Open Thread #3
I may be wrong in assuming that public service announcements in Western countries still don’t feature stylized breasts and vaginas(?), but regardless I love Korea’s no-nonsense attitudes to the body and bodily functions, in this case at least easily trumping any qualms that the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs (보건복지가족부) may have had about featuring them in its campaign for people to get regularly checked for cancer.
What I really love though, is that it has been turned into the song and dance below:
Easily to laugh at perhaps, but are more serious but otherwise rather dull campaigns in Western countries really more effective?
Meanwhile, apologies to all those readers who were looking forward to my promised restarting of the Korean Gender Reader series in the new year, but after much soul-searching this week – prompted by my catching a cold after writing the last two posts until the small hours – I’ve been forced to admit that I still don’t have the time. I may have next month if some anticipated changes are made to my job, but until then, please feel free to pass on and discuss any Korean gender, media and sexuality-related stories yourselves here!
Update - Seeing as we’re talking about Korean oddities, consider the following advertisement for a cosmetic surgery clinic here in Busan:
From page 18 of the 4th of January Busan edition of Focus newspaper – the entertainment section no less. And don’t get me wrong: with the proviso that Noblesse has a vested interest in fostering insecurities about one’s body image, I’d image that female-like breasts are no laughing matter for the high-school boys with the misfortune of having them.
It is also common for Korean cosmetic surgery clinics to use comics in their advertisements, one that readily comes to mind consisting of a group of people gaping in either awe, lust, or jealousy at a woman who has just received breast implants. You may have seen it on the Seoul subway:
Thanks to reader Marilyn for passing on the photo. And again it is unsophisticated perhaps, but regardless of one’s opinion of cosmetic surgery in general, it was probably effective: it got both Marilyn’s and my own attentions at least!
Granted that the Noblesse advertisement remains just plain bizarre though, albeit a little less so when you realize that the woman featured was either the school nurse or a visiting government health inspector, not simply a new teacher.
Finally, while we’re on the subject of cartoons, here’s one I couldn’t help smiling at a couple of days later (from Focus newspaper again):
In case you don’t get it, the young man is living with his older sister but has to find his own place. At first, he thinks the place the real estate agent shows him is too old for the rent being asked, but he changes his mind when he sees the view from his window. In the final panel, the real estate agent crumbles about how difficult his job is these days…
More problematic in Japan than in Korea perhaps, where I hear that voyeurism is so taken for granted that women can expect their underwear to be stolen if it is hung from the first or even the second floor, or is that just an exaggeration? Alternatively, is it a problem in Korea too?
Korean Sociological Image #9: The Secret to Bigger Breasts?
( The title reads: “A message of hope to all women!” )
If someone had told me years ago that I’d be writing about a Korean infomercial at some point, then I would have wagered good money that it would have been about one for bidets actually, for nothing quite gives you that “We’re not in Kansas anymore” feeling as switching the television on and seeing attractive women holding perspex buttocks over jets of water, waxing lyrical about how well they cleared a strategically placed brown-yellow paste. I could mention the looks of ecstasy and relief on various actors’ faces as they supposedly use the bidets later too…but you get the idea.
Lest I give the wrong impression though, there are certainly many advantages to Koreans’ no-nonsense attitudes to bodily functions, and actually I much prefer them to many Americans’ delicate sensibilities. But what to make of these – for want of a better term – electric breast enlargers?
If you can forgive the pun, then two things really stick out about this infomercial and its accompanying website for me (beware a loud video if you click on the latter):
First, needless to say, since writing this post on the subject a year ago I’ve still seen absolutely no evidence to suggest that doing fuck all is an effective way to lose weight and gain muscle tone and so on, let alone enlarge any specific body part. But while Korea by no means has a monopoly on misleading advertising, it is also true that various loopholes in advertising legislation here mean that there is little to stop producers of “diet-related” products from, well, basically completely lying about the efficacy of their products. For more on this, see the second half of this post where I discuss Minjeong Kim’s and Sharron Lennon’s “Content Analysis of Diet Advertisements: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” (Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, October 2006)¹ from which I first learned of it, and if it sounds like I’m exaggerating, then consider the fact that despite supposedly far stricter standards for “normal” food that over 88% of food labeled as organic isn’t, for instance, or that the KFDA is not empowered to tell you, say, which Vitamin C drinks contain carcinogens, but only (and uselessly) how many (see #14 here).
And second, in the strange event that you didn’t look closely enough to notice, then let me point out that it is only the Caucasian model above that you can see in lingerie, whereas her Korean counterparts are all fully clothed. True, that may sound like a strange way to describe a woman in a crop-top, but the difference is more than mere semantics, as many Korean porn stars worked as lingerie models before bans on foreign models working in Korea were lifted in the mid-1990s. This means that even today lingerie modeling still has a certain stigma that even bikini-modeling lacks, and despite the bikinis themselves obviously being just as (if not more) revealing. For more information, see #1 here for the most recent of many posts on that.
Still, Koreans are notoriously savvy consumers, so while I confess that I haven’t bothered to look at this late hour, I imagine that there will be many scathing reviews of this product available online. And, with obvious parallels in many other (more important) aspects of life in a democracy as young as Korea’s, to a certain extent this vibrancy of online Korean life is the result of and compensates for deficient legislation, although on the other hand in this particular case it is also stymieing the development of a healthy Korean consumer culture.
Tempting as it is to continue this post in that vein, let me wisely close here by pointing out that in the product’s defense, it can simply be returned with your money back before 2 weeks. And I seem to recall from my 2 viewings of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story that actor Jason Scott Lee playing Bruce Lee had two similar things strapped to his pecs in a scene where he was working on a script at home (i.e. not exercising, just like the women in this infomercial). Can anybody enlighten me? Am I dismissing…er…electric shock treatment(?) unfairly? As far as I know though, and to many teenage girls’ chagrin, the size of a woman’s pectoral muscles still has little effect on the ultimate size and look of her breasts, which are mostly connective tissue, “lobules,” and fat.
(For all posts in my “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)
1. On a technical note, since I wrote that post the PDF of the article is no longer free to download I’m afraid, so I would be grateful if anyone that knows of a free link an/or a copy themselves could pass it on for me to provide to others here. Alternatively, serendipitously my printer broke last week and I’m buying a printer/scanner to replace it, so I’ll be able to scan the copy I printed if anybody asks!
Creative Korean Advertising #16: The Male Gaze
( Source: Add Shots )
Given my Feminist pretensions, then usually I’d instinctively feel defensive about my decision to post an ad like this, and in the past this has often prompted me to write lengthy arguments about how, say, exposure of breasts per se shouldn’t be regarded as sexist. But with some notable exceptions (and from which I’ve learned a great deal from), whether through preaching to the converted, most of my readers being men(?), or some other reason, judging by the lack of detracting comments on those occasions then such justifications have probably proved unnecessary.
So, I’ll let it go: readers certainly don’t need me to spell out that on the one hand this ad is definitely objectifying, but on the other that men would behave exactly the same way even if women had achieved complete equality, and can decide for themselves if it’s sexist or not (I’m still happy to discuss that in the comments section though). In the meantime, I’m learning to feel less ashamed about the unabashed grins ads like this put on my face, especially the first ad in this post.
Actually, a much more interesting issue it raises is its directness. Of course objectifying women is hardly new or unique to Korean ads, but I can’t think of any other example that so blatantly incorporates the corresponding (sexual) male gaze into its message, and this makes it more sexual than, say, the sudden spate of couples kissing in Korean advertisements that is making news recently (see here, here, and here). On top of that, it actually went up way back in November 2007 too (see the details here), which raises some interesting questions:
- How common was it?
- Where was it posted?
- Were there any complaints?
- If so, was it removed from circulation?
- If not, why have there been no similar ads since?
- Or perhaps there have been, it’s just that I didn’t notice them?
If any readers can help me with any of those, I’d appreciate it. In the morning, and with apologies for not doing this first, I’ll scour Naver and so on and see if there’s anything in Korean on it.
Update: Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything at all about this ad in Korea, either at Naver or Yahoo! Korea, and which makes me wonder if it was actually released or not? But as for ads featuring the male gaze, I forgot about this one with Han Ye-seul (한예슬) for lingerie company Venus (비너스). From February 2008:
(For all posts in my “Creative Korean Advertising” series, see here)
Sexism is in the eye of the…Director?
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s rather a lonely place being a man studying sexism and gender roles in advertising sometimes. Not least, because one soon notices that those individual women and women’s groups motivated to write about such issues (naturally) tend to be those individuals and groups most offended by and/or have corporate interests in drawing public attention to, say, what they regard – and want others to regard – as sexist advertisements. But that is not to say that there is anything at all wrong with either per se: for instance, a quick browse of this blog reveals that Korean society, for one, could do with many more people of any ideological stripe writing (in English or Korean) about gender issues on the internet than, well, what appears to be just myself and a handful of academics these days, and while I do write here for pleasure I must confess that I am just as equally motivated by wanting to make a name for myself and thereby ultimately get paid to write (sorry).
Hence, while the raison d’etre of the aforementioned (and, admittedly, conveniently ill-defined) “seekers of outrage” arguably leads to a certain dogmatism and repetitiveness on their part then, perhaps my own leads me to just as regularly and repetitively counter that the use of women’s body parts in an advertisement isn’t necessarily sexist, and indeed I think that this commercial for the airbag system in the Renault/Samsung SM5 is a good case in point(!). Kudos to Brian in Jeollanamdo for finding it:
And the voiceover explains:
어떠한 상황에서도 안전한 엄마의 품처럼
충격이 작을땐 약하게 클땐 강하게
또 하나의 가치를 더해갑니다. SM5
Or roughly:
“Whatever situation you come across, you are as safe [in this car] as in you are in your mother’s bosom. The airbag responds softly when there is a small collision, and strongly when there is a large collision. Always adding value. SM5″
Hardly Shakespearean prose, but then the original Korean isn’t either.
Now, while I really hate to disagree so completely with a self-confessed fan of my blog (sorry, and congratulations on the engagement!), and would echo her points about this commercial merely being the latest in a long line of Korean ones that “would be right at home in a nostalgic ad collection, showing women in pearls and belted dressed hugging their (kimchi) fridges or seeming astounded by the technology behind washers while hubby is off at work,” (and you can read more about why that is and see examples in the second half of this post), I beg to differ when Ms. Parker says:
This ad leaves a bad taste in my mouth for a) the disembodied breasts (Mom doesn’t have a face?) b) the BOUNCY disembodied breasts (that are somehow protecting the child from the menacing tidal wave?) ~ what an insult to mothers!!!!!!!!!! and c) comparing a part of a woman’s body to a safety feature of a car.
Certainly the breasts are disembodied in this case, and although I personally see no difference between them and comparing, say the power of the car’s motor to a man’s disembodied pair of muscled legs, I do grant that: in general women’s bodies are objectified on a much much greater scale than men’s; that that objectification of men doesn’t somehow render that of women okay; and also that it is not up to women and/or feminists to act upon the objectification of men in advertisements either. But I still fail to see the problem with bouncing breasts when breasts do indeed bounce upon the impact of a child’s head, nor do I find any analogies with the warmth and safety of a mother’s bosom off-limits in advertising when the entire human race fully understands and appreciates the sentiment being referred to.
But most of all, I find it difficult to feel any sense of outrage because actually the very first thing the commercial reminded me of was this Mercedes Benz advertisement on the right from early last year (source):
And which raises some interesting questions, for while I can’t put my finger on it (no crass pun intended), I was initially at quite a loss as to why I (and I think most readers) would find this and not the commercial simply, well, disturbing: after all, both use precisely the same disembodied female body part(s) to advertise almost exactly the same products.
I am open to any alternative explanations for my conflicting reactions to them, but I title the post the way I do because I think that the solution lies in the fact that, while I find it very easy to visualize the undoubtedly female-devoid decision-making process in smoke-filled German boardrooms that lay behind the Mercedes Benz advertisement, I can’t imagine that anything like the same occurred for the *cough* simply nice Samsung commercial that emphasizes how the SM5 is a safe car for one’s family: it’s a wholly different vibe. Or in other words, and to reiterate my central point, disembodied female body parts are not a automatic feminist negative in advertisements, but the rational and motivations behind and contexts in which they’re used are equally if not more important criteria for judging them, yes?
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