False Feminism in the Korean Media
Introduction
Yesterday I made the mistake of looking through one of Korea’s English-language dailies, The Chosun Ilbo. I know, I know…what was I thinking? For sure, Western tabloids are also full of “news” articles that don’t stand up to more than two minutes of analysis by anyone with critical thinking skills, but then their anti-intellectualism is not only acknowledged but is precisely what makes them so appealing to their audiences. In contrast, I dare say that the overwhelmingly Korean readers of the Chosun Ilbo, Korea Herald, and Korea Times think of themselves as a pretty sophisticated bunch, something not helped by copies of them sometimes featuring prominently in the backgrounds of advertisements and in the foyers of larger businesses.
Don’t get me wrong: being a Westerner in Korea, then I too have always felt pretty sophisticated reading Korean-language news articles on the subway myself. But being a blogger parent too means that half-hour(s) all to myself are increasingly few and far between, so these days I’m genuinely grateful for what are sometimes my only chances to study Korean on a weekday. Still, with a pencil, soy grande latte, eraser, clipboard, electronic dictionary and briefcase to carry, then like Korean students of English I too like my study material to be eye-catching, short and not require too much thinking.
Hence this English article about “alpha girls”, and what commuter wouldn’t rather read something about dating and relationships in another language over, say, the Korea-US FTA? But I say that it’s “false feminism” because, while I strongly suspect that the (unnamed) author patted him or herself on the back for giving Korean alpha girls some much overdue attention, what is actually said about them perpetuates a number of sexist stereotypes about confident and/or assertive women. In short, it’s trash, and I sincerely hope that enough Korean readers did in fact stop to put their dictionaries down for a moment and realise just how bad it was.
Here it is in full, with my comments and emphases, but with a little less time spent on editing than I would usually spend…sorry, but then in this case my instinctive and immediate reactions to it are probably the most apt.
Alpha at Work, Omega at Life: Korea’s Superwomen
“Others envy my daughter, who’s a doctor, but she’s a pain in the neck to me,” grumbles Hwang (61) concerning her 35-year-old single daughter. “Who would understand my worries?” Just that morning, the daughter rang asking her mother to take care of her unpaid electricity bills. Hwang used to brag about her doctor daughter, but now she is starting to worry about how much longer she will have to look after her. Kim, in her 50s, shares the same concerns about her daughter, a university instructor. She’s appalled that her educated daughter has declared to marry a divorced man, and that she was the one who asked him for his hand.
Mothers of so-called alpha girls — girls or women who beat their male counterparts in all areas from academic prowess to sports — have a tough job in Korea. For while their daughters are exceptional in their work and abilities, many are hopeless when it comes to practicalities such as dating or managing their money.
Despite what people may think, I’m not going to make too much of Kim being appalled at her daughter marrying a divorcee and asking him herself; she is mistaken for sure, but her beliefs are hardly confined to Korean middle-aged women. But “many are hopeless when it comes to practicalities such as dating or managing their money”? Okay, call me picky, but:
- how many exactly?
- how do we know that they were hopeless…were they given tests? (the dating one would have been interesting)
- why does them being hopeless at both have everything to do with their jobs, but nothing to do with the fact that the Korean education system leaves both (ordinary) men and women shit-scared of the opposite sex in their early-20s, or that the structure of the housing and service industries here confines 20-somethings to living with their parents, where their mothers will usually remain all too happy to cook, clean, and wash their clothes for them, and to whom young adults will usually contribute most if not all of their incomes?
- even if true, why do only alpha women lack these skills, whereas alpha men, raised in the same environment, don’t? Or if they do in fact lack them too, why is only women lacking them newsworthy?
I’m not at all saying that all Korean 20-somethings are impractical and mommy-coddled; in fact, I argued the exact opposite in a forum back in March. My point is more that the reason for young Koreans having those flaws may (and probably do) have little to do with their jobs. Alternatively, it may well be true that career-minded alpha females are “less practical” than less-driven women simply because they have so little time and energy for housework given Korea’s long, albeit not particularly productive working hours. But I can’t say I blame them if it remains normal and socially acceptable for their brothers to get away with doing no housework at all, their wives merely taking over from their mothers upon their marriage. I’m still waiting for the Korean media to pick that one up, although the last point of this article is a start.
Alpha at Work, Omega in Love
Experts say it’s no coincidence that alpha girls often prove omega girls (from the last letter in the Greek alphabet) when it comes to romance. Whang Sang-min, a professor of psychology at Yonsei University, says alpha girls are obsessed with having to excel in everything and more likely to form unsuitable relationships, attracted as they tend to be to older men and lacking the needed concern for the partner’s financial capacity.
Park Jin-seng, the director of Dr. Park’s Psychiatric Clinic, says these women unconsciously dislike men they have to compete with, so they gravitate toward men with lowlier jobs than theirs or even no job at all.
Again, evidence? And yes of course, assertive alpha girls’ unsuitable relationships surely have everything to do with their “obsession to excel”, and nothing at all with Korean mens’ general (if media images are anything to go by) preferances for passive, submissive women who act like children.
Eyesore to Mothers
When they become alpha mums, such women often pass on the duty of child rearing and homemaking to their mothers. Hahm In-hee, a sociology professor at Ewha Womans University, says alpha girls in the West leave their parents early so they become superwomen in both work and real life, but here lack of independence is to blame for their Korean sisters’ lack of competencies in real life.
Rigggght…only alpha mums expect their mothers to raise their children for them. Their inability to do so themselves has nothing at all to do with the facts (all covered here) that:
- there is a severe shortage of affordable childcare facilities in Korea, and laws requiring companies with 300+ employees to provide them for free are universally ignored
- that the government lacks the resources and manpower to ever check to see that they are all sanitary and that the care is up to a required standard
- that reports of children being fed crap at them and becoming sick are in the news regulary
- that Korean companies and lawmakers are still in the mindset that women should quit work upon getting married, and thus already minimal maternity leave and sexual-discrimination laws are rarely enforced
- that consequently almost all working women, alpha mums or otherwise, must either rely on relatives for childcare, have less or no children, or give up their careers
Naaah, bad parenting skills are confined to only Korean women who want children and a career. Shame on them!
Excessive Protection a No-No
“Alpha girl” originally means a woman thoroughly capable of self-management in all aspects of life. But in Korea, the job element is inflated, distorting the true meaning. Prof. Hwang points out that many parents, bent on raising studious daughters, are neglecting the competencies needed to manage a full life. Park, too, advises parents to acknowledge their daughters as independent beings and instill that mindset in them.
Sounds like the audacity of wanting to have a career is the only damn defining thing of these alpha girls to me, at least in the way the Chosun Ilbo describes them. Still, I shouldn’t have expected anything more coherent than that: earlier in the year, there was another article in the same paper about “Gold Misses” whom, despite having much virtual ink spilled on them, were all linked by nothing more tangible than making more than 40 million won a year.
Serves me right for having some faith that the English language media here was getting better, yes?
wow that’s a really shocking article. The latent sexism is . . . yeah. I asked my girlfriend about the state of feminism in Korea once, and she said, “Most feminism in Korea is lip service. . . women don’t want to become wangdda, and they’ll be accused of being unfeminine and probably lesbians if they speak out too much.”
Thanks for posting this. I’m basically done with the English Language Media in Korea, other than as hooks to hang my outrage on, and sources for conversation classes and pissy blog posts (cf: Korea Herald is Trash and Kimcheerleaders).
Gender relations in Korea is a topic I’ve thought of studying formally. . . except that it’d just make me so angry to dig deeper into these kinds of attitudes and their sources. If I could do it and be sure I came through it with as open and generous a mind as the Joshing Gnome, I’d go for it, but I’m afraid I’d have to rename my blog The Ranting Pissed-off Canuck instead.
It’s a Confucian society, however modern. The lowest rung on the pole is occupied by single women. It’s endemic to the culture and unconsciously perpetuated by women themselves as they are creatures of the society that raised them.
Yeah, I only buy these papers very occasionally, and almost always just to have something to line the bottom of the vegetable drawer with. (The veggies keep longer. Lime puts them at the bottom of trash bags, too. Less leakage.)
But I’d bet the article was translated from Korean, given that translating and plagiarizing is easier than writing something new.
Your analytical takeapart is pretty much what I’d have said. The interesting thing is that the Korean women I know (ie. these days, some of my more outspoken students plus Lime) have a very interesting take on their own “feminism” as it were. It’s refreshingly honest in some ways, but also surprisingly conservative in others.
Lime would have replied to the point about the female doctor that younger female doctors bear the brunt of the work in a hospital, so mom’s bitching about unpaid bills is probably unrealistic. Mom probably never had to balance 14-18+ hours of work a day with being taken out drinking at night, the way her doctor daughter had to during her residency, or the long hours of being at the hospital that followed. Take it from me, when Lime did her internship year here in Seoul, she did very little but work, sleep, and sneak in occasional meals.
I have come to what may seem, at first blush, a strangely conservative view of parenting, too, which is this: members of the immediate family DO need to do it. Day care is always going to suck to some degree, and really, it’s a social distortion to imagine other people could ever do a good job of parenting large numbers of other people’s children. The problem with the government and public attitude is merely the dated idea that the woman alone should do it. The real problem is that we haven’t realized — collectively — that the answer to not forcing it all on women is NOT just abandoning kids to childcare and to be raised by teachers, or making women do it in addition to working: the alternative means mens’ role in childrearing needs to change as much as womens’ has in the workplace, and adjusting the workplace — adjusting what employers can demand of us and what they can withhold from us — so that people can actually participate in their families in a reasonable way.
But that’s a long ways off in the West, and I daresay much farther off here. People say, “But how will Western companies compete with foreign ones, where labour is so cheap?” And there’s one glitch in the structure and purpose of corporations we’ll need to work out before this becomes feasible. (But which I’m saving for a novel sometime.)
Hi everyone, just about to watch the last 3 episodes of Lost with my wife so will comment properly tomorrow, but I decided to see if the article was indeed a translation of a Korean one and a few minutes search on Naver revealed that it was; there’s even the original, the English version, and a Chinese one alongside each other available here. I found this Korean blog post about it with some comments about it too, and I’ll try to translate the comments over the course of next week, as well as this (obviously) related but different Korean article I found while looking.
In the digital age where you can set up direct debits, there is absolutely no excuse for not having enough time to pay bills…
Thanks again for all the comments guys.
Roboseyo, I hear what you’re saying, or rather what your girlfriend is saying. Sentiments like hers are hardly confined to Korean women, but still, the level of self-cencorship by Korean feminists is quite amazing, particularly their relucatance to consider certain topics, like the conscription system, feminist issues at all. I’ll be doing a big post on that later this week.
Gord, thanks for telling me about what things were like for young female doctors here. I had no idea, and in their cases of course then the job would have a huge impact on how “practical” their mothers considered them to be. And I’m completely in agreement with you regarding men’s input into childcare and the need for the role of the immediate family in it. Speaking of which, you may be interested in excerpts on that from this influential artice (on me) at least which I’ve referred to in the past a lot:
“Still, social transparency has its virtues. The anthropologist Phillip Walker has studied the bones of more than 5,000 children from hundreds of preindustrial cultures, dating back to 4,000 B.C. He has yet to find the scattered bone bruises that are the skeletal hallmark of “battered-child syndrome.” In some modern societies, Walker estimates, such bruises would be found on more than 1 in 20 children who die between the ages of one and four. Walker accounts for this contrast with several factors, including a grim reminder of Hobbesian barbarism: unwanted children in primitive societies were often killed at birth, rather than resented and brutalized for years. But another factor, he believes, is the public nature of primitive child rearing, notably the watchful eye of a child’s aunts, uncles, grandparents or friends. In the ancestral environment, there was little mystery about what went on behind closed doors, because there weren’t any.”
“The suburbs have been particularly hard on women with young children. In the typical hunter-gatherer village, mothers can reconcile a homelife with a work life fairly gracefully, and in a richly social context. When they gather food, their children stay either with them or with aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins or lifelong friends. When they’re back at the village, child care is a mostly public task–extensively social, even communal. The anthropologist Marjorie Shostak wrote of life in an African hunter-gatherer village, ‘The isolated mother burdened with bored small children is not a scene that has parallels in !Kung daily life’.”
“But even working mothers suffer depression more often than working men. And that shouldn’t shock us either. To judge by hunter-gatherer societies, it is unnatural for a mother to get up each day, hand her child over to someone she barely knows and then head off for 10 hours of work–not as unnatural as staying home alone with a child, maybe, but still a likely source of guilt and anxiety. Finding a middle ground, enabling women to be workers and mothers, is one of the great social challenges of our day.”
“One reason the sinews of community are so hard to restore is that they are at odds with free markets. Capitalism not only spews out cars, TVs and other antisocial technologies; it also sorts people into little vocational boxes and scatters the boxes far and wide. Economic opportunity is what drew farm boys into cities, and it has been fragmenting families ever since. There is thus a tension within conservative ideology between laissez-faire economics and family values, as various people have noted. (The Unabomber complains that conservatives “whine about the decay of traditional values,” yet “enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth.”)”
Daeguowl, for sure, although the habit for rent payments seems to be to pay it physically in cash at the bank. I’m sure my wife is quite wrong in saying that you can’t do direct debit from private account to account here (as opposed to for bills, which she does do), but still, she doesn’t do and has never heard of anyone doing so!
Hey James,
Thanks for this amazing blog/post! I was doing some research on korean feminism and came upon your site.
The situation is exasperating really, ‘love’ and ‘gender’ mean so many different kinds of violent things.
I think it’s difficult for Koreans to embrace alternative lifestyles, or sub-cultures…for so many of the reasons that it’s difficult for other societies to embrace them. I find the lack of openness to be especially strong in Korea–but I could just be extra critical for being one? I’m not sure.
Thanks again for your observations..looking forward to the others…
Thanks, and sorry for taking so long to reply. By coincidence, there’s been a lot of stuff about “Gold Misses” in the Korean media recently (see here for one), so I plan to have a post looking at all of those up by next week hopefully. I’ll put a link here once I’ve finished it!
[...] less feminised and a Korean single parent who moved to NZ says it's quite bad for women while this post shows women are already being doctors etc. Perhaps all countries have both Patriarchy and [...]
@Tolerance
New Zealand bad place for women Why?
Woman in New Zealand have more rights then man Specially in Family court and child custody.