“Cleavage out, Legs in” — The Key to Understanding Ajosshi Fandom?
(“Here is the next Samsung: fast growing Korean companies that you’d better know about”; Source)
Stop obsessing with sex (Fernando)
If I went to New York and started pointing out how many skyscrapers there were, would you suggest that it was *me* that had the obsession with noticing skyscrapers, or New York for building them all? (Norman Lewis; source)
And indeed if you went to Seoul instead, it’d be difficult not to notice all the exposed women’s legs. Even — or perhaps especially — in the winter.
It wasn’t until I saw this November 2010 video from the Singaporean RazorTV though, that I realized the fashion might not be so common there yet. Likewise, it was just starting in Thailand, where authorities were warning against the danger of dengue fever from the ensuing extra mosquito bites:
Unfortunately, only the narrator speaks English, while the hosts and interviewees chat away in Chinese (is that normal for Singaporean TV?), and no subtitles are available. However, I was able to find this related article from parent organization The Straits Times, and it had an intriguing conclusion:
Entertainment journalist Tan Chew Yen from the Chinese Central Integrated Newsroom reasoned that showing off legs allows these girl groups to maintain a healthier but nonetheless sexy image.
It invites less controversy and criticism from concerned citizens as compared to showing cleavage, for example, due to their young fan-base.
I beg to differ on the youth of their fan-bases these days. But still, those few words resonated on so many levels, potentially speaking volumes about how K-pop has developed over the last 5 years.
First, because it’s certainly true that Koreans regard legs as a much less sexual body part than cleavage. While that distinction is easy to overstate though, and indeed is eroding precisely because so many Korean girl-groups are wearing hot-pants and mini-skirts these days, it’s confirmed by numerous expat women that have had to adjust to it (and of course men like myself have noticed it too!).
(Source)
Next, because choreography, outfits, and music videos tailored for that distinction would be equally applicable to the more conservative — but still lucrative and influential — Chinese market, where for a long time Korean groups were considered much “safer” than their Japanese and Western counterparts:
In 2003, the Korean National Tourism Office [a major investor in the Korean wave] conducted a Hanliu tourism survey in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong exploring attitudes to Korean culture, publishing the results online…
….It compared the impact of Korean culture with that of four “competitor” countries (the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), and in the process revealed much about Korea’s own political and nationalist concerns, particularly in relation to Japan and America. Six of the eleven options for respondents to the category “reasons I like Korean culture” reflect this preoccupation: “less sexual than Japanese culture,” “less sexual than American culture,” “less violent than Japanese popular culture,” “less violent than American popular culture,” “decreased interest in American culture,” and “decreased interest in Japanese culture.” One other echoes Straubhaar’s notion of cultural proximity: “similar in culture.” Certainly, Korea’s own music media censorship laws (which even in 1997 prohibited the displaying of body piercings, navels, tattoos, “outfits which might harm the sound emotional development of youth,” and banned violent or political lyrics), meant that Chinese TV stations could buy in Korean music videos and music TV shows knowing that they were unlikely to upset local censors. However, these questions also reflected a perception that Korea acts as a defender against excessive Westernization and as a guardian of Confucian values within East Asia. (Rowan Pease, 2009)
Of course, this assumes that the Chinese make the same distinction between legs and cleavage. But I’d wager they do — after all, Park Jin-young (JYP; 박진영) of JYP Entertainment especially has always had a firm eye on the Chinese market, with two members of Miss A (미쓰에이) being Chinese, and even the “A” in the name meaning “Asia”. And the group’s logo speaks for itself:
(Source)
Finally, likewise hot-pants would be a perfect fit with “Ajosshi” or “Samchon” fandom. Here’s a quick definition of that for new readers:
…what is extraordinary in girl idols’ fandom is that a large number of male fans in their 30s and 40s have constructed the unprecedented scale and mode of fandom called Samchon-fans, or uncle-fans. As Samchon in Korean refers to one’s parent’s brother, this name implies the middle-aged men’s care for their young nieces. Once this familial setting is built up, a relationship between male viewers or self-claimed Samchon fans is restructured in the complicit relationship between uncle and little nieces. Accordingly, the male’s gaze at young female bodies is legitimized and normalized as the voluntary support and pure love of uncles for their nieces. Under the identity of uncle, they can deny the sexual aspect of what they see and insist on appreciating merely the pure surface of pretty children. This double male psychology of interwoven denial and justification is pervasive in the constitution of the girl idols’ fandom. Thus, with the pretentious reformulation of the male gaze into an uncle’s familial support, the male consumption of the girl bodies becomes relieved of the predictable blame for pedophiliac abnormality. (Yeran Kim, 2011; see sources below)
Previously, most discussions about Samchon fandom have focused on pointing out its existence and/or its effects, both of which you can read about in depth here and here. But in hindsight, not enough attention has been give to the process of how it came about, which this cleavage/legs distinction now potentially fills. For if entertainment companies subscribed to it, having their girl-groups members flaunting their legs while covering up their cleavage, then it’s easy to see why this would provide plausible deniability for all involved.
(“Because of Sistar uncles [feel like] teenagers again!!”; Source)
Not that being a middle-aged male fan of a girl-group is wrong per se of course. But for a number of years the Korean media would indeed promote the deceitful “innocent until proven sexual” byline of Samchon fandom (and to a large extent still does — see here and here), providing a window for entertainment companies to sex up performances to their hearts’ content.
Was this the result of a deliberate, years-long strategy by entertainment companies? That’s unlikely: not only did Girls’ Generation at least actually wear “skinny jeans” well before hot-pants for instance (I believe they only started doing so with Tell Me Your Wish in July 2009), but it’s difficult to speak of grand plans by JYP, for instance, when he’s well known for his constant experimentation with groups, trying everything until one concept finally succeeds.
In short, I think entertainment companies lucked out. But like the video says, K-pop has been about legs, legs, and legs ever since they did, and with a palpable influence on Korean fashions. Moreover, whether they’re on the screen or on the streets, people will still make much the same claims about them:
…people maintain [Girls' Generation are] pure, clean, and cute, and everyone tries to erase and deny the blatant fact of their sexualization in that curiously Korean way that college freshman can click-clack to class in 5-inch hooker heels and a leather skirt and when asked if that might not to be too risque for class, people get defensive and indignant and call the gazer the pervert, while letting the main parlayer in and of the male gaze (the women totally subjecting herself to it) off the hook. (Michael Hurt; source)
Granted, mini-skirts especially are just as — if not more — popular in Japan, so it’s entirely possible that the Korean trend actually comes from Japan, and predates the girl-group boom of the late-2000s. Yet I don’t personally recall seeing quite so many legs on the streets of Busan (much warmer than Seoul!) until just a few years ago, with the exception of World Cup summers (when standards are relaxed). And while I’m usually loathe to ascribe top-down origins to fashion trends, I’d be lying if I said Koreans weren’t notoriously conformist:
And on that note, please let me know what you think, and by all means poke holes in it — my connection between girl-groups only showing their legs and the rise of Samchon Fandom is just the germ of an idea at the moment, which now needs fleshing out (not unlike many of the legs themselves). But if I do say so myself, it’s one of the biggest epiphanies about K-pop I’ve had in a while!
Update 1 – See here, here, and here for the next 3 parts of the RazorTV video, about which idol has the best legs, problems with underage performers, and the increasing objectification of male idols respectively. Parts 2 & 3 also have more English
Update 2 – Let me pass on Esther Hoeve’s illuminating comment from Facebook:
The difference in what constitutes as ‘sexy’ bodyparts is an interesting one. Back home (western Europe) I’m much quicker to reveal cleavage or shoulders, but I spent half a year in Thailand and had to adjust to wearing shorts, but tops with sleeves. The shorter my skirt or shorts, the longer my sleeves would be. I actually grew self conscious of how much upper body I was showing, but usually have the same feeling concerning my lower body here in Europe. It completely changes your perspective on what’s considering ‘revealing’.
Like I say there, this reminded me of some of my female students back in 2000 complaining of middle-aged and old women telling them to cover up their bare arms. This was in Jinju/진주 though, a university town but still quite small and conservative, so I don’t know if their counterparts in larger cities had the same problems.
Sources
- Yeran Kim (2011): Idol republic: the global emergence of girl industries and the commercialization of girl bodies, Journal of Gender Studies, 20:4, 333-345.
- Rowan Pease (2009): Korean Popular Music in China: Nationalism, Authenticity, and Gender, in Chris Berry, Nicola Liscutin, and Jonathan D. Mackintosh ed.s, Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes, 151-167.
(Hat tip to dogdyedblack)
Korean Boys: “Wearing Hot Pants Says Something About You”
(Source)
A much more serious topic than it may sound, this article from Ilda Women’s Journal will definitely give you a renewed appreciation for the goals of the Slutwalk (잡년행진) movement.
Once it does though, unfortunately you’ll probably find yourself pretty frustrated with it too. For the author only really gives platitudes about the need for change, rather than provide any details about who those boys were, what they said exactly, and the sex-education program her and her colleagues were involved in.
But still, she’s right to be concerned about the messages children are receiving about sexuality when any elementary school boys both approve of and chastise attractive women for wearing revealing clothes. Let alone disallow “ugly” ones from wearing them:
(Source)
“못생긴 애들 핫팬츠 입지 말라”는 아이들 Children That Say “Ugly Girls Shouldn’t Wear Hot Pants”
‘여성의 노출’을 바라보는 십대들의 시선 Teenagers’ Views on Women Who Wear Revealing Clothes
So Yeong-mi, August 2010
(일다의 독자위원인 서영미님은 현재 십대들과 함께하는 성교육 프로그램을 진행하고 있습니다―Editor)
Editor: Ilda reader So Yeong-mi is currently involved in a sex-education program aimed at teenagers.
“선생님, 질문 있어요. 왜 여자애들은 그렇게 짧은 반바지를 입어요?”…“여자애들이 핫팬츠 좀 못 입게 해주셨으면 좋겠어요!”…“?????????”
“Teacher, I have a question. Why do women wear such short shorts?”…”If young women didn’t wear hot pants, that would be good.”
이게 도대체 무슨 문제란 말이지? 최근 들어 두 번이나 받은 질문이다. 고등학교 청소년 남자 아이들을 만났을 때 한번, 그리고 초등학교 남자아이들과 교육하면서 한번. 성장기 자신의 몸의 변화나 성관계, 임신/출산에 관련한 질문들이 대부분인 편이라 이 질문이 유독 기억에 남았다. 같은 반 여자아이들이 핫팬츠를 입지 말았으면 좋겠다니 이 무슨 말인가?
(Source, NSFW)
Why on earth are they saying and asking these things? This has happened to me twice recently. Once, from teenage boys at a high school, and the other from boys at an elementary school. Most of the questions I get are normal ones about their development, changes to their body, sexual relationships, pregnancy and childbirth and so on, but I especially remembered these. Why are boys saying that girls in their classes shouldn’t wear hot pants?
James – Because of the mention of female classmates, I’m assuming the boys were in mixed-schools then? But So Yeong-mi doesn’t mention how the girls reacted to such questions, an omission which hopefully means she taught the boys and girls separately.
뜬금없는 질문이 궁금해 스무고개 하듯 계속해서 질문을 주고받으며 질문한 의도를 파악하려 애썼다. 질문자는 한 명이었지만 반 아이들 모두가 동의하고 있었고 별로 웃기지도 않은 질문에 아이들은 자지러졌기 때문이다. 질문을 받은 내가 자신들 생각대로 웃어넘기지 않고 진지하게 계속 물으니, 나중엔 아이들도 제법 진지하게 맞받아쳤다. 그리하여 나온 결론은 같은 반 여자아이들은 핫팬츠를 입으면 안 된다는 것!
I was very curious why these questions came out of the blue, so I sort of played 20 Questions with the students to find out. Only 1 student [in each case?] asked, but all the other students thought it was hilarious, and they expected me to laugh along with them. I wanted to get to the bottom of that, and so later when they gave me feedback it emerged that they felt that girls in their classes shouldn’t wear hot pants.
(Source)
모자와 핫팬츠는 다르다? What’s the Difference Between Hot Pants and Hats?
“오크가 그런 걸 입는 게 말이나 돼요?” “Would Orcs Wear Hot Pants?”
판타지 소설이나 롤플레잉 게임에 주로 등장하는 괴물, ‘오크’족. 쭉쭉빵빵 몸매도 좋고 능력도 좋은 미녀캐릭터들에 비해 볼품이 없어 쉽게 무시당하고 힘만 센 캐릭터. 아이들의 설명에 의하면 이랬다. TV에서 연예인들이 입는 것과는 다르다는 것. 그건 당연히 ‘봐줄 만하다’는 것이다. 핫팬츠뿐만 아니라 미니스커트에도 역시 강한 불만을 표했는데, 이번에는 또 다른 이유를 제기했다.
As the students explained, in fantasy novels and role-playing games the monster that appears the most frequently is the orc. Unlike beautiful female characters, with great abilities and voluptuous bodies (and usually useless armor – James), orcs are essentially faceless characters that can easily be disregarded. What entertainers wear on TV is different though, and, of course, it’s worth watching.
But it’s not just hot pants that the boys had problems with girls wearing, but also miniskirts. They gave a second reason for that.
“옷이 그러면 그렇고 그런 거 아니에요? 위험할 수도 있잖아요.”
“Doesn’t wearing clothes like that say something about you? And it’s dangerous too!”
아이들은 여성인 내게 “선생님도 그런 옷을 입냐”며 “도대체 왜”냐고 야단이었다. 한 학생이 모자를 쓰고 있기에 “너는 왜 모자를 쓰고 있냐” 물으니 “그냥 좋아서”라고 가볍게 얘기했다. 그럼 “핫팬츠나 미니스커트를 선택해서 착용하는 것은 무엇이 다르냐” 물으니 “그건 당연히 다르다”고 소리친다. 적절한 대답이 없을 때 아이들은 대개 화를 낸다.
(Source)
The students asked me, a woman, “Do you wear clothes like that?”, and, in a critical tone, “Why on Earth do women wear those?”. So, to one student who was wearing a hat I asked “Why are you wearing that hat?”, to which he casually replied “Because I like it”. So then I asked “How is that different to choosing hot pants or a miniskirt”, and got the retort that “Of course it’s different!”, the student becoming angry that he didn’t really have a proper answer.
그날 종일은 아이들과 좀 더 많은 시간을 들여 ‘개인의 취향’에 대한 이야기를 나누었다. 서로의 취향을 존중하고 이해해야 하는 이유를 찾아보며 남/녀를 탈피한 다양한 관계 속에서 역할활동까지 해봤다. 그러나 그 날의 아이들에게는 이미 모자와 핫팬츠의 ‘선택’이 다르지 않다는 것을 이해시키는 것이 어려워 보였다. 너무나 견고한 그들만의 ‘패션철학’이 놀라울 따름이었다.
I spent all day with the students, and shared a story about personal tastes with them. Then we did roleplaying, breaking away from normal man/woman and girl/boy ones, in order to better understand and respect each other’s personal tastes. It was difficult to make them understand that wearing hot pants was a choice, no different to wearing a hat, and I was very surprised in how unwavering some of their attitudes to fashion were.
우연히 비슷한 시기에 만난 이 집단 아이들만의 문제였을까. 교육이 끝난 후 평가시간에 이 에피소드를 털어놓으니 유난히 남자아이들 교육을 진행할 때 그런 질문이 많이 나온다는 실무자들의 의견이 있었다. 예쁜 사람이 입으면 괜찮고, 아니면 안 괜찮고, 짧은 옷을 입으면 위험하고 야한 어떤 것이라는 10대 초반의 아이들의 논리. 고등학생 이상의 청소년 들을 만났을 때만 해도 성인과 비슷하게 생각해나가는 시기여서 그런가 생각했는데, 초등학생들에게서까지 강한 불만으로 표출되어 나오니 그냥 웃어넘길 일이 아니라는 생각이 들었다.
I wondered if this way of thinking was just confined to the groups of students I taught, so afterwards I asked other sex-ed teachers involved in the program, and they confirmed that they get similar questions and opinions from especially male students. The logic of boys in their early teens was that if pretty girls wear hot pants and so on it’s okay, but if they’re not pretty then it’s not, and that [in either case] such clothes are both too revealing and dangerous.
(Source)
Now, if I’d asked high school students and so on, who think like adults, then I wouldn’t have been surprised, but once I learned that even elementary school students are saying such things then I realized that this was no laughing matter.
고 민지점은 성인들이 갖고 있는 편견이나 고정관념들이 고스란히 아이들에게도 답습된다는 것이다. 또한 그 연령이 대폭 낮아졌다는 사실도 놀랄만한 일이다. 그 어린 학생들마저도 ‘여성’의 몸을 검열하고 있다는 사실에 주목하지 않을 수가 없는 것이다.
Children are picking up adults’ prejudices and biases, although it is surprising that they’re doing so at such a young age. And we can’t help but notice that even these children too think the female body is something to inspected and evaluated.
우리가 어떤 일을 할 수 있을까 What can do we do about this?
노출이 많은 옷을 입은 여성과 그렇지 않은 여성을 간단하게 이분화 시키고, 거기에 아름다움이라는 가치를 연결시킨 잣대로 평가하는 것은 아이들도 어른들과 크게 다르지 않았다. 다만 아이들의 용어로 표현하고 있을 뿐이었다. 이를 우스갯거리로 사용하는 아이들을 보고 있자니 솔직히 조금 화가 나기도 했다. 그리고 그와 동시에 우리 스스로 반성해야 될 때가 아닌가 생각해보게 됐다.
Children splitting women into simply those who wear very revealing clothes and those that don’t, and judging their value only in terms of their appearance, is little different from what adults do. But although the children just used these terms jokingly, to be honest I still got a little angry with them.
Yet at the same time, we really need to examine ourselves too.
대중매체에 대한 비판을 하려던 차에 최근 10대 청소년 연예인들을 상대로 60%가 신체 노출이나 과도한 성적 행위 장면을 강요했다는 기사들을 보게 되었다. 한 언론과의 인터뷰에서 가수 이은미는 음악성 보다 외적인 면에 더 관심을 갖는 사회 분위기를 우려하며, 성적인 면이 강조된 걸그룹의 노래, 의상, 춤에 환호하는 이 사회를 ‘몰상식의 극’이라고 표현했다. “초등학교를 졸업한지 몇 년 되지 않은 아이들을 벗겨놓고 대 놓고 섹시하다고 박수를 치거나, 꿀벅지, 꿀복근 같은 용어들을 사용하는 대중문화를 보면 소름이 끼친다.”는 것.
(Source: unknown)
I was about to blame the mass media, as recently I’ve read reports which say that 60% of female teenage entertainers have claimed to have sometimes been forced to wear revealing clothes and/or do sexual dances and so on. And in an interview of the singer Lee Eun-mi (James – Not one of those teenage entertainers; she was born in 1968), she said she was worried about a society that considered external appearance more important than musical quality for singers, where girl groups’ sexual dances, songs, and outfits where cheered…she used the term “thoughtless/careless”. She said “I freak out at the thought that just a few years after they graduate from elementary school, young male and female entertainers are being praised for taking off their clothes and being talked about in terms of their ‘honey thighs‘ or six-packs.
쏟 아지는 대중매체의 벗기기 논란은 새삼 어제오늘 일도 아니건만, 아무 손쓰지 않고 있었음에 반성하게 된다. 상품화되고 대상화되고 있는 여성들의 문제를 공공연히 문제 삼지 않았던 것이 일상생활에까지 주변 사람을 대상화하고 외모로써 평가하는 지금의 일을 만든 게 아닌가 하는 생각에서다.
But these trends in the media didn’t just appear overnight – they were allowed to flourish by the public’s inattention and lack of concern. This way, we have come to consider the commercialization and objectification of women as a normal part of our daily lives.
아 이들의 생각을 넓게 펼쳐주진 못할망정 오로지 외모로써 사람을 평가하는 우리 사회에서 우리가 어떤 일을 할 수 있을지 함께 고민해봤으면 좋겠다. 우리가 그동안 무심코 내뱉었던 말들이 아이들에게 어떤 영향을 미치게 될지 생각해보면서 말이다. 문제가 수면으로 드러난 지금이야말로 왜곡된 미와 과장된 외모 중심의 평가들로부터 벗어나 아이들에게 더 많은 관심을 가져야 할 때다. 아이들뿐만 아니라 사실은 우리 모두를 위해서 말이다.
It’s difficult to broaden children’s minds, but we do have to make an effort to stop judging each other on our appearances. We have to consider what has been the effect on our children of this focus, this excessive emphasis on appearance. Not just for them, but for society as a whole (end).
My post title aside, I don’t mean to generalize about all Korean boys, and given the author’s vagueness then what she says about them really needs to be taken with a grain of salt. So, to get a better overall picture, I’d really appreciate anything any teachers can tell me about what their own young students have ever said about such things (alas, it’s been a while since I’ve taught children or teenagers myself).
And to end on a positive note, was anyone else reminded of the above semi-response to such sentiments? Now I have a renewed sense of appreciation for that too!^^ (See here for a discussion of the song’s lyrics and meaning)
Korean Gender Reader
(Source)
1) “Skinny Baby Hot Hot?” Not Really
Sometimes, people think I’m just being paranoid when I see pop-culture deliberately encouraging body dsyphoria among younger and younger fans. And to be sure, usually I do have to dig pretty deep to find such underlying message(s), only to be left with the nagging doubt that I’m just simply projecting really.
Frankly, the whole thing can be quite a chore.
But then something like BEAST (비스트) and A Pink’s (에이핑크) Skinny Baby (스키니 베이비) comes along. As Angry K-pop Fan explains:
Just by looking at this song’s title alone…it should be enough to understand why some fans are quite upset with this new release…
… [let's] focus on the most disturbing issue at hand: the implicit, or even subliminal message this sends to not only BEAST and A Pink fans, but the general consumer audience of Skoolooks, the brand that this video serves as a promotion for.
Asides being the name of the song, “Skinny Baby” is also the newest collection of school uniforms released by Skoolooks…
However blatant though, Korean school uniform manufacturers have long used young celebrities to encourage girls especially to obsess over their body shapes, so Skinny Baby is exceptional only in its format really. But having said that, fans of either group at least are much more likely to be influenced by something more akin to a music video than a traditional advertisement, as Kpop Reality Check helped me realize (emphases in original):
Skinny Baby…has lyrical content that reinforces messages about what body types are attractive and superior. It is not subtle but instead is very blunt with messages such as “Skinny Skinny Boy Boy, Skinny Skinny Girl Girl, Skinny Baby Hot Hot.”
Now this easily forms an in group consisting of people who ARE SKINNY. They are not only reinforced with this song that they’re hot but they feel as if they can identify and a sense of belonging. They watch the music video and see the girls from A Pink and the boys from BEAST who are all skinny and feel abit closer to the idols.
Now this forms a direct out group. The out group is basically everybody who isn’t skinny. Those who have different body types or who feel offended watching the video. Those who aren’t skinny are discriminated against and aren’t allowed in the in group. Everyone in the out group is made to feel insecure, anxious and lost.
This is where the body image and self esteem issues come in. Everyone in the out group continues to watch and absorb the MV as it becomes something they aspire to become. They’re being fed this message that they too can be cool and hot like A PINK and BEAST only if they’re skinny and… surprise surprise purchase Skool Looks clothing.
2) Michael Stipe Produces Gay Korean Film
Update – Electric Banana has just informed me that they made a mistake. Stipe is actually the co-executive producer of Fourplay: Tampa, not Dol.
From Pink News:
Former REM frontman Michael Stipe is the executive producer behind a new short film of a gay Korean man who yearns for a family, which the director used to come out to his own parents.
The short, entitled Dol, will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival this year, Indie music news site Electric Banana reports.
Writer and director Andrew Ahn says he used the film to come out to his own parents, who agreed to feature in it as actors without knowing their son was gay.
As it happens, Michael Stipe quite literally represents my closest brush with fame, as I managed to get only about 2 meters away from him at a concert in Auckland in 1995. And come to think of it, the next time I was so close to a celebrity was the (now deceased) Andre Kim in Insa-dong in Seoul roughly 10 years later. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I now find myself writing about sexuality and gender issues?^^
Seriously though, in further LGBT news Charles Montgomery of Korean Modern Literature in Translation continues his Q&A series with Gabriel Sylvian, the founder of The Korea Gay Literature Project, and Gil at Seoulbeats has a controversial post on Super Junior (슈퍼주니어) member Choi Siwon’s (최시원) homophobia.
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3) Korea’s First Lady of Space
Imagine you are runner-up in a contest to be the first person in your country to go into space. A month before launch, the finalist is disqualified by the hosting Russian Federal Space Agency due to security breaches and all eyes fall on you. You carry not only the nation’s pride, but also the reported $25 million your government paid to get you there. Yi So-yeon (이소연) was that woman. Nearly four years later, she talks about her life on earth and in space.
Read the rest of the interview at Busan Haps. I also highly recommend these video interviews of her by Michael Hurt (a friend of hers) at Scribblings of the Metropolitician, and especially these posts on the surprisingly negative way the Korean media handled what should have been one of Korea’s greatest achievements, which he makes a strong case for being entirely due to her sex.
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4) Korea’s Nationalistic Adoption Quota Hurting Children
As reported by Sean Hayes on the Korean Law Blog last November:
Korea has one of the highest populations of orphans in the OECD because of an unwillingness, in large numbers, of the local Korean population to adopt non-blood related children and a new policy that limits the number of overseas adoptions. The majority of local adoptions are the adoption of the children of family members.
The good news is the government may be changing its policy because of its plan to join the Convention on the Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention) and realization that its present policy is harming the psychological health of children.
In 2005 over 2100 overseas adoptions were granted in Korea, while in 2010 a little over 1000 adoptions were granted. The reason for the decrease was the decrease in the overseas adoption quota in favor of a policy of supporting domestic adoptions. The policy failed to the detriment of needy children.
And now photographer Romin Lee has written a moving photo-essay at Groove Korea on the very real effects of that on Korean children and the overseas couples that want to adopt them, a story which you can continue to follow at Our Happily Ever Afters.
Meanwhile, Hello Korea!, my favorite blog on Korean overseas adoptee-related issues, passes on the following video by Korean Unwed Mothers & Families Association worker Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, with “powerful images and rational arguments by an adoptee/scholar/poet on re-humanizing the women who gave birth to us [adoptees]“:
See also this Groove Korea article on those regular adoption scapegoats, single moms, whom the Ministry of Health and Welfare described as “ignorant whores” until as recently as May 2010. Also note that the photo above is from Korea’s nearly decade-long “Letters From Angels” (천사들의 편지) campaign to encourage domestic adoption (but which of course is not bad in itself).
5) Quick Links
- Anti-sex buying campaign causes stir
From the Korea Times:
“You will get 410,000 won if you promise not to buy sex during year-end drinking sessions.”
This is a campaign a male rights group is promoting in a bid to criticize the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family’s anti-prostitution policies.
But the campaign is causing a stir, as the prize money is fake and the ministry’s policies which the group stated have been non-existent.
To play Devil’s advocate however, the Ministry has indeed had similar campaigns in the past, as the article points out.
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- “Women Only” in Korean Swimming Pools
At NateOn’s local pool, frequently only women are allowed. Against which he argues:
In Egypt, I got the separate gender stuff a little bit. The religion in many contexts called for it, and the men there are idiots. It’s the Middle East, and gender and sexual issues are rampant. But this is Korea. It’s the 21st century. Why do we need two hours of open swim that are women only? And why is that in the middle of the day? Oh, yeah, because women aren’t supposed to work. And are home at the day.
In an update, he clarifies that his problem is not with women’s only swimming in itself, but that 2 hours of women only for every 3 hours of mixed sessions seems a little excessive. And why aren’t there any men-only ones?
- Saturday Night Live Korea does Blackface
Not strictly-related to gender issues sorry, but for those that are unaware, the December 31 show had a skit with Blackface, which has generated a lot of negative publicity overseas (at least on Korean fan sites and so on):
It’s also a real pity, especially after the first show seemed so progressive. But Angry K-pop Fan at least thinks some of the accusations are unwarranted.
Meanwhile, see My First Love Story for a list of recent problematic and/or offensive Korean music videos, which includes those that have used Blackface.
Who are the Korean Pin-up Grrrls?
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No, not pin-up girls, but pin-up grrrls. Let me explain the difference.
First, take another long hard look at Yoon Eun-hye’s (윤은혜) photoshoot for October’s Dazed and Confused, as one does. Despite appearances though, it was probably a tough sell. Would you invest 8000 won (US$7.24) in a magazine for just 7 revealing pictures of a celebrity, out of 255 pages? Even if there are still no high-definition versions available on the internet?
Maybe. I did, but as you’ll see, I was looking for an interview of her. You can make jokes about my real motivations later.
I suspect then, that the photoshoot’s main purpose may not have been to sell more copies of that particular edition per se. Rather, it was looking to enhance Dazed and Confused’s brand through the ensuing publicity, thereby selling more magazines and being able to charge more for advertisements in the long-term. If so, then the massive attention the pictures have been getting in the media can be considered a success, in the process Eun-hye literally – if only fleetingly – embodying the Wikipedia definition of a pin-up girl as “a model whose mass-produced pictures see wide appeal as popular culture”. Even, in a hyperreal sense, in the physical absence of the pictures themselves.
Next, consider them in the context of a retro fad that has been sweeping movies and K-pop (or at least the female half of it) since at least Lee Hyori’s (이효리) U Go Girl of 2008. Again, while strict censorship and sexual conservatism likely confined any physical Korean pin-ups to seedy bars until the 1990s (I’ll consider “soju girls” separately shortly), pin-up girl chic is certainly becoming a recognizable part of Korean popular culture. It was no great surprise to see models copying them (source, right) on Korean television last year for instance, and I refuse to believe that it’s a mere coincidence that now there’s even an online clothes store with the pin-up name.Vivent les femmes?
Well, that’s certainly a possibility, which I’ve very much underplayed in the last five years I’ve been writing about Korean gender issues. And not that I wasn’t correct to do so: knowing that baring breasts in magazines was one notable form of resistance to censorship in Francoist Spain in the 1970s, naively I projected that onto what were increasingly risqué Korea soju ads starting from about 2006, likewise equating more T&A in them with, well, sexual and political liberation (see here for a modern Arab equivalent). Thankfully, many readers soon disabused me of that notion, and I’ve been at pains to point out that the latter doesn’t automatically signify the former ever since.
But then I read Maria Buszek’s Pin-Up Grrrls.
A brilliant book, alas it is also 444 pages long, but fortunately a roughly 20 times shorter version(!) is available online here, which I strongly encourage you to read in full. Here’s just a taste of why it was so eye-opening:
In the same way that women surely saw their own reflection in the illustrated recruitment pin-ups of WWII, it seems that many similarly saw the Varga Girl not as an unattainable fantasy of the heterosexual male imagination, but an ideal they could both associate with and aspire toward. Contrary to contemporary assumptions that the Varga Girl (and Esquire magazine) were enjoyed by an exclusively male audience, we find her presence in such contexts where she would not only have been highly visible to women, but there as the result of what one can assume was her already existing popularity with a female audience. By the start of the war, women were certainly familiar with her; in the very same issue as the first Varga Girl, an Esquire reader-poll appeared that indicated nearly three-quarters of the “gentlemen’s magazine” subscriptions were in fact read by women, for whom the magazine’s illustrations were the number one attraction…. In fact, if one reads the magazine’s letters section, “The Sound and the Fury,” throughout the ‘40s, women’s letters were frequently published–many written solely to remind the male editors and readers that the magazine had a broad audience that included women, whose presence they should consider in features, cartoons, and advertisements.
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Next, consider the following from pages 169 and 170 of Whang Zheng’s chapter “Gender, employment, and women’s resistance” in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict, and Resistance (2nd Edition), 2003:
Replacing the “iron rice bowl” of job security in urban China in the 1990s is the craze of creating the “rice bowl of youth”. Everywhere attractive young women have been sought to represent the shining image of “modernity”. Booming service, commercial, and entertainment industries post numerous age-, gender-, and, often, height-specific advertisements seeking women under the age of 25 and above 165 centimeters in height. Stylish, elegant, or sexy, young “Misses” are displayed in remodeled or newly built “modern” hotels, restaurants, department stores, travel services, night clubs, dance halls, and so on. As older state industries lay off women workers over 35, these modern young Misses, many with no particular education or technical skills, are entering the rising industries (mostly in the private sector, some with foreign investment) where their youth and beauty provide a ticket to incomes several times higher than those of their older sisters.
And in particular:
The creation of the rice bowl of youth is a “joint venture” of consumerism and capitalism that commodifies and objectifies women. Its contradictory aspects should not, however, be overlooked. Many a Miss Public Relations, Miss Shopping-guide and Miss Travel-guide is far from being a passively constructed “decorative” object for the fulfillment of her bosses’ utility needs and their male clients’ sexual fantasies. Rather, many are active players in the melodrama of modernity, who consciously manage their “profits” by a range of strategies, including frequent job changes to advance their position, and investing in various adult education programs to acquire new qualifications and skills [James - a surprising absence here is mention of cosmetic surgery]. Seizing the rice bowl of youth, many young women catapult themselves into lasting careers. The inherent modern values in this position, such as assertiveness and competitiveness, have been expressed prominently in young Misses’ pursuit of career development in a competitive job market. This gendered employment pattern with its inherent contradictions, in short, provides opportunities for young women’s social and economic advancement, even if it blocks employment access of older laid-off workers, and reinforces gender [James - and sexual] stereotypes.
For an alternative, much more critical view of that development in the Korean context, please read this post of Michael Hurt’s at Scribblings of the Metropolitician, and indeed I do think Whang slightly overstates her case. But the points have been made: dressing and posing sexily in commercial photographs isn’t necessarily exclusively for men, nor does a woman deserve scorn if she does so simply in order to advance her career. Also, that these are not mutually exclusive.
But as something to celebrate in a Feminist sense? That all sounds somewhat hollow, let alone just basic common-sense. Whereas last week I promised you a useful, refreshing perspective with this post.
Enter the pin-up grrrl, who exalts in her sex appeal to both men and women, whether as sexual object, subject, role model, or all three. And above all, she never strays out of character.
By these criteria, merely being featured in Korean pin-up girl chic isn’t quite enough. Just like www.pinupgirl.co.kr doesn’t actually sell anything even remotely pin-up girl themed, simply appropriating the risqué clothing, poses, and terminology of an earlier, quite literally foreign era is meaningless if the same women are infantilizing themselves in their next commercial, talkshow appearance, and/or photoshoot (update: or their Japanese promotions). Yet this is the norm in Korea, where so many female icons loudly touted as confident and independent are actually under the firm control of their management agencies (not even being able to use the internet or have cellphones, let alone go on dates), and where the fact that almost 3 out of 4 commercials feature celebrities means that the same women can be found endorsing just about anything (even competing brands).
Examples abound. At the same time that KARA (카라) were making waves for their “butt dance” (엉덩이 춤) choreography for Mister (미스터) below for instance (and which is a problematic song in itself, placing – for all its supposed female bravado – all romantic initiative in the hands of said “Mister”)…
…you were just as if not more likely to see them on Korean TV doing their childish commercials for Pepero (빼빼로):
More recently, Girls’ Generation’s (소녀시대) purported shift to a more mature, sexual, and empowering image with the release of their latest album The Boys is undermined by familiar narratives of passivity in the lyrics to the Korean version of the song (but which are tellingly absent from the English one). In particular, while one member (Sunny) did claim that (hat tip to askbask):
“The lyrics’ [meaning] are up to the interpretation [of the listeners']. Rather than just the simple meaning of girls giving boys support, it can be interpreted in many ways. The girls could be telling the boys that we’ll take the lead, giving off a more tough image. It could also be interpreted as girls telling the boys to get their act together and cheer up. (laughs) The song also aims to give courage to people, whether they’re girls or guys, who are tired out [by life].”
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Nevertheless, as someone not just contracted to SM Entertainment, but also the niece of its founder, she is hardly in a position (or have the inclination) to claim otherwise. Moreover, even if for the sake of argument I allow that the lyrics are indeed open to interpretation, most likely the very next thing I’ll see Girls’ Generation in will still be an advertisement for one of the numerous brands they’ve endorsed above, piling on the cutesy aegyo. And even if I further concede that that’s because surely many of those endorsement contracts precede the release of The Boys, and will continue to apply for some time after it, you’d a) assume that if that was a genuine concern, then SM Entertainment could have scheduled things better so as not to undermine Girls’ Generations’ new image, and b) be hard-pressed not to recall that actually they were already supposed to have become “bad girls” with Run Devil Run nearly two years ago.
Forgive me for being a little cynical.
(Sources: left, right)
So again, it’s promoting and maintaining a pin-up grrrl image that is crucial. By which token we can also dismiss most soju girls too, even if they are indeed technically a kind of Korean pin-up. Because with very rare exceptions, such as Kim Yoon-ah’s (김윤아) example discussed here (the singer, not the skater), not only are soju ad formats usually extremely restrictive, but, for all their sexing-up in recent years, the models therein remain firmly ensconced within a virgin/vixen dichotomy, well illustrated by Jeong Ryeo-won (정려원) and Ha Ji-won (하지원) above (only three years apart btw; they changed really quickly!).
And yet again, despite the latter having – ahem – a special place in my heart because of: a) first learning of her through ads for the Platinum Dance 7 CDs that played on Korean TV for much of 2002, in which she simply stood there looking stunning; b) singing in Wax’s (왁스) music videos, my favorite Korean artist; c) later learning of her connection to my hometown; and d) literally being kick-ass in the drama Secret Garden (시크릿 가든) and more recently the movie Sector 7 (7광구)…she undermines all that by, amongst other things, also endorsing skin care products, looking decidedly pale, unnatural, and delicate in them too. And so on.
Which brings me back to Eun-hye’s pictures, which surprised me because I remember that she endorsed the Korean lingerie brand Vivian (비비안) back in 2008, yet somehow without actually wearing the lingerie at all (as you could see earlier in the post {source}; see here and here for the politics of Korean lingerie modelling behind that). So, I bought the magazine itself assuming that they would include an interview of her, in which, however lame, unreliable, and/or perfunctory, she explained her reasons for the sudden change. Not only was there no interview inside though, but to my chagrin (no, really) I soon discovered that actually she’s been talking her clothes off in public for years now (“have you seen this” indeed!). Which possibly explains why I can’t find any mention of why she did the photoshoot on the internet whatsoever, despite the ubiquity of “news” articles about it as mentioned (source, right).
So, the jury’s still out on Eun-hye at least (although I admit that I’ve yet to look for interviews about her earlier photoshoots), and I acknowledge that my relative lack of knowledge about Korean female celebrities means I may be unfairly and/or prematurely dismissing them, something I’m sure has also gone through many readers’ minds.
But as you can see below, I’ve been trying to rectify this, looking for reliable interview sources of interviews of Korean singers. But this is harder than you may think, as Korea seems to lack any definitive music magazines. AstaTV, for instance, is literally just 105 pictures of mostly boy-bands for 11,800 won (US$10.44), a magazine format I’ve very surprised to still see around in 2011, while Junior is, well, very much for juniors. Alternatively, the very cheap – but thick – weekly Movieweek and Cine21 magazines are good sources for singers that have also acted, but naturally I’m frustrated not to find something much more music focused.
So, I would very much appreciate recommendations from readers, or if in future you could pass on any decent interviews and articles available on the internet (whether of men or women), in which they elaborate on the themes discussed in this post (I’ve included my translation of one I did find at the end of this post). Indeed, probably in just five minutes some of you will find something about Eun-hye’s Dazed and Confused photoshoot in that I couldn’t in two weeks.But even if so, you’d think that someone earnestly looking would surely have a much easier time of it?
And with that thought, I suddenly realized that I’ve been going about this all the wrong way, and in fact had been quite hypocritical. Because the onus is not on me to find pin-up grrrls by sifting through what, by this stage, looks like an increasingly homogenized, clone-like mass of female celebrities, but rather to highlight those ones who are already doing their darnedest to stand out themselves.
Can any old-timers guess whom I’m thinking of?
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Who else but Nancy Lang (낸시 랭)?
Yes, her eccentricities have put me off in the past too. No, I haven’t heard anything about her in at least a year either. But, just like that picture in that last link demonstrates (well, just about any picture of her really), you’d be hard-pressed to think of a well-known Korean woman quite so brazen (Update – Oops: actually she’s Korean-American, in which case Margaret Cho also instantly comes to mind. But she’s not quite so well-known in Korea itself).
If you personally have never heard of her though, then here is a quick biography of her below. Normally I’d be reluctant to copy and paste an entire article like this, but unfortunately there is increasingly less information about her available in English, and so this (originally from KBS somewhere) needs to be preserved before it’s lost when the long since defunct Pretty Korean Girls blog disappears (hey, beggars can’t be choosers!):
Since her performance of ‘Lost Dream’ in her underwear at the 2003 Venice Biennale, Nancy Lang was introduced to Korea, and she quickly appeared in magazines, on TV and on the Internet. Her showbiz philosophy that she would make money with art shouting “Cutie! Sexy! Kitty!” and “I Love Dollars” has raised controversy among art circles as well as the public.
Unconventional performance
Lang played the violin in the middle of a street wearing Victoria Secret lingerie and red high heels with kabuki style makeup. Her childhood dream was to become a violinist. And she realized the dream through art. Once, at the San Marco Piazza in Venice, she was held by the police for four hours, after which she became popular. Her performances thereafter continued to stand out. The New York born ethnic Korean is a US citizen. She only attended an international high school in Manila but her mannerisms and accent bear the hallmarks of a third generation Korean-American. Her Korean name is Park Hye-ryeong. But eyeing the world as her stage, she strategically changed her last name through help from a lawyer. “Lang” was the final choice among several names as it visually looked nice in typographic terms. Born into a well-to-do family, Lang however went through difficult times when her father died during her college years and her mother fell sick. At times, she couldn’t pay her tuition. But through the trials, she developed a clear sense of life and living.
The evolving Taboo Yogini
Multi-talented Lang’s unconventional character and provocative performances have grabbed the attention of the art, fashion and entertainment circles alike. In her trademark series ‘Taboo Yogini,’ characters such as a woman with a huge courtesan wig or a figure with a body of a robot and a head of a girl, rooster or dog appear. And invariably held in their hand is a powerful gun or a Louis Vuitton bag. In the backdrop is a car, a Chanel lipstick and other luxury brand logos. “Yogini” means an angel or a devil in the dictionary. Taboo Yogini, representing both good and bad, is a ceaselessly resurrecting spiritual being due to its persistent power and life energy. It is the symbol of Lang herself, her dreams, her wounds and her fight. The self-proclaimed ‘walking pop art’ doesn’t hide her love for brand name and elite goods. Last year at the Seoul Arts Center, the bikini clad Lang asked audience members to put oil on her body before going on to sing ‘Purple Scent’ to the tune of a karaoke machine. She pulled off another eccentric performance “Nancy Lang’s autograph session” during which she autographed her posterior as the inaugural artist of the Gwangju Biennale. The Taboo Yogini series is expected to evolve even more. In pursuit of breaking apart and assembling robots, Lang has only yet gathered the parts, and during the process she can let go of past regrets. Her work these days in fact show glimpses of her severing chains with the past and moving toward a fantastic future, portrayed by a wounded yogini and a guardian angel robot. If yogini was Peter Pan to Lang, the robot would be her Tinker Bell. It may be that she is inviting someone she can rely on in the future into her world filled with luxury goods.
Dreaming of Korea’s Takashi Murakami
Her work and lifestyle and her brutally candid and daring speech and actions invite criticism at times. But she doesn’t care. She confidently argues that, like a racehorse, she only runs toward a clear goal. She has firmly established herself as an artist reaching out to the public. Few others see art as showbiz as much as she does. But approaching show business with new ideas and works is a whole different realm. Her role model is Takashi Murakami, who successfully turned his character creations into art based on the animation, comics and games culture. Most of her works sell well and her name once topped the top online search word list. She knows what she wants, “I will become a world renowned artist who can influence the general public, and based on that foundation, I want to gain wealth and fame.” We wonder what she will show us next, as she brings along issues and controversies wherever she goes with her art.
Next, in the unlikely event that you’re not already convinced of her worthiness of the title of pin-up grrrl, then surely Psychedelic Kimchi’s interview of her in 2006 will be sufficient, which I was very glad to still find five years after first reading it (and apologies for stealing that above image from it!). Especially as, unfortunately, that seems to be the sum total of the only substantive English sources remaining on her, although there is still her (pretty active) official Facebook page (albeit not accepting new Friend requests, or at least not mine; sniff), her (less active) Twitter account, and finally her personal website (but curiously blocked because of phishing attempts the day after I first found it!). And of course I would again be very grateful if readers could pass on anything else, as I would for any suggestions of any other candidates for Korean pin-up grrrls.
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But one final thing before I do thank you though, is to draw attention to the origins of the term “grrrl” itself, lest people more familiar with it than I feel that I’m using it too liberally. In short, it comes from the Riot Grrrl underground Feminist Punk movement in the Pacific Northwest in the early-1990s, about which the New York Times wrote the following on the twentieth anniversary of its founding earlier this year:
Ms. Marcus, the author of “Girls to the Front,” agreed that it was part of a 20-year nostalgia cycle. But she added that “people are flocking to these reminiscences because there remains a tremendous hunger” for the kind of liberated, don’t give-a-damn femaleness “that was in full flower in the ’90s,” with nothing quite as potent since.
The fashion pendulum may have inevitably swung back to the ’90s, but riot grrrl, with its snarky cut-and-paste zines and carefully built micro-communities, prefigures a lot of youth culture today: targeted communication and social networking (although they did it with letters and flyers, not e-mails and Facebook messages); the lure of the handmade and the local — the craft marketplace Etsy could have been born in a riot grrrl meeting; and an attitude, evident in blogs like Jezebel and the Hairpin, that feminism can be fun.
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And in particular, the original Riot Grrrl Manifesto included the following, in what was I’m sure a deliberate choice of double entendre:
BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own moanings.
Why this is important is because of how in her book proper, Maria Buzek contrasts Andre Dworkin’s Beauty Hurts (1974; see it here) and Annie Sprinkle’s Anatomy of a Pin-up Photo (1991) above, then in her conclusion (pages 362-3) discusses Ann Magnuson’s Revenge of the Vargas Girl (1992) below, about which she says:
In “Revenge”, the artist poses in the guise of an elegant World War 2 Varga Girl but turns the artist’s airbrush gun – the medium through which Vargas created his fantasy women – back onto the world. Magnuson has associated her appropriation of the pin-up with the same bait-and-switch subversion as the riot grrrl movement, saying: “Women’s sexuality has been shunned; there’s no shame attached to being sexual. But then, why should frat boys be the only ones who get to appreciate a curvy figure? When the pin-up is allowed to speak (and has something to say), it changes the landscape”. But Mangnuson’s assertion that the tools of the pin-up’s male creator, in the hands of its dangerous spawn, can be easily turned against its creator’s or viewer’s potentially oppressive motives also serves as a metaphor for all of the Feminist pin-up imagery we’ve seen here. In this way, the pin-up’s ultimate “revenge” lies in the fact that, although it may have been created as a tantalizing but unreal object for the delectation of heterosexual men, the pin-up would also find ways to reject this role to reflect and encourage the erotic self-awareness and self-expression of real women.
I’ll leave it up to the reader to determine how and where Nancy Lang fits into that. Or, indeed, how Korean women who wear extremely revealing clothes on the red carpet do, as discussed in the following article from the Sports Chosun, found via Charles Tilly at the Marmot’s Hole. Normally, I’d reject such a tabloidish and vacuous source, but then you recall the difficulty of finding more “serious” sources, and besides which I’ve often pointed out how tabloidish even the mainstream Korean media is. Indeed, considering that such pictures are the newspaper’s unofficial focus, then it might actually be the best source on them(!), and to my surprise its choice of accompanying pictures is not only quite conservative (as Tilly also points out; in particular, it makes no mention of Kim So-yeon’s [김소연] notorious dress below, worn at the opening of the 2007 Busan International Film Festival), but to its credit it also extols the virtues of confident “older” women, usually at best considered completely asexual by most of the Korean media:
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[WHY] 여배우들의 레드카펫 과다 노출, 왜 끊이지 않나 / Why is there no end to actresses’s excessive exposure on the red carpet?
김표향 기자 suzak@sportschosun.com / Reporter: Kim Pyo-hyang
이처럼 수위가 높은 ‘파격 노출’은 지금껏 없었다. 뜨거운 ‘노출 논란’의 주인공은 바로 신인배우 오인혜. 6일 부산국제영화제 개막식 레드카펫에 그녀가 등장하자 사람들은 충격으로 벌어진 입을 다물지 못했다. 겨우 가슴의 일부만을 아슬아슬하게 가렸을 뿐, 상반신의 대부분은 훤하게 드러냈다. 곧바로 그녀의 이름 앞에는 ‘노출 종결자’ ‘노출 폭격’이라는 단어가 붙었고, 인터넷과 SNS는 관련 내용으로 도배됐다. 전세계인의 애도 물결 속에 하루종일 검색어 1위였던 스티브 잡스도 이번만큼은 자리를 내줄 수밖에 없었다.
Never has there been exposure like this. In this “exposure controversy”, the leading figure is new actress Oh In-hye. As soon as she stepped out on to the red carpet at the opening ceremony of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) on the 6th, everyone was so shocked they couldn’t close their mouths. With a dress that only barely covered just part of her breasts, she was displaying almost her entire upper body. Immediately, prefixes like “Exposure Terminator [Killer/Best]” and “Exposure Bombshell” were attached to her name, and social network services inundated with them. While all day previously the world was in a wave of grief over Steve Job’s death, [in Korea at least?] his position as the most searched item couldn’t help but be replaced by Oh In-hye.
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Image caption left – 제16회 부산국제영화제 개막식이 6일 부산 영화의전당에서 열렸다. 개막식에 앞서 거행된 레드카펫 행사에서 배우 오인혜가 등장하고 있다. 최문영 기자 deer@sportschosun.com / The opening ceremony of the 16th BIFF on the 6th at the [new] Busan Cinema Center. Actress Oh In-hye arriving at the red carpet event prior to the ceremony. Photographer: Choi Mun-yeong.
Image caption right – 조선명탐정: 각시투구꽃의 비밀’ 제작발표회에 나선 한지민. 스포츠조선DB / Han Ji-min at the Chosun Dynasty: Detective K production announcement (SportsChosunDB)
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Image caption left – 백상예술대상 시상식을 찾은 민효린 (스포츠조선DB) / Min Hyo-rin at the Paeksang Arts Award Ceremony (SportsChosunDB)
Image caption right – 지난 해 열린 골든디스크 시상식을 찾은 남규리 (스포츠조선DB) / Nam Gyu-ri at the GoldenDisks Award Ceremony last year (SportsChosunDB)
여배우들의 파격 노출, 끊이지 않는 이유는? / What is the reason actresses keep exposing themselves so?
오인혜가 부산의 레드카펫을 휩쓸고 간 후, 개막식 자리에 참석했던 한 중견감독은 이런 말을 했다. “무명일수록 노출이 심하더라.” 여배우들이 레드카펫 노출을 선택하는 이유가 이 말 속에 들어 있다. 화제와 논란을 일으키며 사람들 입에 오르내리는 것. 그러면서 자연스럽게 인지도가 올라가기를 기대하는 것이다. 무명에 가까웠던 오인혜도 강렬한 첫 등장과 함께 사람들 머리에 그녀의 이름을 깊숙이 새겼다. 신인들에게 레드카펫 노출은 자신을 PR하는 가장 효과적인 전략인 셈이다.
After Oh In-hye overwhelmed the red carpet in Busan, an important producer attending the opening ceremony said the following: “The less famous, the more extreme the exposure”. Herein lies the reason so many actresses choose to wear such revealing costumes on the red carpet. As the controversy surrounding them grows, the more they will be on everyone’s lips. At the same time, you can naturally expect them to get a lot of name recognition. [Indeed] Oh In-hye was a virtual unknown, but with her intense first entrance has carved a deep impression on people’s minds. To new actresses, exposing themselves on the red carpet is definitely the most effective PR strategy.
반면에 신인이 아닌 배우들은 이미지 변신과 연기 활동을 위해 과감한 노출을 선택한다. 한지민과 민효린, 남규리는 공식석상에서 선보인 섹시한 드레스로 ‘첫사랑 소녀’ 같은 이미지에서 벗어날 수 있었다. ‘반전 몸매’ ‘베이글녀’라는 수식어와 함께 여성스럽고 고혹적인 매력이 보태졌고, 남성들은 물론 여성들에게도 호감도가 상승했다. 작품 선택의 폭이 넓어졌음은 물론이다.
On the other hand, for established actresses a bold, revealing dress statement can be used to change an image or [assist in some new] acting activity [like a comeback?]. By wearing sexy dresses, Han Ji-min, Min Hyo-rin, and Lam Gyu-ri could get rid of their “First Love” images. Now with the words “electrifying body” or “bagel girl” [James - I disagree: that latter is invariably a term applied by the media rather than deliberately sought, and indeed many women labelled with it actually reject it] they have a charming, feminine attractiveness added to their names, of course increasing their popularity among men and widening the acting roles available to them.
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Image caption left – 2008년 청룡영화상 시상식의 김혜수 (스포츠조선DB) / Kim Hye-su at the 2008 Blue Dragon Awards (SportsChosunDB)
Image caption middle – 제16회 부산국제영화제 개막식이 6일 부산 영화의전당에서 열렸다. 개막식에 앞서 거행된 레드카펫 행사에서 배우 송선미가 등장하고 있다. 최문영 기자 deer@sportschosun.com / The opening ceremony of the 16th BIFF on the 6th at the [new] Busan Cinema Center. Actress Song Sun-mi arriving at the red carpet event prior to the ceremony. Photographer: Choi Mun-yeong
Image caption right – 2007년 대종상 시상식에 참석한 김수미 (스포츠조선DB) / Kim Su-mi at the 2007 Daejeong Film Awards (SportsChosunDB)
노출의 고수들은 뭐가 다른가? / What makes the experts different?
레 드카펫을 노리는 여배우들의 ‘워너비’는 단연 김혜수다. 관록과 여유, 고급스러움이 느껴지는 김혜수의 레드카펫 드레스는 여배우들에게 교과서나 다름 없다. ‘김혜수’ 하면 자연스럽게 파격적인 드레스가 떠오를 만큼 노출에 능하지만, 과감한 드레스를 입고 움츠러들거나 옷을 추스리느라 바쁜 여느 여배우들과 달리, 김혜수는 고개 숙여 인사할 때도 좀처럼 손으로 가슴을 가리지 않는다. 그 당당함과 자신감이 김혜수를 지난 10년간 ‘레드카펫의 여왕’으로 만들었다. 매번 베스트드레서로 뽑혀도 드레스 자체보다 김혜수가 더 빛나는 이유이기도 하다.
Of course, the model for red-carpet actresses is Kim Hye-su. She [not only] gives off an aura of dignity, composure, and refinement, [but in] the case of red-carpet outfits, is like a textbook for other actresses. She is very skilled in making her name synonymous with daring fashion statements, [for instance] unlike other actresses wearing revealing clothes, not only not shrugging, laughing, adjusting, and/or rearranging her clothes when she has to lean forward to greet someone [in order to not expose themselves further], but not even covering her chest up with her hand [James - as is the Korean custom]. [Indeed], it is not so much her outfits that have made her the “Red Carpet Queen” for the last 10 years, or why her dresses have been selected as the best at the award shows so many times, but rather it’s the way that she wears them.
올 해 부산국제영화제를 찾은 송선미도 지적인 이미지에 맞는 ‘지능적인’ 노출로 눈길을 끌었다. 가슴 부위가 세로로 깊게 파인 블랙 홀터넥 드레스로 우아함을 잃지 않으면서도 파격 노출에 성공했다. 세련된 포즈와 여유로운 표정도 단연 압도적이었다.
This year at the Busan International Film Festival, Song Sun-mi gave off an eye-catching “intellectual exposure” that suited her intellectual image. Over her breasts was a deep vertical cut in her black halterneck dress, which successfully showed off her body without detracting from her elegance. Of course, the combination of her sophisticated pose and composed expression was overwhelming.
중견배우 김수미도 공식석상에서 노출을 즐겨온 대표적인 여배우다. 김수미는 글래머러 스한 몸매를 강조한 과감한 드레스를 종종 선보였다. 그리고 근래에는 드라마에서 호피무늬 비키니까지 소화했다. 올해 제천국제음악영화제를 찾은 김부선도 상반신과 하반신이 분리된 독특한 드레스로 화제의 중심에 올랐다. 다소 난해한 컨셉트였지만, 사람들을 의식하지 않고 축제의 열기와 팬들의 환호를 마음껏 즐기는 그녀의 모습은 당당하고 아름다웠다. 나이를 무색하게 만드는 두 사람의 노출은 여배우의 자존심이 무엇인지를 몸으로 증명했다.
Kim Su-mi is a middle-aged actress who also enjoys showing off her glamorous [James - busty] body, often wearing daring dresses that emphasize it. In a recent drama for instance, she even wore a tigerskin pattern bikini, and what’s more it fitted her well too.
Also, at this year’s Jecheon International Film and Music Festival , Kim Bu-seon wore a unique dress that separated her upper and lower body into two halves, and which was on everyone’s lips. While its concept was a little difficult to understand, she was unconcerned, and was beautiful and confident reveling in fans’ passion and cheering for her [James - see above; source].
Both actresses showing of their bodies like this is testament to the fact that age is just a number!
(Source. Call me indulgent, but that dress really does have to be seen to be believed!)
때론 노출이 발목을 잡기도 / But sometimes exposure backfires
‘노출’에는 반드시 치밀한 전략과 계산이 필요하다. 자칫 무리수를 둘 경우, 배우 생활에 치명타를 입을 수도 있기 때문이다. 오인혜가 등장하기 전까지 파격 노출의 대명사처럼 인식됐던 한 배우는 그 덕분에 인지도는 올라갔지만 작품 활동에 있어서 보이지 않는 제약이 생겼다. 매번 비슷한 역할만 제안이 들어오고, 노출에 가려져 상대적으로 연기력까지 저평가 받고 있다. 털털하고 액티브한 이미지로 호감도가 높았던 한 배우 또한 레드카펫에서 선보인 파격 드레스가 화제가 되면서 오히려 원래의 건강한 이미지를 잃어버리고 말았다.
“Exposure” requires elaborate strategy and calculation. Even if it just barely excessive, it can permanently affect an actress’s career. Before Oh In-hye appeared on the red carpet for instance, there was one actress who became well-known for her own exposure but found the roles available to her severely restricted from then on – indeed, not only was she offered the same kind of ones again and again, but her exposure detracted from people’s evaluation of her acting ability in them. And in another case, an actress was well-liked for her free and easy and active image, but she lost her original healthy image when she wore a revealing dress on the red carpet.
James – I’m surprised the author doesn’t mention who, as she is so ready to directly comment on everyone else (albeit positively). Also, I’m afraid I don’t know what “healthy” means in this context either!
신 인일 경우, 이같은 노출은 더욱 조심해야 한다. 이미지가 생명과도 같은 연예계에서 ‘노출 전문’이라는 꼬리표가 평생 따라다닐 수도 있기 때문이다. 한 영화 관계자는 “레드카펫은 여배우들을 위한 것이라 해도 과언이 아닐 만큼, 여배우의 아름다움과 숨겨진 매력을 최고치로 보여줄 수 있는 자리다. 그만큼 사람들의 시선도 더 강하게 끌어당기고 이미지를 선명하게 새길 수 있다. 하지만 그것 때문에 오히려 역효과가 날 수도 있다”며 “노출로 논란을 일으킨 배우의 경우, 그 이미지가 워낙 강해서 전혀 새로운 역할에 캐스팅하기는 현실적으로 쉽지 않다”고 조언했다.
Meanwhile, new actresses have to be much more careful about this type of exposure, as they may be labelled an “exposure expert” and be unable to shake it off later, which would be disastrous in an industry where image is everything. Like someone in says, ” the red carpet is mainly for female actresses, and it is the best chance for them to show off their beauty and hidden charm. It’s also a good chance to get people’s attention, and to emphasize their image. However, that can have side effects. If an actress arouses too much controversy because of her exposure, then the reality is that she will be typecast in that corresponding role from then on”. (end)
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A possible starting point for discussion: is Lee Hyori (이효리) also a pin-up grrrl, whom I’m sure many of you expected me to mention instead of Nancy Lang? That is, if any of you still have the energy to talk by this stage!^^
Update 1: Or how about the Brown Eyed Girls (브라운아이드걸스) instead? While I was pretty disappointed with them for endorsing “Juvis Diet” back in 2009 (see here and here for why), this recent post on them by Dana in Soko has definitely persuaded me to reconsider.
Update 2: The link to Dana in Soko has been fixed. Sorry!
Update 3: It’s not really worth translating, but for what it’s worth, Oh In-hye doesn’t regret her choice of dress! (Via: The Marmot’s Hole).
Vaginas & Street Fashion: Two Great Things to Check Out This Weekend!
(Sources, used with permission: left; right)
Two very interesting events this weekend, at both ends of the country!^^
First, this Saturday at 4pm, there will be a performance of “The Vagina Monologues” at Changwon Women’s Development Center, with an after-party to follow: see here for details and further links. And again, guy or girl, I highly recommend it, especially if you’re already in the neighborhood and missed Busan’s performance in February.
Next, this Sunday at 12pm, Michael Hurt will be launching his “The Fashion of the Korean Street” photography exhibition at Cafe Bene, just outside exit #5 of Chungmuro Station in Seoul. Just his name alone surely being enough to persuade The Grand Narrative readers to go(!), please see his Facebook event page or his blog for further details.
Finally, there will be further performances of “The Vagina Monologues” in Jeonju on April the 2nd, in Seoul on April the 2nd and 3rd, and again in Seoul (but in a different location) on April the 9th and 10th. But I’ll remind everyone again closer to the dates.
If there’s any more events anybody would like me to publicize, please let me know in the comments or via email.
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