable them (Kim, 2017). Whereas previous new economic sociology and historical-institutionalist approaches to markets view markets as “embedded” in social structures, Callon (2007) has argued for positioning markets as a type of agencement, a plurality of assemblages that are shaped by the continuous performance of heterogeneous human and non-human actors in a network of connections. This emphasis on the technological and conceptual “market devices”—the technologies, measurement systems, discourses, and narratives involved in constituting the market—helps to make the actual formation and operation of digital technology-mediated Beot-bang an object of analysis (Çalışkan and Callon, 2010).
From this perspective, the topics that previous studies on camming have focused on—the working conditions of models (Jones, 2016), the internal protocols of platforms (Stegeman, 2021), and algorithmic systems (Doorn and Velthuis, 2017) that regulate the sexual work of models—reveal the kinds of human and non-human actors in the camming market and their specific performances and dynamics. Indeed, Doorn and Velthuis (2017) analyzed camming on Chaturbate, focusing on Callon and Muniesa’s concept of market devices to analyze the competitive environment fostered by the platform’s algorithms and the practices of models who negotiate and coordinate it. Drawing on the work of existing camming studies, but with an emphasis on Korean specificities, my research focuses on the formation and operation of various sexual and economic markets, including Beot-bang, and how they reflect and transform society.
The binary distinctions that we are familiar with in our society, such as legal and illegal, labor and violence, exploitation and extortion, and formal and informal, actually join rather than separate, and the boundaries are always fluid and unstable. The Beot-bang market reveals this fluidity and instability as a new legitimate industry. My further research will investigate how it gains its legitimacy through distinction from the illegal sphere, how digital technologies are used and operated in this process, and how they are simultaneously traversed and profitable. In the process of exploring these fluid and unstable relationships, it is possible to question the formation and functioning of different sexual and economic markets, and the market as a dynamic process that both reflects and transforms society. Ultimately, it can question the logic and practice of the changing categories of gender and sexuality behaviour permitted by contemporary capitalist society.
Notes
[1] Beot-bang, as used here, is a shortened version of the Korean word for “naked broadcast” (Beot-nun Bangsong 벗는 방송), which is usually referred to as webcamming or camming in English terminology. In Korea, streaming broadcasts tend to be named by combining the Korean word for “broadcast” (Bangsong) with a word that describes the main content, for example, Mukbang is a shortened version of the verb “to eat” (먹다 Muk-da) combined with the word “broadcast,” and Umbang is the noun “music” (음악 Um-ak) plus the word “broadcast.” This is how camming is referred to in Korea, with the verb Beot-da, meaning “to take off.” Because of the unique nature of the Korean camming market, here I will refer to camming in Korea as Beot-bang to distinguish it from camming outside of Korea, as well as refer to models as Broadcasting Jockeys, the Korean term for models.
[2] Official statistics on the streaming market in South Korea mainly focus on Afreeca TV and Twitch, the two platforms that dominate the country’s streaming market. After Twitch pulled out of South Korea, CHZZK, with its deep pockets, emerged as the new market player. Statistics for other smaller platforms are hard to come by, but the fact that DoubleMedia, which operates a major platform that broadcasts beot-bang, is expected to generate KRW 60 billion ($43.31 million) in annual revenue in 2022 suggests that the beot-bang market is substantial.
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