As the Year of the Snake gives way to the Year of the Horse, a symbolic shift unfolds—one that invites reflection on desire, transformation, and freedom. The snake, associated with wisdom, intuition, mystery, and metamorphosis, has long occupied a rich place in Korean cinema. A prime example is Madam White Snake (1960), where the snake appears variously as seductress, devoted wife, healer, and committed Buddhist, embodying ambiguity rather than moral excess.
The horse, by contrast, occupies a far more limited presence in Korean film history—except in the Madam Aema series of the 1980s. Here, the horse emerges as a potent sexual symbol, evoking repressed desire, unbridled sexuality, masculine virility, and even female tactile sensitivity. The films were enormously popular, even as they attracted sustained criticism for commodifying female bodies and sexualities. A recent streaming-platform drama series revisiting Aema reframes the original films within their historical and social contexts, emphasizing the display of female bodies for the pleasure of the male gaze. But is the now-iconic image of a naked woman riding an unsaddled horse across a green horizon merely an instance of degradation?
Released in 1982, Madam Aema ignited a boom in erotic cinema in Korea, eventually spawning thirteen installments by 1996. “Aema,” the name of the central character—a middle-aged housewife trapped in an unsatisfying marriage—became synonymous with sexual films and representations of women’s supposedly insatiable desire. The name itself is a linguistic site of negotiation. Originally written with Chinese characters meaning “love/horse,” it was deemed too vulgar by censorship authorities and officially altered to mean “love/hemp.” Yet the visual and phonetic association with “horse” remained unmistakable. This episode marked the beginning of the horse’s symbolic linkage to sexual desire in Korean cinema.
The narrative of Madam Aema is relatively conventional. Aema’s womanizing husband is imprisoned for a drunken brawl that results in manslaughter. During her weekly visits, she meets a painter on the train, and their encounters gradually deepen into emotional intimacy. Seeking an outlet for her unfulfilled sexual life, Aema briefly reunites with a former lover, only to find the experience disappointing and selfishly one-sided. Eventually, she consummates her long-awaited desire with the painter, who urges her to leave Korea for Paris. She refuses and returns to her unhappy marriage when her husband is released early for good behavior.
What distinguishes the film is not its plot—borrowed almost wholesale from pulp romance—but its visual regime. The camera’s gaze is unapologetically voyeuristic, emphasizing an arc in which repressed female desire builds toward extramarital release. Female sexuality is rendered animalistic, positioned as something beyond culture or discipline, and offered up as spectacle for anonymous consumption. It is here that critiques of commodified female bodies and desires find their sharpest target.
Who’s Controlling Women
There have been various attempts to explain the emergence of this cinematic phenomenon, most notably through interpretations that situate Madam Aema within its political context. One dominant critical view argues that the promotion of sexualized entertainment functioned as a form of distraction under the military regime that seized power through a coup. From this perspective, the proliferation of eroticized female bodies is read as a byproduct of authoritarian governance, diverting public attention away from political repression.
The recent streaming series Aema develops its dramatic tension precisely along these lines. It foregrounds the machismo of ruling elites—embodied in rigid censorship practices—alongside the unethical “parties” and informal networks that exploited actresses, presenting women on screen as vessels for male fantasy. Yet despite the persuasiveness of this narrative, there is little concrete evidence that the political milieu directly shaped the creative direction of the Madam Aema films.
An alternative explanation shifts attention away from state manipulation and toward broader cultural change. According to this view, sexual freedom and liberal attitudes circulating in the West had finally reached Korean shores and proved impossible to contain. From this perspective, Madam Aema was not the product of political orchestration, but part of a global current in which sexuality entered popular culture as a visible and marketable force.
However, this argument overlooks a crucial distinction between Madam Aema and its Western counterparts—most notably Emmanuelle, often cited as a key influence. In Emmanuelle, sexual desire operates as a pathway toward self-realization and personal autonomy. Desire is fluid, exploratory, and largely unburdened by moral consequence. In Madam Aema, by contrast, desire is something that awakens only to remain perpetually unfulfilled.
For Aema, sexual longing is inseparable from moral anxiety rooted in her roles as wife and mother. This is precisely why sexual encounters fail to deliver happiness, despite the intensity of her desire. Sex appears less as an expression of self than as a cumbersome instinct—external to her personhood and detached from her agency. Although Aema repeatedly engages in sexual acts, these encounters only deepen her sense of alienation, as if her desire belongs to someone else.
Significantly, Aema’s sexuality does not reside within a private realm. It unfolds in a public space, exposed to scrutiny, judgment, and spectacle—much like cinema itself. This displacement of desire from the intimate to the visible constitutes a subtle yet powerful form of control. Female sexuality is neither fully repressed nor freely expressed; it is rendered observable, manageable, and narratively contained. It is here that Madam Aema reveals its most revealing contradiction.
Rather than reading Madam Aema solely as a case of sexual exploitation or as an expression of imported sexual liberalism, it may be more productive to understand the film as operating through a form of erotic compromise. Female sexuality is made visible as a marker of modernity, desire, and cinematic excess, yet it is never allowed to function as a source of autonomy or self-realization. Desire is acknowledged, even indulged, but only insofar as it remains narratively contained, morally burdened, and visually appropriated. What emerges is not sexual liberation, but a carefully negotiated visibility of desire—one that satisfies spectacle while preserving control.
Between the Knees
The success of Madam Aema triggered a boom in erotic cinema throughout the 1980s. A wave of films foregrounding flesh and desire flooded the silver screen. Among them, one title largely escaped the critical backlash directed at Aema: Between the Knees (1984), directed by Lee Jang-ho. Only a decade earlier, Lee had made Heavenly Homecoming to Stars (1974), a landmark of 1970s youth cinema whose countercultural spirit was reflected in its treatment of intimacy and sexual mores.
Between the Knees tells the story of a young woman whose sexual pleasure is unusually centered on her knees—an erogenous sensitivity repeatedly emphasized through close-ups. On the surface, the film displays all the hallmarks of 1980s erotic cinema that critics condemned for objectifying and fetishizing the female body and inviting the male gaze. Yet critics were notably less severe in their assessments. Some even described the film as “artistic.”
This difference in reception likely stems from the film’s psychological framing of female desire. The protagonist’s fixation is traced back to childhood trauma: she was molested by her music teacher, whose attention fixated on her knees. Her adult sexuality is thus explained as a symptom of unresolved psychological damage. In this way, the film offers a scientific—or quasi-scientific—narrative to account for her desire.
However, the medicalization of female sexuality does not necessarily restore ownership of desire to women. On the contrary, it risks transferring authority to male-dominated systems of explanation that define female desire as pathological, distorted, or compensatory. Trauma becomes the key that unlocks desire, but it is a key held by others.
Together, Madam Aema and the erotic films of the 1980s expose a persistent dilemma: female sexuality enters the public arena either as spectacle or as pathology, but rarely as autonomous expression. Desire is made visible, debated, and even explained—yet it remains something to be managed rather than owned. The questions raised then have never fully disappeared. They linger, reshaped but unresolved, within contemporary media landscapes still negotiating visibility, pleasure, and control. If the Year of the Horse symbolizes vitality and freedom, perhaps it also invites us to ask whether we are finally prepared to confront these questions without compromise.