Korean Gender Reader
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If you’ll please indulge an old Korean Studies geek for a moment, Girlfriday’s review of Dancing Queen (댄싱퀸) at Dramabeans this week instantly reminded me of The Adventures of Mrs. Park (박봉곤 가출사건), from way back in 1996. After all, both are about wives who blatantly defy their husbands to follow their dreams of becoming singers, both are comedies, and – I’ll take a wild guess about Dancing Queen – both wives are ultimately successful.
One likely difference though, is that Mrs. Park runs away from her husband. And in fact, The Adventures of Mrs. Park was the first Korean movie to ever show a wife getting away with such insubordination.
That may sound difficult to believe today, but director Kim Tae-kyun (김태균) would later confess to Cine 21 magazine that he was extremely concerned at how audiences might react to such “an unexpected ending”. As even comedies back then would invariably close with continued happy marriages, while more realistic movies would show a miserable and destitute wife returning home with her tail between her legs.
In contrast, I doubt director Lee Seok-hoon (이석훈) has any such qualms in 2012. And it’s always quite sobering, realizing how much Korea has changed in the time I’ve been here.
So, while I doubt I’ll ever make the effort to track down and watch The Adventures of Miss Park for myself (all of the above is based on this book chapter), I will watch Dancing Queen. For not only is Hwang Jung-min (황정민) my favorite actor ever (see here for my review of A Good Lawyer’s Wife {바람난 가족; 2003}, the first movie I saw him in), but I’ve always had a soft spot for Uhm Jung-hwa (엄정화) too, as she was very much the queen of K-pop when I came to Korea back in 2000. Here’s my favorite song of hers from back then (just give me the word, and I’ll translate it in a flash!^^):
And after all that reminiscing(!), finally here are this week’s links, in no particular order:
• What K-pop can teach us about the ROK military (Seoulbeats)
• Foreigners organize flash mob against prostitution (The Marmot’s Hole)
• ‘Dream High 2′ cast express the need for laws protecting minors in the industry (Allkpop)
• Sexual harassment widespread in workplaces (Hankyoreh)
• Did the Piggy Dolls ruin their credibility? (Mixtapes and Liner Notes)
• Essential information for understanding divorce in Japan: there is no such thing as joint custody of children (Economist)
• How Korean fashion is seen from an international perspective; opposed to how Koreans think it’s seen (Noona Blog: Seoul)
• K-pop’s first lesbian love story? (Seoulbeats)
• Congratulations on the Dragon baby! (On Becoming a Good Korean {Feminist} Wife)
• 290,000won bags for elementary kids – competition at the extreme? (Hangukdrama and Korean; also see my post on how pink and princessey the schoolbag ads for girls are, but sporty and full of space-shuttles and racing-cars for boys)
• [Debate] Leave ancestral rites where they belong- in the past (Hankyoreh)
• [Debate] Cultural rites provide key to understanding ourselves (Hankyoreh)
• “Holiday stress for an average married Korean woman is as bad as the pain of losing a close friend” (Arirang)
• Statistics on social trends in Korea – a great resource (Korean Journal of Sociology; scroll down to the “research guide”s)
• Roundtable: our friend, MOGEF (Seoulbeats)
• Harsher punishment urged for pedophiles (Korea Times)
• Monfemme: gender, feminist, and medical anthropology in the steppes and deserts of Mongolia (Blog recommendation)
Korean Gender Reader
(Source: Joseph Senior, via Visual News)
Just some quick links this week sorry, I’m very busy working on what feels like a dozen blog posts and offline articles at the moment!
• Recent controversial events in K-pop (My First Love Story)
• WTF Moment: Teen Top’s C.A.P and his jokes about domestic violence (Seoulbeats; see Feminoonas for updates)
• Iron Butterfly: memoir of a female Kuk Sool Won master (BBC News)
• Gay in Korea: foreign female perspective and foreign male perspective (Expatkerri)
• Sejong move splits families, hits female civil servants’ marriage prospects (Korea Joongang Daily)
• Portion of unmarried 30-something men growing, becoming social problem (Hankyoreh)
• Number of elementary school students in Seoul falls 30% in 10 years (Korea Times, via Gusts of Popular Feeling; see The Marmot’s Hole also for more on Korean demographics)
• Unemployed middle-aged men ostracized by their families (Chosunilbo)
• “In 2010, only 8.7% of working mothers in South Korea took maternity leave” (Hankyoreh)
• The importance of women for the future of Korea (Korea: Circles and Squares. And after reading that, make sure to check out this revealing photo too!)
(Links are not necessarily endorsements)
Korean Gender Reader
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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.
Korean Gender Reader
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For anyone interested, auditions for the 3rd annual Busan performance of the Vagina Monologues will be held on the weekend of January the 7th and 8th at the HQ bar in Kyungsung (the performance itself will be at the end of April). See Busan Haps for the details.
1) Single Korean Female, 30. Not Seeking Marriage.
Over at Seoulist, Stephanie Kim has written a great article on the pressures Korean women her age come under to get married. An excerpt:
Much like writer Kate Bolic, I also left a long-term relationship at the age of 28. It is never an easy explanation as to why a relationship doesn’t work out, but more disconcerting than my ambiguous story are the perplexed looks on the faces of my more conservative friends, especially those who believe that certain things must happen at certain times in one’s life….
…My Korean friends tell me that there is a very bad stereotype for a man who dates and then leaves a woman in the twilight of her twenties, letting her waste away into what my Chinese friends call a Leftover Woman. This was hardly my case. My ex-boyfriend was, and still is, a wonderful man. Smart. Caring. Supportive. The easiest answer I can give as to why the relationship fell apart is that things did not “feel right,” and that I was not ready for the next level of commitment, the marriage-minded track. It’s a scary feeling we all experience: everyday you feel one step closer to fulfilling a perfectly planned life, and it’s damn comfortable, but deep in your gut something tells you that that’s not what you truly want. I simply had the courage to act on that feeling. Though I don’t regret my decision, the stereotypes I face every day remind me that I took a non-traditional path.
Read the rest there. Note though, that unfortunately her message is a little confused by her referring to herself as a “Gold Miss” (골드미스), which she mistakenly thinks refers to an unmarried woman in her thirties or above. As regular Grand Narrative commenter Gomushin Girl points out however, actually it refers to women also highly successful in theirs career and/or financially well-off (the Joongang Daily says an income of 40 million won or above is required), which you can read about in depth in this discussion of the Japanese origins of the term at Ampontan: Japan from the inside out.
(Sources: left, right)
Not that I endorse the use of the term in any way: as even the Joongang Daily indirectly concedes in that above link, Gold Misses have little in common besides their salary and marital status, and one wonders at all the media attention on them a few years ago considering there were only 27,000 of them in 2006 (2 years before the article was published).
The explanation is that a Gold Miss is simply an invented role model for 30-something unmarried women to aspire to, all the better to sell them products that (supposedly) help them achieve that goal; or in other words, it’s normative rather than descriptive. This financial motivation becomes obvious when you realize that Japan-based Ampontan overlooks that the term is actually suspiciously similar to the “Missy” (미씨) term first used in 1994, about which So He-lee explains in her chapter “Female Sexuality in Popular Culture” in Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea (ed. by Laurel Kendall, 2002; my emphasis):
As soon as it came out [in a Seoul department store advertisement], it was adopted widely to indicate a particular kind of housewife, a married woman who still looks like a single woman. Even the copywriter was surprised at the speed with which this term took on social meaning and evoked specific images of women and femininity. “Missy” rapidly permeated the Korean language once the advertising industry recognized the consumerist implications of this target age groups’ flamboyant desires.
The essential condition of being a Missy is a preoccupation with being looked at….Another fundamental condition of membership in the Missy club is her professional job.
You could argue that that this was simply luck by the copywriter rather than being part of a grand conspiracy between advertisers and the media, but then both are constantly inventing new terms in order to find one that’s likewise happily adopted by the public, as the never-ending creation of new “bodylines” makes clear. Tellingly, the terms also tend to be quite broad and vague, conveniently leaving others free to further define them as they see fit: say, when they want to blame all Korea’s modern social ills on working women for instance, in an appalling Korea Herald report on “Alpha Girls” that I eviscerate here. So I think So He-lee is a little misguided in assuming that Missys’ “flamboyant desires” came before rather than after that 1994 ad.
2) Questions on Korean LGBT Literature
As explained by Charles at Korean Modern Literature in Translation:
Chasing down a question from long-time commenter Charles (not me^^) and some interesting information about Yi Kwang-su, I came across some interesting work by Gabriel Sylvian at The Three Wise Monkeys, .
I emailed him some questions and the answers were interesting (and lengthy!) enough that I decided to run them individually, with some comments they evoke from me.
Gabriel, a grad student in Korean Literature at Seoul National University, founded The Korea Gay Literature Project in 2004, and you can read more about him here. In any case, my first question was for background:
Read those questions and answers there, continued in Parts 2 and 3 here and here.
In other Korean LGBT-related news, a gay Korean man recently received refugee status in Canada because of the abuse and discrimination he would be expected to receive during his mandatory 2-year military service (see here also for more on sexual abuse in the military in general); anti-gay art caused a stir at a recent Seoul National University exhibition; and – sorry for not noticing earlier – the Korean gay movie 알이씨REC below came out last month, which you can find many links about here.
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3) Japan’s ‘Mancession‘
As Tokyo-based New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi put it:
Very interesting in its own right of course, that Bloomberg article referred to is also particularly useful in contrasting the Korean government and businesses’ decision to fire women in droves in response to the financial crisis, as in the US and – now Japan – it was actually men that suffered more. Indeed, in the former working women came to outnumber working men for the first time in its history (see story #5 below also).
4) Another Reason to Hate Naesoong and Aegyo
Via Tumblr Kitty Kitty Korea (but actually written by Party in the R.O.K.):
I can’t count all the times I’ve said “I’m going home” and attempted to leave wherever I was, and the Korean guy would be like “Oh, no you don’t!” and grab my wrists or shoulders or take my phone or hold me against a wall so I was physically unable to get out. No, man, I’m not just saying I want to go to be cute; I want to go. It’s not until I start thrashing around and yelling at them that they let go, and then they just act really confused. (I’m guessing that it’s a thing for Korean girls to pretend they want to leave a man so they can watch him beg for them to stay. Korean couples go on all sorts of weird power trips I just don’t get coming from the relatively sane world of American dating.)
Read there for her discussion of what lay behind that confusion. Also, I don’t mean to cause and/or perpetuate negative stereotypes about Korean men, and should be(!) the very last person to ask for dating advice, so please let me know how that does or doesn’t match your own dating experiences.
Update – By a wonderful coincidence, 5 minutes after I published this post this one appeared at Seoulbeats, about how seemingly every Korean drama features the male lead grabbing the female lead by the wrist and literally dragging her away with him like she was his property and/or child, despite her screams and protests. Sound familiar?
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5) What do Women’s Groups Think of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (MOGEF)?
Not much, according to the Hankyoreh, citing:
…its passive approach in the cases of the comfort women who had been coerced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II and a sexual harassment victim who was dismissed from a Hyundai Motor subcontractor. In the latter case, the occurrence of sexual harassment was acknowledged in January by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, and the victim held a nearly 200-day sit-in protest in front of the MOGEF building when she was not reinstated. The ministry made almost no efforts to offer support, merely reiterating that it was “not within our legal authority to help victims.”
And also that:
In addition to its failure to do its job, the ministry has also added fuel to existing conflicts in the most bewildering of places. A case in point was its embarrassment after indiscriminately handing out “19 and older” ratings to songs with references to alcohol in their lyrics. Meanwhile, a late-night Internet shutdown system for those aged 16 and under has stirred up a controversy over violations of freedom.
Hey, I’m no fan of the Lee Myung-bak administration, and indeed I think its mixed performance in other areas of governance pale in comparison to its appalling record on women’s rights, which will be one of its most enduring legacies. Having said that, it’s a real struggle to find a Hankyoreh article that doesn’t criticize the present government in some form or another, whereas MOGEF does have a point about its relative powerlessness (it has only 0.12% of the total government budget for instance), the editor’s assertion that “if its authority is limited, then it can only survive by constantly raising issues and making its voice heard” proving my own point that this is the very impetus behind its constant censorship of K-pop (but not that I’m for that either!). Also, when Lee Myung-bak himself encouraged the firing of women in 2008 (see #3 above), then it deserves at least some praise for its recent efforts at job creation (source, right):
On December 23, MOGEF presented its plans to provide individually tailored job assistance programs for 130,000 people in 2012 before the Korean Youth Counseling Institute with President Lee Myung-bak in attendance.
The plan stipulates expanding the number of job training centers for women to 111 by next year and developing more in-depth programs for those with less access to employment opportunities, such as migrant women and women with disabilities. Furthermore, the Women Friendly City program, which currently counts 30 cities among its members and has received growing interest from regional administrations, will expand to 40 cities. MOGEF will also perform assessments, differentiating for gender, to measure the effects of such programs.
Read the rest at Korea.net. It does have to be acknowledged though, that still much much more is needed to boost female employment in Korea, as today’s final link – this comprehensive report from the Korea Herald – makes clear.
Korean Gender Reader
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1) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Circumcision in Korea
Whether you’re for or against male circumcision, there’s no sugarcoating some shocking facts about the practice in Korea.
First, consider why it is was taken up so enthusiastically after the Korean War. Not so much for its perceived health benefits, but more because it was seen a way to catch up with the medical practices of the developed world (i.e., the U.S.). Indeed, it was done so wholeheartedly that now more than 90% of Korean men between the ages of about 12 and 40 are circumcised, far higher than the U.S. rate.
Despite being world-leaders in numbers of procedures performed however, unfortunately Korean doctors are actually woefully ignorant about the practice, as Seamus Walsh explains at Asadal Thought:
What I find truly incredible is that the same misconceptions and outright false beliefs that were held about circumcision in the 50s – effects on sexual performance, prevention of STDs, cleanliness etc – are still so prevalent in Korea today, regardless of the fact that the rest of the developed world has moved on in its attitudes and knowledge, making such beliefs redundant.
Also, one of the journal articles he examines concludes that:
The mistaken and outdated notions of South Korean doctors about circumcision…seem to be a leading contributory factor to the extraordinarily high rate of circumcision [there].
Next, as most English teachers in Korea are probably well aware, Korean parents (painfully) get their sons circumcised in their early-teens rather than as babies. And finally, in what I regard as the most damning indictment of the practice, those parents often do so for no more compelling reason than the fact that all their sons’ friends are getting it done, as surveys of the parents make clear.
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Update: By a wonderful coincidence, a related article from the Canadian medical website CMAJ appeared in my Google News Alerts as I was typing the above. Here’s what it says about South Korea:
…South Korea…may be the only country on earth where the majority of men are circumcised but not as infants, and do so for reasons unrelated to health, religion or aesthetics. According to one paper, almost 85% of males 16–39 years old are circumcised in South Korea, the vast majority around the age of 12 (BJUI1999;83:28-33).
No one can say for certain how the country came to embrace circumcision so quickly — the procedure was basically unheard of there in the 1940s — though the prevailing theory is that South Korean men were influenced by circumcised American soldiers during the Korean War in the 1950s. “Within a decade, South Koreans came to believe that practicing circumcision was ‘advanced and modern,’ just like the American soldiers,” US sexologist Robert Francoeur wrote (http://gkorea.nayana.com/s1.html). “If Americans did it, it must be good.”
In the 1960s, South Korea’s doctors made a big push for circumcision, launching a widespread media campaign promoting it as better for hygiene and health. Since then, the practice had become the cultural norm. “Korea has no religious background, it is nevertheless practiced during adolescence, largely initiated by peer pressure,” states the South Korean study. “Therefore, it has partly become a ‘rite of passage’ and is fully integrated into present Korea culture.”
(Taken by a friend of mine at Hongdae Station this summer. Is it still there?)
2. Homophobia in K-pop
No, really. As Megan at Seoulbeats explains:
Just take a little time and browse some K-pop videos on YouTube. Odds are, on at least one video by a boy group, you’re going to see a comment along these lines:”See, this is why K-pop and Korea are superior to America! Because boys can look and act like this and not be accused of being gay!” This is hardly anything to celebrate. In fact, this is precisely the problem. People pretend that homosexuality doesn’t exist. It wouldn’t matter if a boy group member snogged his bandmates in public (ahem, Heechul), because it’s nothing. It’s just fanservice, they’re just close like brothers, is all. No way my oppas are gay! Even if an idol was to stand up on a table and scream at the top of their lungs that they were gay, it would mean nothing. This acceptance of behavior commonly pegged as gay in the West isn’t acceptance at all. It’s discrimination so strong it assumes that homosexuality doesn’t even really exist.
Maybe I’m just prejudiced by coming from New Zealand, where the only time men touch is when they’re fighting or playing rugby, and where if a guy doesn’t don’t like beer, cricket, or rugby then both the men and the women will think he’s gay, but still: I think the physical affection and pink clothes are something to celebrate. Also, please correct me if I wrong, but I’d argue that it’s overwhelmingly foreign audiences that are making such comments about Korean male singers, whereas the question of their sexuality wouldn’t be an issue in Korea itself.
I definitely agree with Megan though, that the corollary of allowing such a wide range of gender-bending (skillfully exploited by G-Dragon [지드래곤] throughout his career; hence the sticker above!) considerably narrows the range of what is regarded as genuinely homosexual behavior, although I think she’s putting it much too strongly when she says that people deny that possibility altogether (despite what the foreign media says, few Koreans now deny that homosexuals exist). Indeed, that that possibility is still very much open is evidenced by so many male celebrities making a lot of homophobic comments recently, lest their clothes and behavior cause people to question their sexual orientation (which to be fair, Megan also discusses).
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3) Science Blogging at its Finest
Remember last month, when one of my favorite blogs I09 told you about a study published in the latest issue of Hormones and Behavior, that concluded that women’s facial features and estrogen levels correlate with their self-reported desire to have children? Since then, two science bloggers wrote even-handed critiques of the study, to which the author of it responded with a blog post of her own.
In short, this was the internet was invented for, and you can read more about those exchanges at a follow-up post at I09 here.
4) The More Egalitarian the Society is, the More “Innate” Biological Differences Disappear
Back when I was an undergraduate student, I read The New Sexual Revolution by Robert Poole (1994), which would come to have a big influence on how I viewed the nature/nurture debate regarding differences between the sexes. As the introduction on Amazon explains:
In this controversial study of gender differences, Robert Poole outlines the recent research which has strongly challenged the notion that men and women would be equal if only they were brought up in the same way. The research has revealed that the brains of men and women are different in distinct ways and that it is these differences which account for much of the mental, emotional and psychological variation between the sexes.
To be sure, after four years of writing about gender issues I’m much more in the nurture camp now, and indeed I regularly make arguments about the influence of one’s environment in gender socialization myself. However, I do still think that there are some innate – not learned – differences between the sexes, especially men’s greater hand-eye coordination and spatial ability mentioned in the book’s introduction, which Poole suggested may be why men prefer playing computer games to women.
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Then I read on Sociological Images about spatial ability tests given to two tribes in Northern India, the Karbi and the Khasi. As the post explains:
- The Karbi are patrilineal. Only the men own property, and they pass that property to their sons. Males get more education.
- Khasi society is matrilineal. Men turn their earnings over to their wives. Only women own property, which is passed along only to daughters. Males and females have similar levels of education.
And whereas the Karbi men were much better at spatial ability than the women, the difference between the Khasi men and women was negligible.
For sure, it’s just one study, and there are also methodological issues to consider. But if the result holds true, and the relationship can be confirmed by a wide range of other groups, then it will definitely force me to reassess some beliefs about male/female differences I’ve held dear for the last 17 years!
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5) Gay-Han-Min-Guk: Gay Culture in Korea
For the last two years, I’ve been referring readers wanting a good quick history of Korean LGBT issues to a paper by Professor Douglas Sanders of the University of British Colombia, a noted author on human rights and LGBT issues, and as it happens also the first openly gay person to speak at the UN. And I still will, but now I’ll also link to this post by Michael Hurt and Josh Forman at Groove Korea, which does a good job of filling in the last two years (and much more).
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