Monthly Archives: December 2009

Mise En Scène: The Sexiest Korean Commercial Ever?

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It’s much easier to say than do, but it’s true: sexiness is an attitude. To whomever is responsible for the spate of “sexy dances” in the Korean media in 2009, the vast majority of which have been anything but, let me counter with this 2005 Mis en scène commercial featuring Ha Ji-won (하지원), whose smoldering gaze at Jo In-sung (조인성) has burned in my memory ever since:

Granted, perhaps you had to be there: something really is lost in the transition to your smaller computer screen. And apologies for the poor quality, but this is now the only copy of the 30-second version available that I am aware of. Still, it’s worth preserving, even if only for myself.

I didn’t realize just how much however, until I saw this alternate 16-second version. While this particular copy – again, the only one -  has better video quality, and is worth watching just for that reason, it ultimately falls flat because it lacks the build-up of the music:

By the way, it’s actually her gaze at 0:21 (or 0:09) that really did it for me in 2005, but I’m certainly warming to her long lingering one at the beginning. Meanwhile, like it or loathe it, can anyone suggest any more genuinely sexy Korean commercials, subtle or otherwise? Perhaps I should start a new series…

Update: This was part of a series of several with the couple, most of which you can find here or on Youtube. Considering how easy those were to find though, I was surprised and disappointed at how this one slipped through the net so to speak (no pun intended).

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The Alphabetization of Korean Women’s Body Types: Origins

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That the female body has occupied a central place in the Western cultural imagination hardly comes as news, says comparative literature writer Susan Suleiman. And while I lack knowledge of Korean counterparts to the historical examples in the visual arts, literature, and religion that she mentions, I don’t doubt that they exist.

What to make of the recent trend towards categorizing the female body and/or body parts into a plethora of different romanized “lines” however? Where do they fit in?

It’s been easy enough to prove that they have become a pervasive feature of Korean popular culture; indeed, they’re so much so that they’ve become somewhat divorced from the (idealized) women’s bodies they were first used to describe. But those earlier observations of mine were devoid of context, something which began troubling me once I paused to consider the source of the above article on the most recent manifestations of the trend, about Korean cosmetic surgeons classifying woman’s buttocks into four types. To be precise, it raised two questions, which I would appreciate readers’ help with.

The first is that is this trend of categorization qualitatively and/or quantitatively different to that which occurs in the Western media? As to the former, probably not: I need hardly point out the similar obsession with women’s bodies there, or that it also provides often impossible ideals to live up to. And however much English speakers may find Koreans’ romanization habit in this particular case both curious and amusing (and thereby memorable), arguably it merely reflects Koreans’ general obsession with English, grafted on to an interest in women’s body forms that is not dissimilar to that of the West. Indeed, even some native English sources are beginning to describe women’s bodies in terms of letters (see below), and while that failed to catch on, are they really different to describing women’s bodies in terms of bananas and hourglasses and so forth?

( Image sources: top; bottom. The results are from this 2005 study )

Forgive me for stating the obvious perhaps, and I mention all that not to exonerate the Korean media for the ways in which it warps and distorts women’s body images: quite the opposite. Rather, that if I still feel that it does so more than its Western counterparts nevertheless (and I do), then that something more than my gut feeling is necessary to convince skeptics. And perhaps the difference simply lies in the much greater extent to which S-lines and V-lines and so forth are mentioned? After all, not for nothing do I describe them as a “pervasive feature of Korean popular culture.”

Unfortunately however, providing empirical proof of that is rather difficult, at least for a humble blogger. But I can provide indirect evidence in the meantime, which I would very grateful if any readers could add to.

The first is the source of the article on women’s buttocks I’ve translated at the end of this post. While it may not be obvious from the opening image, it is actually on the front page of Focus, a free daily newspaper: the image on its left, not coincidentally an advertisement for a chair which supposedly shapes one’s buttocks, part of an accompanying cover.

To your average Westerner, I’d wager that this choice would immediately single out the newspaper as a tabloid – “Women have four kinds of ass! Read all about it!” – but I’ve been asking my 20-something students’ opinions of Focus and other newspapers over the past week, and only a minority considered it such. And why would they, considering that the article was also covered by numerous other news sources (see here, here, and here), including the authoritative Hanguk Kyeongjae, a business newspaper, and which even had a helpful graphic?

Ergo, the bar for tabloid journalism is rather lower in Korea, and this extends to mainstream Korean portal sites, about which I wrote the following in my last post:

Unlike their English counterparts, you have roughly a 50% chance of opening Naver, Daum, Nate, Yahoo!Korea and kr.msn.com to be greeted with headlines and thumbnail pictures about sex scandals, accidental exposures (no-chool;노출) of female celebrities, and/or crazed nude Westerners.

To which I should have added - of course – numerous thumbnail pictures of female celebrities’ S-lines, and also a warning to never look at any of the otherwise innocuous images in the “image gallery” at the bottom of Yahoo!Korea in particular, for if you do you’ll frequently be greeted with advertisements for videos of celebrities’ nipple-slips and so on alongside those birds, flowers, and interesting landscapes.

And if portal sites are fair game, is it any wonder that children are also encouraged to be concerned about their S-lines and so on? And don’t get me started on ubiquitous narrator models.

Finally, consider what Javabeans wrote on the subject, a blogger on Korean dramas who is a much more authoritative source on Korean television than I will ever be:

…while this [romanization] practice is seemingly frivolous on the surface, it actually belies much more pernicious trends in society at large, when you have celebrities vocally espousing their alphabet-lines and therefore actually objectifying themselves as a conglomeration of “perfect” body parts rather than as whole, genuine people. (my emphasis)

With that combination, something has finally clicked for me: why it is so difficult to find Korean language sources on sexism in the media, and on advertisements in particular? I’ve been looking on and off for years now, and while I accept (and would be more than happy to learn) that perhaps I’ve simply been using the wrong search terms and/or looking in the wrong places, that it is so difficult in the first place is surely telling. A solution though, is perhaps provided by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust – no, really – who had this to say about anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany:

A general problem in uncovering lost cultural axioms and cognitive orientations of societies since gone or transformed is that they are often not articulated as clearly, frequently, or loudly as their importance for the life of a given society and its individual members might suggest. In the words of one student of German attitudes during the Nazi period, “to be an anti-Semite in Hitler’s Germany was so commonplace as to go practically unnoticed.” Notions fundamental to the dominant worldview and operation of a society, precisely because they are taken for granted, often are not expressed in a manner commensurate with their prominence and significance or, when uttered, seen as worthy by others to be noted and recorded. (Vintage Books Edition, Feb. 1997; p.32)

Not lost or transformed, but equally obtuse to someone from another culture perhaps, and which I’m still only just starting to make a dent in.

But a good grounding for that would be the origins of Koreans’ obsession with romanizing women’s bodies, the second question the article raised for me. Or to be honest, an element of the subject I realized I’d paid little attention to when, serendipitously, Korean reader Chorahan provided this extremely informative comment on the subject on another post. With permission, I am happy to now place readers in her more than capable hands:

…I think the specifics of the alphabetization of Korean women are best approached in the context of the classification of women into certain rigid subtypes (read: simplified stereotypes) of women. The S-line and V-line are part of the ‘formula’ for the ‘pretty girl’ here, as are humongous pupils in big double-lidded eyes, cosmetically unaided pallor, bone-tight ligaments, etc. I would suggest that people here perpetuate this mind-boggling state of sheeple-ness precisely because this ‘formula’ serves as helpful, socially constructed and ordained criteria – with which to deduce the type of woman being dealt with, and to adjust manners to suit.

Manners are adjusted according to the woman’s ‘type’ because it is widely taken as a given that certain things can/cannot be said/thought about women depending on how they look (value-judgment wise). The socially ‘accepted’ or ‘conceivable’ scenario that follows any such encounter is rigidly stratified into according variations. My take on this phenomenon is that this is directly derived from a warped and popularized Confucian principle popularized in the Chosun dynasty called 정명론 (正名論), or literally ‘right name idea’, in which the ‘father should be fatherlike and the son sonlike etc.’ A beauty should be treated as a beauty, or a ‘talking flower’; an ugly girl can be laughed at/with (hence the ‘ugly’ – or, as I like to put it, ‘uglified’ – comedian typification.)

I’m a Korean girl and I’ve lived in Seoul nearly all my life, going through the average Korean educational system to enter the undergraduate level here. Inferring from the numerous social contexts in which I’ve encountered such blunt references to conventionally ugly/pretty features, I would venture the possibility that in originally familial, communal societies where everyone had to stick together whether they liked it or not, the ‘insult’ was not only an insult per se, but also employed as a form of veiled endearment. This is widely considered the ideal sort of 부담없는 (easygoing) interaction between two close individuals – dialogue employing insult as endearment, or ‘constructively realistic advice to help you in the real world’ – and is often the most commonly resorted-to excuse for horrific verbal abuse. (Coloring vacuous praise according to these featural types is also just such a form of ordained interaction, considered honest and respectful and completely normal.)

I do not, however, think that this should simply be chalked up to individual stupidity on the part of people that blindly follow this line of thought/action – quite the contrary. I think it’s very telling that the homogenizing retardation of the populace in this regard is and has always been spearheaded by *the commercial/entertainment media sector,* which is – big surprise – notoriously homogenized/stereotyped! It has even resorted to homogenizing certain snapshots of stereotyped ‘diversity’ or ‘unconventionality’ in the form of teen idols that are held up on pedestals as somehow being harbingers of Korea’s ‘openness’ and ‘creativity of the youth’.

As a twenty-something Korean woman towards whom those commercials are directly marketed, I find all this very sad and disgusting and lame, and I am very troubled by the thought that people actually think Korean society is improving/ has improved in its bridging of (sexual or gender-based, if that’s your cup of tea, though I don’t think that’s all) dichotomies (if dichotomies are indeed criteria on which to issue any normative judgment.)

I think it is not people being stupid, but the other way around (stupid being people, or stupidity donning the guise of specific individual avatars) : the root of the problem (of not seeing people for the people they are, and adjusting social perception/performance according to formulas hammered in by peer pressure since birth) is a sort of warped ‘commodification of human beings’ + ‘Confucian backwash’ that is only being exacerbated as people constantly look to external/ international solutions to symptoms that stem from an overlooked, simplified, but inherently endogenous disease that must be addressed within its own context.

I definitely think something fundamental has to give. This isn’t just an odd cultural quirk to cluck tongues over – this S-line, this V-line trope, this alphabetization of women just as much as the stereotyping of men – it’s seriously symptomatic of some skewed rift in the goodness and saneness and kindness of people here vs. the expressed, contorted manifestations of such potential strengths.

Not exactly concise, but this is my very understandably strong opinion regarding the topic of this post. But I’m no sociologist, so I wouldn’t know.

p.s. In first paragraph – sorry, this could be misunderstood, i don’t propose any normative suggestion – I’m suggesting as an explanation that people ‘are perpetuating’ etc (end)

( Sources: far above; above )

Despite all that context however, one still shudders at the thought that the following was the first thing millions of Koreans read one November morning:

Korean Women Have 4 Types of Buttocks

The results of a survey about the different types of Korean women’s buttocks have just been released.

Baram (wind) Cosmetic Surgery Clinic, which focuses on operations on the body rather than the face, performed operations on the lower bodies of 137 female patients in 2008-2009. An analysis of their different types of buttocks was performed, and the results released on the 23rd of November. All in all, Korean women have 4 types: “A”, “ㅁ,” “Round,” and “Asymmetrical/Imbalanced.”

According to the team of doctors there, women with type A have a lot of accumulated fat in their thighs, making buttocks look big and their legs short, and those with type ㅁ, a lot of accumulated fat in their thighs and around their waists, making their hips look relatively narrow. Both comprise 47% of Korean women each. On the other hand, those with relatively smooth and curved hips and buttocks have a Round type, and those with an asymmetrical or imbalanced pelvis have an asymmetrical or imbalanced type, compromising 4% and 2% of Korean women respectively.

As the doctors explain, even though Korean women’s bodies are Westernizing, Korean women still have these 4 East-Asian types of buttocks.  According to the doctor in charge of this study, Hong Yun-gi, “because Korean women’s buttocks don’t have much volume at the top, but have a lot of accumulated fat at the bottom, they look a little droopy” and so overall “their buttocks look boring overall, and their legs short.” (end)

No, the extrapolation from 137 cosmetic surgery patients to all Korean women was not a mistranslation I’m afraid. And I beg to differ on Korean women’s buttocks looking boring also, but that discussion is probably best avoided. Instead consider, first, Jezebel’s take on “the ridiculousness of dressing for your shape,” many guides to which came up as I researched this post, especially this one from The Daily Mail, a UK tabloid. Next, another case of Korean romanization gone mad that I originally planned to look at alongside the above, albeit of women’s dresses rather than their bodies per se:

And finally, literally the very first thing that came to mind when I saw the Korean article on women’s buttocks: the following picture from a post on male objectification from Sociological Images, because I wondered if men’s buttocks would ever similarly be categorized. But given that a page exists on Wikipedia for “female body shape” for instance, but not on male’s, then I suspect not in the near future.

On a side note, and not that I want to repeat the experience anytime soon, but searching for images of Korean men’s buttocks instead proved impossible, at least on Korean portal sites. But perhaps again…*cough*…I’m not looking in the right places?

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Korean Sociological Image #27: What, Koreans Can Do The Love Shake Too?

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Something that manages to combine both the best and the worst of the Korean media.

Go to the Korean portal site Nate at the moment, and you’ll see a small advertisement with an old VW Beetle on it with the words “흔들리는 자동차 안에선 무슨일이?” or “What is happening inside the shaking car?”. And if you’re using Internet Explorer – this is Korea after all – then it will invite you to move your cursor over it. If you do, then the screen above will pop up, with the following commercial:

The good point about the commercial is the joke about having sex in a car…and just a few days after I wrote that you never see that sort of thing in the Korean media too; hopefully, this shows how much attitudes are changing. Not that there wasn’t already a great deal of sexual innuendo and increasing amounts of skin in the Korean media of course, but the latter especially is by no means a reflection of open and healthy attitudes to sex per se.

If any readers can think of any similar references to sex in the media before it though, then I’d be happy to be proved wrong. And if you do, then I’d wager that you too first found them on a mainstream Korean portal site. Unlike their English-language counterparts, you have roughly a 50% chance of opening Naver, Daum, Nate, Yahoo!Korea and kr.msn.com to be greeted with headlines and thumbnail pictures about sex scandals, accidental exposures (no-chool;노출) of female celebrities, and/or crazed nude Westerners. Which brings me to the commercial’s bad point.

I first saw this advertisement on a work computer during a break this afternoon, already thinking of writing about it here as soon as I saw the shaking car (and as a side-benefit, it meant I could put off the translation for the post I originally planned!).  But when I saw who the occupants were I was simply floored. For in a supreme irony, just two minutes earlier I had been doing a free-talking activity with my students about national stereotypes.

Don’t believe me? Sure, I admit I’m not averse to embellishing details for a good story on occasion. But I really had been doing page 22-23 of my edition of Taboos and Issues with them (which I highly recommend by the way, and I was surprised that my students shared many of my stereotypes about European nationalities). And regardless, I would still have been sat there thinking why, oh why, did the second couple have to be Westerners?

Now, I’ve already written a great deal about how many Koreans have stereotypes of Westerners as being much more sexually liberal and promiscuous than Koreans (especially women), so I won’t rehash that here. And of course there’s a certain element of truth in that (most Koreans live with their parents remember), and it’s not meant entirely negatively and/or without a sense of envy either, although I have heard from some Western female friends that it can lead to some Korean men expecting guaranteed sex on a first date, and so on. Examples like this commercial though, demonstrate why that stereotype is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Against that, I grant that it appears to have been filmed in a Western city, and that if you watch the video to its conclusion, then you see the Korean couple deciding to get wholeheartedly into the “Love Shake”™ too. But to which I reply a) Why not a Korean city? and b) wouldn’t the Korean couple have appeared more confident and prouder of their nationality if, instead of the Westerners, it had been them in the shaking car, with the Westerners later copying them?

Seriously, how to explain not having either without some serious Occidentalism going on, of which artificial sexual dichotomies have always been a core component? I’m open to suggestions.

Update: On a side note, I know little about the actors Seo Woo (서우) and Im Joo-hwan (임주환) sorry (see Dramabeans for more information on both), but I can confirm that this innocent(ish) looking image of Seo Woo is consistent with her role in both Tamna the Island (탐나는도다), ironically groundbreaking in that it featured a romance between a Korean woman and a foreign male (I think – I only watched the first few episodes sorry), and also Paju (파주; see #7 here)…or at least consistent with the way it was advertised. I just mention that because many Korean celebrities appear in so many commercials that their brand easily gets diluted so to speak, so I couldn’t help but notice that she doesn’t appear to be making the same mistake.

(For all posts in the Korean Sociological Image series, see here)

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Lusting After Teenagers…or the Maturing of Women’s Fan Culture?

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When living at home forces young Koreans to keep their sexual encounters a secret, it’s no great surprise that Korean society strongly discourages open expressions of sexuality outside of marriage.

In particular, rare expressions of assertive female sexuality in the media seem to get parodied until they lose all their impact, if they’re not banned outright. And from teenagers? Simply unthinkable, despite abundant evidence of their sexual activity.

Which is not to say that they don’t exist. Rather, that while most Koreans will readily admit the sexual nature to, say, the clothing and dance moves of a 20 year-old female singer (at least privately), they will probably be much more reluctant to do so if she is 16.

Don’t get me wrong: regardless of their age, I think it’s perfectly natural to feel sexually-attracted to a fully-developed member of the opposite sex (acting on that attraction, however, is a different matter). Deny that sexual element though, and there are are few social inhibitions against grown men expressing their liking of teen members of girl groups like Girls’ Generation or the Wondergirls and so on.

Or are there? While 46 year-old Mr. Kim has no qualms about waxing lyrical about Girl’s Generation on the front cover of Metro newspaper above, I doubt that he would be quite so forthcoming in real life, nobody really fooled that his interest was entirely asexual. And only skimming the first few paragraphs when I first saw it, highlighting that subtext was my original intention in translating this article for you. After all, in just the third sentence you have him denying that he has a “Lolita complex.”

But actually the article is about how middle-aged Korean men and women are increasingly dominating young celebrities’ fan clubs instead. And as I’ll explain, this struck a chord with me because of what I’ve already read about women’s fan clubs earlier this decade.

Unfortunately I can’t speak for the male fan clubs, which I’ve never studied. But in short, I think that the demographic shift within Korean fan culture described is genuine, and so I’ve decided to make this post a discussion of the reasons for the shift that the article lacks. But first, the article itself:

Middle-aged People are Head Over Heels about Young Idols

(Source)

Fan Culture is Changing

#1. Mr. Kim (46), a department manager of a medium-sized business, knows the names and personalities of all 9 members of Girls’ Generation. He thinks that the Wondergirls and 2NE1 do not even come close in terms of purity and class. He dismisses accusations of having a Lolita complex, and says that watching the girls of Girls’ Generation, who are about the same age as his daughter, give him a feeling of life and vitality.

#2. Film company CEO Mrs. Kim (39), suffered severe depression after her movie did extremely badly 2 years ago. But she was able to recover because of her interest in male idol groups, and when she analyzes the charms of members of 2PM, or discusses the potential for the new group MBLAQ, she is indistinguishable from an expert in the music industry. Her dream is to make a movie like Attack on the Pin-up Boys (2007) that Super Junior starred in.

Middle-aged People Are Actively Participating in Fan Clubs

As the name implies, “older brother” fan club members used to be mainly teenagers, but this is no longer the case. But as active consumers of culture, middle-aged women passionate about flower men‘ and middle-aged men heavily into girl groups are actively changing fan culture.

For instance, on flower man Lee Min-ho’s fan club “Dave,” there is an “older sister” section of  for 30-50 year old women to exchange information about their star, and when there are fan meetings with him they make up over 80% of the audience. And whenever SS501 (James: if you don’t want to show your age, say “double-ess” rather than “ess-ess”!) have a concert in Korea or attend some event in their region, their middle-aged female fans prepare packed lunches with healthy foods such as red ginseng for them.

(Source)

And whenever there is an event featuring Rain, his middle-aged female fans call the media and request favorable coverage. Before the release of his first Hollywood movie Ninja Assassin (2009), they even delivered rice-cakes to them, a symbol of good luck for a new venture.

Indeed, it has become quite normal for there to be fan clubs that only allow those older than the flower men themselves to join. And this is true for male-only fan clubs for female idols too. In the Girls’ Generation’s “Girls’ Generation’s Party” and the Wondergirls’ “Wonderful” fan clubs for instance, middle-aged men have regular virtual meetings where they exchange opinions about how the groups can progress and thoroughly how they can celebrate group anniversaries and birthdays and so on.

A New Fan Culture is Actively Forming

Many people have dim views of middle-aged men and women who don’t act their age, dismissing them as merely chasing after their lost youth. But an alternate view is that this demographic shift in membership is an inevitable change.

Professor Tak Hyeon-min, on sabbatical in the Cultural Contents Department of Hanyang University, said “People of the 386 Generation, who have finally established their own unique culture, are used to actively absorbing new things,” and that “from their 20s until now, they have demonstrated that they are the biggest consumers and purchasers of cultural products.”

Also, “members of this generation are stuck with heavy family, home, and/or social responsibilities, so as a means of escapism and renewing themselves, they have created a middle-aged fandom in a sense, fundamentally changing Korean fan-club culture in the process.” (end)

(“Oooh! Whatever shall we strut around in hotpants to sell next?” Source)

Now, the reasons for this shift? Well, I’d wager that most 30-something members of the female ones were also active “Red Devils” during the World Cup of 2002.

Granted, that sounds obvious. But for those that witnessed it, 2002 was a simply amazing time to be young and in Korea. And as it turned out, a watershed in Korean sexual politics too, primarily because of the unprecedented participation of women.

It is the factors that made that participation possible that makes this cohort of women so interesting. For they appear to be applying the same lessons to fan clubs today.

Consider how before the World Cup began, soccer was considered an exclusively male sport, and a rather dull and unglamorous one at that. Members of the national team even made less money than I did as an English teacher.

Within a few short weeks however, Koreans turned out on the streets in their millions to watch their team’s games on giant TV screens across the country. And – crucially – not only were two-thirdsof them women, and their restrictions on the amount of skin they could publicly display suddenly lifted, but the male players’ bodies were transformed into a product for their consumption also.

True, this did build on trends already existing in music videos in the late-1990s, but only with the World Cup did it suddenly became socially acceptable to discuss men’s bodies in the media like men already did of women’s.

As an aside, please note that this is not contradicting what I said in the introduction about expressions of sexuality being restricted in the Korean media though. There are still limits, all too easy to overlook if a particular cultural product is studied devoid of its context.

For instance, consider one recent manifestation of the male objectification sparked by the World Cup, a commercial involving women admiring the abs of a half-naked male singer on a poster, then poking them to see if they are real. While it may appear rather “Western” though, one will struggle in vain to find references in the Korean media to what one might actually want to do with an attractive male singers or his abs. Similarly, consider how the Korean language has readily adopted the English word “sexy,” but is frequently used in ways that are completely devoid of anything remotely sexual (sometimes perversely so), or how it can even be quite a trial to get many Koreans to publicly admit that a women thrusting her buttocks in your face on television can be sexual.

To be fair, Korean films are rather different. And all that is not to say that the Western media is replete with discussions à la Sex and the City either. But sexual liberation in the Korean media is very much just a veneer, and it is important not to overestimate the extent of the changes I describe. Indeed, I could go on and point out how in 2002 Korean women could still not publicly discuss foreign men’s bodies in the same way they suddenly could for Korean men’s for instance (the Korean media laughing at Japanese women for doing so), and even today it is extremely rare to see foreign male-Korean female relationships in the Korean media. Also, while standards of dress for women did indeed change permanently, many people that had tolerated crop-tops, say, during the World Cup, were less willing to do so once they were no longer in the service of a national cause.

But rather than diminishing from Korean women’s achievements in 2002, perhaps these limits demonstrate just how remarkable it was that women effected any change at all?

Apologies for the whirlwind tour of 2002 I’ve provided so far, but that’s because I have already discussed it at great length here, which also has a list of the sources if you’re interested. It is one of those – Hyun-Mee Kim, “Feminization of the 2002 World Cup and Women’s Fandom” in Feminist Cultural Politics in Korea, ed. by Jung-Hwa Oh, 2005, pp. 228-243 – that I rely heavily on for the examination of oppa budae (오빠부대), or “squads of teenage female fans” that is my focus for the remainder of this post.

She notes that in 2002, one’s support for soccer was interpreted differently depending on one’s age and gender, and the dominant opinion on women’s sudden enthusiasm for it was that due simply to the male stars. As such, they were easily looked down upon as ppasnsuni (판순이), slang for female teens chasing after male entertainers, and often denounced by the media as “being subordinate to the stars and used for the commercial strategy of the management companies.” But this Frankfurt School reading of the relationship between the media and the consumer, which I’ve discussed in another context here, is a gross oversimplification:

Just because these women go fanatical over the male entertainers, it does not mean that they are blind followers, and the power relations between many of the women fans and the male stars are not fixed, but rather multivocal and dynamic. Looking at only the images represented in the Korean media with no information about the politics of fandom, these women in their teens and their 20s seem like reckless followers. But this World Cup provided a momentum for a new interpretation….(pp. 231-232)

Also:

Actually to the women fans, heterosexual desire and social activism are not separate….consumers of mass culture and followers of stars are carrying out “civil movements” within their social conditions through efforts such as fan club activities. Even if they may have initially become fans because they were attracted to the images and appearances of the soccer players, the woman fans create regulations and change the culture in the process of forming their identities as fans.

Usually, fans of a popular star wield a collective “power,” which helps the pop star to climb the ladder from being an “entertainer” to being a “star,” and this power is formed through certain rules and negotiations. This is why to have an identity as a fan is to consciously to learn specific behaviors.  For an oppa budae to demonstrate its power as a budae (squad), individual fans must train their actions and languages in an organized and systematic was. They must wear the same clothes, shout the same slogans, and show contained passion. Therefore, “fandom,” which signifies the identity as a fan of a star, is not something that is formed or practised abruptly. (p. 232)

And she gives further examples of the often considerable time and effort one must invest to become a respected member of an oppa buddae, also noting that collectively, they try to maintain “grace” in the face of attacks from other fan clubs and so on. Of course that is not always the case, as 2PM’s fans recently attacking Ivy for having the temerity to arouse…er…member Nikhun during a joint performance recently demonstrates. But that is an exception, and most importantly, it is not so much a description of female members of the Red Devils as what they brought with them to that group:

“Not a small number…have had this experience of fandom as teenagers and 20-somethings and have imitated and practiced basic actions that are required to root for and support stars. By devoting themselves to such efforts that demand time and money, fans not only consume image of stars, but also become acquainted with a certain “civil spirit” in the process of embodying fandom….the codes and action trained and familiarized by women fans in their teens and 20s were grafted onto the cheering culture of the Red Devils…(p. 233, my emphasis)

Bear in mind that the internet component of civil society is not to be underestimated in a country with such a recent experience of democratization, that relationships between 30-something women and 20-something women have become popular in Korean cinema over the past decade, and that – to paraphrase Hyun-Mee Kim – when women manifestly lack political and economic power in Korea, that they will gravitate towards displays of resistance and subversiveness in those arenas that they can affect a measure of change.

In which case, is it any wonder that nearly a decade later, the she-devils of 2002 would come to dominate fan clubs of male idols again?