Korean Boys: “Wearing Hot Pants Says Something About You”
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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:
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“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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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).
Should the Sexualization of Teens in K-Pop be Banned?
(15 year-old f(x) band member Sulli {최설리} in February 2010 Oh! Boy Magazine; source)
In short, “yes, but…”(!), as I explain in this opinion piece I recently penned for the Korea Herald. It’s pretty faithful to the original, for which I’m grateful, but unfortunately two crucial sentences on boy-bands got edited out at the beginning of paragraph 4. It should read:
This is why this discussion is overwhelmingly about girls. However, owners of boy-bands too have been affected by the ensuing pressure to make them stand out from their competitors. Add in Korea’s notoriously high levels of illegal downloading, ensuring that profits in the Korean music industry are overwhelmingly from concerts and commercial endorsements (and which explains why 75% of Korean commercials feature celebrities), then courting controversy with ever more provocative performances is a no-brainer really.
Still, only 800 words long even with those inserted, at best the article only gives an introduction to some of the issues involved really. For any interested new readers and old readers that haven’t already then, please read my post Reading the Lolita Effect in Korea, Part 2: The role of K-pop and the Korean media in sexual socialization and the formation of body image for a much more comprehensive discussion of those, and for the many caveats I would have liked to have added to the generalizations in the article!^^
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