Choi Jin-sil Sued For Being Beaten by Her Husband: Update
When hearing last week about something as appalling as an actress being sued for daring to show her bruises and black eyes to the media, it’s only human nature to assume the worst of Korean society.
But while Korea certainly does have a great deal of work to do in combating domestic violence – and criminalizing spousal rape would be an essential first step (see #2 here) – it’s also true that police and legal attitudes towards it have considerably hardened in recent years, both cause and effect of a law change in 2007 that requires police to forward all cases of domestic violence to a prosecutor (the previous 1998 law just left it up to their own discretion). In addition, Korean women are now more likely than ever to divorce on the basis of verbal or physical abuse, rather than suffering silently as in past decades.
Indeed, what stands out more than anything else about the court decision is how much it goes against the grain of trends within Korean society, and certainly does not reflect the will of all Koreans. Some quick excerpts from today’s Korea Times for instance:
Women’s groups are angry over the top court’s ruling that ordered the late actress Choi Jin-sil (최진실) to compensate a builder for failing to maintain “dignity” as a model representing its products.
They censured the Supreme Court for not realizing the suffering of domestic violence victims, which included Choi.
Korean Womenlink, the Korea Women’s Hot Line, and the Korea Women’s Association United issued a joint statement Wednesday lambasting the ruling.
On June 4, the court reversed a high court ruling that decided in favor of Choi in a compensation suit filed by Shinhan Engineering and Construction in 2004 against the actress, who was the model for its apartments.
The advertiser claims she did not keep her contractual obligation to “maintain dignity,” because she disclosed to the public her bruised and swollen face which was caused by the violence of her then husband, former baseball player Cho Sung-min. They divorced soon afterward.
For the rest see here. Also, see here for my original post on this issue and information about similar cases in the past, see here for my introduction to domestic violence in Korea, and finally, for a quick primer on the numerical rates of domestic violence in Korea (albeit in 2004), with many graphs and tables, see here.
(Although it was already common knowledge, it’s good that the Korean media is now naming the company by the way. But I wonder if it was originally kept anonymous by a court order, or just by convention?)
Gay Pride Festival and Parade in Seoul This Saturday
Update: I may discuss it in more detail in a later post, but in the meantime a big thanks to Chris in South Korea for this post about attending the event.
A little confused by the first ever “Stonewall Celebrations” being held in other Korean cities at the same time (see #5 here), I didn’t realize that the 10th Korea Queer Culture Festival has also been taking place in Seoul sorry, and is actually almost over. I can tell you before it’s too late though, that there will be a festival and parade this Saturday: for further details, see this English page of the festival website, or alternatively contact one of the posters in this thread at Dave’s ESL Cafe (or ask me to PM them if you’re not a member already).
Being unemployed and with two kids to support then I can’t make the trip to Seoul myself unfortunately, but I’d appreciate it if anyone can send me links to blog posts and pictures and so on afterwards.
(Poster from here, which also has a Korean timetable of events)
Korean Gender Reader
1. Chinese Women Becoming More Expensive…
Back in April, I wrote this post on recent research that had finally provided hard data on the extent of the skewed sex-ratio in China, which showed that in 2005 there were 32 million more Chinese boys under the age of 20 than girls. And like virtually every commentator who has ever imagined a world with a scarcity of women – Robert A. Heinlein comes to mind – I had assumed that it would mean that women would be able to command a suitably high marriage price, to contract for favorable marriage conditions, and/or that it would usher in a veritable watershed in men’s behavior towards women. In reaction to this report on the somewhat predictable phenomenon of scams targeting particularly rural bachelors’ families saving more money for brides though, Kenneth Anderson at the (rather hard to categorize) Volokh Conspiracy blog has drawn on his Mormon upbringing to provide a unique perspective on what is occurring to the status of Chinese women. An excerpt:
Exposure to the wider world…has left me persuaded that abstract libertarianism must sometimes give way to the realities of cultures and actual conditions. My view today is that – drawing on conversations with Nicholas Eberstadt in which he noted that he, too, had read Heinlein – it was far more historically common, and almost certainly the more common direction of things today, that in a world with scarcity of women – especially in a world of scarcity of females and yet a cultural preference for male births – the result would be increased treatment of women as property. More valuable property, yes, but increasingly as property precisely as the perception of its value increased.
The authors of Bare Branches have noted that a surplus of males unable to find mates is the social equivalent of plural marriage in which a single male has exclusive reproductive access to multiple wives. The effect is to create, as in China, India, and other places with similar cultural patterns combined with modern technology, the imbalance in the sexes. Again, my moderate libertarianism gives way to social realities – no doubt informed by my Mormon upbringing, which left me on the one hand the least offended person in the world by the idea of polygamy, but on the other hand a very detailed understanding of what it means in practice, for women but also for surplus men and boys. Indeed, there is a very good and persuasive paper by Thom Brooks arguing – contra Martha Nussbaum and others – that a society of multiple wives and a single husband is inherently and necessarily an inegalitarian one.
Among many other things, see the (much longer) original post for a link to that paper by Brooks (emphases in original).
2. AIDS Cases in Korea
Adding to those I mentioned in February (see #10 here), for some recent statistics and links to further analysis see Brian in Jeollanam-do here, who also briefly discusses the contradictions between advertising free AIDS tests to foreigners when a positive result can mean instant deportation.
Like I’ve already discussed here, but worth mentioning again because it’s so important, it was through listening to a Korean radio report back in 2005 that I realized that the vast majority of Koreans no longer think that they’re are no homosexual people in Korea, nor – considering that 99% of Korean cases were infected through sexual intercourse – that AIDS is a “gay disease.” I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but if that comes as a surprise, then don’t worry – it was to me too – and if you think about it you’ll probably realize that you never actually heard a Korean person say them; rather, you heard them from other, non-Korean speaking expats and/ or English-language books or magazines about Korea, the latter of which tend to get outdated very quickly in such a rapidly changing society as Korea.
And then you’ll realize that the same goes for a lot of things about Korea…it’s quite a sobering experience, or at least it was for me. Apologies if I’m projecting a little here though!
(In my brief survey of Korean AIDS/HIV awareness posters while finding the above image by the way, all of those I saw were tasteful and/or a little abstract like the above. Personally though, like experience with those for smoking suggests, I think the more graphic and explicit the better, either by showing terminally-ill patients, or by making strong negative associations with the act of having sex without a condom itself {see here, here, here, here, and here}. From *cough* experience, anything else is just too abstract to remember and/or care about in the heat of the moment)
3. Korea’s Most Beautiful Men and Women
With a nod to the sorts of things most people actually read on my blog, here is a rare list provided by photographers at Movieweek rather than by netizens.
4. Number of “Harmful” Korean Web Sites Decreases for the First Time
The title of this Korea Times report is self-explanatory, but if you didn’t know it, much more interesting is Korea’s dubious high-ranking in this league:
There are about 3.45 million sites worldwide that contain sex, violence, gambling and other offensive material, 230,000 more than at the end of last year, with 1,500 to 2,000 new sites generated every day, KT said.
English sites accounted for about 1.99 million of the disturbing online destinations, or 57.6 percent, followed by the 490,000 Chinese sites, which accounted for 14.3 percent.
Korean sites, which accounted for 11 percent, came in third, relieved of its second-place position of last year, followed by the 360,000 German sites and the 80,000 Japanese sites.
More than 98 percent of those identified contained sexually explicit content, KT officials said, while gambling sites accounted for 1.62 percent and violent and “grotesque” sites combined for 0.05 percent.
“Although the decrease in the total number of sites is encouraging, this doesn’t exactly mean that the users of these sites have declined by the same rate as well,” said a KT spokesman.
I’m not surprised by the ranking of English and Chinese sites (although I’m sure it means English-language sites), but (98 percent of) 11 per cent of all pornography sites in the world are Korean? You don’t need to have spent a long time in Korea to realize that it’s by no means the conservative society it’s portrayed as in the foreign media, but still…
5. First Korean Astronaut Speaks on Women in Korean Society
Like Korea Beat says, unfortunately it was a very brief interview, but this does give a flavor of what she said. If you’ve never heard of Yi So-yeon (이소연) before though, first read Scribblings of the Metropolitician here and here on the incredible amount of criticism and negativity with which she and her achievement were received because of her replacing the original, male candidate.
6. How to Get Koreans More Interested in Foreign Culture
It’s a little old, but if you’ve been following these Korean Gender Reader posts for a little while then you’ll know that I’m very interested in censorship issues in Korea, and the mechanisms by which the Korean media is slowly but surely being liberalized. One way, according to Korea Pop Wars, is a prime example of desperation being the mother of invention, as – outside of film festivals – there is unfortunately almost no market for non-mainstream foreign films in Korea, regardless of how popular they have been overseas or how many awards they have received. Consequently, local film promotion companies are focusing on any instances of nudity in them…and with immediate and enthusiastic responses!
7. Korean Women’s Skin Whitening
Lest you feel I’ve already mentioned this subject often enough, this Malaysian(!) reporter was also amazed at the extreme lengths Korean women will go to to have light skin.
8. The Korean Female Cutsie Act
Like Tony Hellman says:
I’ve noticed for some time that some Korean women have a tendency to talk in a high voice and have a kind of coquettish, childlike way about them. Often enough for me to to recognize a pattern. So I talked to a couple people and got some perspectives. I have a good friend who is a Korean-American woman, who explained it thusly…
See here for that explanation, and Gord Sellar’s posts here and here remain very good for putting it into a wider context.
9. Update on Domestic Violence in Taiwan
One of the longest recent news reports I’ve ever seen on the subject is available at The China Post here. See #2 here for more links on Taiwan and Japan and Korea also.
10. Effects of the New Lay Judge (Jury) System on Sex-Crime Victims in Japan
With relevance to Korea, that is also experimenting with using juries in trials. See In Absentia here for more (via Global Voices).
11. Global Links…
As this has already been probably the least Korea-specific “Korean” Feminist Reader post that I’ve ever written, then I may as well pass on some recent stories that are only indirectly related to Korea, but which I’d be surprised if readers that have gotten this far wouldn’t still find interesting:
- Re: the above image(s), this New York Times article discusses the increasing backlash against the excessive levels of photoshopping done on especially women’s bodies in the media. And see here for an hilarious annotated guide to the changes above.
- With parallels to attempts to create a market from scratch for deodorant and men’s cosmetics in Korea, this post from Sociological Images discusses Philips attempt to create a trend for the other 50 per cent of the market to trim their pubic hair.
- And finally, with obvious relevance to Japanese and Korean social norms of virtually sexless marriages after having children (this is not an exaggeration), this report from the New York Times (again) demonstrates that married couples that have sex frequently are more likely to report being happy in their marriages and less likely to divorce. Who’d have thought it?
Related is this not entirely whimsical article from Esquire on determining whether you love your spouse or not.
( Image Sources: first, second, third-unknown, fourth, fifth, sixth, final )
Gender and The Unwritten Rules of Korean Alcohol Advertisements
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Prompted by my recent post on an advertisement selling soju to women, which I misinterpreted the details if not the spirit of (no pun intended) because I was too lazy to translate the voiceover first, I’ll be using Korean sources as much as possible in my analyses of Korean advertisements from now on. Unfortunately, judging by its absence in bookstores and its website not being updated, then the only specialist magazine on offline Korean advertising I used to use for that – Korea Ad Times (코리아애드타임즈) – folded back in March, and Korean-language internet sources (on any subject) are notorious for their vacuousness and poor quality writing.
This Maeil Economy (MK) report that I’ve translated below is no exception, and as I pay much more attention to what readers might actually find interesting these days than I did a year ago, when admittedly I used to post just about any tabloid trash I’d translated, then normally I’d reject posting this. But – lest that honesty put you off reading further – I did still learn a couple of things from this one, especially from the last paragraph:
소주광고의 법칙…모델은 만 18세이상의 여자: 포스터 우측 하단에 소주병
The Rules of Soju Advertisements: models have to be over 18, and there has to be a soju bottle in the lower right corner of the poster.
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모델 나이 제한을 비롯해 이래저래 제약이 많은 소주 광고엔 공식이 있다.
Beginning with restrictions on the minimum age of models used, there are many de facto rules to the standard formula used in soju advertisements.
소주 광고의 가장 기본적인 공식은 최고의 인기를 누리고 있는 여자 연예인을 모델로 기용하는 것. 현재 진로 참이슬은 하지원, 진로 제이는 신민아, 롯데주류 처음처럼은 이효리, 보해 잎새주는 백지영과 모델 계약을 맺었다.
The first is that female models that enjoy the highest popularity are hired. Currently, Ha Ji-won models for Chamisul (James: taking over from Son Dam-bi above), Shin Min-a for Jinro, Lee Hyori for Lotte’s “Like the first time,” and Baek Ji-young for Bohae’s yipsejoo.
이는 소주라는 제품 특성상 남성 소비자 비중이 70%를 넘고, 소주를 자주 찾는 남성층이 여성 모델을 선호하기 때문이다. 소주 판매에서 가장 주축이 되는 소비자는 20~30대 남성층. 인기 있는 여성 모델이 소주 광고모델을 하면 이들의 호응을 얻을 수 있다. 이와 함께 깨끗하고 순한 이미지를 강조하고자 하는 업체들의 요구도 강하다. 과거 독한 술로 여겨지던 소주가 최근 알코올 도수를 낮춰서다. 이 같은 이유로 웬만하면 소주 광고는 여성 모델을 기용하고 있다.
As 70 per cent of soju drinkers are men, primarily in their twenties and thirties, then female models are preferred, and popular female entertainers always get the best response from this group. Also, soju companies demand a clean a pure image be emphasized in advertisements. Finally, the alcohol content of soju is going down. For all these reasons, women are used in soju advertisements.
하지만 최근 저도주 경쟁에 따라 남성을 모델로 기용하는 사례도 찾아볼 수 있다.
However, as there is increasingly a market for weaker soju drinks, then you can increasingly find male models being used.
20대 여성을 타깃으로 삼은 대선주조의 `봄봄`은 강동원을 모델로 썼다. 봄봄은 알코올 도수가 16.7도로 국내에서 시판 중인 소주 중 가장 낮다. 젊은 여성들을 주된 소비자로 삼다보니 여성들 사이에서 인기가 많은 모델 강동원을 택한 것이다. 대선주조는 대학생 1000여 명을 봄봄 개발에 참여시켰고, 그중에서도 여성들의 입맛에 초점을 맞췄다.
For Daesun’s “Spring Spring” brand of soju, at 16.7 per cent the weakest soju on the domestic market, Gang Dong-won was used to target female consumers in their twenties (source). He was the first choice of 1000 female university students that were used to help develop the brand by participating in a survey on how they found its taste.
소주업계 관계자는 “최근 알코올 도수를 낮춘 소주가 출시되는 것은 여성들을 소주시장에 끌어들이기 위한 것”이라며 “이에 따라 여성만 광고모델로 쓰던 관행도 변하는 추세”라고 설명했다.
An industry insider explained that “recently soju drinks with lower alcohol contents have been released in order to attract female consumers, and accordingly we are changing the convention that only women should be used in soju advertisements.”
소주잔은 반드시 오른손으로 들어야 한다는 것이 두 번째 공식이다. 우리나라에서는 술잔을 왼손에 들고 받는 것은 술을 따라주는 사람에게 실례로 여기기 때문에 모델이 왼손잡이라고 하더라도 반드시 오른손으로 들어야 한다. 또 소주병은 포스터 오른쪽 하단에 똑바로 서 있어야 한다. 이는 주류회사들의 오래된 관행인데, 소주병 자체가 바로 제조회사를 상징하므로 소주병이 기울어져 있으면 사세가 기운다고 여기기 때문이다. 모델이 들고 있지 않은 상태에서 가장 잘 보이면서 광고 전체의 분위기를 깨지 않는 곳이 오른쪽 하단이다.
That soju glasses have to be held in the right hand without fail is another unwritten rule of soju advertisements, as in Korea it is impolite to a person offering the alcohol to receive it in left hand, even if one is left-handed. Also, on soju advertisements the soju bottle itself must be standing, as it is a symbol of the company, and if it is leaning then similarly the fortunes of the company will decline. Finally, if the model is not holding the bottle but it is standing in the bottom-right corner, then it does not detract from the advertisement’s sense of atmosphere.
There are many exceptions to the above rules of course, but now that I’m aware of them, then a quick survey shows that the vast majority of soju advertisements do indeed follow those conventions. Needless to say though, while most advertisements are not as explicit as the opening one for in this “bokboonja” (복분자) here, the use of a bottle as a phallic symbol is by far the most important consideration in virtually any drink advertisement, and it’s difficult to take seriously any analysis of one that doesn’t mention that. Nor one that wouldn’t mention what the shape below is supposed to represent either, which I was interested to learn is called a “yonic” symbol:
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And speaking of women, while I won’t give this subject the attention it deserves here (perhaps next week), also interesting is that I’ve noticed that it is alcohol advertisements targeted towards women that are more likely to break those conventions, which by no means apply only to soju. A good example is this one below (more here) for Jinro’s “maehwasu” (매화수) drink with 14 per cent alcohol, clearly targeted exclusively at women, and one wonders at the logic behind both the flowers and pastel colors and Jinro’s belief that such a vastly different marketing approach was warranted. More often than not these are more indicative of advertisers’ stereotypes and prejudices than any empirical evidence that gendered advertising actually works, at least in the case of broadly similar products marketed to both sexes (cosmetics are possibly one exception though).
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On a final note, I can’t resist mention of the maehwasu website, for what do you find literally popping up and extending in the bottom left corner of the screen when you visit, to the obvious delight of the three women next to it? It would be interesting to listen to a company representative or advertiser try to explain a non-sexual reason for that particular exception to the rules…
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