#MeToo: North Korean Cheer Squads Are Really Sex Slaves

[WARNING: GRAPHIC] It was only a week or so ago that the mainstream media went gaga for the North Korean Olympic cheer squads. The beautiful women, who outnumbered the country’s Olympic athletes by 10 to one, performed routines in perfect sync and captivated journalists and audiences alike. Now  North Korean defectors tell that the party leaders’ treatment of the cheerleaders would put Harvey Weinstein to shame.

Some critics of the North Korean regime pointed out that the possibility of having your family killed if you embarrass your country is a powerful incentive to perform well, but the reality is much worse than just the potential threat of death. A former North Korean military musician who defected in 2008 says that a secondary role of the cheer squads is to act as sex slaves for the elites of North Korea’s ruling communist party.

Lee So Yeon described to Bloomberg how the women, informally called the “Pleasure Squad,” are compelled to perform sex acts on party leaders. “They go to the central Politburo party’s events, and have to sleep with the people there, even if they don’t want it,” she said. “Those sorts of human-rights infringements take place, where women have to follow what they are told to do with their bodies.”

The UK Metro reports that the women are constantly monitored to prevent defection. They are not even allowed to make a trip to the bathroom without a teammate and a South Korean government monitor. 

Mi-Hyang, who defected in 2010, described how she was kidnapped from her school at age 15 and pressed into service as a sex slave for Kim Jong-Il. She spent 10 years catering to the sexual desires of Kim and his associates.

Lee Il-Nam, a relative of the Kim family who defected in 1982 and was assassinated in 1997 described the Pleasure Squad in his book, “Kim Jong-Il’s Royal Family.” The women were featured at parties for Kim’s closest associates that lasted into the wee hours and “included eating, drinking and dancing, but usually ended with erotic games.”

“A favorite was a game in which the losers had to take off clothes one by one. It was enforced, regardless of men or women,” he wrote. “If they got heavily drunk, the also played a hair-shaving game. If men lost, part of their head hair was shaved, as if it was mown. For women, their pubic hair was shaved.” At times, Kim had orgies devoted entirely to sex.

When the women get old, they are retired into marriage with elite guards, but remain sworn to secrecy about their activities. Women who break the vow of silence are immediately executed.

Even if they perform perfectly, the women and athletes still face punishment when they return to North Korea. When North Koreans return from abroad, they face the prospect of re-education to deprogram any ideas that the outside world is more attractive than home.

“North Korea makes an effort to plant an idea in their head, that everything that they saw in South Korea wasn’t that wonderful,” said Kim Jung-bong, a former South Korean intelligence official. “And then they are sent to a political school, or a political education system from one to three months for what they call ‘moral education.”’

While American sexual predators are being denounced for far less egregious activities, the members of the Pleasure Squad would face unspeakable punishments if they spoke out. Those of us in the free world should speak up on their behalf.

Originally published on The Resurgent