How to Get Ahead in Korea…
While I wouldn’t go so far as to include it in my “Creative Korean Advertising” series, this advertisement certainly did get my attention when it was in the form of the entire back page of today’s Korea Times, and not just because I have a shaved head myself! Click on it for a full-size image, and you’ll soon see what I mean.
Meanwhile, apologies for the lack of posts recently, but my father-in-law literally fell off a cliff last weekend, and had to be taken by helicopter to the closest hospital. He’s okay (ish), but he’ll be in hospital for a long time, and with my wife going back and forth to her hometown to see him, my looking after the children while she does, and all my other work and paid writing commitments, then my blogging plans for this week have lost out to my getting a whole 5 hours of sleep a night I’m afraid(!). But blogging-wise at least, things should be back to normal within a couple of days.
Korean Sociological Image #3: From Asian to Caucasian
If you weren’t aware of it previously, then learning about the pressure Korean women are under to have cosmetic surgery for the sake of getting jobs certainly makes you less judgmental about it. Here are two quick excerpts on the subject from this excellent article from The Independent, which I found via this article about the cosmetic surgery component to Korea’s recent drive to become a hub for medical tourism.
First, from the introduction:
The patients crowding the waiting rooms of plastic surgeons in upmarket neighbourhoods such as Apgujeong want jobs with industrial conglomerates such as Samsung or LG. They are rushing to clinics for chieop seonghyeong or “employment cosmetics,” surgical procedures designed to improve a job seeker’s chance of being hired.
Ahn Yun-Seon is a typical candidate. A 21-year-old economics student, she has a job interview scheduled for early May. Last week she spent 1 million won (£538) for surgery on her gums and ears. She hopes to get a job in a bank. “Female bank employees must wear their hair tied back,” she said. “It’s important to have nice looking ears and a good smile.”
And then the conclusion:
Parents in Korea, especially in Seoul, spend a fortune on their children’s education and often go deep into debt to secure them a place at a top university. Knowing the sacrifices their parents have made, many young Koreans are prepared to go to extremes in search of a good job.
“People doctor their CVs and the photos they send to employers,” said Lee Ho-Jeong, who graduated from Hanyang University. “Doctoring their faces is the logical next step, especially when people are scared that they won’t get hired.”
But much more curious than the demand, is its manifestations in Korean women’s choices of cosmetic surgery operations, for they tend to plump for (no pun intended) – double-eyelid surgery, the shaving down of high cheekbones, Romanizing of noses, and so forth – all of which have the effect of making one’s face look much more Caucasian than Mongoloid (East Asian). And place those choices in the context of an East Asian mania for light skin also, then when one sees the image above (source: Scoubi), an advertisement for this cosmetic surgery clinic in Busan, then it’s difficult not to conclude that Korean women have Caucasian ideals of beauty, as I argued in this post in April last year.
Naturally that post aroused quite a *cough* heated debate in the comments section, not least from Korean women themselves, and to be fair I now acknowledge the historical role that, for one, light skins have played as a sign of the non-farming, indoor elite (albeit not just in Asia). And also the fact that I was strongly influenced in my original opinions by seeing such things as an abundance of Caucasian models in Korean advertisements, and that so many Korean cartoon characters tended to look Caucasian also, whereas in reality “Caucasian ideals of beauty” are only one of a host of factors responsible for each (see here – scroll down a little – and here respectively).
But as Michael Hurt wrote in 2005, arguments that modern ideals of appearance are merely extensions of historical associations of light skin and so forth, must confront the:
…big, fat, white elephant in the room that is America and the West. You have to consider how having white skin here in Korea is not simply a matter of lightness anymore, of being a sign that one doesn’t have to work outside in a field. The relative pallor of one’s skin is now inevitably linked to notions of civility and class that are also reflected against the very real presence of white people, who are not surprisingly, positively associated with notions of civility and class.
But which has been notably absent from counter-arguments that I’ve heard so far. So although I’m always open to changing my mind, and think I have a pretty good record on this blog for admitting when I’ve been mistaken and/or changing my mind upon hearing new evidence, until someone actually addresses that point at all then I’ll continue to believe that “Caucasianness” is a very strong, albeit usually subconscious and/or indirect, influence on modern Korean women’s cosmetic surgery choices. But by all means, if you disagree then please try and prove me wrong!
Update: Turns out, this post led to some lively discussion on this K-pop blog, even though the first image wasn’t loading properly at the time!
(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)
Korean Women Are Not Alphabets!
It has a cool graphic, but otherwise I’m a little unhappy with the excessive editing of the my article for Saturday’s Korea Times (to put it mildly), so here is my original, with links in each paragraph to my own or others’ posts where the points mentioned are discussed in greater depth:
Well known for donning corsets on stage since her comeback in May last year, few can deny that there is much to find cute in singer Son Dam-bi (손담비) tightening a miniature one around a bottle of ‘Today’s Tea’ in her latest commercial.
But while modern corsets lack the uncomfortable body-shaping functions of their Victorian counterparts, they remain an enduring symbol of the pressures women can be under to conform to often impossible ideals of appearance. And despite its lightheartedness, this commercial provides an excellent illustration of a distinctly Korean spin on this.
(True, that’s actually Kim Ta-hee (김태희) on the right (source), but as she is such an icon for “V-lines” in particular, then any post on the subject would look rather strange without her!)
Beverage producer Lotte Chilsung invented the term ‘bellyline’ for use in this commercial, and it is this that the corset and supposedly the drink help with slimming. In itself, doing so is not at all worthy of any criticism, nor is the term dissimilar to, say, the English equivalent of ‘waistline,’ which would actually have been a much more appropriate choice here. But with that perfectly good term existing already, then why invent a new one?
The reason is that the term is merely the latest in a spate of naming particularly female body parts after English letters in recent years, a very curious fashion that seems unique to Korea so far. Consider the following best known examples of this:
- M-line (abdominals, for men)
- S-line (breasts and buttocks, viewed from the side)
- U-line (exposed lower back)
- V-line (one for face, and another for the line in-between breasts)
- W-line (breasts)
- X-line (long legs and arms, with a narrow waist)
( Source: Dark Roasted Blend )
And so integral to Korean pop culture are S-lines and V-lines in particular, that within five minutes of turning on a television you are likely to see either female celebrities strutting them on talk-shows, or prominent ‘S’s and ‘V’s displayed in commercials. Indeed, such is the current mania surrounding them that you can even come across examples completely unrelated to the original body parts involved, including in commercials for cell-phones, school uniforms, and even gas boilers!
Although this practice seems frivolous on the surface, says blogger Javabeans “it actually belies much more pernicious trends in society at large,” and something is surely seriously amiss when, rather than the media, you have a majority of female celebrities “vocally espousing their alphabet-lines and therefore actually objectifying themselves as a conglomeration of “perfect” body parts rather than as whole, genuine people.” But, why their alacrity in doing so?
(Left: BoA (권보아) enjoying having a V-line just a little too much? Source)
A clue is that this quote was made in the context of a breast cancer fund-raising party in October last year, the producers of which saw absolutely no irony in naming ‘Love Your W.’ And if nothing is viewed as untoward in doing so for an event supposedly about empowering women by encouraging them to respect more and take better care of their bodies, then you can imagine that there are few inhibitions for promoting the use of ‘lines’ to teenagers and young girls either.
Accordingly, there are even educational videos that promote healthy food such as fermented bean paste (dwenjang/된장) to elementary-school children that mention that eating it will be good for their S-lines and V-lines also. And one probably direct effect of this is the fact that many Korean middle-school girls have ‘face rollers,’ the repeated application of which is supposed to flatten one’s face towards a desired, angular, ‘V’ shape.
To be sure, the Korean media is not unique in placing undue emphasis on women’s appearances rather than their intelligence – the American media obsession with Michelle Obama’s fashion choices being a notorious recent example – nor is it in providing often unobtainable and unnatural role models and body ideals for women and girls. But the contexts in which those are received are important, and whereas videos like the above would rapidly be banned in schools in many other developed countries, and/or educators that criticized children because of their appearance rapidly fired, unfortunately both are par for the course in Korea.
( Han Ye-seul (한예슬) demonstrates another meaning of “V-line.” Source )
To an extent, this lack of awareness and/or concern is understandable when a child’s entire life prospects are almost entirely determined by a single exam: parents have other priorities. But on the other hand, when a majority of netizens did not take pride in astronaut Yi Soyeon for being the first Korean to go into space last year, but instead criticized her for her appearance during the flight, then teenage girls will hardly be encouraged to study harder.
And on a wider scale, as Korea again faces an economic crisis, in order to recover it is worth pondering what lies behind Korea long having one of the lowest rates of working women in the OECD. Surely a good start to using this underutilized human resource, one of the best-educated in the world, would be to encourage both sexes to stop judging women, and women expecting to be judged, entirely on their appearance?
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