Monthly Archives: September 2008

Beyoncé, Bloodlines, and Globalization

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I have a confession to make: since last month I’ve been sneaking into bookstores under cover of darkness, snapping up various editions of CéCi (쎄씨), Jubu Life (주부생활),Vogue, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Maxim, and so on, trying to get a feel for which ones I’ll use to conduct my own study of the way gender roles are portrayed in their advertisements. True, sometimes I do get some odd looks from the proprietors, arriving as I do close to their closing time (when I get off work) with a backpack for the bulky, mostly women’s magazines I’m buying…but when did that ever stop a visionary?

After a lot of heavy lifting back home then, I’m increasingly thinking that my own study will have to be broadly similar to that of Oh and Frith’s comparing those in Korean women’s magazines with Korean editions of Western ones, albeit with much more attention paid to the race of the models as explained in the previous post. It’s only with the greatest reluctance that I’ve abandoned the idea of comparing men’s magazines too (they’re much thinner), but then Korea seems to lack any domestic equivalents of “Lad’s mags” unfortunately, or at least the general ones which would be the women’s magazines’ closest equivalents.

I’m kicking myself for not have chosen Elle though (although who knows, it may be in the backpack somewhere), for I would have liked to have known if this L′oréal advertisement with Beyoncé in last month’s US edition was reprinted here too:

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Now, I may be a little out of touch with my US entertainment news, but I could have sworn that Beyoncé’s skin color was somewhat darker than that:

( Source )

Clearly her skin color in the first advertisement was heavily photoshopped, although L′oréal deny it. While photoshopping a model beyond all recognition is in itself nothing new, rendering someone with an African-American father and a Creole mother into a Caucasian clone of herself certainly is, especially in such a racially-charged environment as the US; indeed, the contrast is easily visible even with L′oréal’s own previous advertisements with her. Hence the resulting furor in the US over the advertisement was arguably justified (if somewhat predictable), and you can read more about that here, here or here if you’re interested, or alternatively here if you’d prefer a short video summary.

But what does this have to do with Korea?

Well, nothing on the face of it (no pun intended), although naturally I think I can be forgiven for passing on something at least advertising if not strictly Korea-related. But then it is related in the context of recent posts, primarily because while if the L′oréal advertisement was a one-off then I wouldn’t be writing about it now, it did remind me of something that I mentioned with relation to Vogue in this post, but didn’t highlight enough: the fact that despite it’s reputation for ethnic diversity, the US modeling and fashion industries themselves are actually heavily biased in favor of Caucasian models. Consider this explanation for that:

Agents blame designers for the current state of affairs. Designers insist agents send them nothing but skinny blonds. Magazine editors bemoan the lack of black women with the ineffable attributes necessary to put across the looks of a given season.

The current taste in models is for blank-featured “androids,” whose looks don’t offer much competition to the clothes, pointed out James Scully, a seasoned agent who made his mark casting the richly diverse Gucci shows in the heyday of Tom Ford. In today’s climate, it is far more difficult to promote a black woman than her white counterpart.

“You want to sell the model on the basis of her beauty, not her race,” said Kyle Hagler, an agent at IMG. Yet when he sends models out on casting calls based on what he terms a “beauty perspective,” omitting any mention to potential clients of race, “You always get a call back saying, ‘You didn’t tell me she was black.’” (My emphasis).

Sound familiar? Recall why you see so few Korean lingerie models here:

The main reason is the body types of foreign models. They’re tall and their skin is white and clean. Above all, they have glamorous figures which let them effectively show off the underwear. With well-developed chests and bottoms, they have a sexual magnetism that stimulates the interest of women consumers. Underwear manufacturers and home shopping programs also choose foreign models. And with no aversion to being exposed, they are willing to strike daring poses without feeling it to be too much. (My emphasis)

As I discussed here, I beg to differ on the claim that Korean women lack glamorous figures that don’t look good in lingerie. But with Koreans’ preferences for Caucasians in women’s magazines’ advertisements in particular being well known (sometimes they even outnumber Koreans), then I wondered where exactly the advertisement with Beyoncé would fit in to Korean consumers’ notions of race if it indeed it was published in the Korean edition of Elle. What do Koreans know about her? Do they know that she is actually, well, Black? While there obviously wouldn’t be the same sense of outrage about the advertisement as there was in the US, would Koreans still be angered at being duped by L′oréal as it were? Or would they not mind, perhaps finding the change acceptable and even preferable?

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Questions to pose my Korean friends, as although I will look for Korean language articles on L′oréal’s faux pas, I suspect that it would be such a non-issue here that they would do little more than pass on the basic details. In the meantime though, the advertisement did serve to reaffirm to me the need to study and understand the role of international magazines in globalizing and/or Westernizing the Korean advertising industry as a whole.

Why? Well not for a moment because I’m implying that Koreans are passive, unthinking recipients of Western notions of race and sexuality and so on, and in fact I have repeatedly pointed out the exact opposite, most recently in the overwhelmingly domestic origins of metrosexual notions of Korean male beauty, better known as the “Flower Men” (꽃미남) phenomenon here. Moreover, Korea has definitely has its own century-old notions of “bloodlines” and race that somewhat incongruously place both Caucasians and Koreans on a pinnacle, and which any parent of a mixed-race baby and/or anybody not belonging to either of those groups can readily confirm still have very strong influences on Korean society today. For the definitive guide to that subject I highly recommend reading Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, And Legacy (2006) by Gi-Wook Shin, the conclusion to which you can read online here, and Michael Hurt has also done some work on the practical mechanisms by which Korean children learn their stereotypes of Africans.

But no, despite that legacy, the reason is more my belated recognition that Korea is not exactly immune to Western influences either, and if notions of race in the Western media – the global norm – that arrive in Korea via those magazines still bear little evidence of Western countries’ ethnic diversity in 2008, is it any surprise that Koreans, manifestly lacking that diversity themselves, would also subscribe to it? If not always with actual Caucasians used as models, then at least with preferences for light skins?

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Certainly Koreans still have issues with race when they don’t find themselves attractive enough for their own advertisements, but still, in a sense they can’t entirely be blamed for having Caucasian ideals of women’s beauty: indeed, very few countries don’t. What I’ve personally learned from the L′oréal advertisement then, is that although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I have overemphasized the effects of the uniquely the Korean origins of those, I have at the very least concentrated my attention on them to the exclusion of other aspects. It’s high time that I stepped back and started looking at the forest rather than just the trees.

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Comparing Gender Role Portrayals in American and Korean Advertisements: Update

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( Advertisements for a Brazilian Art School found while trying to find a high definition copy of this quintessential Korean cosmetic surgery advertisement; this Korean blogger (understandably) missed the double entendre! )

Turns out that I put my foot in my mouth a bit at the end of the earlier post: after lamenting the lack of studies on gender role portrayals in Korean advertisements and commercials, and especially those with cross national comparisons, then naturally it turned out that a simple google search of “Korean Advertising” revealed the following:

Eun, Ki-Soo. and Kim, Eun-Young “The Transformation of Gender Roles within the Families in Korean Television Commercials from 1985 to 2005″, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Aug 10, 2006.

Nam, Kyoungtae., Lee, Guiohk. and Hwang, Jang-Sun“Gender Role Stereotypes Depicted by Western and Korean Advertising Models in Korean Adolescent Girls’ Magazines“, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, San Francisco, CA, May 23, 2007.

Oh, Hyun Sook. and Frith, Katherine “International Women’s Magazines and Transnational Advertising in South Korea”, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, Jun 16, 2006.

(All links are to their PDF files).

The English in the first reads a little awkwardly, and it suffers from lacking the images referred to in the text too, but I’ll take what material I can get for changes in gender roles in advertising after the so-called “IMF crisis”. In brief, it appears to say that Korean advertisers were strangely unmoved by government and business exhortations for Korean women to nobly acquiesce in their mass lay-offs and then reaffirm their return to the home by supporting their hardworking husbands or fathers, and instead continued trends begun earlier in the 1990s of showing men doing more housework. Moreover, such advertisements rapidly became more common thereafter, reflecting the fact that more and more husbands had to do some housework considering that their wives were increasingly forced to work for the family to get by. A rare positive development then, ironic given the generally irregular, low-paid and insecure work that has comprised the bulk of women’s (and men’s) jobs in the post-IMF era, and which produces an atmosphere that makes it difficult for them to confront the still pervasive sexism in the workplace (I will discuss the resulting “lost decade” of Korean feminism in a later post).

Meanwhile, the quality and depth of the latter two papers are excellent. First, Oh and Sook’s breakdown of the Korean women’s magazine market and then discussion of the practical economic imperatives behind their choices of advertisements, prices and content so forth make it essential reading on the topic hereafter, the latter in particular building on my point about the nuts and bolts of globalization that I mentioned in that earlier post. Then there is Nam et. al.’s paper, which begins thus:

Browsing a Korean fashion magazine targeting adolescent girls, one notices the abundance of Western models in advertising. One again notices that the portrayal of Western models is somewhat different from that of Korean models. This is where our research question begins.

And then on the next page:

Examining gender stereotypical images in advertising using content analysis is a relatively well researched area….However, the current study is different from any other studies in incorporating race as a main factor of the inquiry. Even though race was a main concern in some studies…it has never been a serious factor in studies involving Asian countries, indicating the unspoken assumption that every race in advertising would have been portrayed similarly in those countries. This assumption was unquestioned in studies in gender role stereotypes in Korean advertising as well….That is, those studies reported gender role stereotypes in Korean advertising as a whole, not distinguishing races. As indicated in the beginning sentence, Western, especially Caucasian, models are common in Korean magazine advertising. This observation hints that reporting gender stereotypes without racial distinction in Korea (and probably in other regions of Asia) might be an inaccurate indicator of gender status. In many Asian countries where the white population is essentially non-existent, a comparison of gender role portrayal by Western models and native models seems overdue. (My emphasis)

Having come to precisely the same conclusion myself two days ago, then naturally reading that has left me feeling pretty pleased with myself. I’ll spare you the self-congratulation for now though, confining my frivolity to posting the following photo (the use of the pink is a great touch):

(Source: David Smeaton, whom I should have mentioned when I posted a link to his photoblog in my blogroll months ago. I highly recommend paying a visit, as not only is his work of excellent quality, it’s also very rare to find a Seoul-based professional photographer with his own blog)

My original intention when I found these papers was to analyze and discuss them after concentrating solely on and finishing this series of posts, for I do have a terrible record for beginning series on big ideas, realizing after further study that the subjects are much bigger than anticipated, putting off the extra work required, and then by accident or design getting distracted by something else instead (sorry). But, spurred as I was by Roger’s comment, it would be a shame to prematurely end this particular little epiphany too, so I will analyze those papers above first, and plan to present my conclusions by the end of the week.

I do have at least one more post to go up between now and then, so with this post I thought that I’d just let readers know my plans and provide links so that anybody interested could download and read the papers for themselves first. Enjoy!

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Change in its Cultural Context: Comparing Gender Role Portrayals in American and Korean Advertisements

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(Warning: Some of the images and links in this post are NSFW)

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Introduction: The State of Contemporary Western Advertising

For the leading “fashion” magazine of its era, Vogue certainly has a strange predilection for printing pictures of women in various stages of undress, so in hindsight it was naive of me to be surprised at the huge contrast I found recently between its advertisements for the Cyon “Bikini Phone” and those for the same product in Gentlemen’s Quarterly in their respective June 2008 Korean editions. If anything, the skeletal, half-nude figures in the ostensible “women’s magazine” are much the more objectionable.

But while Vogue would certainly be the most notorious of the bunch, it is by no means the only women’s magazine to occasionally rail against sexism, diets, impossible body ideals, the objectification of women and so forth on one page and then feature precisely that on the next thirty or so (not to mention those  objectifying men also). Nor has this not been the case for decades, and if anything Western advertising at least is in many senses merely repeating the 1970s in its increasing use of provocation, nudity and/or sexual poses in attempts to engage consumers’ interest.

But there are important differences: one is that back then it was women that were in fact the primary target of racier advertisements, as stagnant and/or declining sales in the cosmetics, fragrance and hair-care industries, combined with the fear that the “New Woman” would increasingly reject those forms of products proved to be powerful motivators for innovation within the advertising industry. Partially they were also the result of adapting to the changed social environment wrought by Second Wave Feminism too, Dyer noting in 1982 that:

…some advertisers, aware of the objections of the feminist movement to traditional images of women in ads, have incorporated the criticism into their ads, many of which now present an alternative stereotype of the cool, professional, liberated women…Some agencies trying to accommodate new attitudes in their campaigns, often miss the point and equate ‘liberation’ with a type of aggressive sexuality and very unliberated coy sexiness.

(pp. 185-186, quoted in Strinati, pp. 187-188)

Later, Kang’s 1997 study, which compared advertisements in women’s magazines of 1979 and 1991, found that whereas advertisements featuring men in roles instructing (presumably) less intelligent, assertive and/or educated women had almost completely disappeared – something I remember from old versions of school textbooks when I was growing up in the 1980s -  those featuring more nudity and body-revealing clothes had largely taken their place, both developments clearly building on those shifts noted above.

( Source: smiteme )

But that was 1991. Today, it’s no great exaggeration to say that those trends continued to the extent that nudity and provocative poses are an endemic feature of Western advertising, resulting in a snowball effect of companies using ever more provocative and gratuitous imagery for their products to get noticed. The difference now is that it is men that are the target of this new “advent garde”, with PETA in particular being well known for creating sexual links in male consumers’ minds where none had existed previously. But what else to expect when so many advertisements for products aimed exclusively at women are already just as, if not more sexually titillating than those for products aimed at men? American Apparel’s advertisements most readily come to mind for contemporary examples of those, but there are thousands more:

( Visual part of American Apparel advertisement (full here). Source: Mai Le )

Ironically, while PETA, American Apparel and many other “offending” organizations may regard themselves as progressive and countercultural – or at least want consumers of their products and/or social messages to think of them that way – they share similarities with their 1970s counterparts in that they increasingly expropriate the very language of feminism, yet use it for decidedly unfeminist ends. Gill notes the example of a British travel company (Club 18-30) that used the slogan of abortion campaigns – “a women’s right to choose” – as a slogan for one of its advertisements for instance, and she argued that:

…in this advert a women’s right to choose is being limited to choices about her individual style which in turn, are reduced to a choice about what to consume (i.e. what holiday to book). The meaning of the slogan has been changed: what was essentially a collective political demand is reduced to an individual personal one, concerning which of the fifty-one Club 18-30 resorts to visit. This transformation of meaning has turned the feminist idea that the ‘personal is political’ on its head – by reducing the political to personal choices…[this is possibly] an example of the co-option or incorporation of feminist images…in such a  way as to empty of them of their progressive meaning.

(p. 36, quoted in Strinati, p.189. Emphasis in original)

Personally, I find that particular example disingenuous: in the United Kingdom at least (the source of the advertisement), that phrase has lost much of its power precisely because it was so successful, abortion being made legal by a referendum rather than by a Supreme Court decision granting it a popular legitimacy still lacking in the US (the source of much of the venom of the “Culture Wars“). In a more general sense though, it is indeed noteworthy (and ironic) how all of the above developments are commensurate with very real gains for particularly US feminism in recent decades too, and are hardly what was envisaged by the more militant bra-burning, Second Wave Feminists either, many of whom have lamented the defeat of that particular aspect of their struggle.

Bearing that in mind, while sexualized advertisements are hardly a universal negative, the juxtaposition of them with feminist gains merely reflecting how sexually liberal most Western societies are today, on the other hand the degree to which women are portrayed sexually in advertisements today goes well beyond what would could be accounted for by sexual liberalness, or even that female body parts satisfying my heterosexual male gaze would be a core and healthy part of that. No, with advertisements for products aimed at women like in the above pictures, it’s difficult not to concede that the objectification of women is the new norm for all advertising.

Awareness of our Cultural Baggage

Why provide this background? One reason is to provide some context to account for Hovland’s (2005) discovery that advertisements in US women’s magazines in 2000 were more sexist than in Korean ones, surprising considering that the latter society is palpably more sexist and patriarchal as a whole. Another is to provide a healthy reminder that, however undeserving we may be of them personally, however much Koreans shouldn’t act on them, and however much they are deliberately perpetuated by certain Korean organizations with clear economic and/or corporatist interests in doing so (see here also), it’s still no wonder that many Koreans have the sexual stereotypes of Westerners that they do.

( “Qi BaiShi vs. Marylin Monroe”, by Zhang Wei, Oil on canvas 2006. Source )

But my main purpose, other than finally being given a legitimate opportunity to use the above artwork (it’s quite a juxtaposition, yes?), is to demonstrate that while it’s human nature for us to assess change based on our own experiences, for myself and my English-speaking, overwhelmingly Western readers to judge the extent and impact of recent changes in Korean advertising in terms of Western advertising is simply wrong (as is PETA’s notorious protest strategy, done regardless of if the audience is American or Korean). That’s not to say that they aren’t increasingly linked over time, as I’ll discuss in a moment, but it’s what I should have said in my reply to this commentator on this earlier post for instance, who argued that the (then) 15 year-old members of the Korean group The Wondergirls dancing in a sexually provocative fashion in an advertisement was no different to (still) 15 year-old Miley Cirus dancing on TV in the United States. Sure, but what she and other young entertainers like Britney Spears did there suddenly doesn’t somehow negate the fact that no 15 year-olds stroked their breasts and/or strutted their buttocks on TV here previously, or that – surprise surprise – they haven’t been doing so in virtually every advertisement of theirs ever since. Hell, when I arrived 8 years ago, there weren’t too many 25 year-olds dancing like this on TV, let alone teenagers:

( Source. Remind any readers of anything? )

Notice that I say “changes” and not, say, “sexism”: I’m completely against culturally relativist defenses of that, or indeed of any incidence of any other social ill. Hence I’m still trying to figure out why I’d describe the above poses more arousing than “cute”…which I guess is my fault, as I am a sex-obsessed Westerner after all.

Meanwhile, to return to Korean magazines, if one actually buys and then reads and/or studies them, rather than just making assumptions about them based on their Western equivalents, then two interesting features emerge: one is that women’s magazines are not (yet) full of advertisements as sexually appealing to men as to women, making recent changes like this and this much more significant – in a Korean context – then they may at first appear; the other is that while Korean editions of international magazines have a lot of original content, it’s no exaggeration to say that a great deal are their articles are simply translations of what appears in their American editions, the human subjects of which are often completely unknown in Korea, of little relevance and/or interest to Koreans, and whom, other than their brief appearances there, are unlikely to ever be covered again.

In the process of writing this post I’ve realized that this latter feature may be more significant than I first thought, as providing a carbon copy of American photos and content, usually much racier than the Korean norm, may in hindsight be one of the most direct mechanisms by which the Korean media becomes Westernized and/or globalized. A concrete case of that would be advertisers for the Korean Bikini Phone adapting their content for readers of that particular, decidedly non-traditional Korean magazine for instance, something they’d be much slower and have less of an incentive to do otherwise, and which in turn would at least indirectly influence their advertisements for other Korean magazines and so forth.

An obvious point perhaps, but with globalization having a greater or lesser role to play in virtually any social change these days, then in practice it’s often very easy and convenient to take that role as a given in any examination of that change, so much so that it eventually begins to sound almost like a teleological force of nature. So It’s healthy to have a reality check and pay some attention to the how the process actually physically occurs now and then.

Gender Role Portrayals in American and Korean Advertisements

Which brings me to Hovland’s journal article of the above title, which originally inspired this post. I found it useful in three main ways:

  • first, by providing a good summation of the relatively little work that has already been written about gender portrayals in Korean advertisements
  • second, by providing some data on the numbers of Caucasians models in Korean advertisements, sorely needed for my argument that Koreans have Caucasian ideals of female beauty
  • and thirdly and most importantly, by introducing me to and using Goffman’s (1979) classic framework for studying gender role portrayals in advertisements. So essential is using that to my moving on from presenting – let’s face it – mere vibes about advertisements to conducting actual objective research of them, and, in turn, being taken seriously in the field, that I didn’t need much persuasion to order a copy from Amazon (not available from whatthebook? in Seoul unfortunately, which begs the question of why it’s listed on its website).

When I began writing this post I intended to discuss what I’ve learned about Goffman’s framework so far, but after – in all seriousness – 13 hours spent on this post in total, then I’ll wisely reserve something that would double its length for a much later post. Covering the other two points above then, first, I don’t think that I could be more succinct than Hovland herself about the historiography so far:

Advertising has played a major role in developing new Korean lifestyles and consumption patterns based on Westernized values. Chung (1990) concluded that the appearance of Western consumer ideology greatly increased after the 1960s based on an analysis of all the advertisements published between 1965 and 1989 in Ju-Bu-Saeng-Hwal (주부생활), a Korean women’s magazine. For instance, the number of working women in advertisements dramatically increased, and the advertisements seemed to depict Korean women as having freedom for traditional roles in the family structure and as enjoying their own social activities.

The emphasis of Western values increased with the use of foreign elements in Korean advertisements. The use of foreign models in advertisements has been popular since the Korean government lifted restrictions on the use of foreign models in 1989. Taylor and Miracle (1996) measured the uses of foreign elements, including foreign models in Korean and U.S. television advertising. They found that although some foreign elements are present in U.S. advertising, the inclusion of foreign elements in Korean advertising appears to be associated with Korean culture, history, and economic development. Cho et al. (1999) found evidence that implies a shift toward the use of Western consumer ideology at the expense of traditional cultural values in Korean television commercials.

(Hovland: 4. Page numbers refer to the online version)

One minor quibble with the above is that Kim (2003) says that those laws were not lifted until June 1994, not an insignificant difference considering that Korea joined the OECD two years later and that Caucasian models may have been quickly and deliberately used in advertisements thereafter more as a symbol of that economic success than anything else, so I’ll try to find a third source on that. Meanwhile, as for the second point, Hovland’s study of various 2000 editions of Korean women’s magazines Women’s Donga (여성동아) and Céci (쎄씨), and American women’s magazines Good Housekeeping and Glamour, chosen for their primary appeal to middle-aged and younger women in those countries respectively, found that:

  • 30% of Korean advertisements featured White female models, whereas only 1.9% of US advertisements showed Asian female models.
  • The American and Korean magazines for middle-aged women showed more White and Korean models than their counterparts for younger women respectively
  • Both American and Korean magazines used abysmally small numbers of Black female models. This is a well known phenomenon in the global fashion industry as a whole too.
  • Compared to US advertisements in 1979 and 1991 (covered by Kang), US and Korean advertisements in 2000 portrayed women less stereotypically overall
  • But there were significantly more sexist depictions of women in the American sample than in the Korean sample

Contrast this to Kim and Lennon’s (2006) study, which used various issues from 2001 of the Korean women’s magazines Woman Sense (우먼센스) and Jubu Life (주부생활) (neither site will open in Firefox) and the US magazines Good Housekeeping (again) and Red Book (all of which are targeted towards middle-aged women), and found that US magazines had more White than non-White models (84.9% vs. 15.1%), whereas Korean magazines had more White than non-White models (52.3% vs. 47.7%). For my analysis of that, see here; I won’t bother to further analyze Hovland’s article sorry, but you can read it for yourself here (it’s shorter than it looks).

( Source. Naturally, a Caucasian model is used to promote a collection of Korea’s most famous designer)

Now, considering how fundamental the ubiquity of Caucasian models in Korean advertisements is to informing expats of Korean notions of race, it’s amazing how few academics in Korea-related fields – many of whom were presumably expats themselves once – have actually done the number crunching. Moreover, the recent revelation that Korean female models disdain lingerie modeling has rendered those above studies problematic for examining the extent to which Korean women have Caucasian ideals of beauty, as they don’t break down the incidences of Caucasians in Korean advertisements into lingerie and non-lingerie categories.

To be fair, that newspaper report needs to be critically examined, the above studies were conducted several years before it was published, and even if the newspaper report is completely objective and correct, it doesn’t mean that Caucasian beauty ideals can’t and don’t readily exist alongside snobbery within the Korean modeling industry (which I think is in fact the case). But still, any new study definitely needs to take this new information into account.

Failing death and/or injury, it will definitely be me that will making that next new study, and all of above means that l will have to pay particularly close attention to lingerie and (probably) bikini advertisements as I do so. Needless to say, I can think of worse ways with which to make my mark in Korean academia.

____

Cho, B. et. al (1999). Cultural values reflected in theme and execution: A comparative study of U.S. and Korean television commercials. Journal of Advertising, 28, 59-73.

Chung, G (1990), Transnationalization of Korean Advertising: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota.

Dyer, G. (1982) Advertising as Communication

Gill, R. (1988) ‘Altered Images?: Women in the Media’, Social Studies Review vol. 4, no. 1.

Goffman, E. (1979), Gender Advertisements.

Hovland, R. et.al. (2005) ‘Gender Role Portrayals in American and Korean Advertisements’, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research December 2005. Downloadable here.

Kang, M. (1997) ‘The Portrayal of Women’s Images in Magazine Advertisements: Goffman’s Gender Analysis Revisted’, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research December 1997. Downloadable here.

Kim, M. and Lennon, S. ‘Content Analysis of Diet Advertisements: A Cross-national Comparison of Korean and US Women’s Magazines’, Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 2006 vol 24, no. 4. Downloadable here.

Kim, T. (2003) Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society, Body & Society, Vol. 9, No. 2, 97-113.

Strinati, D. (1995) An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture.

Taylor, C. & Miracle, G (1996) Foreign elements in Korean and US television advertising, Advances in International Marketing, 7, 175-195.

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Pregnancy, Caesareans and Body Image in Korea

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(Celebrity mother Byun Jung-soo (변정수), posing in July 2005 and then July 2006. Source)

I’ve been reading a lot about Korean modernization recently, and it’s been interesting to see how the few feminist sources on that uniformly emphasize the sociological themes of the nuclearization of the family and “housewifization” involved in the process that “traditional” accounts lack. Related are the adoption of rational, Western models of health-care and mothering as symbols of that modernity too, and hence I came to be reading the following description of becoming a mother in Korea in the very same week that my second daughter suddenly arrived:

“Women experience acute conflicts and tensions in accepting their new, post-birth identities. Especially amongst the younger women [interviewed], the “mother” identity conflicts severely with their identities as an independent, self-reliant professional woman, or as a lover or wife of a young husband. Moreover, in the 1990s, mass media touts images of beauty, youthfulness and competence; this discourse on femininity, which implies that women should continue to be “feminine, slim, and competent,” makes it much more difficult for them to accept the physical and social changes accompanying childbirth. Therefore, women exert tremendous efforts to lose the extra pounds they put on during pregnancy, and some, concerned with their body shape after delivery, even diet during pregnancy. Some choose to bottle-feed their babies instead of breast-feeding simply because they want to go on a diet immediately following delivery. Also, some young women commented that they suffered from post-partum depression, which resulted in part from their own conflicts with their changed status.

(Kim, 1997: 363. My emphasis)

Of course, the first half of the paragraph is applicable to virtually any new mother in any developed society, whereas the part that I’ve emphasized is probably most common in Korea and East Asia. But however perverse it sounds, in a sense it’s a logical conclusion to the excessive emphasis that Korean women tend to place on their body images, demonstrated by the fact that, for instance, while Korean women in their twenties are the slimmest in the OECD they actually consider themselves to be the most obese personally (reference to be added over my coffee tomorrow morning; for now, see here). With plenty more factoids like that to offer based on my research on Korean women’s body images, then personally I’m not at all fazed by this new information (new to me that is), and have a gut instinct that the statement is equally if not more applicable of Korean mothers today than when it was first written.

(Update: For an interesting, more down-to-earth description of becoming a mother in Korea, see here)

(In March 2007. Source)

But let’s examine this “gut instinct” of mine for a moment. Certainly I think I’ve earned the right to able to make judgments on the validity of any statements made about Korean women’s body images, and that revelation of Kim’s is very much in line with what I already know about them. But then I’m only just beginning to scratch the surface of mothering in Korea specifically, and have no research of my own to back that up. Unfortunately, Kim provided no evidence for her assertion either.

Was it absolutely necessary for her to do so? Certainly in a thirty page article in an academic journal not every point needs to be religiously referenced, particularly if it is considered common-sense and/or an article of faith by readers, generally specialized academics already very familiar with the topic. Nor does a lack of evidence by any means imply fabrication either.

But the more I study the topic of Korean women’s body images, the more I become aware of what I previously regarded as common-sense for the subject may sometimes be little more than preconceptions on my part. Take what I regard (update — formerly regarded: see here, here, and here!) as Korean women’s Caucasian body ideals for instance. While there is much more basis to my belief in those than the fact that it is extremely rare to see a Korean rather than a Caucasian model in lingerie advertisements (see here for a summation of them), it’s also true that those advertisements were certainly the most visible and glaring piece of evidence in favor of them: turn on a Korean TV, open a Korean women’s magazine, or simply wait for a bus, and one is soon bombarded with images of Caucasians. Hell, of course Koreans place them on a pedestal.

(Source)

But at the very least, the recent revelations that Korean models merely disdain lingerie modeling as “beneath them” (update — in hindsight, things were a little more complicated than that; see here for more details) demonstrates that things are more nuanced than they may at first appear, and cross-country comparisons (see here and here) of the number of Caucasians in Korean advertisements need to be reexamined in the light of this new information: would the numbers of Caucasians drop dramatically if lingerie advertisements were excluded? More pointedly, did they lead me to see inferiority complexes and racial motivations in other aspects of Korean women’s body images where none actually existed?

Naturally I don’t think so, but it’s good to remember that what passes as common-sense is really very specific to cultures, periods, individuals and their agendas, as I’m sure any expat in Korea is fully aware. The author of this recent post on the bodies of young Chinese gymnasts at Feministing, for instance, quotes a study that finds 46% of American women to naturally have “rectangular” body shapes, whereas to me (and this commentator) that figure is simply absurd. But the otherwise excellent quality of that post also leads me to believe that the author didn’t simply pick and choose a source which best supports her arguments; rather, she genuinely believes that most American women generally do not have the curvy, hourglass figures that have been so venerated historically, and both our notions of common-sense just so happen to support our different takes on that (see here and here for mine).

Hence, what one author or groups of authors regards as common sense always needs to be challenged. To me, the classic experiments of Harry Harlow reveal this truism best.

(Source: fotos.rotas)

Back in the 1950s and 60s, it was generally believed by the scientific community that rats were just as effective experimental subjects as primates for learning about human behavior, a position that just so happened to be much cheaper and convenient for researchers too. It was also believed that there was absolutely no basis to the idea that children with bad parents would be more likely to be bad parents themselves either. To prove the former wrong in particular, Harlow conducted:

…a series of experiments on mother-child bonding in rhesus monkeys. With hindsight, many of Harlow’s tests seem quite hideous. In order to demonstrate that it was comfort rather than food alone that baby monkeys sought from their mothers, he created a pair of monstrous models: cloth mother and wire mother. Cloth mother was soft and cosy. Wire mother was hard and uncomfortable, but delivered milk. No prizes for guessing which one the babies preferred to cling to. Some mothers were even worse. In order to investigate maternal rejection, brass-spike mother, air-blast mother and others like them were brought into play. Harlow had no time for the euphemisms which, even today, are used to soften the descriptions of experimental procedures in scientific papers. The apparatus he devised to impregnate females whose courtship skills had been destroyed by their sterile upbringing was known as the rape rack. The inverted pyramid used to impose isolation, in order to investigate the origins of depression, was the pit of despair.

The results were exactly what you might have expected. Children need mother love. Upbringing matters. Females who are neglected as children go on to neglect their own children. But Harlow’s experiments were needed to convince the experts of this self-evident truth. And those experts held sway over the child-rearing practices of the day. Monkeys had to suffer so that children might not. The University of Wisconsin’s psychology department was nicknamed “Goon Park” because its address, 600 N. Park, could read that way on carelessly addressed letters. As a comment on crude behaviorism, though, the name could not be bettered.

(“The Goon Show”, The Economist, Jan 23rd 2003. My emphasis)

Unfortunately, any “choice” of English-language sources to use on Korean sociology is usually a choice between finding the one source you’ve found and…well…not using any at all, but it’s still something to be aware of. This led me to look much more critically at a 2001 article from the Los Angeles Times on the popularity of caesarean sections in Korea (the best I could find by googling) than I would have previously, and as a result I’m surprised to say that South Korea seems to have received an undeserved bad press for its supposedly high rates compared to Western countries. Some excerpts from it:

(Source: butejin)

Labors of a Caesarean Culture

By Mark Magnier, April 19, 2001.

…

Proportionately, South Korea performs more caesareans than any other nation, with 43% of its babies entering the world under the knife, compared with 20% in the United States. Public health experts say many Koreans, awed by modern Western medicine, believe that caesarean deliveries are safer than natural births.

…

But more than simple misperception appears to be driving up the caesarean numbers. Until recently, doctors and hospitals earned three times more, or $1,490, for a caesarean birth than for a natural one. Add in longer hospital stays, and the fees jumped as high as $8,000.

“The major blame should go to the doctors,” says Kim Ki Young, deputy research manager with South Korea’s National Health Insurance Corp. “They’re always urging women and frightening them in order to boost their fees.”

Doctors, however, cite factors other than profit, including a legal system that absolves physicians of most liability in the case of caesarean births but leaves them vulnerable when accidents occur during natural ones.

Women often report being told weeks in advance that they will need a caesarean, even though medical literature suggests that the procedure should be a last resort generally decided on in the delivery room after signs of trouble appear.

Another factor in the incredibly high levels, public health officials say, is convenience. Doctors prefer to handle births during regular office hours rather than see their schedules upset by a long labor that lasts late into the night.

…

South Korean public health officials say the 43% figure is so high that they have been reluctant to report it to international research organizations. Recently, in an effort to reverse the trend, the government insurance corporation-part of a universal system funded by company and employee premiums-has dramatically reduced its reimbursement schedule for a caesarean, although the operation still generates more income for doctors than does a natural birth.

…

But the most common argument is the different ways the two procedures are treated in court. Under the assumption that a birth requiring a caesarean must be problematic by definition, the law saddles doctors performing caesareans with much less liability than in cases of natural birth. The fact that the law spurs more caesareans was an unintended consequence.

“The courts are always finding doctors guilty, so it’s common sense they try and avoid natural childbirth,” says Park Moon Il, professor of obstetrics at Seoul’s Hanyang University.

The number of childbirth malpractice suits in South Korea remains tiny by U.S. standards-49 for the entire country in 1999 out of 616,000 births. But the Health Ministry plans to submit legal changes to the National Assembly this year that would equalize liability in caesarean and natural births.

Not all the blame, however, can be placed on doctors’ shoulders. Women also play a role for some very unscientific reasons. One commonly held belief in Korean society is that women who undergo caesareans will be thinner and physically more attractive than those who give birth naturally. Another holds that the sex life of women who undergo caesareans will be better than that of their natural-birth peers because the birth canal will not have been distended.

Also prevalent in South Korea’s education-obsessed society is the view that squeezing the baby’s head through the birth canal risks dulling the child’s intelligence, ultimately hurting the youngster’s chances of getting into a prestigious university.

“The important thing is to eradicate these myths,” says Kim Sang Hee, director of WomenLink, a South Korean nonprofit group.

Saju, Korea’s art of numerology derived from ancient Chinese practices, is another culprit. Superstitious mothers-to-be visit saju masters for advice on the best days to give birth to children who will be healthy, wealthy and wise. Armed with the input, they request caesareans.

…

The publicity has resulted in more women questioning doctors when told that they need a caesarean. “I can see a change taking place among medical consumers and future mothers,” says Chung Hee Kyung, a senior reporter of the Women’s News, a weekly newspaper. Still, most believe that it could take many years before a fundamental shift in the culture is visible.

Medical experts say part of the sharp rise in the caesarean rate stems from South Korea’s greater affluence over the last few decades, during which its society enthusiastically embraced Western medicine. Only now is the pendulum swinging back as Koreans rediscover the benefits of midwives and other long-standing medical traditions.

…

I was tempted to cut and paste the entire article, but the length prevented that. Instead, I chose to highlight both the unique elements to South Korea’s birth culture it mentions and those which are actually just as applicable to virtually any modern medical system too. But perhaps this American cartoon puts it best:

(Source)

But while interesting, figures in newspaper reports without reference to sources are next to useless really, something I’ve begun to repeatedly emphasize on the blog recently (sorry). This blog post providing a summary of different countries’ rates of Caesarean births doesn’t provide them either unfortunately, but does demonstrate that the figures for South Korea, while excessive, are not particularly higher or lower than in many other countries. Paradoxically, that’s still relevant despite the lack of sources, because while the author of that may well have had at least a subconscious desire to exaggerate and/or select sources which gave high rates, there’s no reason to suggest that in a blog not at all related to Korea that those of Korea in particular were done so more than any other countries mentioned.

Moreover, one author that does mention her sources, albeit to books which I’m not going to dogmatically link to the Amazon pages of here, is Maureen Baker (2007), and the excerpts from her book below demonstrate that South Korea practices are by no means exceptional:

…

Rates of Caesarean deliveries vary by the age, social class, and ethnicity of the mother, with older, wealthier, and ‘European’ or ‘white’ women more likely to experience such deliveries in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand (Baker:83).

Considerable controversy exists over [the rising rate] of Caesarian births, which are increasing partly because women are having their first baby later in life and medical practitioners tend to define these births as ‘high risk’ Doctors and nurses view childbirth as risky if women are over age of 35…

Doctors use Caesarean deliveries to limit the risks of vaginal birth but also to reduce their potential legal liability if the birth becomes complicated. However, Caesareans also can be conveniently scheduled in advance and command higher fees because they require more medical expertise.

…

Some older and wealthier women may ask their doctors for a Caesarean delivery because they are encouraged to believe that they are safer, but also because they can be scheduled in advance. Some journalists have suggested that a few women are convinced that [they] provide aesthetic and sexual benefits over vaginal births (i.e., an abdominal scar is seen as a lesser disadvantage than a ‘loose vagina’ from vaginal birth that may impede sexual satisfaction (Baker: 84).

…

The steadily increasing rate of Caesarean births over the last century has become one of the most contested issues in maternity care. The WHO…suggests that the optimum rate should fall between 5 and 15%….however, in some regions of a number of countries, rates range from 25 to 45% of all births.

…

If a doctor cautions a pregnant woman that vaginal birth could be risky for her, few patients would have the means of evaluating this medical advice and most would be likely to accept [it]. Doctors, as well as pregnant women and their families, do not want to take unnecessary risks in childbirth.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that Mark Magnier, the author of the Los Angeles Times article, lied or exaggerated in his article, but I do suspect that only one source was used for the figures in it. Had more been, then I suspect that the (more accurate) article would never have made it into print, reporters – and bloggers – tending to emphasize the differences between the culture examined and that of the majority of readers, and hence a title along the lines of “Korean Rates of Caesarean Births About the Same as Most Western Countries” not quite being eye-catching to readers. On the other hand, the fact that Caesarean deliveries are usually performed unnecessarily overseas too doesn’t somehow render the same in Korea more acceptable somehow, and I recommend reading the owner of the blog Ranting of An Englishman’s account of the recent birth of his child for a personal negative experience of it here.

p.s. In hindsight, this post may have given the impression that my wife just had a Caesarean, and/or that I don’t have any problems with them. Quite the opposite, on both counts!

____

Baker, Maureen, Choices and Constraints in Family Life, Oxford University Press, 2007.

Kim, Eun-shil,  “Women and the Culture Surrounding Childbirth”, in Korean Anthropology: Contemporary Korean Culture in Flux, Anthology of Korean Studies Volume III, ed. By Korean National Commission for UNESCO (2003), pp. 343-371. Originally in Korea Journal, vol. 37, no. 4 (Winter 1997), downloadable here.