The Grand Narrative

(Number 5 of 7 Pictures of the Wondergirls on this Chinese porn site, found a whole three minutes after typing “Wondergirls” into Yahoo Image Search. Sorry to those of you who have regrets about the picture suddenly appearing on the screen in front of all of your students and colleagues, but, as you shall see, that you have those regrets at all neatly demonstrates one of the points I’ll be making!)

This post is a direct response to the second comment left by Chris in my last post on the Wondergirls. While I still think that he has deeply mistaken views about the Wondergirls and the issues they raise, I also think that a great number of people probably share them, and so it is worth me devoting a post to specifically addressing some (though not all) of his points, rather than losing my arguments at the end of a long line of comments that few people would bother scrolling through again.

Before I do, I must apologize in advance to Chris if highlighting what he said word for word here feels like a personal attack on him. But I don’t know how to avoid that.

Look More Closely

Fortunately for the sake of warming up readers up, we can start with something simple:

James, I don’t know how to convince you of Daegu high school girls’ clothing habits, but when out downtown on a weekend you can’t walk 10 feet without seeing a young woman who is obviously under 18, wearing high heels and/or a short skirt. Even when we took our high school students to the Busan Aquarium for a field trip, my very own students dressed much the same as some of the WG. You’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

This may sounds facetious, but I’m afraid that I really don’t think I can be convinced without photographic evidence.

I’ve put both videos up again below to stop people have to scroll between posts: in the first video certainly, the quasi-uniforms that a couple of the girls are wearing would be a strange sight in real-life. but are still within the boundaries of appropriateness and good taste. I never actually said that they weren’t. I don’t think many school students are wearing shorts as high as those orange ones between 0:14 and 0:17 though, but I’m willing to concede that there may be some, although I’ve never seen any myself.

But none of those observations apply at all to the second ad:

To paraphrase Bulgasari, bizarrely, if the ad to encourage voting was indeed re-fashioned to sell teenage sex instead, then the ad wouldn’t need to be changed much visually. To mention its features in order of least suggestive to the most, there are: none of the shirts being tucked in; two of the girls wearing suggestions of waistcoats, one of which is more akin to a crop-top considering it starts just underneath her breasts; and that one looks to be wearing a skirt but is in fact wearing an extremely high and tight pair of shorts with the pattern of the skirt. And don’t get me started on the dancing, or what any of all this has to do with voting.

Certainly, two girls are wearing clothes not dissimilar to normal school uniforms, and I think that when combined with the quasi-uniform patterns and designs of the other girl’s clothes, certainly would give the impression of normality with just a casual, single viewing. But repeated viewings and pausing reveals that 3 of the uniforms are anything but, and not at all like what you’d see at any Korean school, whether in Daegu or anywhere else.

Cultural Relativism?

Second point is perception. You and many others find the WG clothing and dance overly suggestive, while myself and many others do not. Who’s to say who’s correct? You say one of the girls strokes her breasts, I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestingly blase manner….

I won’t insult Chris’s intelligence by saying that he doesn’t know what cultural relativism is, but let me refer readers to When One Culture’s Custom Is Another’s Taboo by Barbara Crossette (New York Times, March 6 1999), to my mind a classic on the different but related and relevant subject of how “do democratic, pluralistic societies like the United States, based on religious and cultural tolerance, respond to customs and rituals that may be repellent to the majority?”. It’s also very short, well worth spending the 5 minutes it would take to read in its entirety. But for now, let’s consider just this (emphasis added):

But going more than half way to tolerate what look like disturbing cultural practices unsettles some historians, aid experts, economists and others with experience in developing societies. Such relativism, they say, undermines the very notion of progress. What’s more, it raises the question of how far acceptance can go before there is no core American culture, no shared values left.

Many years of living in a variety of cultures, said Urban Jonsson, a Swede who directs the U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, in sub-Saharan Africa, has led him to conclude that there is “a global moral minimum,” which he has heard articulated by Asian Buddhists and African thinkers as well as by Western human rights advocates.

“There is a nonethnocentric global morality,” he said, and scholars would be better occupied looking for it rather than denying it. “I am upset by the anthropological interest in mystifying what we have already demystified. All cultures have their bad and good things.”

Murder was a legitimate form of expression in Europe centuries ago when honor was involved, Jonsson points out. Those days may be gone in most places, but in Afghanistan, a wronged family may demand the death penalty and carry it out themselves with official blessing. Does that restore it to respectability in the 21st century?

(Number 2 of the aforementioned series)

I hope that reference doesn’t make Chris rehash accusations of Orientalism against me, because the point I gained from that was that there are standards and limits that can not be crossed by the glib defense that him and I, and by extension Koreans and Westerners too, have merely different, but equally valid perceptions of what is and isn’t sexually suggestive. Somewhere out there, there are divisions between innocent and sexually suggestive that the vast majority of humans would agree upon, even though there will always be some individuals and groups of people that don’t for various reasons, and I think Gord explains very well why in this particular instance Koreans themselves do not see the Wondergirls as sex symbols.

But while they have limited exposure outside of Korea, the rest of the world does see them that way. Pictures or videos of the Wondergirls are certainly still some distance from child pornography, but then the first picture above especially and the place where I found them in particular give at least one demonstration of what’s being done with them and what non-Koreans consider them as, and that should at least give pause to the people who still protest that they’re nothing more than, say, innocent fashion shoots. And remove the Korean element from them, and the first thing most people familiar with the topic would say is that both photos above look like they’re from a Japanese schoolgirl photobook.

I’ll grant that despite my saying that there are limits to what 15 year-olds should be able to do and wear on national TV, it’s still a grey area and there are indeed issues of freedom of expression to consider too. But in Japan, the refusal of legislators to draw more specific lines between supposedly artistic pictures of underage girls in school uniforms and swimsuits and child pornography, for instance, led to nearly two decades of “art” photographers constantly pushing the boundaries, ultimately ending up last year with U-15s and even preteens in variously:

• their lingerie
• g-strings
• shoestring bikinis or whatever they’re called, with only the smallest of triangles covering their nipples
• doggy-style poses
• swimsuits stretched tightly over their labia while they’re on a gyrating chair simulating the “cowgirl” sexual position, their genitals sometimes only 10cm away from the camera.

All still technically legal because the law only prohibited nudity. It was only with those latter, most recent cases that legislators finally and belatedly stepped in and started making prosecutions (as I discuss here). I’m not saying that this will inevitably happen in Korea, Japan, for one, having a long pornographic tradition that Korea lacks, but not drawing lines between innocent and sexually suggestive dancing and photos at earlier points in Japan did ultimately lead from swimsuits to in-your-face child pornography there. So while sexually suggestive photos and videos of 15 year-old girls on TV will not lead to child pornography in themselves, unchallenged they certainly are a significant potential step in the same direction. And that is why the Wondergirls matter.

This is also connected to what Chris says later:

So far all I’ve seen regarding this issue from blogs like the Metropolitician and now the Grand Narrative are emphatic but nebulous statements that there is most definitely some correlation between the rise in popularity of wonjo gyojae and the increased sexualization of young women in Korea, OR that the WG are inappropriate because they might lead to REALLY bad things like that 6-year old girl who was really wearing next to nothing for no reason at all and dancing wayyyy more suggestively than the WG do in that youtube video. This is like when George W. said that gay marriage should not be allowed because, well if you let two men or two women get married, what’s to stop people from marrying their dogs or washing machines?

Chris does mention other factors behind the rise of wonjo gyojae/원조교제 than Korean teenagers’ increased sexualization as represented to me by the Wondergirls phenomenon, and these are all just as valid, but the absence of hard evidence for a correlation between, say, a future increase in teenage prostitution and the emergence of Wondergirls phenomenon, doesn’t mean that they can’t at least be a factor either. Even if they end up being 100% responsible, I’m not sure that hard evidence of a correlation that would satisfy Chris would even be possible, and am open to suggestions. But Chris seems to be saying that the absence of hard evidence means that media images of teenagers aren’t a factor in teenage prostitution at all, and that’s clearly not true. It would though, be difficult to accept if you didn’t view the above ads as sexual at all. Here is some extra evidence, although I sense that for some people there will never be enough:

Forced Sexualization, Cause and Effect

Actually, the second part of that original comment is the most revealing:

You say one of the girls strokes her breasts [in the first video], I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestedly blase manner….

Sure, she’s not working in a strip club, but her hands definitely go over her breasts, albeit very quickly. And I can’t imagine that there is a single woman in the world who wouldn’t make the same, really very unnatural gesture without knowing exactly what she’s doing. In that girl’s case, that she’s doing so in “an uninterestedly blase manner” is spot on, and suggests two possibilities:

1. That she knows what she’s doing and why a woman would do it, but her youth and sexual inexperience means that while she knows the basic mechanics of the gesture, she doesn’t really know how to pull it off in a more sexually appealing manner (ie, smiling, looking in the viewer’s eye, maybe licking her lips).

2. That she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and is only doing it because she’s being specifically told to do so by the producer of the video, and it’s thus to her it’s just another, uninteresting part of the video to be gotten over with. And judging by the other moves that the producer got her to which weren’t in the video, then I’d say that this explanation is much the more likely. See 3:02-3:32 of this video which shows the making of the commercial too:

My ass that that’s “just dancing”. Well, her ass rubbing against the big letter G at 3:26 to be precise. Why did the producer want her to do that? Maybe, just maybe, to use her ass to titillate male viewers, thereby helping to sell the product? Heaven forbid!

On a final note, and going back to the notion of hard evidence for links between the Wondergirls and other issues, I recall that there are a pair of orange books about Korean feminism sitting in most English sections of Korean bookstores which I’ve been meaning to buy ever since I started writing so much about Korean women’s body images several months ago (I don’t know the names sorry). I didn’t buy them earlier because they were full of mostly postmodernist waffle, but I desperately want one of them now because I recall that one essay in it discusses how Shim Mina/심민아’s (a.k.a “Miss World Cup 2002″) unconventional means of gaining public attention meant that, years later, it become perfectly acceptable for women to wear such revealing clothes in public, starting with similar national sporting events and increasingly outside of them too.

This is an example of supposedly “nebulous links” being more concrete than they first appear, and in this case may well have even provided part of the background to what the Wondergirls do being considered acceptable by Koreans. So I’ll try to find and buy the book soon.