The Grand Narrative

( Source: sam samantha)

1. Introduction

Back in the second part of Part Two, I discuss the phenomenon of so many Korean women using whitening make-up, usually to excess and in situations where it is completely inappropriate, like on the treadmill at the gym. It’s easy to sound like I’m exaggerating when I describe how much it is used in Korea, but in fact Korean women’s desire for light skin is so strong that, by the time they reach menopause, they have serious vitamin D deficiencies (actually the worst in the world). Apparently, that’s what three decades of not being able to even cross a sunny street without covering your face does to women.

It sounds inconvenient and unhealthy and, based on what I discuss about the socio-biology of cosmetics in Part Two, anti-instinctive too. Clearly, there must be some strong cultural pressures towards and/or advantages to light skin for Korean women that outweigh these disadvantages. In the comments to that last post, Gord Sellar and Skinny Steve argue that the primary explanation is the historical association of light skins with sedentary, indoor elites, and while I agree that that certainly plays a role, it can’t explain why the practice is so widespread across Northeast Asian countries in particular, nor why the vast majority of the “ideal”, light-skinned Northeast Asian women in those countries’ medias have undergone such a plethora of cosmetic surgery operations also. I’ll respond to their comments in detail in the third section of this post.

( Source: ~Dezz~)

Meanwhile, the most notable of those operations is “double-eyelid” surgery, which I variously hear that 60-80% of Korean women have received by their mid-20s, and both argue that the practice either predates contact with Westerners and/or is not reflective of a Korean desire to look Caucasian. Personally, I think it’s too much of a coincidence that the most sought after cosmetic surgery operation by Korean women is for a bodily feature found naturally in much greater numbers amongst Caucasians. By itself it could be coincidence, certainly, but combined with: the skin-whitening as explained; the decades of articles in Korean women’s magazines extorting readers to turn their “incorrect” and “flawed” Korean bodies into Caucasian ideal shapes and forms (which I’ll explain momentarily); and finally the numbers of Caucasians in Korean advertisements, (which I’ll cover in section four), then naturally I do think that the primary purpose of whitening make-up and cosmetic surgery by Korean women is indeed for the specific purpose of making them look more Caucasian. As least in 2008.

2. Sources

( Source: Scoubi)

To be fair to Gord and Steve, so far I’ve never mentioned on the blog the fact that, say, Korean women’s magazines do explicitly say that the Korean body is flawed and Caucasian bodies the ideal. There’s very little on the subject in English, especially on Korea (in fact the 2006 article I discuss in the fourth section is the first of its kind), and unless you’re fluent in Korean and are an avid reader of women’s magazines yourself then the only real way of knowing this would be to read the journal articles that I have. I’m not saying that having read them makes me smarter than readers, or that the journal articles themselves aren’t open to interpretation, but…well, that’s what they say, and they do appear to fatally undermine arguments against the links I make between cosmetic surgery, skin-whitening, and a desire to look Caucasian.

Let me (belatedly) provide an example:

The article presents what it considers to be particular features of Korean women – short legs, big face, yellow skin – as problem features that can be corrected by certain types of clothing and colours: ‘For Korean women the best look is the formal tailored suit with padded shoulders. This square shaped suit helps make big faces look smaller and puts the entire body in order’ (italics added). [The author] implies that the imperfect Korean body is disordered but can be put back in order through the tricks of fashion. The body is something to be rearranged so its apparent flaws are concealed or eliminated. These flaws themselves stand out as imperfections because they are features peculiar to Koreans and absent in white models.

That was from page 104 of the 2003 journal article “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society” by Taeyeon Kim (details and abstract here), which was the basis for these posts that I started last month. Since finishing those, I’ve read very similar descriptions of articles in Japanese, Taiwanese and Singaporean women’s magazines too, and because women in those countries also desire light skins and share “Eurasian” ideals of women’s bodies, then I think that basing, say, modern ideals of Japanese women’s skin colours and body forms the white-face painting of geisha is useful and necessary, in a parallel of what commentators said about Korea, but neither the Japanese or Korean hostorical specifics can explain why those ideals are so common to the region.

( Korean actor Jeon Ji-hyun (전지현). Source: wongtai231 )

What does link the region then? Let me adapt the remainder of Taeyeon Kim’s paragraph above, by replacing “Korean” with “East Asian”:

All three elements, the Neo-Confucian woman’s subjectlessness, the perception of East Asian bodies as imperfect, and fashion’s function to re-order the disordered East Asian bodies, make East Asian women’s bodies particularly prone to alterations, rearrangements, and re-creations of the body.

In simple terms, these elements provided a base upon which individual countries’ own culture and histories of the use of cosmetics and so forth built upon. They were important, but I do seriously doubt that those East Asian populations with the means to afford cosmetic surgery operations would have done so quite so readily and in such large numbers without a shared philosophical framework that gave such leeway and encouragement for women to do so.

( Source: c0nn0r )

That’s the gist of what my theory, anyway, which I’m in the process of researching and fleshing-out, like I discuss here. But for the remainder of this post, first I’ll address points Gord and Steve raised in much more detail, and after that I’ll discuss the phenomenon of large numbers of Caucasians in Korean advertisements.

3. Response to Comments

Sorry in advance if my chopping and pasting and combining of comments maybe (inadvertently) misrepresents commentators’ arguments; I encourage readers to click on the links to their names and read their comments in full before moving on. Also, much of what I’m quoting below I’ve already responded to earlier (they’re the detritus of many rewrites of this post, sorry), so here I’ll try to concentrate on things I haven’t mentioned already.

Here goes then:

In Part Two, Steve said:

In regards to Korean women trying to whiten their skin in order to look more Caucasian, I used to agree, but as I’ve learned more about Korean history and culture, as well as seeing traditional dance performances, I’ve come to conclude that Korean women have been painting their faces ghostly white for a long, long, time because it makes them look more upper-class in the sense that they’re not out working the fields in the hot sun.

And Gord said:

I also would take issue with the idea that Korean women are (at least consciously) trying to look white. After all, as far as I can tell the double-eyelid obsession was in place BEFORE they met us folk, since some percentage of Koreans are born with it naturally (like my fiancée, for one). Paleness, again, would be a sign of domesticity, and thereby a sign of higher status. (And anyway, there’s lots of anecdotal evidence that even in very remote, non-Westernized societies, there are preferences for paler members of the group…my mom has observed it in many groups living in the bush in Malawi, for example.)

I readily agree that Koreans have historically associated lighter skin with stuck-indoors-all-day elites, and that it may well be a universal phenomenon; I first read of it myself while studying Medieval history when I was fourteen, and if you’re interested you can read a specific chronology here of how tanning in turn became a signifier of the leisured (Caucasian) classes, starting in the early 20th Century. But while it’s difficult to empirically quantify, things like Korean women’s vitamin D deficiencies do point to specifically Koreans (and East Asians) desiring lighter skins to a surprising degree, and I don’t think these historical associations are a sufficient explanation.

I’m very surprised to hear about Koreans being obsessed with double-eyelids before meeting Westerners, especially before modern cosmetic surgery allowed Koreans to get them for themselves (I’ll return to this point in a moment). I’d be the last person to doubt the veracity of anything Gord said, but I’d be very grateful if he or anyone else could point me in the direction of sources on that; after all, if all goes well, I’ll be presenting a paper on it in Fukuoka in September!

(Source: bowtie614)

Steve continued:

Nowadays, though, I think that it may be playing a part (like, 30-40%), but I still don’t think attempting to look Caucasian is the motivation. I think a Korean woman might say “I buy face whitening cream to look more beautiful” but highly doubt she’d say, “I buy face whitening cream to look like a white woman.” You still don’t see that many Korean women with dyed blond hair walking around, after all.

Like Gord mentions earlier, I’ve never said that Korean women consciously want to look Caucasian (although I still think that some surely do). Arguing that they do reminds me of the British stand-up comedian Ben Elton making a joke about women thinking about making their faces resemble their aroused vaginas as they put on lipstick in the morning (God, considering he said that in 1985, no wonder he got the reputation that he did!); that they don’t doesn’t mean that it is not ultimately a factor in the origins of the cultural habit, just like I won’t think about the universal desire for humans to distinguish ourselves from other animals when I shave tomorrow morning, or that my tie is actually a phallic symbol when I get dressed after that. Well, actually I will now, in a pink elephants fashion, but you get the idea.

What do they consciously say are their motivations then? Well, Gord says:

I’d say Korean women, at least younger ones, are trying more to look like Hyori or Jeon Ji Hyun or some other icon of Korean femininity than, say, Julia Roberts.

As this old post of Robert Koehler’s demonstrates, that’s certainly true. Steve also says:

As far as the double-eyelid surgery is concerned though, I think if anything that trend has come about from Koreans’ own desire to conform. I read somewhere (actually, I think it was an MTV documentary by Soojin Pak, but I can’t remember the title) that a certain percentage of Asians naturally have the double eyelid, so it’s not as if the feature is alien to Korea/Asia. What they see, though, is all the rich and famous people in the world sporting the double eyelids, combined with the Koreans that already have it, and now the double eyelid is considered trendy and beautiful. Again, it doesn’t strike me as overtly trying to look like a Caucasian person. It seems like Koreans are fascinated with big eyes as well, a feature that tends to creep me out more than anything, and I suspect the double-eyelid surgery may haveus much to do with giving an appearance of having bigger eyes than anything else.

( Source: PopSeoul! )

But I think the point that average Korean women are whitening their skins and undergoing cosmetic surgery because they want to look like rich and famous Korean women is, to be blunt, irrelevant: it merely changes the focus of our attention, but doesn’t answer the question of why rich and famous Korean women (rather than average Korean women) are doing so. And returning to the point about double-eyelids, I confess that when I first read Gord’s comment that Koreans were obsessed with them before Western contact, personally I doubted it very much. And were it to be true (and for sure, it might be), I still find it too much of a coincidence that that particular body feature, which Caucasians just so happen to naturally have in far greater numbers than East Asians, has become virtually a mandatory requirement for young Korean women.

(Update: Sorry, I just realized that I forgot to respond to Steve’s point about Koreans’ fascination with big eyes. But personally, I don’t think that that fascination is exclusively Korean or even East Asian for that matter. And while I’ll readily admit that big eyes are certainly, say, a prominent feature of manhwa (만화) or manga for instance, that is more to make especially female characters look more youthful rather than a fascination with big eyes per se )

Steve also says:

So, yes, it LOOKS like Korean women are trying to look Caucasian, but that doesn’t mean that’s the real motivation, and I haven’t seen any evidence to really suggest that Korean women are running around trying to meet a beauty standard intended for the whole purpose of appearing like the very Caucasians Korea is continuously trying to keep at arm’s length.

( “Swede Revenge” by cheese bikini)

That last point is very eloquent, and is a good, pithy way to round off a university paper or a newspaper article, let alone a comment in a humble blog. Unfortunately, it’s also completely wrong. It doesn’t take academic study of Korea and/or of Anti-Americanism in Korea and abroad to know that public displays of antipathy towards America and/or Caucasians and/or Foreigners usually go hand in hand with fascination, jealousy, and extensive trade and cultural links, and the stark differences in the way Caucasian and non-Caucasian foreigners in Korea are treated is evidence enough that Koreans don’t want to keep Caucasians “at arm’s length.” When non-Koreans are negatively-portrayed and scapegoated by the Korean media – and I’ll be the first to admit that that happens entirely too often – invariably it’s for domestic political purposes and/or to deflect attention from Korean society’s own flaws.

Finally, Gord says:

There’s no shortage of students who are happy to suggest that contemporary images of Korean femininity are *fueled* by Western icons of “beauty,” but I think it’s worth throwing in a grain of salt, since many of the same students who are talking about this now, were one semester ago regurgitating rather distorted versions of Edward Said’s Orientalism. *shrug*

For sure, and that’s something to bear in mind when reading the next section.

4. Images of Caucasians in Korean Women’s Magazines

Because this post is already rather long, I’ll do little more then outline the conclusions Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon come to in their article ”Content Analysis of Diet Advertisements: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” (Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, October 2006), and readers can form their own opinions from those.

Because of a lack of prior research (pretty typical for Korean Studies) they write that null hypotheses were developed:

Hypothesis 1: There will be no difference in the percentage of diet advertisements in Korean and U.S. Women’s magazines.

Hypothesis 2: There will be no difference in the percentage of female model’s ethnicity in Korean and U.S. Women’s magazines.

The two Korean magazines they used were Women Sense/우먼센스 and Jubu Life/주부생활, and the two U.S. magazines were Red Book and Good Housekeeping. You can read details of the hypotheses and methods of the samples from pp. 351-353, and details of the results from pp. 353-359.

( Source )

Hypothesis 1 isn’t relevant to this post, but it is to Parts One and Two, and is still very interesting.

In a nutshell, Kim and Lennon found that the hypothesis was false, and the percentage of diet ads in Korean women’s magazines was significantly higher than the percentage in U.S. women’s magazines (11.8% to 3.5%), and also that they tended to promote passive dieting methods, reinforcing the idea that buying their advertised product will solve weight problems with no effort required on the part of the user. Unfortunately, most of those claims are completely false, but because diet products are technically considered supplements in Korea, they are not regulated by the strict guidelines used for pharmaceutical products. Even in the rare cases that companies are prosecuted by the Korean Consumer Protection Board, penalties are minimal and companies often merely close down, reopen under a new name, and go on selling the same product with a different name.

Shocked? Unfortunately asbsent or ineffective regulations are a fact of life here, as things like almost all Korean Vitamin C drinks containing carcinogenic benzene and 88% of Korean organic food is completely fake demonstrate.  Not only is little done about this, but I recall that in that benzene case above the KFDA wasn’t allowed to mention the names of the three vitamin C drinks that didn’t have benzene…how ironic that Koreans have to turn to a Chinese news source to find out what they’re drinking.

In such circumstances, it’s no wonder that impressionable young girls take the messages of dieting product companies to heart: as Kim and Lennon report (p. 357), in 2002 half of Korean high school girls were anemic because of dieting-induced malnutrition, and were considered unqualified to give blood.

( Source )

Hypothesis 2 was also found to be false: U.S. magazines had larger percentages of White than non-White models (84.9% vs. 15.1%), whereas Korean magazines had much more equal percentages of White and non-White models (52.3% vs. 47.7%).

In Kim and Lennon’s words:

Instead of having predominantly non-White (Korean) female models in Korean magazines, White female models were as common as non-White models. The number of White models was actually greater than the number of non-White models. The presence of White female models in Korean women’s magazines to this extent suggests that the Western cultural ideal for women is ubiquitous and widely accepted among Korean women. Korean magazines seem to portray and promote Western feminine beauty as ideal and subsequently pressure Korean women to achieve the Western ideal. Subsequently, this indicates that the Western cultural beauty is not limited to Western countries anymore but has gone global. (p. 358)

Naturally I agree: it’s certainly telling that Korean women’s magazines have more Caucasians than Koreans in them. But it’s not unreasonable to argue that Kim and Lennon are making too much of a conceptual leap, without also considering the extent to which having Caucasian models in advertisements is a sign of wealth, class, and of a country having “made it.” Not coincidentally, the first time Caucasian models were even allowed in Korean advertisements was shortly before Korea was admitted to the OECD in 1996. As Taeyeon Kim (referenced earlier) explains:

A casual browser of Korean women’s magazines might observe that many of the models or settings in the advertisments are Euro-American or look Euro-American. This image has become ever more pervasive. In June 1994, changes in laws allowed the Korean advertising industry to use foreign models and celebrities, which quickly led to a sharp increase in the use of foreign models to sell domestic wares. No longer were only foreign products sold to Koreans with a foreign face, now even domestic products were marketed to Koreans by the likes of Cindy Crawford, Meg Ryan, and Claudia Schiffer. (p. 103)

She still comes to much the same conclusions as Kim and Lennon though:

While there does seem to have been a gradual increase in recent years of Korean models in domestic advertisements, these Korean models nearly all have features that have already been reconstructed to meet the prevailing standards of beauty which, if not totally white, are at least a melding of Asian and Western features, the ideal encapsulated by the increasingly popular ‘Eurasian’ look. Many of the articles and beauty tips in these magazines function on the assumption that the Korean body is flawed while the white body is the standard norm.

I don’t read Korean women’s magazines, but I have noticed the virtual absence of Korean women in lingerie advertisements here (it’s difficult not to notice, given the number of ads on subways and cable TV here). Or to be more precise, the fact that Korean models in them will almost invariably be fully clothed (a very rare exception below), but Caucasian (usually Russian) models will more usually be wearing only the lingerie. Sometimes in the same infomercial you’ll have Russian models in their lingerie but the Korean models fully clothed, holding the lingerie in a hanger. Seeing those for the first time years ago, it was difficult not to conclude that they reflected some pretty warped notions of Korean feminine virtue and foreign lasciviousness.

( Source: menacingPanda )

To be sure, many Koreans do indeed have some warped notions of Korean feminine virtue and foreign lasciviousness. But now I think I was mistaken, and realising that the Russian models are signifiers of “developed country status” makes their numbers and their sharp distinctions with Korean models in ads more explicable. So despite what the two journal articles I’ve quoted at length in this post say, the mere presence of Caucasians in Korean advertisements certainly does not necessarily mean that Koreans have embraced and aspire to Western ideals of feminine beauty. But having said that, I do find the overall weight of evidence compelling.

And on that note, because I sense I’m beginning to lose the thread of things at this late stage of a much too long post, I’ll put this subject to rest for now!

Update: Years ago, Robert Koehler mentioned the Korean model Jang Yun-ju (장윤주), one of the few Korean models “that nobody will ever accuse her of cutting up her face to look white”. In a less academic phase of the blog (hey, we’ve all been there), I linked to many pictures of her here.

COMMENTS ARE NOW CLOSED 21/05/2010

Written over 2 years ago, this post was my first ever attempt to look seriously at the subject, and hence naturally many (but by no means all) of the arguments I made were misguided, and/or proved to be wrong as new information came to light. As this post no longer really reflects my views then, and I don’t particularly feel like defending things I may no longer believe, I’ve decided to close this particular post to further comments (many of which are also now outdated anyway!).

For more recent posts which do reflect my current views though, and which I very much welcome and promise to respond to your comments to, please see here and here. ^^