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.