Lessons about Korean ads from a Hong Kong woman
How cool is it that someone so young makes a video starting like this:
Now, I’ve been here [in Hong Kong] for about…3 and a half years…and I think that if you look at common stereotypes, and you look at the way women are portrayed in the media, there are basically 3 main categories of role models for young girls to look up to. I call them: the sex-object, the virgin baby-machine, and the [bitchy] career woman. And the thing is, I can’t help but feel that it doesn’t matter which category a woman finds herself falling into…cause they all suck! And no matter what she chooses, she just can’t win!
Without deriving from her arguments, many commenters at Sociological Images note that those categories are equally valid in many other developed countries. But as pointed out by Emma, some of the things she mentions are at least more pronounced in the Northeast-Asian region:
…there are a lot of similarities between gender dynamics in HK and many other places in the world, but I do feel the dictate of virtue/virginity is especially strong here, along with a notion of ‘cuteness’ which I do not really recognize from Europe. I would say that the ‘sex babe’ model is not really something you see played out that much in daily life – it’s mostly confined to celebrity culture…
…I also know women from Japan and Korea, who tell me it is still very difficult for many women to balance between having a career and being ‘the good wife’, meaning a modest and submissive mother who mainly spends her energy on the family and the home-sphere.
( Source: p. 13 of my copy of 살아있는 한국어 [한자성어] )
Focusing on Korea in this post, see here for the strength of that “dictate of virginity”, and here, here, and here for more on how a very gendered notion of cuteness pervades Korean popular culture (although it does also affect men to a certain extent).
I broadly concur with Emma’s description of the Korean concept of the “good wife” too, but I’d add that the specific Korean term for that – hyeonmo-yangcho (현모양처; literally “wise mother good wife”) – very much predates the notion of working women within the confines of a nuclear-family and capitalist system (it’s actually derived from Chinese characters), and consequently is much more antithetical to the notion of working mothers than she makes out. Despite that, it’s still very much used and espoused to by many Korean women today, and this is surely at least one factor in Korea having one of the lowest female workforce participation rates in the OECD.
Much more interesting for me personally given my own interests in advertising though, were her comments about slimming advertisements by langmo (literally teen models: see here, here, and here), which she discusses from 1:08-1:58 in her segment on “the sex object”:
If you’ve been to Hong Kong, then you probably know what I mean by “the sex object”. For example, if you go into any MTR station, or if you take the bus, or if you pick up any tabloid or magazine, then you’ve probably seen a ridiculous number of slimming-centric advertisements. Usually, these ads feature hot girls with really, really big boobs…probably not that different from slimming ads in your own country. But in my opinion, you know, slimming ads in Hong Kong are NOT just slimming ads. I mean, they don’t just like, lower your self-esteem by making you feel incredibly fat…but they also play a very big part in mainstreaming the sexual objectification of women. And this is especially so because they tied up with, like, the langmo, or like young model culture in Hong Kong.
And commenter Syd does a great job of putting those ads into context (source, right):
I will agree with what many people are saying when they mention that in general, it’s pretty much the same was in the US, UK, New Zealand, etc. However, without being very versed in Hong Kong culture, I can see that in her examples there are at least slight differences in the values espoused. Most noticeably the ‘slimming ads.’ Of course, we get bombarded with ads for diet pills, machines, techniques, and more in the US as well (any female with a facebook knows that), but there is a distinct difference between the ads she showed and the ads I see on my facebook sidebar or on daytime TV. I very rarely see an American diet ad that is ACTIVELY selling sex (Anna Nicole Smith’s old Trimspa ads exempt, and that could arguably just being a play on her raunchy public persona). Yes, the woman will likely be shown in a swimsuit, and the word ‘sexy’ may be used, but the imagery is overall different. In American ads, there are usually before and after pictures, and possibly more dynamic pictures if it is for exercise rather than diet (ex; a woman smiling and lifting weights), and most drastically, as the rest could be chalked up to aesthetic differences, the implication is that being thin will make you healthy and happy in addition to good-looking. Most American diet ads are also quite clearly aimed at women.
In comparison, the Hong Kong ads shown in the video:
…don’t actually look much of anything that reminds me of diets (of course, that is my media exposure as an American). The poses the model is in, the fact that the model seems to be similar to the UK’s glamour models (while American ads focus on either celebrities or ‘real life’ women), and the general composition of the posters reminds me more of advertisements I’ve seen for night clubs, gentlemen’s clubs, and blowout parties than advertisements selling a particular product, or perhaps those ads for women’s clothing that seem inexplicably aimed at men. The ads are selling the same products and the idea that ‘it’s good to lose weight and be thin,’ but there also seem to be different motivations behind WHY it’s good to be thin. While that doesn’t sound like it would make that big of a difference, personally, I think it’s interesting to see even these small differences.
I agree, but just how representative are those of Hong Kong slimming ads as a whole? Judging by the surprised reactions of numerous male bloggers to them (albeit without – grrr – providing decent quality and/or non-copyrighted examples), then I’d argue that they’re actually exceptional. And if so, then one mild of criticism GennieOnline was that it was misguided of her to build that categorization of female role models on so few examples.
But where on Syd’s continuum do Korean slimming ads lie? Just 2 minutes on Naver revealing them to be as diverse as the related products and services available themselves however, then let us consider ads that feature idealized, Romanized “lines” for women’s body shapes instead, as discussed here, here, here, here and here:
( Source )
By definition, the most popular of those lines – the S-line – is just as sexually-objectifying and designed for the male gaze as langmo ads are; after all, according to one blogger, the term literally means “ample breasts and buttocks when viewed from the side” in English, and I’d be lying if I pretended that I can think of anything else when I see that screenshot of Go A-ra (고아라) above. Indeed, I’d argue that the cruder “tits and ass” would be a much more appropriate term given the tabloidish contexts in which it is usually referred to too.
But ads that “remind [you] more of advertisements for night clubs, gentlemen’s clubs, and blowout parties than advertisements selling a particular product, or perhaps those ads for women’s clothing that seem inexplicably aimed at men” S-line ads definitely are not. Instead, they seem overwhelmingly marketed towards women, albeit with the fact that women should aspire to have a (male-gaze driven) S-line taken as a given, the video commercial below being a good – and probably surprising – example of that:
( Source )
Granted, of course male viewers are also affected by such ads, and consequently be more likely to also judge women’s body shapes in such terms. But when you switch on the TV and see scores of women literally personally encouraging us to do so (see comment #21), for reasons explained here and here, then I’d argue that in Korea at least, popular culture is at least if not more repsonsible for that than advertising.
Moreover, that these ads are designed for female audiences seems even truer for ads for products associated with the plethora of other lines too, which is no great surprise seeing as they have no basis whatsoever in men’s biologically-driven female body preferences. Which by coincidence, was indirectly demonstrated to me by my male students just this week, fully half of whom mentioned an S-line in response to the inane question of “What do you think your date should look like” that was in their final oral test (even though I’d specifically told them not to use Korean, and to demonstrate to me that they’d learned the English words I’d taught them). In contrast, not a single one mentioned any other lines.
And finally, there’s the commercial origins of all the lines in the first place, which make this even clearer. For instance, as I mentioned in my presentation at Wellesley College last month, from which the following series of images was taken, one is the V-line for one’s face:
( Source )
But then here’s another contender for the term, appropriately enough from the Venus (비너스) lingerie company:
( Source )
In addition to both of those, pay particular attention to the Y-line and M-line in the diagram below:
( Source: unknown )
As while you can see that that particular Y-line appears to be something to do with the back, apparently there’s another which appears to be something to do with the neck:
( Source: unknown )
And yet there’s still one more, for a by now very familiar part of the body, and explicitly in competition with Venus. No great surprise as to the first letter of the company promoting this use of the term:
( Source: unknown )
Let’s not forget W Korea Magazine and its promotion of the W-line either:
( Source: unknown )
Albeit strictly speaking, W Korea didn’t invent that particular term itself, and it was more likely the creation of this chain of cosmetic surgery clinics in Busan:
( Source: unknown )
And finally, you may recall that the M-line was originally for men. So what’s this below?
( Source: unknown )
In that case, I’d argue that the M-line for men has been superseded by the the new buzzword “chocolate abs” (초콜릿복근), as discussed here. and I could (and did) go on with many many more examples, but I’m sure you get the point: all of these lines are clearly being created entirely for the sake of selling products that will supposedly help you attain them. And with the vast majority of the lines being for women’s bodies, then like I said, naturally women are overwhelmingly the target audience for them.
Of course, I’m sure that most of you knew that well before reading this post. But hopefully, it does make the possibility that such ads are actually being aimed more and more at men over time more interesting. And which ironically, is a trend I only noticed after seeing this ad for MBody Diet and Slimming Center (엠바디 다이어트 & 슬리밍) on the subway last week, even though it probably isn’t actually aimed at men:
Blame this post on that ad: I was struck by the model’s expression, which I found somehow lifeless, cynical, and jaded all at the same time, as if she was well aware that nobody would be focusing on her face. True, that may have been reading too much into it, and an image below from the website shows that she was rather more lifelike than she originally appeared.
But in combination with the wooden way in which she’s standing in order to show off her S-line – breasts thrust out like a figurine on the front of a ship (like Go A-ra); buttocks thrust back; the hip-pop; the “bashful knee bend“; and so on, then to me she appears almost as a caricature of herself, eerily reminiscent of children’s pictures of people created by cutting and pasting body parts of people from different magazines together.
With that frame of mind, then I’m sure you can appreciate why a comment by reader “sunwritesthings” received shortly after would really strike a chord with me:
…The V-line, S-line (and so forth) phenomenon is in fact very similar to what we call fragmentation of the female body in the American pop culture. In music videos, you’ll often find that the camera will focus only on certain parts of the female bodies, showing only the “objects” of interest of the viewer (assumed to be young males) rather than people. By focusing only on the line that the torso and the lower body creates, rather than the body as a whole, they’re sending the message that this female body does not need anything other than sexual attention.
Granted, I may simply be latching onto the term “fragmentation”, very apt for what I’m describing. But either way, I have been seeing more and more ads like it recently, although in fact it may already been going on for some time:
( “passing by” by David Smeaton; reproduced with permission )
And in particular ,it is epitomized by actress Lee Chae-young (이채영) on the right below, whose recent ads for AppleHip Korea seem more worthy of Maxim than anything women might actually be interested in. See galleries by the advertisement photographer here to see what I mean, particularly this one.
( Sources: left; right unknown )
And on that note, I both praise and silently curse GennieOnline for ruined my posting schedule and making me think so much this week, and throw the floor open to readers’ own thoughts on the target audience(s) of Korean slimming ads, on how they make you feel, and if and how you also think they’ve been changing. And please: with my own conclusion being such a speculation, then don’t feel inhibited from making your own!^^
Gender Studies 101: How the media perpetuates negative body images
( Source )
Alas, I’m still taking a break from blogging for another week or so(!), so let me just quickly pass on a Korea Times article on “X-lines” and women’s body images that I’m quoted in today. New readers who want to learn more about them, please see:
- Here for a quick summary of all the various “lines” used to describe women’s bodies at the moment
- Here for a much longer analysis and a discussion of how and why they’ve developed from being mere fads to become enduring parts of Korean media culture
- Here for the ways in which even prepubescent girls are socialized to develop a concern for achieving such lines in the future
- Here for the deep roots this Alphabetization craze has in various Korean philosophical and linguistic traditions, rendering it qualitatively different to similar sounding name-assigning in English.
- And finally here, here, and here for more on the fact that Korean women are the slimmest in the OECD, but still consume the most diet drugs.
Meanwhile, I’m very grateful to author Cathy Rose A. Garcia for asking for my input, and for then including so much of what I wrote in our email exchange. It seems almost churlish of me to critique it so severely after that, but I’m afraid I must, for it seems rather naive, almost disingenuous to write an article about how popular X-lines are when the only evidence for that comes from a company that has a vested interest in making people think so:
Three out of four female college students consider X-line, a term referring to a slim waist with ample breasts and hips, to be the ideal body shape, according to a survey by Amore Pacific’s V=B Program. The survey covered 1,000 female college students from Ewha Woman’s University and Dongduk Women’s University from May 13 and 17.
Granted, Cathy does mention later:
Amore Pacific’s V=B Program, which sponsored the survey of college students, offers a line of herbal Oriental beauty supplements. It recently introduced the “S-line slim DX,” which claims to reduce body fat and abdominal fat.
But the conflict of interest should have been made more explicit, and indeed is rather ironic in light of one of my quotes:
“Companies do have a vested interest in creating new, artificial body ideals that purchasing their products can supposedly help you achieve. And given the media’s overwhelmingly uncritical reporting and active dissemination of these ideals, then it is difficult not to conclude that the media is at least passively colluding with its advertisers in this regard,” Turnbull said.
Moreover, as I explain here, the X-line is by no means a “new” obsession of Korean women, but is at least 2 years old, originally created by – you guessed it - Amore Pacific, who created the monstrosity on a computer when Yoon Eun-hye’s (윤은혜) actual body failed to deliver:
( Sources: left, right )
In fairness, Amore Pacific did use more human-like realistic images of her body in some of its advertisements for the V=B Program that year, but those in no way compensate for encouraging women to obtain a literally impossible body shape in the first place. And call me picky, but any news article on X-lines is severely remiss in not mentioning that.
What do you think? Are my critiques of the article fair?
The Alphabetization of Korean Women’s Body Types: Origins
That the female body has occupied a central place in the Western cultural imagination hardly comes as news, says comparative literature writer Susan Suleiman. And while I lack knowledge of Korean counterparts to the historical examples in the visual arts, literature, and religion that she mentions, I don’t doubt that they exist.
What to make of the recent trend towards categorizing the female body and/or body parts into a plethora of different romanized “lines” however? Where do they fit in?
It’s been easy enough to prove that they have become a pervasive feature of Korean popular culture; indeed, they’re so much so that they’ve become somewhat divorced from the (idealized) women’s bodies they were first used to describe. But those earlier observations of mine were devoid of context, something which began troubling me once I paused to consider the source of the above article on the most recent manifestations of the trend, about Korean cosmetic surgeons classifying woman’s buttocks into four types. To be precise, it raised two questions, which I would appreciate readers’ help with.
The first is that is this trend of categorization qualitatively and/or quantitatively different to that which occurs in the Western media? As to the former, probably not: I need hardly point out the similar obsession with women’s bodies there, or that it also provides often impossible ideals to live up to. And however much English speakers may find Koreans’ romanization habit in this particular case both curious and amusing (and thereby memorable), arguably it merely reflects Koreans’ general obsession with English, grafted on to an interest in women’s body forms that is not dissimilar to that of the West. Indeed, even some native English sources are beginning to describe women’s bodies in terms of letters (see below), and while that failed to catch on, are they really different to describing women’s bodies in terms of bananas and hourglasses and so forth?
( Image sources: top; bottom. The results are from this 2005 study )
Forgive me for stating the obvious perhaps, and I mention all that not to exonerate the Korean media for the ways in which it warps and distorts women’s body images: quite the opposite. Rather, that if I still feel that it does so more than its Western counterparts nevertheless (and I do), then that something more than my gut feeling is necessary to convince skeptics. And perhaps the difference simply lies in the much greater extent to which S-lines and V-lines and so forth are mentioned? After all, not for nothing do I describe them as a “pervasive feature of Korean popular culture.”
Unfortunately however, providing empirical proof of that is rather difficult, at least for a humble blogger. But I can provide indirect evidence in the meantime, which I would very grateful if any readers could add to.
The first is the source of the article on women’s buttocks I’ve translated at the end of this post. While it may not be obvious from the opening image, it is actually on the front page of Focus, a free daily newspaper: the image on its left, not coincidentally an advertisement for a chair which supposedly shapes one’s buttocks, part of an accompanying cover.
To your average Westerner, I’d wager that this choice would immediately single out the newspaper as a tabloid – “Women have four kinds of ass! Read all about it!” – but I’ve been asking my 20-something students’ opinions of Focus and other newspapers over the past week, and only a minority considered it such. And why would they, considering that the article was also covered by numerous other news sources (see here, here, and here), including the authoritative Hanguk Kyeongjae, a business newspaper, and which even had a helpful graphic?
Ergo, the bar for tabloid journalism is rather lower in Korea, and this extends to mainstream Korean portal sites, about which I wrote the following in my last post:
Unlike their English counterparts, you have roughly a 50% chance of opening Naver, Daum, Nate, Yahoo!Korea and kr.msn.com to be greeted with headlines and thumbnail pictures about sex scandals, accidental exposures (no-chool;노출) of female celebrities, and/or crazed nude Westerners.
To which I should have added - of course – numerous thumbnail pictures of female celebrities’ S-lines, and also a warning to never look at any of the otherwise innocuous images in the “image gallery” at the bottom of Yahoo!Korea in particular, for if you do you’ll frequently be greeted with advertisements for videos of celebrities’ nipple-slips and so on alongside those birds, flowers, and interesting landscapes.
And if portal sites are fair game, is it any wonder that children are also encouraged to be concerned about their S-lines and so on? And don’t get me started on ubiquitous narrator models.
Finally, consider what Javabeans wrote on the subject, a blogger on Korean dramas who is a much more authoritative source on Korean television than I will ever be:
…while this [romanization] practice is seemingly frivolous on the surface, it actually belies much more pernicious trends in society at large, when you have celebrities vocally espousing their alphabet-lines and therefore actually objectifying themselves as a conglomeration of “perfect” body parts rather than as whole, genuine people. (my emphasis)
With that combination, something has finally clicked for me: why it is so difficult to find Korean language sources on sexism in the media, and on advertisements in particular? I’ve been looking on and off for years now, and while I accept (and would be more than happy to learn) that perhaps I’ve simply been using the wrong search terms and/or looking in the wrong places, that it is so difficult in the first place is surely telling. A solution though, is perhaps provided by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust – no, really – who had this to say about anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany:
A general problem in uncovering lost cultural axioms and cognitive orientations of societies since gone or transformed is that they are often not articulated as clearly, frequently, or loudly as their importance for the life of a given society and its individual members might suggest. In the words of one student of German attitudes during the Nazi period, “to be an anti-Semite in Hitler’s Germany was so commonplace as to go practically unnoticed.” Notions fundamental to the dominant worldview and operation of a society, precisely because they are taken for granted, often are not expressed in a manner commensurate with their prominence and significance or, when uttered, seen as worthy by others to be noted and recorded. (Vintage Books Edition, Feb. 1997; p.32)
Not lost or transformed, but equally obtuse to someone from another culture perhaps, and which I’m still only just starting to make a dent in.
But a good grounding for that would be the origins of Koreans’ obsession with romanizing women’s bodies, the second question the article raised for me. Or to be honest, an element of the subject I realized I’d paid little attention to when, serendipitously, Korean reader Chorahan provided this extremely informative comment on the subject on another post. With permission, I am happy to now place readers in her more than capable hands:
…I think the specifics of the alphabetization of Korean women are best approached in the context of the classification of women into certain rigid subtypes (read: simplified stereotypes) of women. The S-line and V-line are part of the ‘formula’ for the ‘pretty girl’ here, as are humongous pupils in big double-lidded eyes, cosmetically unaided pallor, bone-tight ligaments, etc. I would suggest that people here perpetuate this mind-boggling state of sheeple-ness precisely because this ‘formula’ serves as helpful, socially constructed and ordained criteria – with which to deduce the type of woman being dealt with, and to adjust manners to suit.
Manners are adjusted according to the woman’s ‘type’ because it is widely taken as a given that certain things can/cannot be said/thought about women depending on how they look (value-judgment wise). The socially ‘accepted’ or ‘conceivable’ scenario that follows any such encounter is rigidly stratified into according variations. My take on this phenomenon is that this is directly derived from a warped and popularized Confucian principle popularized in the Chosun dynasty called 정명론 (正名論), or literally ‘right name idea’, in which the ‘father should be fatherlike and the son sonlike etc.’ A beauty should be treated as a beauty, or a ‘talking flower’; an ugly girl can be laughed at/with (hence the ‘ugly’ – or, as I like to put it, ‘uglified’ – comedian typification.)
I’m a Korean girl and I’ve lived in Seoul nearly all my life, going through the average Korean educational system to enter the undergraduate level here. Inferring from the numerous social contexts in which I’ve encountered such blunt references to conventionally ugly/pretty features, I would venture the possibility that in originally familial, communal societies where everyone had to stick together whether they liked it or not, the ‘insult’ was not only an insult per se, but also employed as a form of veiled endearment. This is widely considered the ideal sort of 부담없는 (easygoing) interaction between two close individuals – dialogue employing insult as endearment, or ‘constructively realistic advice to help you in the real world’ – and is often the most commonly resorted-to excuse for horrific verbal abuse. (Coloring vacuous praise according to these featural types is also just such a form of ordained interaction, considered honest and respectful and completely normal.)
I do not, however, think that this should simply be chalked up to individual stupidity on the part of people that blindly follow this line of thought/action – quite the contrary. I think it’s very telling that the homogenizing retardation of the populace in this regard is and has always been spearheaded by *the commercial/entertainment media sector,* which is – big surprise – notoriously homogenized/stereotyped! It has even resorted to homogenizing certain snapshots of stereotyped ‘diversity’ or ‘unconventionality’ in the form of teen idols that are held up on pedestals as somehow being harbingers of Korea’s ‘openness’ and ‘creativity of the youth’.
As a twenty-something Korean woman towards whom those commercials are directly marketed, I find all this very sad and disgusting and lame, and I am very troubled by the thought that people actually think Korean society is improving/ has improved in its bridging of (sexual or gender-based, if that’s your cup of tea, though I don’t think that’s all) dichotomies (if dichotomies are indeed criteria on which to issue any normative judgment.)
I think it is not people being stupid, but the other way around (stupid being people, or stupidity donning the guise of specific individual avatars) : the root of the problem (of not seeing people for the people they are, and adjusting social perception/performance according to formulas hammered in by peer pressure since birth) is a sort of warped ‘commodification of human beings’ + ‘Confucian backwash’ that is only being exacerbated as people constantly look to external/ international solutions to symptoms that stem from an overlooked, simplified, but inherently endogenous disease that must be addressed within its own context.
I definitely think something fundamental has to give. This isn’t just an odd cultural quirk to cluck tongues over – this S-line, this V-line trope, this alphabetization of women just as much as the stereotyping of men – it’s seriously symptomatic of some skewed rift in the goodness and saneness and kindness of people here vs. the expressed, contorted manifestations of such potential strengths.
Not exactly concise, but this is my very understandably strong opinion regarding the topic of this post. But I’m no sociologist, so I wouldn’t know.
p.s. In first paragraph – sorry, this could be misunderstood, i don’t propose any normative suggestion – I’m suggesting as an explanation that people ‘are perpetuating’ etc (end)
( Sources: far above; above )
Despite all that context however, one still shudders at the thought that the following was the first thing millions of Koreans read one November morning:
Korean Women Have 4 Types of Buttocks
The results of a survey about the different types of Korean women’s buttocks have just been released.
Baram (wind) Cosmetic Surgery Clinic, which focuses on operations on the body rather than the face, performed operations on the lower bodies of 137 female patients in 2008-2009. An analysis of their different types of buttocks was performed, and the results released on the 23rd of November. All in all, Korean women have 4 types: “A”, “ㅁ,” “Round,” and “Asymmetrical/Imbalanced.”
According to the team of doctors there, women with type A have a lot of accumulated fat in their thighs, making buttocks look big and their legs short, and those with type ㅁ, a lot of accumulated fat in their thighs and around their waists, making their hips look relatively narrow. Both comprise 47% of Korean women each. On the other hand, those with relatively smooth and curved hips and buttocks have a Round type, and those with an asymmetrical or imbalanced pelvis have an asymmetrical or imbalanced type, compromising 4% and 2% of Korean women respectively.
As the doctors explain, even though Korean women’s bodies are Westernizing, Korean women still have these 4 East-Asian types of buttocks. According to the doctor in charge of this study, Hong Yun-gi, “because Korean women’s buttocks don’t have much volume at the top, but have a lot of accumulated fat at the bottom, they look a little droopy” and so overall “their buttocks look boring overall, and their legs short.” (end)
No, the extrapolation from 137 cosmetic surgery patients to all Korean women was not a mistranslation I’m afraid. And I beg to differ on Korean women’s buttocks looking boring also, but that discussion is probably best avoided. Instead consider, first, Jezebel’s take on “the ridiculousness of dressing for your shape,” many guides to which came up as I researched this post, especially this one from The Daily Mail, a UK tabloid. Next, another case of Korean romanization gone mad that I originally planned to look at alongside the above, albeit of women’s dresses rather than their bodies per se:
And finally, literally the very first thing that came to mind when I saw the Korean article on women’s buttocks: the following picture from a post on male objectification from Sociological Images, because I wondered if men’s buttocks would ever similarly be categorized. But given that a page exists on Wikipedia for “female body shape” for instance, but not on male’s, then I suspect not in the near future.
On a side note, and not that I want to repeat the experience anytime soon, but searching for images of Korean men’s buttocks instead proved impossible, at least on Korean portal sites. But perhaps again…*cough*…I’m not looking in the right places?
28 comments