But first, let me extend my warm thanks to Professor CedarBough Saeji (a.k.a. @TheKpopProf) for her invitation to talk on this topic to her class last week. Next, to her students also for their many interesting questions and observations, given to me both in person and as they live-tweeted the event!
As there were too many tweets to respond to individually afterwards however, and because most were related to some key points I’d ended up having to rush over because I’d wasted far too much time showing videos of time constraints, I decided to clarify them in a long thread instead. Please click to read, and, because the more in the discussion the merrier, please feel free to respond yourself, either on Twitter or in the comments section below.
Finally, seeing as we’re on the subject of talks, let me also remind everyone that if you too would like me to give one to your own class or organization, whether in person or via Zoom, then I’ll probably jump at the chance if our schedules work out. So please get in touch! :)
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
Time may be of the essence though—a note on the signup page says there’s a deadline of April 10 to register. While that may actually just be referring to entering the draw to win a free copy of the book, and indeed a moment ago I was still able to register to attend, if you also want to do so I recommend registering as soon as possible just in case.
But I still recommend attending our own meeting too of course!
If you’re interested, please contact me via email, or leave a comment below (only I will be able to see your email address), and I will contact you a week or so before the event. To keep the meetings remain small and informal, and to help me ensure they’re as safe a space as possible, there’s a limit of 12 participants including myself, so please get in touch early to ensure your place (and give you time to order and read the book!).
See you on Zoom!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
Needless objectification, and a power trip from being called Oppa. WHY do advertisers assume cishet men genuinely prefer these?
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes. In case of any lingering doubts that it’s the same model, check out the wisps of hair on her right.
“You’re a man in his 40s, aren’t you?” reads the offending ad’s headline. Ouch. I scroll social media for the dopamine hits thank you very much, not to be reminded of how much my knees hurt.
I also really, really don’t like being pegged as someone who’d prefer to see a woman’s body without her face either. But it’s what the ad says which is more repugnant, so let’s address that first.
The product being advertised is a diet supplement. (Yes, I thought it was for something to help with “men’s stamina” too.) At the top, the text about it extols, “I only took a packet a day and it took care of everything. I levelled up from being called an uncle to an oppa! These days, it’s time for men to take care of their diets too!”. Then, the headline next to the model, “You’re a man in his 40s, aren’t you?” and “We will ensure you’ll never be called ajeossi again!”
I’m not judging the implied huge age gap with the model. One sex being used to sell products to another will always be a thing too, however absurd it feels in this particular case. What I do have a beef with, is encouraging myself and my fellow ajeossis to crave being calling Oppa by women, especially those like her who are much younger than ourselves.
Although we’d like to pretend it really wasn’t all that long ago we were dancing to Wax‘s classic in nightclubs in our 20s, when the word had more innocent and romantic connotations, really we know most women now find the word distasteful at best. We also know they especially resent how all too many older male colleagues, acquaintances, friends, and bosses, taking advantage of their male privilege, will sometimes demand they perform infantilizing aegyo to them at company dinners and so on—which will invariably include demands to call them Oppa.
The men who still ask women to do so regardless then, only to claim it was just harmless fun later, are being completely disingenuous. The only reason any man does so in 2022 is to get his ego boosted, and to put the younger women being asked in their place. Behavior which whoever at Sery Box and/or enigmatic shopping site 형만믿어 responsible for the ad would know full well, and absolutely shouldn’t be encouraging.
To give a recent for instance, in a surreal scene from an episode of the Omniscient Interfering View talkshow in February last year, veteran, internationally acclaimed actor Moon So-ri calmly explained she didn’t call her four year-older husband Oppa because its cute connotations made the woman using it seem childish, whereas she wanted a relationship of equals. One male panelist’s tactless, boorish response to her thoughtful comments? To ask her to call him Oppa instead. When she refused, he demanded a flustered young K-pop star do so in Moon’s place, ultimately forcing Moon to cover for her to save her further embarrassment.
문소리배우가 오빠라는 단어가 가진 젠더권력 존나 알아듣기 쉽고 친절하게 설명해줬는데 애초에 들을 생각도 이해할 마음도 없는거 너무 한남과의 대화 그자체임 https://t.co/d3S5WPIT1x
The top tweet: “Actor Moon So-ri explained the gender politics of the word in an easy-to-understand and non-accusatory manner. He was just such a typical sexist han-nam though, with no intention of listening to or trying to understand her whatsoever.”
On top of all that, the model is headless. No pun intended.
While having bodies or their various parts presented in isolation isn’t inherently bad in itself, and is a practice that people rightfully tend to judge in context, the cumulative effect on the people it’s usually done to day in day out—e.g, women overwhelmingly more than men, and obese people in news reports about them—is to dehumanize them in the minds of observers, even if they belong to the group being objectified themselves. It’s also been demonstrated that if my fellow ajeossis and I consider a woman attractive, we’d also be much more likely to respond to her returning our gaze instead. The implied enthusiastic consent to our interest through a wide smile can be a pretty big deal too.
All of which begs the question of why, if Sery Box and/or 형만믿어 clearly had access to the same stock photos of the same model that Centheal and/or 하태핫태 responsible for the left ad had, did they not also select one with her smiling face?
I’m no photographer or graphic designer, but I refuse to believe there’s anything particularly significant in terms of aesthetics or layout that would compel the choice they did make. Even just raising the bottom of the image just enough to show a smile would have made a big difference.
I’m overanalyzing, I know. Numerous surveys have revealed that Korean internet ads in particular have gotten distinctly smuttier over the past decade, and the Oppa ad is really nothing special in that regard. Less a patriarchal conspiracy, than simple laziness.
Yet there’s something to the juxtaposition nonetheless.
But if you could please bear with me a just a moment longer before elaborating, there remains the task of confirming the gender divide in the two ads first. So again, the offending one is indeed explicitly aimed at men, and the link it takes you to only features two images of a woman—Kim Tae-hee—among the many more of main celebrity endorser Lee Jung-jae, as well as numerous images of muscled men. Most of Sery Box‘s products are actually aimed at women however, and feature Kim Tae-hee and various other female celebrities (with absolutely no men) in their advertising on their various webpages for those.
During rush hour, when men are glued to Facebook on their phones, Korean shopping mall target men with ads like these. The logic being, the images on the left will get their attention, even though they’re not interested in actually buying women’s clothes. Then, when they invariably look away, the next things they will see are the ads for products they will be interested in buying on the right. Image source: The PR News.
In contrast, the left ad (now below) is advertising a fortified extract of garcinia cambogia (가르시니아 캄보지아 추출물) sold by Centheal. Although there’s nothing on their website to explicitly indicate they’re targeting it only at women, only female models are featured, and the logo on the packaging has a woman’s waist incorporated into it. There’s also a “WomaNature” mentioned, although I’ve been unable to pin down what that refers to. Meanwhile, the screenshot actually being saved by me in February 2021, just before the Korean New Year, the text at the top reads “With Seollal approaching, let’s enjoy holiday food with worrying about it.” Then, next to the model, “This Seollal, don’t become like one of those people who’s put on weight from staying indoors all day due to Covid. Instead, take care of your body [even] while eating all that [holiday] food. [Take advantage of this] half-price discount event to celebrate the holiday.”
Finally, let me post the other ad again for the sake of that juxtaposition:
I’m writing here today because personally, seeing them together, I was instantly reminded of a surreal experience I had in 2010, when I innocently switched tabs between Elle Korea‘s photoshoot of Lee Hyori, and then MSN Korea’s article about it (which I’ve presented in GIF form below). Someone at the latter, an ostensible news site, had apparently found the body of then Korea’s biggest sex symbol inadequate:
That particular juxtaposition sparked the beginnings of my own learning journey over the next decade about Korea’s many, many problems with female body-image. Whereas writing about this more recent pairing, has forced me to think deeply about, first, the modern connotations of the word Oppa, which frankly I wasn’t originally going to mention at all (I wasn’t joking about my intense dislike of cishet men being pigeonholed as preferring headless women); and second, what other baggage from my formative years in Korea I absolutely need to jettison over the next decade if I want to continue my quest to properly understand Korean misogyny—which “Call me Oppa” ultimately is.
I hope you too find what’s revealed by the juxtaposition featured today, just as telling and motivating to learn more about as I have.
…Science says she’d be foolish not to take advantage of them.
“Eyebrows have a huge impact on the impression you make”? Estimated reading and viewing time: 5 minutes
This image is from the back of a beauty parlor’s standee. The front, which I saw first, likewise featured an attractive woman. But that woman? I didn’t give her a second thought as I approached the parlor. There was nothing to make her stand out from the hundred or so other attractive women in ads I’d already seen on my walk that night. Whereas the woman on the back, who seemed to return my interest rather than avert her eyes? Of course that would elevate her above her rivals. But did you know that dopamine was the reason why? Which attractive women will trigger in cishet men’s brains only if they stare back?
All is explained in this one minute video from the Psychology TikToks channel, part of a 2010 lecture on human sexual behavior by Stanford University biology and neurology professor Robert Morris Sapolsky. But I encourage you to click on the video of the full lecture below that instead, which I’ve timed to start at 43:55 to help give you some quick context before that clip begins at 45:10:
Granted, no source is mentioned, maybe because it was in the syllabus (but see here for a student’s extensive notes), and I’ve been unable to find any possible candidates; I’ll keep looking. Another issue is that Sapolsky didn’t immediately follow his point with how cishet women reacted to attractive and ugly men returning their gaze (let alone anyone else on the LGBTQ spectrum), as I’m sure that’s what everyone in his audience was wondering. Or was that actually covered by a later comment about switching the genders?
Also granted, whatever your gender and sexual orientation, you too may prefer the back picture, for reasons that have nothing to do with dopamine. If so, having some additional chemical motivation isn’t mutually exclusive with sharing them. For instance, from an advertiser’s perspective, that picture surely ties in with the parlor’s various eyebrow-related services much better than the essentially random one on the front does. Noteworthy too is how, in discussions about the male gaze, examples of women staring back are frequently praised by women for having agency by “being aware of,” “controlling,” and “challenging” that gaze. In fact, as you can see from the links at the bottom of the post, I’ve written tens of thousands of words doing so myself, and wince at the memory of how much caffeine—not dopamine—was involved.
It’s also in those posts that I’ve expressed my anger and frustration with commentators on the female gaze who take it as a given that myself and all other cishet men actually prefer passive, compliant women we can lord over. Say, because that’s the image of women the male-dominated mainstream pornography industry, well known to be a bastion of feminist representation, overwhelmingly provides us with.
And I’m still angry and frustrated, frankly. Imagine if I likewise gave a one hour talk on what, say, cishet women want in men, without providing any evidence whatsoever that I’d asked a single one of them. It would be classic mansplaining.
It brings a certain satisfaction then, to learn that if some commenters won’t apply the same standards to themselves, there is at least now (potential) scientific proof that cishet men aren’t necessarily the domineering brutes that they describe them as ;)
The Grand Narrative 
