Kim Jong Un is reinstating an old tradition started by his grandfather: pleasure squads. Young women chosen for the role will be sent to Kim’s mansions to serve as entertainers for the dictator and his inner circle. Only tall and beautiful women need apply.
Chosen Ilbo first broke the news that recruiters were picking out a new set of girls to serve as Kim Jong Un’s personal entertainers. He has already fired his father’s squad from his family’s summer villas.
North Korea expert Professor Toshimitsu Shigemura explained to the Telegraph , “After he came to power, Mr Kim trusted no-one and ordered thorough investigations into every official in the regime, from the highest to the lowest.”
That included the entertainers, but they won’t be going back to their villages empty-handed. The girls will receive the equivalent of $4,000 in hush money and appliances, a total package that is worth two to four years of the average per capita income for North Koreans.
According to Chosen Ilbo , Kim Jong Un initially shunned the summer villas and their pleasures, but “developed a taste for them and the pliable maidens that come with them when he was being treated for gout last year.”
Not much is known about Kim’s platoons of women, but one defector named Lee Il-nam — who was later killed by assassins — detailed the squads in his memoir Kim Jong Il’s Royal Family .
According to the book, Kim Jong Il, Jong Un’s father, would divide the girls into three groups: the “happiness team” (Haengbokjo) who did the massages, the “dancing and singing team” (Gamujo) who performed sometimes semi-nude, and the “satisfaction team” (Manjokjo) who provided the sexual services.
Women would be recruited as early as 13-years-old and retired at 25. The Huffington Post reports they would then be married off to military guards and receive luxurious homes in a secluded compound to assure Kim’s private life stayed private.
Chosen Ilbo reports Kim Jong Un is requiring his team to be “tall and beautiful” but his father had far more specific requirements, according to the account of Mi-Hyang, a North Korean defector and former pleasure squad member.
“Those over 165 cm are excluded because Kim Jong-il is short,” she explained.
Prospective recruits should also have “skin unblemished by scars, her voice should be soft and feminine and her medical history should be sound. She must, of course, also be a virgin.”
Recruiters would tell the girls’ parents that their daughters were off on a special mission to serve the country’s leader. Of course, the parents could never refuse their daughter’s service.
Mi-Hyang gave a detailed story of her time to Marie Claire .
Whether Kim Jong Un’s pleasure squads will be replicates of his father’s remains to be seen, but it’s also not clear what Jong Un’s wife, singer Ri Sol-ju thinks about the new pleasure squads.
[Image via Twitter]