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Not strictly gender-related sorry, but while Vogue Korea’s recent photoshoot of Lee Hyori (이효리) is not without a touch of class, that particular image above is probably the strangest of her’s I’ve ever seen!
1. “What is Aegyo and How Can We Kill It?”
Regularly expressing a disdain for displays of aegyo (애교) by Korean women, or “affected sweetness”, strangely it has never occurred to me to scratch below the surface of the phenomenon, let alone see how it could actually be an empowering tool to navigate a patriarchal society. I highly recommend reading The Joshing Gnome’s short, very readable, 5-part series then, which is rooted in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class: see here for Part 1, and don’t miss Kelly in Korea’s insights also.
2. “60% of Actresses Accosted for Sex by Bigwigs”
A rather confusing headline, as although the Chosun Ilbo article begins:
Six out of 10 actresses in Korea have been propositioned for sex by influential figures, according to a poll of 111 actresses by the Korean Women’s Development Institute commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission.
In the survey published Tuesday, 60.2 percent of respondents said they had been accosted for sex by senior figures in the broadcast industry or other prominent people. The poll was conducted between September and December last year and involved detailed interviews. Top actresses accounted for around 10 percent of respondents.
…It actually later says that only 21.5% received direct requests, but of course that figure is also unacceptable.
Probably commissioned in the wake of huge public reaction to the suicide of actress Jang Ja-yeon (장자연) in March last year, unfortunately they probably come as no great surprise, but at least attention is being drawn to the scale of the problem. See The Guardian, The Hankyoreh, SeoulBeats, and myself at #13 here for more if that is in the first you’ve heard of that, and which provide some context to the recent news from Korea Beat that a short-track skating coach has been accused of molesting a student, a university professor has been found guilty of sexually harassing one of his students, and a police officer was fired for placing a digital camera under the desk of his female co-worker.
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3. Gays in current Korean dramas
An excellent summary by Yuna at The Marmot’s Hole. Also, see Ask a Korean! for an interview with Kim Su-hyeon (김수현), writer of the drama Life is Beautiful (인생은 아름다워), actually the first in Korea to depict a gay relationship.
Not to imply that Daniel Henney (다니엘헤니) above is gay of course, but I do have a penchant for close-ups of attractive faces, and I also I just thought that my gay readers and heterosexual women might like it! Does anyone else think he looks a little like Roger Moore did in his James Bond days here? (via: PopSeoul)
4. “If you think that Korean women are fragile eastern flowers, you might want to think again”
Streetwise in Seoul writes brief biographies of Lim Su-jeong (임수정) and Choi Hyun-mi (최현미), a Muay Thai fighter and boxer respectively. See here for a video of the latter in action and for some more information on other Korean female boxers also, and you may also like Living on the Flipside, a blog by an expat boxer (with a Korean husband who is also a boxer!).
5. Go So-young knocked-up
A reminder that Koreans’ public attitudes to sexuality are much more subtle than they may at first appear (let alone considering the wide gap with their private ones), the news that Go So-young (고소영) was already 3 months pregnant upon her recent marriage to Jang Dong-gun (장동건) raised nary an eyebrow in Korea, despite strong taboos against premarital sex and cohabitation (albeit only that against the latter strong enough to dissuade it!). As commenter Oranckay explained, and well worth repeating, the reason is because:
…one needs to take into account that not all pre-marital sex is the same. There is a difference between just having sex and having sex with someone you are going to, or intend to, marry, and traditional/Joseon and even 20th Korea saw this as a big difference. Having sex on the premise of, and as consummation of, commitment, was the normal, socially acceptable way to have pre-marital sex. So valued was a woman’s virginity that a decent man could only sleep with her if he was ready to “take responsibility for her,” as the saying would go, and so on, because that’s what sleeping with her was supposed to imply. Fiction and non-fiction narratives (many known to me personally) are full of this kind of thinking. I know couples that decided not to have sex because they weren’t sure they were getting married, that didn’t have sex because he was going to the military and he wanted to be sure he’d come back alive before permanently “making her his,” as that would be too traumatic for her, and of couples that lived together (and obviously were having sex) before being married and it was acceptable because they were going to marry, had family approval, but couldn’t marry because maybe the girl’s elder sister wasn’t married off yet or they were both still in college but both sets of parents wanted to get them married after graduation, or one of those odd reasons. Maybe no money; whatever…
Read the rest here.
6. Korean Censorship: More Than Meets the Eye?
As watchers of Korean dramas may recall, back in January KBS decided to censor the scene below from the popular drama Chuno (추노), despite the fact that Lee Da-hae (이다해) was clearly fully-clothed. I didn’t comment it on at the time, but had I done so then I too would likely have joined the bandwagon of criticism and described it as absurd, completely unnecessary, and downright bizarre in light of the amount of skin that is displayed 24/7 on KBS, let alone on any city street.
And don’t get me wrong: I still consider it absurd. But via a comment on the French-language Korean cinema blog Dooliblog, I have since learned that it was in fact done to placate disgruntled fans of the show, critical of Lee Da-hae’s flawless skin as being too unrealistic for her role. Granted, how blurring her breasts specifically was supposed to overcome that remains a bit of a mystery, but the new information does at least provide a healthy reminder not to take instances of censorship in Korea at face value, and certainly not to automatically assume that the Korean media’s “default” option is for greater conservatism.
( Source. Note: don’t confuse the proclivity for blurring with that done to avoid indirect advertising )
When it does occur however, it can also easily be circumvented or even exploited, as skillfully done by rapper E.via (이비아), who (in my personal opinion) seems to compensate for a lack of musical talent by seeking controversy with everything she produces (see #1 here, #11 here, and #20 here). I may simply be biased because I’ve never liked rap however(!), and against that interpretation Twitterer David Frazer points out (update: actually regular commenter Gag Halfrunt) she has a penchant for “juxtaposing [an] innocent idol look with explicit lyrics”, and may in fact be “deliberately attacking the pretense that ‘it’s not sexy, it’s cute’ when under-18s do suggestive dance moves”. Can anyone more familiar with her enlighten us?
Regardless, it is curious why her latest music video Shake! (쉐이크!) is likely to be banned from public television…
…while advertisements like this remain completely acceptable:
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Meanwhile, the Korea Times reports that Twitter is providing a means for pornography websites to avoid restrictions placed on them by the Korea Communications Standards Commission, the country’s censorship authority for broadcasting and Internet content.
7. Body Image
I confess, sometimes keeping up with Korean gender issues almost feels like being simply scouring the internet looking for more things to criticize, but then there is so rarely any positive news when it comes to Koreans’ attitudes to women’s body images especially. Accordingly, I’ll simply pass on these links below rather than providing (admittedly increasingly repetitive) commentary also, although do check out this video on cosmetic surgery in Korea posted last week if you missed it:
- Many Teens Risk Health for Slim Figure
- Invasion of the body snatchers (mentions South Korea in passing)
- Wannabe Stars ‘Under Pressure to Get Cosmetic Surgery’
- Korea plastic surgery donation girl
Shift the focus of attention slightly however, and there have been positive recent developments. In an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “South Korea’s homemakers don’t want to be pegged” for example, John Glionna explains how “some stay-at-home mothers, known as ajumma, are fed up with being stereotyped as deadbeats who just love to gossip and shop. Kim Yong-sook is helping them forge a new identity”:
( Source: unknown )
Kim Yong-sook is fed up and she’s not going to take it anymore.
She’s weary of women between the ages of 30 and 60 being ridiculed as selfish and unstylish — bossy, gossiping magpies with bad perms who pinch pennies and hog seats on the subway.
They’re known as ajumma, a word long applied to married women with children but which in recent years has taken on a pejorative connotation that irks Kim.
Among many South Koreans, it’s now often used to conjure an image of homemakers who disdain full-time jobs to while away afternoons on park benches, in coffee shops and at social clubs, bragging about their children and, if they’ve got the money, go on shopping sprees.
At 58, Kim has empathy for her fellow ajumma, who she insists have too long been misunderstood and ridiculed. Ajumma are not deadbeats, cracks in Korea’s economic engine.
“Actually, we’re running the nation,” says the mother of one, a son. “We’ve got one foot in the house and one foot in society.”
A decade ago, Kim formed a support group called “Ajumma are the Pillars of the Nation.” Since then, she has attracted thousands to her declaration of independence. She’s written a book and consults with business and government.
Her message: Ajumma unite! Don’t take the snickers, behind-the-back finger-pointing and jibes lying down!
Read the rest here, and you may also be interested in ajummas’ very under-appreciated role in the creation of the kkotminam (꽃미남) phenomenon in the 1990s, and their increasing domination of young male idols’ fan-clubs a decade later.
Update – At risk of contradicting myself and trivializing what Kim Yong-sook is doing, these ajumma cartoons are classic nevertheless: after all, the stereotypes aren’t entirely baseless…
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8. Despite her protestations to the contrary, I’m no Picasso continues to provide sage advice about dating and sexuality in Korea, here demolishing another expat’s seriously flawed logic and stereotypes about both. Jumping ahead to next week’s Gender Reader, many of these are likely to re-emerge in the news that “Single Korean Females Eye Foreign Husbands“, so be sure to read her posts first!
9. “Writers and Women Writers”
Over at Korean Modern Literature in Translation, Charles Montgomery passes on an article by literary critic Bruce Fulton, who begins with “an amusing tendency in Korean Literature that all readers eventually catch”:
Readers of an earlier generation who happened upon the anthology Modern Short Stories From Korea, translated into English by In-Sob Zong (Chong In-sop),1 might be forgiven if they gained the impression that two varieties of human beings write fiction in modern Korea: writers and women writers.
10. Less than 1 in 10 executives is female
In a poll conducted by major recruiting service Incruit, it was found that “the larger the company, the less likely it was to employ women as leaders”: of the companies surveyed, those with fewer than 300 employees had 36,666 executives, of whom 3,279, or 8.9 percent, were female, while in bigger companies only 126 out of 2,474 execs, or 5.1 percent, were female.
See The JoonAng Daily for more.
The Grand Narrative 
I barely did a skim because Im taking a short break from a grueling writing marathon but I’d like to make a short comment on the video on “Shake!” by E.via. I don’t know what determines Korean society to censure what from what because they seem to send confusing messages all the time but when you said that this video most likely would be banned I wasn’t very surprised. Haha, I guess there is too much blatant and really weak (might I add) bootyshaking.
But i’m not commenting here about why it should be or shouldn’t be banned, because honestly the video wasn’t really that explicit except the whole, “엉덩이를 흔들어봐” bit. I mean the clothes maybe, but I’ve seen worse and the same. I just wanted to make a comment on how uncomfortable I felt watching it. It wasn’t because I have never seen Korean girls booty shake and be all sexy or whatever before. On the contrary, there is a lot of blatant sexual stuff that Korean singers promote in their dances and clothes and so on.
But I remember the first thing afterwards was thinking,”…everything about this video is awkward…” And I think the comment about juxtaposing this image of “innocent idol” with explicit lyrics” might explain why I felt that way. I mean if they were going to be innocent idols and then dance with some energy like they had a bowl of wheaties in the morning than fine, but the way they danced was awkward, like they were little girls that didn’t know how to maturely move with the sexual lyrics they were promoting.
The dancing did not match with the quick and fast beat that the video was playing. Especially when there was a picture of breasts of which she kind of shimmies really slowly, and I was like, “hmm…i’m not turned on by that.” It was like the body was a stiff manikin.
My reaction could have ultimately stemmed from the fact that dancing in this video was horrible period. If you want to booty and booby shake, shake with energy, and do it like you own it. Everything about this video emoted…weak. I would take it off the air just because it was a bad video, if I had my way anyways.
I’m a bit biased though I guess because I’m influenced by Latino guy and girlfriends who dance like they are going burn the floor off.
Alright, this comment had nothing deep to say, it was just an immediate shallow reaction to the video with horrible dancing.
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You’ve summed up my own feelings about the video exactly! I will keep an open mind about her in light of june has said about her below, but still, after watching this particular music video at least (I’ll admit its the only one I have though) then I’d have to argue against Greg’s interpretation that she’s “deliberately attacking the pretense that ‘it’s not sexy, it’s cute’ when under-18s do suggestive dance moves”: like you say, “If you want to booty and booby shake, shake with energy, and do it like you own it”, but instead it seems forced and very awkward, like that defiant spirit was never really there in the first place.
Indeed, it most reminded me strongly of the music video by former “race-queen” Jung Eun-joo (정은주) that I briefly mentioned back in July, her management agency explicitly acknowledging its resemblance to soft porn, (not unreasonably) arguing that she wouldn’t get noticed otherwise:
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lol that video of the “race-queen” boggled my mind. Is she popular? Well i’m sure she’s popular, maybe not openly mainstream but probably in the seedy underground of Korea. hehehe.
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I don’t think so: doubt anyone that isn’t a race queen follower will ever hear of her again!
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Yes, but, well… the awkwardness is not simply young women doing it. I had to laugh when a young Korean woman I know said to me not long ago — while living abroad and exposed to a ton of global media — how when Korean women are doing what they call “sexy dancing” what it comes off as is more like “attempting to sexy dance”: she described it as a certain inherent stiffness, awkwardness, and discomfort with the whole release/abandon/primailty of it. She actually mimicked the way a Western or South Asian pop star throws her hair back over her shoulder with a toss of the head, and then, again, but more awkwardly, and said, “… but that’s how Korean pop stars do it.”
And I have to admit: I’ve seen it too, for some time now. Brian in Jeollanamdo’s long-ago post about “Korean Sexy Dance” was spot on in some ways, mainly in that it’s so often ever so slightly awkward. I don’t think younger groups like the Wondergirls are particularly doing it because they’re young, since older performers, I’d argue, do it too. There’s something about female sexuality itself that seems threatening in a Korean cultural context, so that it’s nearly always tempered with cuteness — and this awkwardness seems to be what people are perceivfing as cuteness — or with children and family stuff.
There’s a certain degree to which this whole foreign “be hot and sexy” pop culture is something being tried on for size. Like Western underwear (which a number of Korean women have told me just doesn’t seem to feel like it fits “right” for some reason), we cannot expect it to fit without a few adjustments. An apt metaphor, given how I can’t be arsed to keep up with much of the pop culture here anyway.)
I’ve no opinion of the cleverness of the parody, but I agree, the dancing is pretty poor. Again: the sexiness seems to be primarily directly from body parts and from attire, facial expression, and something highly tempered with cuteness, rather than a function of the dancing.
Which is about what you’d expect for Korean society at this point. Er, more about that in a bit… soonish, I hope.
By the way, if you listen to the music in Ms. Jung’s video, directly above this comment, this is not music for young people. The audience for this song, and the audience for the softcore porn, probably overlap, and are set right in the 40s and 50s crowd. So it’s an understandable (though still bizarre and sad) strategy. What a bad video… I bet I could make a better one just with random gear in my apartment. Wow.
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Oops, and the most disturbing thing about the latter video is how much Ms. Jung resembles someone I know at work in a couple of the shots (like, say, 1:04)… which is kind of baffling me. It’s a bit like stumbling onto a video online of your church pastor one Youtube, except instead of his suit or vestments, he’s in leather chaps and topless on the bar grinding with three musclebound guys in nothing but their army boots.
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Oh, and…
Dammit I hate this tempo change that Korean pop music producers seem addicted to. Suddenly faster or slower in the middle of a song, for 20-30 seconds, then back to the original tempo. It only makes the original tempo feel off somehow, usually plodding or too fast, depending, no matter how big a change it was…
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Thanks for your comments Gord, although I don’t know what to add sorry, having said pretty much the same things for years now, albeit probably never quite so succinctly. To wit, I especially like your point about “a certain inherent stiffness, awkwardness, and discomfort with the whole release/abandon/primailty of it” as I think it’s by no means confined to just women, and is one big reason for the stilted development of the trance music scene here. Having said that, 15 years ago I would have said much the same about young Japanese people, but now trance music is pretty big over there, so perhaps things will change here too.
Could mention a similar experience to yours with Ms. Jung and your colleague involving a porn star and a female relative, so similar as to be very disturbing, but I’d probably better not…
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When I wen to Daejeon on my trip Korea a couple years ago we went to a dance club. 70% of the music was American Hip-Hop. The dancing was pretty stiff everywhere (until I had a few and hit the floor myself and probably looked like a chimp trying to scratch and itch he can’t find, then it became a horror show). One thing that really bothered me was the DJ’s LOVE of interrupting a song, way too frequently, to shout something out…absolutely killing the groove and trance like factor that can come when you have a good DJ. Is this common place in Korean clubs?
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But for one time when a friend came over from the UK and his Korean friends took the both of us to a club, I haven’t been to a Korean club for at least 7 years, and for precisely that reason. So it was common enough for me back then at least!
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About e.via, although her voice might be a little bit annoying, she is actually a good rapper, she’s been labeled as the female version of Outsider because of her speed rapping skills and she writes her own songs too, so she does have some kind of talent.
It seems like she wants attention by creating controversies, but I think in some of her songs she tries to criticize some of the girl-groups trends. For example, on e.via’s song ‘Oppa, Can I do it?” (오빠! 나 해도 돼?)’, seems like she’s kinda criticizing the trend of girl-groups by poking fun at how these girl-groups sing songs with sexual undertones but labeling it as just ‘innocent’ and ‘aegyo’.
E.via writes all of her songs so although she seems to want the attention that she’ll get with the songs being banned, I do think one of the reasons she write and release these type of songs is also as a way to poke fun and criticise the lolita trend of most korean girl-groups.
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You can find a little more about e.via on soompi:
http://www.soompi.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t296553.html
E.via doesn’t seem to be a 100% manufacted product of an ent company like most idols are. In fact, she doesn’t even seem to fit the ‘idol’ label. Like I said she writes and composes all of her music so she seems to have control over the image and concept she uses and on the way she promotes them. If I’m not mistaken, before she debuted she was also an underground rapper. One of her musical influences is Eminem, so e.via might have been inspired by Eminem’s music and his attitude (the way Eminem used to criticise pop artists and boygroups on some of his music videos and songs and therefore the way he used these type of controversies to promote himself).
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I was the one tweeting about e.via (perhaps I should have identiified myself earlier). Anyway, I think that june has better explained what I was trying to say about her. And thanks, June, for that soompi link. I see that e.via (or rrather Lee Ok Joo) has a degree in “Digital Creation” and works in advertising, so I’m tempted to regard e.via as a kind of performance art project with a record deal. :)
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Thanks also June, and I’ll try to keep an open mind about her in light of all that new information. But like I say above, that particular video doesn’t seem very convincing sorry!
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I love e.via her music is pretty good and she’s got some mad rapping skills. As it turns out for rappers, being banned is some what of a good thing, it generates more interest. It happened to epik high as well, they eventually started to get famous by the third album because their stuff was getting banned. But its true, only things that are subliminal fly under the radar, but when a celebrity makes a bold statement, they’re stuff is banned. It’s quite sad.
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You know, I wish English would start to use words like “androphilic” and “gynophilic,” because otherwise we tend to write phrases like “gay readers and women” that … don’t mean what we actually have in mind. You really meant “people who are attracted to men,” but what you wrote is “gay readers” (lesbians, too?) and “women” (all women are apparently straight, or at least attracted to men). I’m not actually picking on you; just our language. It can be difficult to say what we mean, because our standard phrases are heterosexist or at least heteronormative, and that’s what pops out. (Daniel Henney is very nice to look at, though, and I’m not telling you what my Kinsey number is.) ;)
Anyway, a thought-provoking roundup as usual. I am still waiting for someone to do a blog like this for Taiwan or Japan (although the latter would involve moderation of comments, if the morass at Pink Tentacle, etc. is any indication).
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No problem: was just sloppiness on my part while typing it up late last night. But while the words “androphilic” and “gynophilic” are very nice and pithy though, I think they’re likely to remain esoteric at best unfortunately…indeed, have to confess that even I didn’t know that “andro” meant to do with men, although I knew about “gyno” from when I studied “gynocentric” strands of feminism in a Women’s Studies course I did at university. Like a lot of PC language does then, “Gay readers and heterosexual women” that I’ve since edited to does sound somewhat forced and awkward, but the fact that the speaker/writer makes the effort to do so is the important thing.
If I had to change anything in the English language, it would be to make a gender neutral form for the third person singular, possibly “se” to mean “he” or “she”, but that’s likely to remain a pipedream.
I used to have plans to expand this blog to cover Japan and then Taiwan also, but given the amount of work and knowledge required just to cover Korea then that’s likely to remain a pipedream too. Let me know if you do find any counterparts though!
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About E.Via’s music video, all the intelligent things have been said so I’ll just talk about my impression. To me it was 1) funny and 2) slick.
Funny because the blatant ass (bottom? buttocks?) exposure is obviously parodic. It reminded me of Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction.
Slick with regards to the video effects, the clean backgrounds, the typography, etc. I didn’t know when I first watched the music video that E.Via “has a degree in “Digital Creation” and works in advertising” but it makes sense now.
Awkward booty dance parody + simple and slick design = enjoyment!
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Is it just me reading too much into the two prominently placed basketballs due to being overly exposed to selling with the help of sexual innuendos?
I like Rap but I find that Shake!-song extremely annoying! Banning it while the CF is okay for broadcast once again raises questions on how the censorship system in Korea works. The Caribbean Bay Teaser of SNSD & 2pm comes to my mind…
As far as I can see, you can get away with a lot of things in CFs but MVs can be pulled for the most ridiculous reasons.
Must go and read ‘What is Aegyo and how can we kill it’ now. If the article is only half as good as the headline, it will be worth my time!
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Oh yeah! I also want to know how Korean censorship system works!
Because they seem very biased at times and I find it awkard how they ban Rain’s ‘Rainism’, HyunAh’s ‘Change’ and Lee Hyori’s ‘Chitty Chatty …’ and also K.Will & outsider’s ‘Hypnosis’ song just(because it had a line saying ‘I feel like a mute’), DBSK’s ‘Mirotic’ song (because of ‘i got you under my skin’ line) but at the same time they don’t ban a commercial like Caribbean Bay with SNSD and 2PM that was the most explicit and straightfoward sexual korean commercial commercial i’ve seen in years.
I find it really weird Korea’s double standards.
And also really weird how they don’t seem to know when to properly use explicit sexuality images to promote stuff. Sometimes when they use explicit sexual stuff it’s used for something that doesn’t suit it and vice-versa. For example, Caribbean Bay is a family park and that commercial was supposed to be something aiming the family… But the commercial isn’t suited for people of all ages at all.
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I think the link between the breasts and basketballs is pretty blatant, but to be fair the rest of the photos in the photoshoot are completely devoid of any sexual symbolism, and like I said in the text are really quite classy (especially the first one!).
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I’m finding myself in the camp of people who find “Shake” clever parody. The 애교 influenced intonation, the relentless autotuning, cosuming choices, gratuitous and (I think deliberately – I also think this is what is causing the “weird, can’t put my finger on it” bad vibe for some people) badly timed booty shaking . . . it all speaks to me of lampooning girl bands.
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Likewise, I absolutely get the idea she’s mocking all those girl groups.
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I don’t think I’ll ever like her songs, but I’ll certainly keep an open mind about her then. Will try to translate the song sometime too.
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As for the Ajumma stereotype-altering woman, I think it’s good work that she’s doing (whatever it is that she is actually doing), but nothing can get round the fact that lots of ajumma do act exactly like that. It’s not so much that people think it’s funny to talk about ajumma doing those things, more that they are amused by the fact that ajumma really do those things.
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I was thinking about the Shake video last night, purely in an academic sence, mind you. It occurs to me that this could be brilliant marketing strategy.Consider the domination of the Korean music industry is dominated by JYP and YG family. Those two companies have their “star farms” where they take in pre-teens and spend years molding them to be the next Bi or SNSD. In that kind of environment, it would be impossible for someone not associated with those companies to get any sort of exposure whatsoever. However, if she can get a video loudly and publicly banned, then everyone who hears about it will get on the internet to view the video that’s “too hot for TV”. So, in getting herself banned, E.via is actually getting more, ahem, exposure than would be possible otherwise.
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Just a little correction: Lee Da Hae’s breasts weren’t so much censored in Chuno because of her skin, but because netizens were complaining that the show was showing off her cleavage too much and too often. There were a few scenes before the censored one that showed her in some state of undress, although not as many as has been exaggerated by netizens and the media (and she certainly wasn’t undressed as often as all of the men, who were constantly shirtless!). One of the most interesting aspects of this, I thought, was that the first time she showed cleavage, it was during an attempted rape scene, where her character was sobbing and trying to run away from her attackers. But apparently while watching this scene, all netizens could concentrate on was her exposed cleavage…
Anyway, great blog. I’ve been reading a while, but I think it’s my first time commenting? Keep up the great work – you always give me something to think about. :)
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Thanks for the clarification, and the compliments. In fairness to the netizens though, I’d probably only be able to focus on her cleavage too…come to think of it, I came across those scenes while looking for the picture in the post, so I speak from experience! (she was pretty exposed for a Korean drama I thought)
p.s. Not that I’m turned on by a rape scene of course, and actually I didn’t see that; instead, just a small sample of the numerous screenshots plastered all over the Korean internet.
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Hopefully some of you can help me with number three:
Gays in current Korean dramas
I’m trying to compile a list of dramas that feature actual gay characters and dramas that have a “gay” storyline where a character either pretends to be gay or is misidentified as the wrong gender.
So far I’ve got Coffee Prince (gender switch) Personal Preference ( Fey not gay)
Any others?
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Sorry, but I’m afraid I never watch Korean dramas, and so am unaware of any except those you mentioned. You could try at the links I provide in #3 though, or alternatively you could look for more information at Dramabeans, and/or pose the same question in their weekly Open Thread.
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