After all, why settle for mere sausage legs when you can have drumsticks instead?
Found in passing while flicking through a discarded copy of the Korean version of the Metro International, a free daily newspaper. While it’s obvious what it’s advertising, I was sufficiently curious to find out what it was saying exactly:
나는 원래 윤아보다 다리가 섹시했다
다만 쥬비스 관리를 몰랐을 뿐!
Originally my legs were sexier than Yoona’s, but the only problem was I didn’t know about the care that Juvis (the name of the diet clinic) could provide.
내 다리는 원레 백만불짜리 다리,
세월의 무게를 견디기위해
점점 두꺼워져 갔지
이제 쥬비스로 관리받아
예전의 각선미를 되찾을거야!
Originally my legs looked like a million dollars, but in order to get through life my legs got thicker and thicker. Now, through Juvis I am going to receive a service that will restore my legs to their former beauty!
더 즐거워진 쥬비스 체험 EVENT
A more enjoyable Juvis experience event
3월부터 쥬비스의 다양한, 관리시스템이 새롭게 시작됩니다! 이벤트 기간 동안 신규 패키지를 동록하시는 고객께 새로운 관리시스템 중 2개의 이벤트 프로그램을 무료로 체험할 수 있는 혜택을 드립니다.
From March, Juvis will introduce a more varied body care system. For those that register, you will receive the benefits of experiencing two event programs for no extra charge.
여자가 꿈꾸던 라인
쥬비스에서 관리하세요 몸이 즐겨운 다이어트
The line that women have dreamt about
Get the care and a diet enjoyable for your body at Juvis
쥬비스 다이어트가 즐거운 이유:
몸이 힘들지 않아서 즐겁다
요요를 완벽히 잡아서 즐겁다
부작용이 없어서 즐겁다
탄력까지 살려줘서 즐겁다
원하는 부위가 빠져서 즐겁다
추가 부담이 없어서 즐겁다
Reasons why a Juvis diet is enjoyable:
It is not tiring for the body
Your weight will not go up and down like a yoyo
There are no side-effects
You will revive your body’s elasticity and bounce
You can lose weight from the body parts you want to
Writing earlier this month, I was very impressed by the rhetoric of the launch of Adidas Korea’s “Me, Myself” campaign, and especially by the healthy-looking models used. But one fair criticism by frequent commenter Sonagi was that while on the one hand they definitely weren’t “the gaunt-looking models of most fashion shows,” were all “healthy and glowing,” and may well have shown “that women could look stylish while working out at the gym, doing complicated yoga moves or swimming in the pool,” on the other hand they certainly didn’t appear to have anything at all like the physiques of actual athleteseither, somewhat diluting the campaign’s supposed message (source, left: Yonhap News).
And it’s not hard to think of attractive athletes who could have—nay, should have—taken their place instead, a point which I was suddenly reminded of earlier today when I was flicking channels and happened to come across IFBA Bantamweight Champion Kim Ji-Young (김지영) in action, her—let’s face it—feminine appearance being so in contrast to the bulk of her counterparts (in both senses of the phrase!) that I immediately sat up and took notice. As it happens, she was in her hometown of Yeongdong City, successfully defending her title for the fourth time (against Dennapa Sukruaangrueng of Thailand).
(Update, September 2014: Reading over this post five years later, I’m cringing at—among other things—my implication that women with bulky physiques are any less feminine than Kim Ji-Young, and the notion that they could never be accepted as endorsement models for sports clothing companies).
Unfortunately, as images of female athletes tend to be unflattering, taken as they are at instants of extreme pain, anger, passion or even all three (not that those of male athletes aren’t either) then in lieu of a video of the fight I saw then that photo of her above and this on the right from 2005 (source: Yonhap News) will have to do for my purpose, which is to ask you if she could realistically be a model for Adidas or any other clothing company? Why or why not? Yes, granted, she does has bigger arms than average (naturally), but although this is not to say that people of either sex can only find athletic role models in those of a similar (or desired) size to them, her diminutive height and weight (“bantamweight” means 51-54 kg) and small bust do make her very similar physically to a lot of Korean women, albeit having muscle where they usually have fat. Moreover, given that the notions that models “have to” be tall and thin would supposedly be the very antithesis of the Me, Myself campaign, then I can’t think of any reason to reject her for something like that especially.
As it happens, there is already a Korean female boxer who makes a great deal of money through sponsorship, commercial and TV appearances: Choi Shin-hui (최신희), whom I found about via this slightly old but otherwise excellent introduction to female boxing in Korea over at Korea Beat, and it turns out that two years ago at least there was quite a boom in the sport, with Korea having several world champions. I’m almost a little reluctant to post any pictures of her however, as with the vast majority available being modeling shots (including this one below for Vogue magazine in 2004 for example; see here for the article), then they’re naturally going to present her in a much better light than the few and quite frankly rather hideous ones of Kim Ji-young in action out there. So I include a link to this and this other one (scroll down) of Choi Shin-hui from that period too, not to imply that she’s ugly in them—quite the opposite—but more to demonstrate that they’re certainly less flattering than those to be found in advertisements, which just again goes to show that however unglamorous they—or you and I for that matter—can appear in photos of them grunting away at their sport(s) can be, surely Kim Ji-young and/or other athletes like her should have been in consideration for even a one-off, token appearance at a launch for products that are supposedly aimed at athletic women? Even just the minimal consideration towards the campaign’s professed message that that would have demonstrated would have been much better than none at all.
Or am I making too much of it? Do you think athletes weren’t used simply (and perhaps quite legitimately) because of their inexperience with a catwalk? Or is there another simple reason I’m overlooking?
Regardless, if you’ve read this far then you’ll probably also be quite interested in and inspired by this story of 18 year-old Choi Hyun-Mi, who defected with her family from North Korea in 2004 and on whose boxing success they now entirely rely on for financial support (Update: Sorry that the link has died; instead here’s a video below). And I have one final request too: somewhere on this list of expat blogs is one I used to read by a woman in Seoul who happens to be a female boxer and very active in the boxing scene, but I’ve completely forgotten both its and her name, it being a long time since this blog you’re reading turned my own reading of other blogs from pleasure into business (sigh). Writing this post has made me interested again though, and I may well want to pick her brains about some of the issues raised in it too, so if anyone knows who I’m talking about, please pass on her blog address!
And here’s the other reason I have the focus on the blog that I do!
Seriously though, while I am never lacking for pictures of attractive Korean women in sportswear and bikinis to attract “readers” to the blog with if I do so choose, there is still reason to single out this week’s Korean launch of the global Adidas ”Me, Myself” (미,마이셀프) campaign here. Consider its claimed raison d’être, however perfunctory its sentiments may be in practice (source, right: Naver):
Impossible standards of beauty continue to be foisted on young women today. Flip through any fashion magazine, and you’ll find super skinny supermodels on almost every page. Not to mention on billboards, on television and movies and the Internet. Young women feel pressured to live up to this standard of beauty, often to the detriment of their mental and physical well being.
Instead of pressuring women to conform to this impossible standard of beauty, sportswear giant Adidas wants to inspire women to be themselves.
With its new campaign philosophy, ”Me, Myself,” women are encouraged to be healthy, happy, fit, full of life and be true to who they are. It celebrates women’s individuality, confidence and motivation.
To launch the ”Me, Myself” campaign in Korea, adidas staged a unique fashion show featuring its spring/summer women’s wear line at Kring, Daechi-dong, southern Seoul, Wednesday. Korean celebrities like singer Solbi and girl group Afterschool were spotted at the event.
And crucially (my emphasis):
Unlike in most fashion shows with gaunt-looking models, the Adidas models were healthy and glowing. They showed that women could look stylish while working out at the gym, doing complicated yoga moves or swimming in the pool.
Granted, it comes from a blatant advertorial, but that last is much more important than it may sound at first. As while on the surface modern Korean exercise culture is very similar to its Western counterpart(s), albeit naturally with more of an emphasis on hill-walking and, in turn, free open-air facilities in those hills for its rapidly aging population to use, in practice Korean women have generally interpreted the modern Western imports of gym culture and health consciousness through their preexisting notions of consumption and feminine passivity (see here, here and here), often with quite startling and absurd results. Indeed, one could argue that their gym-going merely serves to allow many Korean women to feel a certain sweet self-satisfaction in the mere act of doing so, never actually having to face the challenge of exercising to the extent that, say, sweat interferes with the cosmetics that many wear while doing so, or that it burns off excess fat. Instead, a vast and unregulated industry of passive dieting methods (e.g. diet pills, aroma therapy, diet crème, and diet drinks) takes that place, overall giving the impression that dieting is simple, easy, quick, and effective without pain, so long as women consume various products.
Which is not to say that all Western women (or men) don’t also waste a lot of time at gyms, nor that the act of attending one isn’t also de rigeur for the trendy modern urban professional, and much less the quality of the exercise done there. But…well, as those links above make clear, these things — like so many other trappings of modernity here — are just so magnified here, almost like a hyperreal parody of the goals of modernity itself. In this particular case though, lacking an educational background of critical thinking, Korean women are to a certain extent its victims, which again renders any alternative message of self-agency and of being proactive in naturally achieving one’s desired body image worthy of getting out to as wide an audience as possible.
I dare say, however, that that message could have been done somewhat more effectively had anything at all about the campaign been included on Adidas’ Korean website (let alone in Korean), especially as news coverage seems to have concentrated rather more on the celebrities that attended instead. Being in the job-market myself soon though, then I’ll gladly take on that responsibility of ensuring that the site is regularly updated from now on (there’s my contact details in the top-left corner!), but until that point then I guess that this post and these Korean videos of the event will have to do.
Update: I’m afraid those videos didn’t embed very well: try watching here instead.
Update 2: Thanks to commenters, I now realize that the choice of models (specifically, their body types) should have been much more diverse, preferably with some real athletes included. See here for a follow-up post exploring precisely that, focusing on female boxers.
To refresh your memories, last month I came across this study that showed that Japanese women living with their husbands and parents-in-law were more than three times more likely than their husbands to have a heart attack: interesting in its own right, it led me to wonder how likely a similar study of Korean women would have been to have come up with a similar result, and why I so readily assumed that it probably would. This brief series is the result, a personal combination of learning new things, a healthy airing of some of my intellectual baggage, and, finally, some much-needed hard statistics about Korean families with which to analyze them from now on; without them, then I’ve been as guilty of relying on gut-feelings and generalizing about Korea just as much as the next expat.
As I discussed in Part One, most of those gut feelings about Korean women being under similar stresses were because I knew of the practice of eldest sons living with their parents after marriage and the great potential for the subordination and/or exploitation of the new daughter-in-law within, ethically and legally buttressed by Neo-Confucianism in much the same way that Christianity also heavily informs Western, historically unequal notions of marriage and family life. But are the same living arrangements also common in Japan? And if so, what role does Neo-Confucianism play in their numbers, and in the ways they internally operated so to speak?
Possibly I got the order in which I should have looked at those various questions mixed up, but I confess that prior to writing that post I knew very little about Japanese religion, and given Japan society’s relative progressiveness, and some important, decidedly non-Confucian features of it (most notably sexuality), would previously have assumed the virtual irrelevance of Neo-Confucianism in Japanese society today. Part One was about me investigating that, and I was surprised to learn that Neo-Confucianism permeates daily life in Japan just as much as it does here. Having done that, then this post is (mostly) about the actual numbers of couples and parents living together in Korea and Japan, and given how much I conflate doing so with Neo-Confucianism – or at least, permanently and willingly doing so – then probably I shouldn’t have been surprised at the high rates of that living arrangement I found in Japan also. Ergo, there are many daughters-in-law living with their husbands’ families in both countries, and they are likely to face very similar, stressful social expectations of filial duty and subservience in both countries. But muchhigher rates in Japan?Why?
Well, before getting to the “why stage” though, you’d be surprised at how difficult it was to find even the most basic of demographic data on Korea in particular, even with the plethora of sources that a Korea Studies geek like myself has. And the only(!) book I have which does provide some of the answers: Marriage, Work and Family Life in Comparative Perspective: Japan, South Korea and the US (click on the image for a link to Amazon), I was originally very disappointed with when I first bought it over a year ago, for while it was published in 2004 most of its data actually comes from 1994 or even earlier, a flaw not exactly highlighted by the accompanying notes at online bookstores either. But forced out of desperation to reread it, I realized that I’d dismissed it too quickly: like a visiting UN demographer who lectured at my university once pointed out to me, demographics is all about waves, and as I’ll explain, 15 years later Korea is definitely still feeling the effects of the processes highlighted in this actually rather good book.
And, once I realized that, then I confess that I got a bit lost in it at that point, for the similarities and differences between the three countries are simply fascinating, and go well beyond mere numbers of extended families. In particular, after hearing it first on some old Korea Society podcast, I’ve often said that one’s generation in Korea is as important a marker of identity as, say, race is in the US, but I doubt that whoever I heard that phrase from meant it as anything more than an allusion to Korea’s extremely rapid rate of development (I know that I certainly haven’t!). But then I read this on page 61:
Korea tends to differ from the other two countries on a number of structural characteristics that are likely to [strongly] affect intergenerational relations.
But first, the basics. Seeing as they take up an entire chapter, then I won’t get into all the technical details and potential flaws of the methodologies of the surveys in the three countries sorry: suffice to say that, unless stated otherwise, all the statistics in the remainder of the post refer to married couples at the time of questioning, with both spouses between 30 and 59, and almost all for Korea, Japan and the US are from 1994, 1994, and 1988 respectively. Starting off then, the number of couples that were:
Living with the wife’s parents: Korea 4%, Japan 9%, and the US less than 1%
Living with the husband’s parents: Korea 24%, Japan 37%, and the US less than 1%
Yoshi Sugimoto, in his excellent book An Introduction to Japanese Society (2003), also notes that in 2000 “about a half of persons at or above the age of sixty-five live with their relatives, mainly with the family of one of their children” and that “this pattern is inconsistent with the prediction of modernization theory, that industrialization entails the overwhelming dominance of the nuclear family system” (p. 175). Far from being because immutable and deeply-held Neo-Confucian beliefs however, in reality:
…most two-generation families make [the] arrangement for pragmatic rather than altruistic reasons. Given the high cost of purchasing housing properties, young people are prepared to live with or close to their parents and provide them with home-based nursing care, in the expectation of acquiring their house after their death in exchange. Even if the two generations do not live together or close, aged parents often expect to receive living allowances from their children, with the tacit understanding that they will repay the “debt” by allowing the contributing children to inherit their property after death. This is why aged parents without inheritable assets find it more difficult to live with their children or receive an allowance from them. (p. 176)
But why do more Japanese parents and married children live together than Korean ones? Rather than giving you the answer straight up, let me highlight the other differences, so that hopefully you might be able to work them out for yourself:
Korean parents are the least likely to be alive.
One half of Korean married couples surveyed grew up in rural areas and now live in urban areas, against a third for Japan and a figure “somewhat lower” in the US.
Naturally more US parents live further away from their children in either Japan or Korea (50% of both the wife’s and husband’s parents live more than 25 miles/40 km away), but there’s still a big difference between Japan and Korea: 28% of the wife’s parents and 24% of the husband’s parents live in a different district or municipality, against 45% and 38% respectively for Korea.
Only 46% of Korean husbands were eldest sons, against 56% in Japan.
And finally here are some more interesting facts, albeit more indicative and/or the cause of Korean women’s extremely low economic and political empowerment (possibly – make of them what you will) rather than why Japan has more extended families than Korean does:
Korea has the lowest number of couples in which both spouses are working: 22% against 57% in Japan, and 66% in the US. Undoubtedly these figures will have changed in the 15 years since then, but Korea is still exceptional in this regard, with the lowest number of working women in the OECD.
Korea has the lowest number of couples where the wife is older than the husband (4%), and the most where the husband is substantially older. In contrast, the figures for Japan and the US are 10% and 18% respectively.
Korean women don’t change their names when they get married, Japanese women do. The maintenance of “bloodlines” via male descendants continuing the family register known as hojuje (호주제) being more important in Korea then (at least until it was abolished last year), until roughly a decade ago Korea had one of the most skewed sex-ratios in the world, and Koreans were notorious for refusing to adopt unwanted children, generally sending them overseas instead. The similar koseki (戸籍法) system in Japan does still continue, but there continuing the family name is important, leading families without a son to often adopt one for instance.
I confess, there appeared to be rather more noteworthy statistical differences and interesting tidbits when I began writing this post: I expected to have much more to say, and yet I find I’ve gotten through those in *cough* only 1470 words as I type this, half of which was an introduction/recap, albeit probably necessary. On the plus side though, I do see much of my role as a blogger as being to do condense (very) much larger pieces of work into their key points, thereby making them much more accessible to a wider audience, and so even if you can’t see the reasons for the differences in the numbers of extended families between Japan and Korea yet, if you just read the part of the authors’ summary below, then go back and look at the four points above the last (rather stylish) photo above, and then finally say something like “Ahh! Of course!” once you do…then I’ll know I’ve been doing the right thing!
…from a number of socioeconomic and demographic perspectives, Japan and the US are more like one another, and Korea is more distinctive. Korea’s mortality and fertility declines are more recent than either Japan’s or those the US. In Korea, the generation of middle-aged adults examined here has experienced all the dislocations and opportunities that go with a recent and rapid shift from an agricultural to a manufacturing and service economy, from a rural to an urban settlement pattern, and from a low level to a higher level of educational attainment. In the US and Japan, these transitions occurred somewhat earlier, and it is expected that the timing and nature of these transitions would affect patterns of intergenerational relations. (p.74, my emphases)
If you’re also interested in why so many unmarried Korean and Japanese children live with their parents, see here and here.
As the message boards of numerous expat forums will attest, Koreans simply don’t wear deodorant, except for a few young urban sophisticates in the summer. What’s more, it’s likely almost all of those young urban sophisticates are women, as there have been no deodorant commercials aimed at Korean men yet (although Nivea did start using men alongside women for in-store promotions from 2007).
But why on Earth not? While I disagree with most prevailing explanations for the origins of Korea’s own, distinct brand of metrosexuality, that doesn’t mean that in the last decade or so there hasn’t been an explosive growth in sales of men’s skincare, cosmetic and grooming products to accompany that. It seems strange that Korean men prepared to spend the money and time on, say, wearing “masculine” sunblock for ten months of the year, wouldn’t also be concerned about how they smelled.
Explanations of why both sexes don’t wear deodorant usually focus on their (allegedly) sweating less than the average Westerner and the different kinds of foods that they eat. But personally, I give much more credence to the notion that — to the extent that most Koreans had even heard of the stuff until very recently — it was considered a luxury that few could afford, Korean consumerism in general still being trapped in the mentality of four decades ago. Back then, basic items were scarce, food barely adequate and lacking in quality or variety, and domestic monopolies and the restrictions on the imports of consumer meant that the customer was expected to be grateful for whatever he or she was given, as evidenced today by, for example: the gifting of soap, spam, cooking oil and/or shampoo (examples) on the two biggest holidays of Chuseok (추석) and Seollal (설날); a cuisine culture that — frankly — seems to consist of little more than throwing everything available together and then smothering the combination with salt, sugar or spicy pepper paste; and the often appalling customer service that still prevails in 2008 respectively.
Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, one could also argue that with virtually no-one wearing it and everyone used to the bad smell of each other to the extent that they don’t notice it, then the very minimal benefits of an individual wearing it mirror, say, the economics of my recently purchasing a videocall-capable phone: initially very expensive to myself, completely useless if others don’t have one also, but with increasing benefits to me as others do buy and use them (i.e. I can both talk to more and more people and services will probably become cheaper). Similarly, in the case of expensive Korean deodorant, as the number of users increased then Korean noses would become more and more sensitive to distinguishing between those who did and didn’t use it, and then later to lower prices and people having positive associations with and assumptions about the former group (source, left: cjswoxodwk).
Seemingly regardless of that background however, while it is true that early deodorant commercials featured – in a quintessentially Korean fashion – having a motherly figure explaining the benefits to respectfully attentive and nodding young Korean women (but which unfortunately predate the YouTube era), and that the first commercial below from just two years ago seemed to emphasize friendship more than anything else, commercials aimed at women are increasing in quantity and sophistication every summer, most like these two here and here (I can’t seem to embed them unfortunately) emphasizing deodorant’s supposed benefits in attracting the opposite sex just like their Western counterparts. Moreover, while for various reasons I personally hate any dubbed commercials, you don’t have to speak Korean to understand that the woman in the the second video opens with “What part of my body do you like the best? My legs? My ass? Or my hands?”, which, to put it mildly, you don’t otherwise hear all too often on Korean daytime television. Any wonder that it’s still the most popular deodorant commercial in Korea a year later?
But still, why aren’t deodorants marketed to men here? Actually there isa very detailed report on the Korean deodorant market available on the internet which may have the answer, and I’m quite happy to receive donations towards the US$753(!) required to purchase it and to pass on its conclusions when I do. But in the meantime, via this article on perfume science from the Economist magazine I’ve found, if perhaps not a perfect solution to the conundrum, then at least pointers towards further investigation. Here’s the gist of it, with my emphases throughout:
THE very word “perfume” has feminine overtones to many male ears. Men can be sold “deodorant” and possibly “aftershave”, but the idea of all those dinky little bottles with their fussy paraphernalia is too much for the sensitive male ego. Yet no industry can afford to neglect half its potential market, and perfume-makers are ever keen to crack the shell of male reticence. Now they may know how to do so.
Craig Roberts of the University of Liverpool and his colleagues-working with a team from Unilever’s research laboratory at nearby Port Sunlight-have been investigating the problem. They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odor it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.
Half of Dr Roberts’s volunteers were given an aerosol spray containing a commercial formulation of fragrance and antimicrobial agents. The other half were given a spray identical in appearance but lacking active ingredients. The study was arranged so that the researchers did not know who had received the scent and who the dummy. Each participant obviously knew what he was spraying on himself, since he could smell it. But since no one was told the true purpose of the experiment, those who got the dummy did not realize they were being matched against people with a properly smelly aerosol.
Over the course of several days, Dr Roberts’s team conducted a battery of psychological tests on both groups of volunteers. They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. Not that surprising, perhaps. What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. The women in question were shown short, silent videos of the volunteers. They deemed the men wearing the deodorant more attractive. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.
For Unilever and other manufacturers of men’s scent, this is an important discovery. The firm’s marketing of its main product in this area, a deodorant called Lynx, plays up the so-called “Lynx Effect” – which is supposed to make men irresistibly attractive to women. Dr Roberts’s experiment, however, suggests that the advertised “Born chicka wah wah” of the product may have nothing to do with a woman’s appreciation of the smell, and everything to do with its psychological effect on the man wearing it.
The rest of the article focuses on the scientific theories of smell and attractiveness, not uninteresting in themselves, and I highly recommend you read the full article, especially the comments. Finally, a quick excerpt from the conclusion:
There are many useful inferences that might be drawn from this research. One would be that a woman’s choice of perfume will resist the vagaries of fashion. This may explain why most innovation in the industry involves changes in packaging and marketing, producing all that fussy paraphernalia, rather than changing what is in the bottle.
In hindsight of course, all quite obvious: I’m sure that we can all appreciate how, say, going through the process of our “date preparation routine” — showering listening to your favorite music, wearing more expensive clothes than usual, and finally putting on your expensive perfume/cologne/deodorant strictly reserved for special occasions, and so on – was a very important factor in getting into the mood for it, even though in hindsight showering immediately beforehand would have washed off natural pheromones crucial for the date’s success.
Hence my dismal record.
Also, while the reasons were unknown until know, manufacturers have undoubtedly long been aware of the effects of the phenomenon, but if not then the basic mechanics of capitalism alone — the inevitable saturation of markets and the rates of profit to fall — would constantly compel them to rebrand and repackage their products, the latest manifestations of which seem to be a decidely “Arctic” theme of absolutely any cosmetic marketed towards Western men.
But what does this tell us about the absence of such commercials in Korea?
For a time, I was planning to look at the origins of Korean metrosexuality for my MA thesis (summary here), put wisely rejected that topic after necessarily watching hundreds of Korean cosmetics commercials aimed at men. Only now though, can I see that a surprising common theme of them is the almost complete absence of women in them. Or to be more precise, with exceptions such as the notorious, multi-layered one with Ahn Jung-hwan (안정환) from 2003 above (video, alas, unavailable), of the relatively few times women are featured in them most of the time they are not at all there to demonstrate the product’s alleged effects on women. Rather, generally they are effectively mere props in narratives very much focused on the men themselves.
Some examples, with and without women, starting with…yes, that one with Ahn and Kim Jae-won (김재원) that unfortunately utterly defined Korean masculinity to a generation of expats in 2002, (update: while I’m at it, I’ve added a parody by some Seoul students also) then with Ahn again and Hyun-bin (현빈) in 2006, unfortunately cutting prematurely his distinctive gesture and facial expression at the end:
Now two more commercials, both with Hyun-bin and from 2006, and the second with Kim Hye-su (김혜수). While they appear at first glance to feature women lusting after Hyun, in fact both commercials are actually for women’s cosmetics:
And finally, a exception from late 2007 with Jung Il-woo (정일우) that proves the rule: that wearing cosmetics=more hot sex with lots of women was not a theme of Korean commercials until — to the extent that there are international standards — very late in the development of metrosexuality compared to other countries:
Why is this significant? Well, because when I wondered in a previous post about why so few commercials for women’s cosmetics featured men — naively thinking attracting them was the sole reason women ever used them — I was very surprised and much impressed by Gomushin Girl’s answer (my emphasis):
…I think the main reason for male absence is the convention of putting the product itself in the ad. While some advertisements focus primarily on the made-up faces, most want to show the packaging and look of the product itself, be it lipstick, mascara, or what have you. This means that a lot of advertisements focus on the process of application, or the period just after the makeup has been put on. This process of being made up is strongly associated with the private sphere, and thus excludes men. Men are present when the results (fully made up and dressed) are there, and so can be part and parcel of clothing and other advertisements, but a make up advertisement needs to feature a woman in a private space, preparing herself for going into the public sphere. If the man were there, it would be subverting the purposes of her putting the makeup on in the first place.
And from which I now take away the conclusion that, very generally speaking, Korean cosmetic commercials for men are much closer to those of Korean (and Western) women’s cosmetics than they are of those of the “wear this and women will want to rape you” style that overwhelmingly dominate the equivalent ones Western men.
Why? We can speculate on any number of reasons. But whatever is ultimately responsible, I would argue that the difference shows that:
Korean cosmetic companies were never in the driving seat behind the rise of metrosexuality in Korea over the last decade or so (which is not to say that they ever were in Western metrosexuality either)
And that the development of Korean metrosexuality at least was always driven by and for women, and thus the manifestations of it in consumer culture have been heavily influenced by preexisting narratives in previously exclusively women-focused industries. Or in other words, it’s like cosmetic companies didn’t realize that they were actually supposed to be advertising to men now.
Both of which buttress(ed) my hypothesis in my thesisproposal…
Lest that sound a little abstract though, let me conclude by stressing that, just like you’d expect, Korean men always have and always will strive for appearances and modes of behavior that are most likely to get them laid. My thesis proposal was really just about some of the possible reasons why thee, well, requirements of Korean women for them to have a greater chance to do so changed in Korea in the late-1990s.
As for why those didn’t include wearing deodorant? Well, given that women didn’t themselves, then there was hardly the demand by them that men did. And I strongly suspect that it will be at least 10 years before a tipping point of deodorant-wearing Korean women is reached and it is seen as standard, after which men will increasingly be expected to wear it too,.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to have my parents send batches of cheap roll-ons from home every few months. But if you’re a single male in Korea? Then it sounds like it can’t harm to pamper yourself!
According to a recent study, Japanese women living with their parents-in-law are three times more likely to have a heart attack than those just living with their husbands. This, in a country famous for its very low rates of heart problems overall.
Which got me wondering about Korea. Korean family structures and gender roles are very similar to those of Japan, so it seems reasonable to suppose that the Japanese study has great relevance to Korea, and that a knowledge of Korean family life can reliably inform our interpretation of it.
Or does it? This is the question that has occupied me for past nine days, and, for readers by definition interested in Korean social issues, it is much less abstract and pedantic than perhaps it first sounds. Let me explain.
As a writer about Korean society, but often lacking in English-language material, frankly it is always a temptation to stress its similarities with Japan, just for the sake of having something to work with. But seriously, the huge Japanese role in the development of both the modern Korean state and economy has left profound and enduring legacies. Add that I’m a big proponent of the Marxian concept of base and superstructure—basically that much of a society’s oft-claimed timeless and enduring culture (one aspect of the superstructure) changes pretty damn quickly once economic structures or modes of production change (the base)—too, then it stands to reason that, with still broadly similar economic structures centered around horizontal and vertically-integrated conglomerates known as keiretsu and chaebol respectively, then much about daily life in both societies (workplace culture, working hours, drinking-culture, male-breadwinner based welfare systems, gender divisions between work and the home, and so on) would also be very similar. And it wouldn’t take much reading of just this blog alone to find that this indeed the case.
With that background and strong inclination however, there is always a danger of taking similarities as a given. And particularly in this case, where the authors of the study point out that:
One of the overwhelming things that stands out is that it doesn’t matter for Japanese men what the living arrangements are…they’re immune from stresses in the home (source, right: Urânia – José Galisi Filho).
And from which Samhita of the Feministing blog argues:
The article feigns surprise in finding out that men don’t have these same health problems, but fails to make the obvious conclusion that women get inordinate amounts of pressure from their in-laws to live up to certain expectations that increases stress in their lives. Many women are choosing not to get married or have as many children in Japan, but the culture of expectation around how women should act in the home seems resilient. I wonder if a similar correlation can be made with women that are living with their in-laws in the states?
Which is equally true of Korean brides, where those expectations include assuming the bulk of housework duties, and utter subservience to their mother-in-laws. Naturally, the ensuing potential for domestic tension and conflict make such living arrangements a staple of Korean dramas for decades, one such playing at the moment being You are My Destiny (너는 내 운명, but not to be confused with the 2005 movie with a similar name) starring the decidedly unhappy-looking bride Yuna below. Having said that, just like the traditional hanok houses that many of these dramas are inexplicably set in, one can’t help but assume that women’s disdain for eldest sons and the nuclearization of the Korean family mean that these living arrangements are increasingly rare in practice, which begs the question of why dramatizations of them remain so popular even today.
Writing a week ago, I thought it was because, in practice, living in separate homes has not diminished many parents’ intimate involvement in their childrens’ married lives, and hence the exaggerated situations of dramas still strike a chord amongst married couples and those of marriageable age. Indeed, the combination of Korea’s small size and improvement in Korea’s transport and communications infrastructure has made this even more possible and likely over time. Note that even as recently as the 1970s, a move to Seoul might entail not seeing parents and siblings in the countryside for many years, let alone friends who moved elsewhere in the country. (Source, above: HKGolden.)
But, to spare you the reflections on my preconceptions and academic baggage that took up much of an earlier version of this post, there comes a point where you need evidence. Much of those nine days were spent looking.
Fortunately, I was successful. But in the process, I discovered the question was much more difficult than I thought. Again, to spare readers from a frankly rather incoherent argument in a previous version of this post, in sum I learned that:
According to Yoshio Sugimoto’s brilliant An Introduction to Japanese Society (2003, pp. 175-176), Japanese dramas likewise dwell on intergenerational conflicts in households with extended families.
In fact, Japan has many of more such households than Korea (which will be discussed in Part 2).
But why? Crucially, Japanese society lacks the (Neo-)Confucianist ideology that underscores such family arrangement, and the ensuing conflicts.
Or so I thought. But, after a decade of constantly reading how Korea is the most Confucian country in the world, and “more Confucian than China,” I’d considerably underestimated Confucianism’s influence on the rest of East Asia.
…that it is impossible to advance a plausible argument that the Japanese family today is Confucian in the strict sense. It is equally impossible to argue that it has been completely purged of the effects of attempts by the authorities to structure it in terms of selected Confucian principles. (p. 157)
Some selected excerpts to make up the remainder of this post then. Please forgive me if there’s rather a lot of them, and apologies to any Japan-based readers who already started saying “Well…Duh!” to the computer screens some time ago, but hopefully they’ll still be helpful for any readers like myself that aren’t/weren’t as familiar with Japanese social history as they thought they were.
First, on why I had that impression that I did:
I have asked a hopelessly unrepresentative sample of Japanese colleagues, acquaintances, and friends whether contemporary Japanese think of themselves or their families as Confucian. The spontaneous answer is a resounding no, often supplemented by a dismissive reference to the conservative, reactionary, or feudal (a favorite term of opprobrium in Japan) character of its teachings. The implication is that one’s grandfather or great-grandfather may have been taught Confucian ethics and might even have internalized them, but in 1945 the Japanese consigned Confucianism to the dustbin of history. (p. 157)
…
There is one obvious difference between the role of Confucianism in China and Japan, where is has always been only one of many competing ideologies, philosophies and ethical systems, and never, as in China, “a way of life encompassing the ultimate standards for Chinese social and political order.” (158)
And the Japanese tend to underplay the Confucian influence in their own society because:
Japanese Confucianism started as a cultural ideology serving the needs of the TokugawaBakufu(or Shōgun, or Army Commander)….Although for a time Confucianism had been discredited along with everything else associated with the shogunate, it gained currency again with the consolidation of conservative power in the late 1920s and 1930s. (p. 158-9).
The latter of which was the decade when:
…Japanese society was being reduced at the hands of fanatics to its most stifling condition of oppressive irrationalism [and] in which the ideals of the Japanese educational world were closer to those of its Togukawa past than at any time since 1870….Is it any wonder that today’s Japanese, if they have thought about it at all, are likely to view Confucianism in a negative light? (p. 159, my emphasis)
Now, why the influence of Confucianism on the Japanese and particularly the Japanese family remains pervasive nevertheless:
Were the Japanese ever Confucianists in, say, the same sense as the Koreans? No one claims that they were. Nevertheless, there are many ways in which the Confucianist concern with hierarchical relationships and its emphasis on harmonious families as the basis for harmonious states seems to have influenced Japanese society. Be that as it may, it is just as likely that the Japanese selectively utilized Confucian teachings to reaffirm and strengthen characteristics of their society, which was deeply rooted in the pre-Confucian past.
Presumably one of the domains in which Confucianism did not simply reinforce and justify older social practices is the treatment of women, for it is widely argued that they enjoyed a far more favorable position in Japanese society before the introducton of Confucianism. It may well be, however, that the decline of women’s status in Japan actually began with the popularization of Buddhism. (pp. 160-1, my emphasis)
Finally:
The question is not whether Confucianism is a religion. It is rather: Does Confucianism, broadly defined (or, perhaps better, undefined) have anything at all to do with religion in Japan?
…
The “rules” by which religions are tacitly expected to operate in Japan are, more than anything else, Confucian. As so often in Japan, Confucianism plays the role of a moral and ethical substratum that, its preconditions being met, allows a harmless surface diversity. Indeed, one could argue, as many have, that these principles go back beyond Confucian influences on early Japan to the values inherent in ancient clan structures and an agricultural society with their demands for loyalty and cooperative effort; Confucianism did not so much crate as articulate the values by which Japanese society works.
…
Virtually all religions that have endured in Japan have adapted external forms agreeable to the patriarchal family model and have made their peace with the state. (p. 171, my emphasis)
At this point, a more thorough blogger than myself would probably move onto those passages where Smith discusses that latent Confucianism within Japanese families (and the education system) more specifically, but I think that readers can reasonably extrapolate those from the big picture that I have already provided rather than requiring me to add those too. Ergo, Japanese families are indeed (Neo) Confucianist, and I’m especially glad that demonstrating that gave me a legitimate opportunity to get stuck into my recently purchased copy of Tu-Wei Ming’s book. But while 2500 words is a rather short post (for me), given the long time this one took and that Confucianism, Demographics and Biological Anthropology are much more discreet subjects than what I normally blog about, I’ll wisely end this post here!
Update
Although they’re not really related to the topic at hand, the questions of: a) to what extent the US could be described as a “Christian country” and b) whether Confucianism is a religion or not came up in the comments, and are interesting in their own rights. And while I’m usually reluctant—yes, really—to type out literally entire pages from books here, Robert Smith does answer both much better than I could:
To what extent has the Japanese family ever been Confucian, and to what extent is it today? Would that the question could be so easily answered. Even the most casual survey of the vicissitudes of Confucianism in Japan suggests the need for caution. Indeed, I was tempted to indicate just how cautious one must be by titling this essay either “Confucianism Is in the Eye of the Beholder” or “Confucian Is as Confucian Does.” That is to say, how Confucianism is described, the praises sung of it, the importance assigned to it, and the terms by which it is denounced are all very strongly colored by the historical period in which the assessments are made, the position in the social hierarchy of the person expressing the opinion, and – not least in recent times – the age and gender of those who views they are.
I hasten to add that in these respects Confucianism seems to me rather like all other philosophical, ethical, and/or religious systems of whatever time or place. An example, drawn from personal experience with one such system, involves one of the myriad subcategories of the southern United States brand of Protestantism. Fifty years ago its construction of Christianity was a finely crafted one that had no place for Catholics, who were thought of as idolaters, or for Quakers, of whom few had ever heard. Depending on the particular church and the position of its minister on the issue, it was not always entirely clear that Methodists and Presbyterians were Christian either.
Be that as it may, did my relatives and neighbors think that they themselves led Christian lives? Of course they did, or tried to. Were it to be pointed out that someone had committed some “unchristian” act, the usual explanations were that all are conceived and born in sin, that it all happened before the miscreant had found God – or perhaps it was because Christ had found him. It is all now too far in the past for me to recall the full inventory of shifting grounds on which our neighbors and relatives took their unshakable Christian stands. Would they have agreed – and do they still – that the United States is a “Christian country”? Of course. They have never doubted it….Yet I wager that in the course of conducting interviews on the subject, you could collect scores of definitions – some of them flatly contradictory – of just what the term “a Christian country” might mean. There is bound to be some overlap, to be sure, but no consensus. Are we then to conclude that the United States is not a Christian country? I think not. But I submit that consensus on the religious and ethical dimensions of Christianity is not much more likely to be achieved than agreement as to precisely what Confucianism might be and whether the Japanese family is a Confucian institution.
It is possible, of course, that I am looking in the wrong place for an authoritative definition, and would be better advised to seek it among the philosophers, the theologians, the ethicists, or the intellectual historians. My reading of the relevant sources, however, strongly suggests that consensus at the tip is even more difficult to achieve than at the bottom. In any event, my anthropological training predisposes me to start at ground level. (pp. 155-157)
Just some quick good news that my presentation proposal “Backlash: The Role of the Asian Financial Crisis in the Feminization of Korean Ideals of Male Beauty”has been accepted for the sixth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) conference at Chungnam National University in Daejeon in August next year. I understand if you won’t be penciling anything in your 2009 diary quite yet though, so I’ll make sure to post a reminder closer to the date—it would be nice to meet any readers while I’m there, and to receive feedback.
In the meantime, here’s the abstract, based on this (5100 word!) post from earlier in the year:
In the mid-1990s, the dominant images of men in Korean popular culture were of strong, masculine figures that protected and provided for women, mirroring the male breadwinner ethos that underlay Korea’s then prevalent salaryman system and which, by dint of being much larger and more integral to the Korean economy than the Japanese one with which it is most often associated, had a correspondingly larger hold on the Korean psyche. Despite this, in accounting for the complete switch of dominant images of men to effeminate, youthful “kkotminam” in just a few short years after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, what limited literature exists on evolving Korean sexuality and gender roles in the last decade seems to exhibit a curious blind spot as to possible economic and employment-related factors, instead attributing it to, variously, a rising general “pan-Asian soft masculinity”, the import of Western notions of metrosexuality, and particularly of Japanese ones of “bishōnen”.
In this paper, I begin by acknowledging the validity of these factors but argue that the dominance of Japan in East Asian cultural studies has led scholars to overemphasize the latter, in turn ascribing too much agency to Korean women in their late-teens and early-twenties that were the primary recipients of such Japanese cultural products as “yaoi” fan-fiction. This is anachronistic, as public displays and discussions of female sexuality and ideals of male beauty were in reality very much proscribed in Korea for unmarried women before the 2002 World Cup, the locus of which was primarily married women instead. Indeed, as I will next discuss, in the mid-1990s there was an sudden and intense public discourse on both generated by increasingly radical depictions of married women’s sex lives in books and films, partially reflecting the coming of the age of the first generation of Korean women to receive democratic notions of gender and family life through their schooling but then encountering the reality of Korean patriarchy in their marriages, and partially also the concomitant liberation represented by increased numbers of Korean women entering the workforce: small, but growing, and symbolically significant in that they vindicated decades of the relegation of feminist concerns to the wider aims of the democratization movement as a whole, with the understanding that they would be addressed upon its success.
It is in these contexts that the Asian Financial Crisis struck Korea, and married women in particular would be the first to be laid-off as part of restructuring efforts, with the explicit justification that they would be supported by their husbands. Rather than retaining and reaffirming breadwinner ideals of male beauty as encouraged however, in the final part of this paper I demonstrate how images of men in Korean popular culture were suddenly dominated by kkotminam and such indirect criticisms of salarymen as were permitted under prevailing public opinion. This was a natural reaction to circumstances, and I conclude that explanations for the shift that do not consequently take the role of the crisis as a catalyst into account are inadequate.
In hindsight, my overall argument about the increasing popularity of feminine ideals of Korean male beauty—that it at least partially stemmed from a sense of backlash and anger by Korean married women at their mass lay-offs and so forth—could possibly have been made a little clearer in that last paragraph, but then I was only just shy of the 500 word limit, and I’m not sure that I could have fitted everything necessary in otherwise. But it did the job! :D
Western journalists don’t often write about sex in South Korea. But when they do, they just love to mention how “conservative” it is. As if sexuality wasn’t really the immense concept it is. And, as if Korea, just like the journalists’ own societies, couldn’t actually be progressive in some aspects of it despite being conservative in others.
It frankly annoys then, that the advertising of contraception here does fit the stereotypes. As does what it reveals about attitudes towards its users, especially if they’re women.
The first frustration is that contraceptive commercials were banned from television until as late as January 2006. What’s more, it wouldn’t be until July 2013 that condoms actually graced Korean screens. This was especially ironic considering exceptions had already been made for the sake of HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns that played in October 2004.
The delay is interesting, and deserves further investigation; possibly, some de-facto restrictions against condom commercials remained. Either way, contraceptive pill manufacturers at least soon took advantage of the lifting of the ban, starting with this commercial by Mercilon four months later, and now nobody bats an eye seeing the pill on television or at the cinema. (Opening image source: The Hankyoreh.)
Originally, the first half of this post was devoted to that commercial, as public statements by the actress, 22 year-old SNU student Kim So-mi (김소미), appeared to indicate a false ignorance of the pill, as well as making sure to distance herself from the sexually-active women the commercial was aimed at:
하지만 정작 김씨는 광고를 찍으면서 피임약에 대해 처음으로 알게 됐다고 털어놨다
However, Kim said that she only learned about the pill for the first time while shooting the commercial.
피임약 광고로 자신의 얼굴이 알려지더라도 이중적 시각으로 자신을 보지 말기를 당부하는 것도 잊지 않았다. 어디까지나 광고모델일 뿐이라는 것이다.
Even if her face was known from the pill ad, she did not forget to ask her not to see herself in a double perspective. It’s just an advertising model.
Being slut-shamed by from someone actually endorsing contraceptives will always feel bizarre. Yet it spoke to my own anecdotal experience that all too many Korean women feigned ignorance of contraception for the sake of their reputations, the corollary of which was not insisting on condom use and relying wholly on their male partners to “take care of things.” Which, to many readers of the original post, sounded even more bizarre and outrageous than Kim So-mi did, not least because they were hearing it from a non-Korean man rather than from a Korean woman. But later I would confirm those uncomfortabletruthsthroughnumerousKoreansources.
In hindsight however, her statements may be open to interpretation, and only came from one source. Add that the commercial itself is unfortunately no longer available (alas, I didn’t know how to save videos in 2008) then I didn’t need to think twice about removing that commentary, and consequently the comments (sorry). But the second half of the post was my summary of this survey on “condom-related behaviors and attitudes among Korean youths”, at the time one of the most rigorous and recent available (albeit based on data collected in 2003), and as the PDF is again no longer publicly available then I’m happy to keep that summary below for the benefit of readers.
Here goes (with only a little editing of the original post):
27% of men 7.8% of women had sex before the age of 18
“Contrary to the reported Korean situation, there are no significant gender differences in the rate of premarital sex and age at first intercourse compared to that in many other liberal, developed societies.”
“Compared to other [developed] societies, although there are fewer sexually experienced youths under 18 in Korea, there has nevertheless been an increase in premarital sex and a substantial lowering of the age at first sexual intercourse….the rate for females has risen more rapidly than that for males.”
For an excellent discussion of public attitudes to teenage sexuality in the 1990s that provide a backdrop to those results, I highly recommend reading this post at Gusts of Popular Feeling, and it’s clear that little has changed over a decade later. Moreover, it’s just a thought, but in the almost complete absence of any information or adults talking to them about sex (although I admit there have been some improvements since this post was first written), then I invite readers to speculate about just whom exactly might be providing young Koreans with most of their sexual role models instead:
In December 2005, there had been 3,829 cumulative reported cases of HIV/AIDS, of which males accounted for 90.7%. Of the new HIV infections among Korean women in 2004, all were attributed to heterosexual contact.
By August this year, the total had risen to 5717, with almost exactly the same proportions of men to women. The survey notes that with such relatively low numbers, if women “were able to ensure that their partners use condoms consistently and properly, [then] HIV/AIDS would be prevented effectively.” They’re not, as we shall see, but on the positive side it should be noted that the majority of Koreans no longer see HIV/AIDS as a mere foreign, gay disease that doesn’t affect them.
According to previous research, mostly conducted in the five years before this survey, “the percentage of consistent condom use among young people as well as in the general population was relatively lower than in other countries. It was found that only 18.6% of never married, sexually active young people aged 18-29 used condoms consistently…[and]…the reported condom use at first sexual intercourse was 18.7% for men and 13.4% for women. The reported condom use of high school students was much lower at 10%.”
Personally, I’m surprised that that last figure was even as high as 10%, given that vending machines in public toilets and from older friends would be about the only place high school students would obtain them. But of greater note already, albeit not a hugely significant statistical difference in this particular case, is the I think counter-intuitive finding (to Westerners) that more men than women reported using condoms the first time they had sex. Indeed, this disparity continued afterwards:
“More men (17.3%) than women (13.6%) reported having consistent condom use with a steady partner…for other partner types, consistent condom use was less reported by women than by men. For experience with condoms, more men than women reported having used condoms.”
Why? Partially it is because Korean men are much more sexually active:
50.4% of the single 19-30 year-old subjects reported having had sexual intercourse, but this disguises huge differences between men and women (67.3% and 30% respectively).
“Men reported a higher proportion of sexual experiences with two or more multiple partners during the previous 12 months than women did (57.2% vs 41.0%).”
“Single men were four times more likely to be [sexually] experienced than women.”
“According to a recent study, the median age at first sexual intercourse for Korean men (21.0 years) was three years lower than that for Korean women, even though men marry, on average, later than women do….This difference may be interpreted as an indication that young men have sex with prostitutes or older experienced women. About 13% of young men age 20-29 reported that their sexual partners were prostitutes.”
And this in turn led to them being much more confident and knowledgeable about using them than Korean women:
“Men were more likely to agree somewhat or completely that condoms protected against HIV and other STDs.”
“Compared with women…men reported a higher level of self-efficacy in condom use when they were drunken.”
But this is of course only half the story, and somewhat of a chicken (sperm?) before the egg one at that. For if you haven’t guessed already, the survey concludes that:
…these gender differences in sexual initiation and experience can be explained by strong, gender-based, double standards and values in the traditional culture. Single women in Korea are still expected to be passive and virgins at marriage. Although Korean women’s level of education and participation in the labor force has rapidly risen (albeit the latter still at the lowest levels in the OECD – James), the imposed attitudes on their expected social roles have not dramatically changed yet. Korean society still places emphasis on women’s virginity at marriage and women are supposed to be initiated into sex by their husbands.
And thus:
Premarital sex may be a more serious concern to women because of their vulnerability….young sexually experienced females reported that they had been pressured by their boyfriends or other men to have sex as a proof of their love and been forced not to use a condom at first intercourse.
Which makes Durex’s depiction on the right of its…er…penetration of the Korean market in August this year (source, right:The Korea Times) not a particularly accurate reflection of current Korean sexual mores, and unfortunately the women in it are less likely to be supposed role models as chosen simply because every public event in Korea requires scantily-clad females known as “narrator models.” More seriously though, the survey clears up a great deal of almost instinctive confusion I and I think many readers would have had recently over newspaper headlines such as “Women Inactive in Preventing Unwanted Pregnancy,” and “Korean Women Say Birth Control is Men’s Responsibility“, although I must confess that I never expected to be so, well…true, especially as my female Korean friends have all stated that they have to contend with Korean men often refusing to wear condoms, which unfortunately probably says much more about my choice of Korean female friends than it does of Korean men and women as a whole.
But I’m not merely covering all my bases when I say that it’s not all doom and gloom for Korean men and (especially) women, for I have seen teenage sex education centers, for instance, pop up around Busan since I first moved here, and, just like so many other Korean issues on which Koreans only appear to be unanimous and monolithic in their opinions to non-Korean speakers, the notion that contraception is solely a man’s responsibility is hardly a universally accepted and uncontested notion among young Koreans especially, as this blog post (for one) demonstrates (again, let me know if you’d like a translation). Moreover, and to put this post and myself to bed, while I may occasionally sound like a broken record when I point out this next (but someone has to), I think I’ve more than adequately demonstrated that increasingly sexual images of women in commercials and advertisements in recent years can and are having an effect on these double-standards also. Combined with knowledge that the English-language media and books on Korea especially tend to have a considerable lag behind trends in Korea then, it’s going to be very interesting to see the results of any similar survey in the future. Watch this space.
Korean women taking responsibility for contraception…only in the movies?
Back to 2014 now, if you’re after more recent surveys, there are many more translated and discussed in the “contraception“, “sexual relationships“, and “teenage sexuality” categories here (all of which come under the voluminous “Korean sexuality” one), but probably the most recent is this one conducted in 2012. Unfortunately though, no mention is made of its methodology, so the results must be taken with a grain of salt. But if any readers would like to help me rectify that by going through the original 260- page Korean report with me, I’d be very grateful!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
When I first saw this SKY (스카이) phone advertisement four years ago, naturally I noticed the extremely short wedding dress first, and wondered what on Earth the supposed connection to the phone was. Unfortunately though, I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to find out by getting (very) close to a poster in a phone store window and appearing — to all intents and purposes — to be minutely examining the model’s thighs, which is what reading the very small Korean text would have required of me. But soon, the poster was replaced with others, leaving me wondering ever since.
But now that I’ve just stumbled across it, I confess to being a little disappointed: the text next to the woman merely reads “스타일을 위해 잘랐다”, or “It was cut for the sake of style”, and then next to the phone “안테나를 잘랐다”, or “The antenna was cut”. Not exactly as creative, or indeed, “different” as I’d imagined.
Still, apologies if this next point is too prosaic, too crass, and/or even too much information on my part, but I think that there’s something to be said for more (clearly) physically fit Korean women in Korean advertising and real life. That aside, I enjoy the series as a whole too (all from this source), so let me finish this post by passing on more examples, for the sake of any readers who may also enjoy them:
Update: See here and here for some higher-definition versions of the final advertisement.
벗겨라, 팔리리라! Undress the Models and the Products Will Sell!”
에로틱 광고, 잡지에서 거리로 나왔다…예술과 외설 사이 아슬아슬한 줄타기” 광고 속 에로스. Borderline indecent advertisements formerly only found in magazines are now on the streets (16 December 2006).
▶근육질의 남성과 섹시한 여성이 반라 차림으로 서로를 그윽하게 바라보는 속옷 광고 (서울 지하철 2호선 삼성역). A muscular, semi-nude man and sexy woman furtively looking at each other in this underwear advertisement (Samseong Station, Seoul Subway Line 2).
브래지어와 팬티 차림의 여성이 거리를 점령했다. 잘록한 허리에 배꼽을 드러내다 못해 엉덩이까지 절반쯤 나온 섹시한 여성의 눈빛이 버스 정류장에서 혹은 지하철 역사에서 남성들의 시선을 붙잡는다. 예술과 외설 사이를 아슬아슬하게 넘나드는 속옷 광고들이다.
Advertisements with women in just their bras and panties are to be found on streets everywhere these days, but presenting narrow, slender waists and navels are no longer enough for advertisers, and so many at bus stops and subways stations now reveal women’s buttocks too, which naturally gain the attention of more men than women. Many are not so much artistic, as bordering on the indecent.
과거 잡지 속에서나 볼 수 있었을 만한 아찔한 속옷 광고들이 당당히 거리로 나왔다. 속옷 광고뿐만이 아니다. 녹차 광고나 심지어 커피숍 광고도 일단 벗고 본다. 에로틱한 분위기의 광고는 제품과 관계없이 일단 사람들의 호기심을 불러 일으키는 법. 이것을 광고 제작자들이 놓칠 리 없다. 그러나 너무 많이 벗은 탓일까? 반라의 남녀가 넘쳐나는 거리를 행인들은 무심히 지나간다.
Such revealing advertisements used to be only found in magazines, but now you can find them on the street. It’s not just lingerie advertisements which have such revealing images either: even tea drink companies and coffee shops use them also, trying to attract the curiosity of passers-by with sexual images that have no actual relation to the products being sold. Other advertisers can’t help but notice this trend and be sucked in by it, but don’t you think it’s too much? Indeed, there are so many images of semi-nude men and women on our streets these days that in fact people may be taking less and not more notice of them.
▶위 : (주)좋은사람들이 지난해 8월 20대 후반 여성을 타깃으로 런칭한 속옷 브랜드 ‘섹시쿠키(Sexy Cookie)’의 지면 광고. 아래 : 국내 속옷시장에 패션 바람을 몰고 온 이랜드 계열의 속옷 브랜드 ‘에블린’의 광고판 (서울 지하철 2호선 삼성역). Left: An advertisement for a new kind of lingerie from “Eblin”, set to be quite a trend in the national lingerie fashion market. Right: An advertisement from August 2005 launching Korean company “Good People”‘s new lingerie brand “Sexy Cookie”, targeted at women in their late twenties (both advertisements from Samseong Station, Seoul Subway Line 2).
▶좌 : 반라차림의 여인을 전면에 내세운 속옷 광고판 앞을 한 남성이 무심히 지나가고 있다 (서울 지하철 4호선 명동역). 우 : 여성만 벗는 것이 아니다. 남성도 벗는다. 근육질의 남성 모델을 내세운 ‘코데스콤바인’의 지면 광고. Left: A man absentmindedly walks by a lingerie advertisement. Right: A muscular man in a Korean “Codes Combine” underwear advertisement (both advertisements from Myeong-dong Station, Seoul Subway Line 4).
▶좌 : 반라의 여성모델을 내세우는 것은 속옷 광고만이 아니다. 전지현의 S라인을 전면에 내세운 ‘17차’의 광고판.(서울 지하철 2호선 강남역). 우 : 화장품 광고라고 해서 얼굴만 대문짝만 하게 찍는 것은 아니다. 살짝쿵 벗어 주는 센스를 보여준 ‘라네즈’의 거리 광고 (서울 홍대앞). Left: The semi-nude women in this advertisement is not advertising lingerie, but is actually the actress Jun Ji-hyun advertising a tea drink (Gangnam Station, Seoul Subway Line 2). Right: An advertisement for Laneige cosmetics in which the model’s face has been greatly enlarged, but with which we somehow get the impression of her being semi-nude (Hongdae University area, Seoul).
▶좌 : 홍대앞 속옷가게 앞에 걸린 광고판을 뚫어져라 바라보고 있는 두 남자. 우 : 벗는 것만이 에로스는 아니다. 살며시 눈을 감은 여인의 얼굴에서 살포시 읽히는 에로틱함으로 행인을 유혹하는 커피숍 광고 (서울 홍대앞). Left: Two men’s gazes penetrate a lingerie advertisement in the Hongdae University area. Right: This women’s softly closed eyes while reading a book give a slightly erotic and seductive impression to this coffee shop advertisement, persuading passers-by to come inside (Hongdae University area, Seoul).
▶풍만한 여인의 가슴을 그대로 노출한 속옷 브랜드 ‘ Yes’의 거리 광고 (서울 홍대앞). A “Yes” lingerie advertisement exposing a woman’s voluptuous breasts (Hongdae University area, Seoul; End)
As a further example, contrast two recent bra commercials with Han Ye-seul (한예슬) for Venus (비너스) with I think a 2003 one with Go So-young (고소영). Whereas Han Ye-seul’s unabashedly presents herself — or rather, her breasts — as an object for the male gaze, Go So-young advertised the ‘Nudy Bra’ on the basis of bra-straps and lines not being visible, and therefore unlikely to attract any unwanted attention from men.
Finally, another article from the JoongAng Daily on the rapid change in fashions and attitudes:
Underwear emerges from the shadows
(September 04, 2007)
Underwear has been an integral part of the fashion industry for so long that saying “underwear is outerwear” now feels trite.
Ever since the 1990s, when Courtney Love sported a rag-doll look, wearing nothing but big red lips and a stark white slip, the boundary separating underwear from outerwear has become very thin. It now seems like the line will vanish altogether.
Looking through a rack of neon-colored swimsuits at the Galleria department store, Kim Ji-eun, 27, revealed her own summer fashion tip. “I’ve been wearing halter-style bikini tops in pretty colors under summer dresses. The little bow on the back [of the swimsuit, made when she ties the loose ends around the neck] makes a great accent and it does double duty as a bra.”
Kim, a fashion-hungry Seoul girl, went on to disclose more underwear secrets as she walked out of the department store. “Do you remember when Winona Ryder wore a bright red bra under a white tank top during an award show and the straps showed?” she said, with a smile. “To tell the truth, I’ve been copying that look all summer.”
Looking around the Apgujeong area recently, it seemed that Kim wasn’t the only one. Han Hye-seong, 25, was wearing a flowy peasant skirt with a loose top, under which her colorful bra straps were strategically placed to be noticed. “Five years ago, these [straps] would have been clear. But now, I hardly ever see clear straps being sold,” she said.
Until recently, Kim and Han did their underwear shopping at Internet sites which stock foreign underwear labels like Victoria’s Secret. “I couldn’t find underwear made by Korean labels which had any pretty patterns, bold colors or high-fashion elements,” said Kim.
It seems as though Korean companies are finally catching up. The triad of underwear brands – Try Brands, BYC and Taechang, have faltered, making room for new names.The triad’s standard white, black and beige selections with a small variety of designs couldn’t withstand the new wave of outer/inner wear. By 2005, Try Brands’ sales had fallen from 220 billion won ($24.2 million) in 2003 to 129 billion won. BYC’s sales also went down significantly, from 182.5 billion won in 2003 to 151 billion won in 2005. Taechang sold their underwear division to E-Land in 2005.
In their place, a new triad have emerged, including E-Land World (with brands like Roem, Who.A.U and Hunt), Yeshin Persons (including brands like Maru, Codes Combine and Noton) and Good People (with Bodyguard and James Dean). Yeshin Persons was in the forefront of this new group with Maru Underwear (a domestic sportswear brand) in 2004. “Maru Underwear features casual lingerie with a bit of a fashion edge and it targets women from 19 to 25,” said Lim Sae-un, a Maru media representative. Following the initial success of this brand, the company made another underwear line – Codes Combine – which also stems from one of their sportswear brands. This line, targeting people in their 20s and 30s, includes underwear with bohemian and vintage-inspired elements like fringes and neutral tones. The two underwear lines alone made the company 45 billion won in 2005.
E-Land World has been following a similar path. Besides Hunt Underwear and The Day Underwear, they launched Body Pop and Petite Lin, the former for teenagers and the latter for kids under 10. Both have been a great success. Good People launched underwear lines which target women in their late teens to 20s, including Sugar Free and Sexy Cookie.
One factor behind the success of these lines is their affordability. Along with the growing popularity of affordable cosmetics lines like Missha and The Face Shop, these underwear lines provide a sense of adventure at prices that do not involve the risk of a big investment. “Customers feel free to take risks and buy colorful items with patterns instead of your basic white or skin-colored underwear because these items are so affordable,” said an E-Land representative.
Along with domestic brands, underwear brands from other countries have also been selling well. Women’s Secret, an underwear brand from Spain, was introduced in late 2005, with its first shop in Apgujeong-dong. “Underwear is no longer hidden beneath clothes and consumers are now more daring and wear colorful, showy underwear. We decided to bring in this brand to meet these needs,” said Kim Hyun-hwa, the brand’s assistant marketing manager. “Customers are smarter as well. They don’t want cheap material or poor tailoring. Underwear nowadays has to be fashionable and practical with a reasonable price tag.”
Choi Young-jip, head of Princess TamTam Korea, an underwear brand based in France, agrees. “Customers not only look for good designs, but also for underwear that is a good fit for their body. So material and cut are very important.”
These factors have led to some adjustments in tailoring. “We have introduced a line of bras and panties just for the Asian market for this fall/winter season,” said Kim Hyeon-hwa at Women’s Secret. “The panties in this line support the hips, with more coverage, as opposed to thongs or Brazilian-style pieces which are popular in Europe.”
Actress Park Jeong-su launched Sooanae last year, an underwear line targeting middle-aged women which offers stylish yet form-flattering foundation garments. Next was actress Hwang Shin-hae with Elypry, which was first offered through Hyundai home shopping but branched out to CJ home shopping this year. Actress Hyeon Yeong and actress/singer Um Jeong-hwa both used their sexy image to full advantage by launching underwear lines this year. “Finally, there are now lots of choices [for underwear] in Korea.” said Kim Ji-eun as she flipped her hair and continued to search for the perfect bikini/bras to match her new shoes.
If you’ve followed a link here, please note that this post was deleted and completely rewritten in January 2012, but unfortunately I’m unable to do automatic redirects for single posts sorry. Instead, please click here for the new version.
As long-term readers will (hopefully) recall, in my last major post in this series I put forward the hypothesis that an increasingly feminized ideal of Korean male beauty was not a mere import of foreign notions of metrosexuality, as is often claimed, but more the result of a subconscious or deliberate act of defiance by Korean women, angered at being the first to lose their jobs during the economic crisis of the late-1990s. Given that these small inroads into Korean business had been only recently made too, Korean feminism very much taking a back-seat to the wider goals of the democratization movement previously, then it’s not unreasonable to suppose that Korean women would have angrily rejected their previous ideals of men as strong, masculine providers in response, particularly as the male-dominated government and media chose to urge them to support their hardworking fathers and husbands rather than air their complaints.
Unfortunately, there is not quite the same level of academic interest in evolving Korean ideals of men’s beauty as there is in women’s…*cough*…and in the case of English-language studies of Korean men especially I suspect that I’m entering into almost completely uncharted territory.
But in addition to some that I linked to that earlier post, one more English resource that I did find recently was a paper titled “Dual Dominating Strategies of the Korean Hegemonic Masculinity: Advertisements for Men’s Cosmetics” by Park Seung-min, downloadable here. If the title gives you misgivings however, then so it should, for unfortunately it badly needs a major rewrite by a native speaker, preferably one with some background in social sciences too; at the very least, simple terms should have been chosen over rather abstract academic ones which even specialists disagree on the precise meanings of. Otherwise you end up with ditties like this:
According to R. Barthes, creating any meaning of the advertising goes through two stages in the process of action in its meaning. The first stage is a process representing things with symbols, having the denotative meanings. Since the expression of one symbol only has the content of one symbol, the symbol merely has ‘monosemic meaning’ in the action of meaning at the first stage…
But the paper’s images of advertisements from 1970-2006 alone make it worth viewing, and despite everything it is still possible to follow, something which can’t be said of a great deal I’ve read on postmodernism that that passage is reminiscent of. Meanwhile, to add my own contribution, here is my translation of an article from the July edition of Korea Ad Times (코리아애드타임즈) about a recent commercial for men’s sunblock:
라네즈 옴므 ‘선블록 로션’ 편: 그루밍족을 위한 스타일리쉬 선블록
Laneíge Homme ‘Sunblock Lotion’: Stylish Sunblock for Men Concerned about Personal Grooming
‘자외선은 피부의 적’ 이라는 사실은 누구나 알고 있을 것이다. 자외선의 UVB파장은 진피층의 콜라겐과 엘라스틴 파괴시키고 색소 침착을 증가 시키기 때문.
Everybody knows that UV rays are the enemy of youthful-looking skin. This is because the UVB ray components of it destroy the collagen and the elastin in the dermis layer and increase the amount of pigment.
피부 노화의 주범이 자외선이라는 사실이 밝혀지면서 여름은 물론 사시사철 자외선 차단제의 중요성이 강조되고 있다. 하지만 남성들은 끈적이고 바르면 하얗게 뭉쳐 귀찮아서라는 이유는 선블록을 평소에는 바르지 않는다.
Ultraviolet rays are the main cause of aging of the skin, and people are beginning to realize the importance of using sunblock all year round. But men ordinarily don’t wear it, as they don’t like its sticky, greasy feeling or the fact that it tends to clump together in white lumps.
선블록은 단지 야외에서 운동할 때 여름 휴가 때 겨울의 스키장에서만 바르는 특수한 용도의 화장품이라고 여기고 있기 때문이다. 남성들의 이런 생각 때문에 남성 피부는 항상 자외선에 무비방 상태로 놓여있다.
Men tend to think of sunblock as something only to be used when exercising or traveling in the summer or skiing in winter, and so normally their skin has no protection at all against the sun.
하지만 이런 남성들 사이에도 변화의 바람이 불기 시작했다. 바로 ‘그루밍족’의 탄생이다. 이는 몸을 칭찬한다는 뜻의 ‘Groom’에서 나온 말로 패션과 미용에 아낌없이 투자하는 남성을 지칭한다. 이러한 그루밍족을 위해 탄생한 라네즈 옴므, 라네즈 옴므에서 제안하는 피부관리의 첫단계는 바로 ‘선블록’ 이다.
But men are changing their attitudes, and some are prepared to invest a lot of time and money in their appearance, becoming known as “Groomers” by advertisers. Laneíge Homme’s “Sunblock Lotion” is specifically designed for this new group, and advises men that sunblock is the essential first step in adequate skincare.
갈색으로 그을린 구릿빛 피부는 보기에는 멋지고 건강해 보이지만 실제로는 자외선에 의해 피부가 손상됐을 가능성이 높다. 이 CF는 이점에 착안, 스타일을 생각한다면 스킨과 로션 후, 손질를 마무리하는 단계에서 자외선을 차단하면서 피부톤까지 살려주는 라네즈 옴므 선블록 로션을 잊지 말아야 한다는 것을 강조한다.
Brown skin may look attractive and healthy, but it actually means that the possibility of it being damaged by the sun is very high. This commercial draws attention to this, and also emphasizes that you should not forget to apply the product after applying skin lotion and toner.
라네즈 옴므 선블록 로션TVCF는 ‘스타일리쉬’ 그 자체라고 할 수 있다. 심플하고 모던한 실내 세트장은 그 압도적인 규모뿐 아니라 브라운관들로 이루어진 천정이 눈길을 끈다. 모던한 세트장과 조화를 이루는 절제된 소품들은 고급스러움을 한층 더하고 있다.
Laneíge Homme’s new commercial is very stylish. The simple and modern room interior it was shot in is not just big, but viewers’ eyes are drawn to the ceiling, which has many TV monitors. The commercial has much finesse and many subtle points which combine to produce a high quality piece of work.
그루밍족을 위한 카리스마 강조, Emphasizing the Charisma of Groomers
무엇보다 ‘그루밍’ 의 워너비로 등장하는 배우 김지훈은 그만이 가진 세련된 실루엣과 카리스마로 남성뿐 아니라 여성들의 시선을 사조잡고 있다. 어두운 공간에 홀로 앉아 있는 멋진 남자와 천정에 설치된 작은 브라운관들에 남자의 다양한 표정들이 보여진다. 이 때 부라운관에서 자외선이 강렬하게 내리쬐며 남자를 비추고 강렬한 빛에도 당당한 모습을 잃지 않은 남자, 그의 손에는 라네즈 옴므 선블록 로션이 들려있다.
More than anything else, actor Kim Ji-hoon (김지훈) – Groomers’ ideal type – attracts the interest of both men and women with his charisma and stylishly-cut body shape. In the commercial, a man is sitting alone in a dark space and his various expressions are shown on the TV monitors. Then, on the TV monitors there’s a sudden strong flash of sunshine against him, but he still holds himself confident and strong against it, all the while holding a bottle of Laneíge Homme Sunblock Lotion.
내리쬐는 빛으로 점점 환해지는 실내, 자외선마저도 자유롭게 연출 할 수 있는 당당하고 스타일리쉬한 남자, 바로 모두가 꿈꾸는 진정한 ‘그루밍족’ 이 아닐까?
The sunshine gradually makes the room bright, but the stylish and confident man is unaffected by it and free to do as he wishes. He is the quintessential grooming man, the envy of consumers.
선블록 로션TVCF의 또 다른 매력은 바로BGM과 영상의 조화가 돋보인다는 점이다. 이번 광고를 위해 BGM이 특별히 제작했다. 젊은 남성 타겟의 취향을 고려하여 파워플하면서도 세련된 사운드가 돋보이는 Rock 스타일로 만들어진 것.
Another charm of this sunblock lotion commercial is that is in exceptional harmony with BGM’s background music. BGM produced the music especially for this commercial, and it has a powerful and sophisticated rock-style sound, in consideration of young men’s tastes.
이로써 TV CF의 하이라이트 부분과 BGM의 클라이막스가 완벽하게 맞아 떨어지면서 한층 임팩트 있는 광고가 됐다.
The climax of the music is in perfect synchronization with the climax of the commercial and combines to give a very powerful impact on viewers.
(A 2007 Laneíge Homme advertisement featuring Jo In-sung {조인성}, the first aimed at men. Source:Laniege)
Perhaps not a great contribution sorry, and I really expected rather better from a 15,000 won specialist magazine; given how much my wife was laughing out loud at the original Korean version, then I’m not sure how I could have made it more natural-sounding in English either. On the other hand, at least I do now know about “Groomers”, whom I expect to hear much more about in Korean advertising literature in the future.
Seriously, it’s great that the makers of this video are trying to encourage children to eat healthy foods with fermented bean paste (된장) rather than candy. But do they really need to be told that it’s good for their “S-lines” and “V-lines” too? For those few of you that don’t know what either are, this next commercial in particular makes the former pretty clear:
Note that Go Ara, the actress in the commercial, is actually much younger (16) than she may appear above. Meanwhile, here are some commercials for a tea-drink which supposedly gives you a V-line chin, which at least have actual grown women (BoA, 22; Kim Tae-Hee, 28) endorsing the product:
Not by coincidence, here are some “face rollers” which started to appear all over Korea not long after I first heard of V-lines. I’ve read that they’ve been used for many years in Japan and Taiwan too, so Korean women too may well have been using for a long time before they started worrying about their V-lines specifically. But then they weren’t popular enough for me to have noticed them at all until last year, and certainly sellers of them have been making explicit references to V-lines ever since the concept first appeared:
Alas, I’m not entirely certain why an ad explicitly for women opens with some not particularly flattering shots of men either (Lee Seung-gi and comedian Kang Ho-dong), but I guess I’m not the target market. That they do so humorously though, does help reinforce the notion that dieting (etc.) is only something for women to be serious about.
Or perhaps just girls, as I’ve never actually seen a woman using one. My 13 year-old students, however, use them every other break…(sigh).
Update: See here, here, here, and here for much more on the constant invention of new, often impossible body shapes and “lines” for Korean women to strive for, and for North American and European parallels.
Update, November 2013: My views on skin-whitening have changed considerably since this post was written five years ago, so I’ve removed my original commentary to this commercial, and consequently the comments also. But I’ll keep my translation up, just in case any readers still find this post useful (original article: page 52, July 2008 edition of the now-defunct Korea Ad Times / 코리아애드타임스):
더페이스샵 ‘내추럴 선블럭’ 편 / The Face Shop’s ‘Natural Sunblock’ Commercial
“해빛을 맘껏 즐겨봐” / “Enjoy the Sunshine to Your Heart’s Content”
더페이스샵의 광고가 전파를 타고 있다. 이번 광고는 햇빛을 차단해주는 기존 자외선 차단제의 수동적인 발상에서 벗어나 오히려 햇빛을 즐길 수 있게 만들어준다는 능동적인 역할로 선블록의 개념을 변화시키고 있다.
Currently on air, this commercial marks a move away from the traditional notion that one has to protect one’s skin from the sun passively by wearing sunblock and avoiding the sun, and encourages consumers to enjoy the sunshine.
자외선은 피부 노화를 앞당기는 주범으로 많은 여성들은 최대한 자외선으로부터 멀어지려 갖은 노력을 하고 있다. 특히 자외선 양이 급격히 증가하는 여름철에는 손으로 얼굴을 가리고 빠른 걸음으로 햇빛을 피해가는 여성들을 도시의 길거리에서 흔히 볼 수 있다. 심지어 휴양지에서도 긴팔옷과 모자 등으로 최대한 자외선에 노출을 막고 햇빛 아래로 나오지 않으려고 한다. 왜냐면 자외선은 피부를 위해 경계해야 할 대상 ‘제1호’ 이기 때문이다.
Because ultraviolet rays are the number one cause of aging skin, women in particular try very hard to stay out of the sun. As the amount of potential UV exposure rises dramatically in the summer, these days in cities you can see many women both shielding their faces with books or handbags and walking very quickly across the street to avoid having their skin damaged by it. Even at beach resorts women will often wear long sleeves and hats to avoid exposure, or even stay entirely indoors.
그렇기 때문에 지금껏 자외선 이번 자외선차단제 광고는 흔히 자외선을 가장 효과적으로 ‘방어(Block Sun)’ 해준다는 개념으로 접근해왔다. 하지만 이번 더페이스샵의 내추럴 선블록 광고는 이러한 자외선 차단체의 개념을 새롭게 정의해 주목받고 있다. 이유는 소비자들이 선블록을 바르는 이유는 햇빛을 피하고 싶어서가 아니라 햇빛 속에서도 오랫동안 즐기고 싶어서라는 인사이트(Insight)에 초점을 맞췄기 때문이다.
Because of this, up until now the makers of sunblocks have tended to emphasize how effective their products are at stopping UV rays in commercials. By introducing the new notion that consumers can use sunblock to enjoy the sun rather than avoid it instead, this commercial has gathered a lot of attention.
해빛을 즐기는 미남과 미녀
An Attractive Couple Enjoying the Sun
이번 광고는 태국 파타야 근방의 아름다운 무인도를 배경으로 제작됐다. 자연의 수수함이 살아있는 해변에서 눈부시게 쏟아지는 햇빛을 즐기는 두 남녀의 모습이 비쳐진다. 남자모델은 4년간 더페에스샵의 전속모델로 활동하고 있는권상우이고 여자모델은 이번 광고부터 더페이스샵의 얼굴로 새롭게 합류하게 된 배우 이보영이다. 권상우는 데뷔 이래 광고에서 최초로 상반신을 노출하는 파격읗 보여줬다. 그는 햇빛을 즐기는 모습을 담기에 꼭 필요한 노출이라 생각해 기꺼이 응해줬다는 후문이다. 권상우는 익히 알려진 ‘몸짱’ 스타답게 건강하고 멋진 몸매를 과시해 시청자들의 눈길을 단번에 사로잡고 있다. 광고가 전파를 타기 전부터 관광객이 찍은 것으로 보이는 촬영 한장 사진들이 인터넷상을 뜨겁게 달구기도 했다.
This commercial was shot on a beautiful deserted island in Pattaya, Thailand, a natural and pure setting in which to show an attractive couple enjoying the glistening sea. Kwon Sang Woo, the male model, has been modeling for The Face Shop for four years, but although this is the first time that he’s ever appeared half-naked in a commercial, it’s rumored that that he was happy to do it because he felt it was necessary to show how he was enjoying the sun while using the product. Of course, he is well known for his good body, and not only has this helped to attract viewers’ attentions, even before the commercial was aired it received a lot of publicity through Korean tourists taking pictures of it being produced and then uploading them onto the internet.
이보영은 그동안 여러 영화와 광고를 통해 깨끗하고 청순한 모습을 보여왔는데 이런 순수한 이미지가 더페이스샵과 잘 맞아떨어져 새롭게 광고모델로 발탁됐다. 이번 광고에서는 물에 젖은 머리칼을 휘날리며 기존의 순수한 모습 속에 섹시함이 묻어나는 모습으로 그녀의 색다른 모습을 만나볼 수 있다.
As for the actor Lee Bo Young, this is the first time that she has modeled for The Face Shop. As she already has a pure and innocent image from her previous movies and commercials, it was felt that she would be a perfect new face for the company. But with her wet hair fluttering in the breeze in this commercial, viewers get to see a sexy new side to her too.
Update, December 2013: My translation of an article from pages 108-9 of the July 2008 edition of IMAD (아이엠애드) magazine, which has since been discontinued. I’ve removed my original commentary (and readers’ comments), but am keeping the translation up in case someone finds it useful one day:
소비자의 추억을 자극하라 Stimulating Consumer’s Memories
롯데리아 아바카도 통새우버거 TV CF 제작 현장 The Making of the Lotteria Avocado Whole Shrimp Burger Television Commercial
어린 시절 누구나 가지고 있는 추억이 있다. 신나는 동요 소리에 달려나가면 골목 어귀에 서 있던 늠름한 만들. 100원 동전 하나로 리어카에 스프링으로 매달려 있는 말을 타고 멋지게 달렸던 기억.
Everybody has many memories from their childhood, and one many Koreans cherish is suddenly hearing a nursery rhyme playing in the alleyway outside, which meant they could run out excitedly and pay 100won to ride on a magnificent mechanical horse driven around the neighborhood.
웰빙 트렌드를 반영하면서 먹거리에서도 많은 변화가 일어나고 있다. 햄버거도 가공식품의 느낌이 아닌 원재료의 느낌을 그대로 살린 제품이 출시된다. 이번 TV CF도 그런 제품의 특징을 살리고 빠른 시간 내애 소비자의 인식 속에 롯데리아 아보카도 통새우버거를 자리잡도록 하는 것이 목표였다.
Reflecting the “Well-Being” trend, the food consumers eat is undergoing many changes. Hamburger makers too are trying to remove their product’s image of being unhealthy processed food, and to emphasize the taste of their original, healthy ingredients to consumers instead. Thus, the aim of this particular television commercial is both to grab viewers’ attentions within a short time and to convince them that this new burger is also a well-being food.
‘나는 새우’ 라는 동요를 듣고 카피라터가 찾아왔다. 몇 번을 반복해 듣던 중 머리에 스치는 건 어린 시절 동요를 들으며 타고 놀았던 리어카의 장난감 말이었다. “새우를 타보는 건 어떨까?” 이 한마디로 이지아가 새우를 타게 됐다. 제작에 들어가니 한두 군데 손이 가는 것이 아니었다. 우선 가장 큰일은 새우를 만드는 것이었다. 기본 디자인은 회전목마의 모습에서 따오기로 했다. 여신의 모습으로 커다란 통새우를 타고 치마를 휘날리는 이지아의 모습에 팝송이나 클래식이 어울리지 않을까라고 생각하지만, 기획의도부터 언밸런스를 유도하여 처음 보는 소비자도 금방 기억할 수 있는 CF를 만드는 것이 목표였다.
The “Flying Shrimp” song was copyrighted for this commercial. While listening to it many times, the producer realized that it reminded him of the nursery rhymes played by the owners of mechanical horses that visited his neighborhood when he was a child, and so somebody suggested that in the commercial the model Lee Ji-ah should ride a shrimp similar to those. However, there were many to things to do to bring that concept from the drawing board to actual production, and ultimately the basic design of the shrimp used was more similar to a horse from a merry-go-round. In the commercial Lee Ji-ah represents a female goddess, her skirt fluttering in the breeze as she rides a shrimp of equally god-like proportions. The producer originally felt that classical music or a pop song would have been most appropriate for that image, but to capture consumers’ attention quickly he felt that an “unbalancing” nursery rhyme would be more effective.
촬영장소로 선택한 곳은 제주 함덕 해수욕장. 얕은 수심과 에메랄드 빛 바다로 유명한 이것은 CF촬용장소로 많이 찾는 곳이기도 하다. 전날 육지에서 배로 옮긴 통새우를 바닷가에 설치하고 촬영이 시작되었다. 밀물과 썰물의 차 때문에 바다에서의 촬영은 초를 다툴 만큼 어려웠다. 2D에서 나무를 합성해도 되지만 느낌을 최대한 살리기 위해 바다 중간에 모래로 섬을 만들고 나무도 심었다.
Hamdok Beach in Jeju was chosen as the shooting area, well-known amongst producers of commercial because of its shallow water and emerald-like glittering sea. Time was saved by taking the model of the shrimp was taken by boat from the shore and setting it up the day before shooting, but still, because of the difference between high tide and low tide the production crew was literally fighting against the clock on the day itself. This was not helped by having to make a small island out of sand in the background and planting two trees on it, because it was thought that real trees would give of a more lifelike and vivid atmosphere than the 2D ones called for in the original plan.
통새우의 이미지는 물론, 소비자가 CF를 봤을 때 먹고 싶게 만드는 것도 중요하다. 보통 시즐 촐용은 모델 촬영이 끝난 후 남는 시간에 졸린 눈을 비벼가며 야간에 찍는 것이 보통이다. 하지만 이번 CF에서 중요한 건 통새우와 아보카도를 알리는 것이기 때문에 우리는 시즐 촬영에 이틀의 시가늘 쏟아부었다. 최상의 컨디션과 신선한 재료로 최고로 먹음직스러워 보이는 화면을 찍기에는 이 시간도 짧게만 느껴졌다.
While the image of the shrimp was important, of course the main purpose of the commercial is simply to make people want to eat. Usually, in commercials of this nature the “sizzle” shot is quickly done at night after the main shooting with a model during the day, often when the commercial crew is very tired, but in this case it was felt that convincing consumers of the healthiness of the new avocado and shrimp burger was so important that 2 entire days were spent on it. Because all ingredients had to be shot fresh and in the best condition, those two days also felt too short!
You can’t blame overseas reporters for just calling them metrosexuals: kkotminam (꽃미남), literally “flower beauty man,” sounds a little strange even in Korean, let alone English.
Done too often though, it’s easy to lose sight of the differences. Combined with scholarship that (over)emphasizes the trend’s roots in popular yaoi manga from Japan, one can easily be forgiven for thinking that Korean men are doing no more than imitating what they see overseas.
This needs rectifying. Not least, because when men suddenly adopt some new fashion en masse, it’s invariably with the specific purpose of getting laid. But what was so special about the 2002 World Cup that made Korean women demand hitherto “effeminate” clothing, personal-grooming, and behaviors from them, if they wanted any hope of doing so?
To answer, you need to consider what happened in the 5 years preceding it, which was a tumultuous period for Korean society. Especially for Korean women, something which tends to get ignored in most accounts of events.
In brief, once democratization began in the late-1980s, women were finally rewarded with the drafting, implementation, and — yes — even enforcement of a wealth of sexual equality legislation, after years of having such concerns ignored or deferred by the military authorities and democracy movement respectively. Also, the female workforce participation rate slowly but surely increased, despite the predominance of the salaryman system and the attendant male-breadwinner ideology. In more ways than one, women could feel justified that their patience was being rewarded.
Then the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-8 struck. Not only was “expensive” sexual equality legislation indefinitely postponed, but the government-business “solution” was to disproportionately lay off women, the logic being that young single ones, largely living with their parents, would be provided for by their fathers, whereas married women (and their children) would be provided for by their husbands. More advanced in their careers, and thus more expensive, the latter would be particularly targeted, to the extent that many would do their utmost to keep their marriages a secret from their employers, a theme subsequently explored in many dramas.
Lest anyone feel that this overview is a wild generalization, note that, tellingly, president Lee Myung-bak would repeat the same solution in the next financial crisis in 2008, although by that stage there was more of a pure financial logic: by having the most irregular workers in the OECD, which women would form the vast majority of. Back in 1998 though, and coming so soon after supposedly liberating and empowering democratization, which actually only really, qualitatively, began upon the administration of the first civilian president Kim Young-sam (김영삼) from 1993, then I’m going to take a wild guess that women were, in short, pissed off.
And with that prickly conclusion in mind is precisely how one should view the following music video by the Korean girl-group SES, made in 2002:
About which Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling gives the following insightful commentary, starting with:
Taken at face value, the SES video seems to be about getting revenge on some boorish (white) men and humiliating them, but I think there are other ways to look at this video than just as a representation of Korean anti-Americanism. A very simple question would be: How many working women in Korea interact with foreign bosses, foreign colleagues, or foreign customers? I would imagine that the vast majority of working women never have to deal with foreigners in the workplace. So, for working Korean women…who would the sexist or rude bosses, colleagues, or customers really be?
And a little later:
…could this be seen as a “liberating” narrative of women standing up to boorish, disrespectful men in positions of power over them and humiliating them or otherwise getting revenge on them and asserting their power. In this case, the use of foreign actors to portray these men acts as the spoonful of sugar which makes the medicine go down because images of Korean men being humiliated would never be approved.
Whatever the answer, what’s clear is that, especially in 2002, on TV, Korean men could never have been treated like this, unless it was done with a lot of humor (and probably not even then). It needs to be asked, of course, why it would be acceptable to portray foreign men the way they are in this video, but not Korean men.
Lest you feel that Matt exaggerates the restrictions on how Korean men could be — and still can be — portrayed in popular culture, see here for a wealth of further examples. Yet, despite those, there were other ways women could express their anger. And a lot more besides.
While I should always resist the temptation to generalize my own experiences to the rest of Korea, it is still remarkable just in its own right that, in one of my first ever classes here in 2000, some of my female students mentioned that they were regularly chastised by middle-aged women on the street for — wait for it — wearing short sleeves. For just 2 years later, it would be a point of patriotic pride for them to wear a crop-top made out of the previously sacred national flag during the 2002 World Cup, and very much encouraged by their elders. As Hyun-Mee Kim (see the footnotes) puts it:
Stripping the Korean national flag of its heavy solemnity and nationalism, [women] brought change with their white, red, blue, and black sports bras, scarves, tank tops, and skirts. And the young Korean women who had been the target of criticism by the media every summer for their “excessive spending” and “oversexed outfits” were praised as original and attractive fashion leaders at the soccer scenes (Hyun-mee Kim: 228-229)
To clarify, I am not (yet) making a connection between this and previous events: merely pointing out the speed of the change. But, how to explain that pace? What on earth did soccer — of all things — have to do with the way women chose to dress?
Perceptive readers may already be thinking that all the skin was publicly encouraged to show support of the Korean soccer players, not the first time women’s bodies and sexuality have quite literally been used in service of the South Korean state (see Sex Among Allies by Katharine Moon, or my own series on gender and militarism). And, indeed, the media did soon describe it as such.
But Hyun-mee Kim notes that Korean women were already on the streets wearing sexier and/or more comfortable clothing that summer, well before public perceptions caught up with and condoned the new standards of dress that they had created. Moreover, and crucially, they were also simultaneously publicly discussing, idolizing and objectifying the Korean players and their bodies in ways that would have been previously thought of as shocking. And, as one does not salivate over a guy’s pecs simply by government decree (please correct me if I’m wrong), then it’s difficult to deny that both were definitely initiated by and for women.
Also, that much more was going on than simply women showing more skin, questioning public standards of decency, or talking more about men that they found attractive. Indeed, the process had already begun in popular culture in the mid-1990s.
Writing in 2002, So-hee Lee mentions that in 1995, “the most popular topics among university students were sexuality, sexual identity, and other sexual subjects” but that in 2002 “there is still no broad popular social discourse on female sexuality outside of marriage”. Partially that was because the term barely existed in Korea then as explained, but primarily it was because – for all the stereotypes of married Korean women or ajumma (아주마) having gender but not sex – precisely they that were at the forefront of a veritable sexual revolution in Korea beginning in the mid-1990s. As she explains, many Korean women novelists confessed that it was in marriage that they had begun to recognize their repression as women for the very first time”, and this was because:
Looking at their mother’s lives, Korean women in their early thirties believed that their marriages would be different. Because the Korean standard of living and patterns of Korean life changed very quickly, they believed that Korean ways of thinking had been transformed with the same speed. This is where their tragedy begins. As [a character in a mid-1990s novel discussed] says, “mothers teach daughters to live differently from themselves but teach sons to live like their fathers”….During sixteen years of schooling, they had learned that equality is an important democratic value, but nowhere had they been taught that women experience the institution of marriage as a condition of inequality. Many married women of this generation have [thus] experienced a process of self-awakening…(Lee: 144)
Lee’s chapter is about a succession of novels, movies and TV dramas that suddenly appeared between 1993-1996 which, with their blunt depictions of Korean women’s sexual desires, sexual repression, sexual frustrations within marriage, direct challenges to sexual double standards and so forth, were direct challenges to those stereotypes and provoked intense discussions throughout Korea. Unfortunately, a detailed discussion of them will have to wait for another post (update: and here that is!), but it can be said here that Lee concludes from her study of them that:
Looking back at Korean culture with a certain detachment [in 2002], I can imagine that the years 1995 and 1996 will be remembered as a critical period for the emergence of social discourse on sexuality, especially female sexuality. The year 1995 was particularly remarkable in that housewives began, on their own initiative, to speak in public about wives’ subjective sexuality (Lee: 160).
And that, in a comparison with the US in the 1970s:
My reading of the concept of female sexuality in Korean popular culture might suggest that Korean society is now at a stage of development comparable to America in the 1970s, when every kind of women’s issue appeared in realistic novel form….If this parallel holds, then what kind of story is unfolding in twenty-first-century Korea? Is it not difficult to image that a viable revolution against sexual repression might take place? (158)
With even greater benefit of hindsight, I’m not all that sure that the mid-1990s are remembered quite like that in 2008, and Lee did acknowledge that her discussion possibly:
…gives the impression that Korean women now are marching to demand their sexual subjectivity, in reality, most Korean women are marching only as the passive consumers of the sorts of cultural products described previously, not as their active cultural producers (159).
But quite presciently, she continues:
When women are able to intervene in the process of cultural production as subjective consumers with a feminist point of view, the Korean concept of female sexuality can be transformed more rapidly than before (159, my emphasis).
And of course, just like the 2008 Olympics that are coming in up in 3 weeks time, the World Cup is no longer merely or even primarily a competition for victory between nations, but is a prominent global cultural product. Part of that cultural product is the bodies of the the players themselves, and Korean women in 2002 definitely fundamentally changed the ways in which they “consumed” those.
The Rise of Kkotminam: A backlash against salarymen?
The first change they made was in confirming the dominance of feminized ideals of male beauty that had first begun evolving in the mid-1990s. Consider this description of the previous ideals:
The streets of Seoul are now filled with girlish women. Some look fragile, as if calling for protection. Women of this generation say that want to be protected rather than to protect. Young girls who used to favor gentle “mama’s boys” now turn their backs on them. They are anxious to fall in love with “tough guys” who look strong and even violent, like Choi Min-su and Lee Cheong-jae, who played tough gangsters in the explosively popular 1995 television drama Sand Clock (모레시계). Besides having a “tough guy” as a boyfriend, the women of this emerging generation want a pet. A pretty and coquettish girl, with a tiny, cute dog, beside a tough guy is part of this emergent new image. (Cho Haejoang: 182)
Although the book that was from was published in 2002, by the reference to the television drama and by the focus of other chapters I get the impression she is really writing about the mid to late-1990s. Later in the chapter, she mentions how the country as a whole reverted to a justifying male breadwinner mentality under the banner of “Let’s protect the our fathers who have lost their vitality” or “Let’s restore the authority of the family head” as a result of the IMF Crisis as I’ve discussed, and presumably the natural result would have been that those “tough guy” preferences of Korean women would have been reinforced, or at least the protective elements of them. But in fact, quite the opposite occurred. For instance, by 2000 there was:
…a new type of male emerging albeit in a small number of music videos. It is a de-gendered image of men which is a contrast to the macho image. Male groups such as Y2K, H.O.T., ITYM, and Shinhwa, whose fans are mostly teenage girls, portray this image. They wear make-up and a lot of jewelry and ornaments – which are all considered feminine – and take of their shirts to show off their bodies. This indicates that the male body is also sexually objectified as the female body….The style of the video is similar to that used to show female [bodies] with extreme close-ups to fill the screen with a face, and medium range or full body shots for dances. Although there is a risk of overstating the phenomenon, this image could be interpreted as a signal indicating the possibility of breaking the binary boundaries of men and women that have been formed in a patriarchal culture (Hoon-soon Kim: 207)
And this is corroborated by the fact, as early as the mid-1990s, there were already distinctly feminine advertisements for cosmetics aimed at men. These following ones are all from the Somang Cosmetics website (update: they’ve since been taken down), but I can’t imagine that those of other cosmetics companies would have been significantly different.
1998, with Kim Sung-woo (김승우):
1999, when soccer player Ahn Jung-hwan (안정한) must have signed a modeling contract with them:
And then of course the notorious television advertisement for “Color Lotion” from 2002, featuring Kim Jae-won (김재원) on the left:
Regardless of what women made of that particular homoerotic advertisement, the establishment of distinctly feminine ideals of male attractiveness were at least partially sealed by Ahn Jung-Hwan’s success in the World Cup, when Somang Cosmetics must have thought that all its Christmases had come at once:
Although the Earth must surely have shifted as Korean women collectively put their hands to their chests and sighed as Ahn Jung-hwan kissed his wedding ring every time he scored a goal, I’m not for an instant placing the blame(!) for what came to be known as the “Flower Men” (꽃미남) phenomenon solely on his shoulders. Where does it come from then?
Of course there is some international basis for it. While Taiwan, for instance, both survived the IMF Crisis relatively unscathed and didn’t host the World Cup, much the same phenomenon still happened there:
Josephine Ho (2001: 63-86), a feminist from Taiwan, points out that most of the recent idols of teenage girls are no longer buff and tough men but rather “feminine men” who evoke a sense of sympathy, saying that there is a “clear contrast between teenage girls of enormous strength and their idols of somewhat weak image.” This illustrates that women in their teens are breaking away from the typical framework of heterosexual romance in which women long for me who will devote themselves to, and take care of them, and have started to express their sexuality in an active manner. The preference for men with the capability and personality of the breadwinner as the “most attractive” is being undermined. (Hyun-Mee Kim: 235)
I don’t know enough about modern Taiwanese society to judge the accuracy of that, but I have no reason to doubt that it’s true. But I have many problems with international comparisons.
Firstly, because they mean that the Western notion of “metrosexuality” invariably comes to dominate discussions, years of repetitive comparisons between An Jung-hwan and David Beckham in the Korean English-language media (and, by extension, by foreign observers too) ultimately seeming to absolve Korean women of any ability to determine their own tastes in men. And just like it does to be told personally that my liking any Korean women at all is mere “yellow fever”, it must surely rankle Korean women to be told that them liking say any Korean idol is no different to, say, a British teenage girl liking a member of Westlife.
On top of that, for all their new assertiveness, there were still definite limits on how far women’s new freedoms could go, and they did not extend to publicly praising and/or objectifying non-Korean men. Obviously that’s a crucial point, but as this post approaches (ahem) 4500 words I realize that a discussion of that would be better placed in Part Three; meanwhile, accounting for changes by a simple importation of foreign ideals of male attractiveness portrays Korean women as, well, mindless, uncritical, and passive consumers and again as Part Three will more fully reveal, this was anything but the case.
As the title suggests, I pose a more proactive explanation, and herein (finally) lies the revelation that has so preoccupied me for the past two weeks. First, consider this statement:
When gender discrimination in public areas such as the labor market and politics is still powerfully all pervasive, Korean women often feel helpless in thinking that change won’t come easily. Their sense of devastation leads to displays of resistance and subversiveness in “private areas such as sexuality. Sexuality and intimacy lend themselves to being viewed as the only arena where the women can affect a measure of change through their will or emotions. In this respect, Korean women’s rapid sexual subjectification demonstrates, on the one hand, the power to transform and, on the other, a collective sense of powerlessness (Hyun-Mee Kim: 240).
The first things that came to mind when I read that were the scene in either La Femme Nikita or Point of No Return (I can’t remember which) when, after receiving her training to become an assassin, the main character is placed in a sort of finishing school where her female tutor reveals the existence of “this power” that women have over men. After that was a line from some sex and/or relationship advice book that I read once, which said that women should not consider sex as something to be given to or withheld from partners as a form of reward and punishment.
Yes, considering the virtual gender apartheid that exists in Korea, then an alleged asexuality of ajummas as a form of resistance to patriarchy was one of the first things that came to mind too. But then the next thing was that, maybe, just maybe, flower men became their new ideal of male attractiveness as a act of at least subconscious resistance to the men that had denied them of the opportunity for children and careers that they’d (finally) come to expect? That still maintained that women didn’t even have sexual feelings, but at the same time taking advantage of one of the biggest prostitution industries in Asia? That had the gall, after doing all that, to expect Korean women to continue to hold breadwinners like them on a pedestal? Like I said, they were pissed off, andKorean men that came up with the aforementioned slogans were surely naive to think that things could have gone on simply as before.
Of course, I acknowledge that it will be much more complicated than that in reality. Like I said, I haven’t looked at the 1990s in any great detail here, but in addition to the sexually radical new books, movies and dramas that came out in 1993-96 that Cho Haejeong discusses, there’s a whole host of developments like the “Missy” phenomenon beginning in 1994 and the “Samonim” (사모님) one before that: in other words, things weren’t quite as simplistic as how I’ve depicted them. I haven’t paid enough attention to generational differences either, even though Hyun-mee Kim quite correctly claims that they are as strong markers of identity in Korea as race is in the US, so much so that most chapters in the books used here us them as their base units of analysis, and increasingly books on Korean politics are too.
As I type this, I realize that no description is complete without those, and so they’ll require an unplanned additional post before I talk about the 2002 World Cup proper in now Part Four (or Five)…which is not to imply that this post hasn’t considerably evolved and mutated itself since I first began writing on this, now somewhat amorphous subject.
Another thing I realize is that until recently I’ve been so enamored of my associations of Korea with futurism (see here and especially here for instance) that I’ve mistakenly disdained studying the 1990s previously, feeling that as I looked further and further back in time in Korea then the people become more conservative and unlikeable, the clothes and hairstyles more bizarre, the women less attractive, and the country as a whole much less modern…and so on. That’s not unreasonable given Korea’s breakneck speed of development, but considering that I arrived in Korea as long ago as 2000, and that I first went to university in 1994, then in hindsight my disinterest has been very strange. After all, to understand me, you’d have to understand New Zealand in my formative years as an adult, and indeed just on the bus home yesterday I listened to a Korea Society Podcast on president Lee Myung-bak’s first 100 days in office, in which one panelist argued that the experience of the IMF crisis defines Koreans of my generation. All obvious certainly, but I’ve got some catching up to do.
Regardless of all that though, I think my notion of flower men becoming popular because of a backlash is a definitely a valid one, and I think original too; certainly no-one that I’ve read recently makes a link like that. At the very least, it needs further exploring.
Only having just begun examining the 1990s myself then, I can’t confirm or disprove Gord Sellar’s suggestion that cross-fertilization from some elements of Japanese popular culture may also have played a role in the rising appeal of flower men, and while my gut instinct tells me that it was mostly home grown and that that would only have had a marginal role at best, I still highly recommend his post just for its discussion of the ways in which the phenomenon has evolved and be sustained since 2002 alone. Given that I end my discussion on them in 2002 (for now), then our two posts nicely compliment each other on that score.
Ho, Josephine, “From ‘Spice Girls’ to ‘compensated dating’: sexualization of Taiwanese teenage girls,” Yonsei Women’s Journal, 7, (2001), pp. 63-86.
Hoon-Soon Kim, “Korean Music Videos, Postmodernism, and Gender Politics” in Feminist Cultural Politics in Korea, ed. by Jung-Hwa Oh, 2005, p. 207 pp. 195-227.
Hyun-Mee Kim, “Feminization of the 2002 World Cup and Women’s Fandom” in Feminist Cultural Politics in Korea, ed. by Jung-Hwa Oh, 2005, pp. 228-243.
So-hee Lee, “Female Sexuality in Popular Culture” in Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, pp. 141-164.
Update, December 2013: A translation of this article, with my original commentary (and consequently readers’ comments) removed. Here are some quick translations for the captions below too:
“Be picky”
“Embrace your desires”
“Be lazy”
“Think differently”
“Look at them [men] humorously”
“Don’t wait”
“Don’t even look up [at him]”
“Shout”
“Dios Women Cheer Project” (the name of the ad campaign).
최근 TV를 통해 방영중인 LG 냉장고 ‘디오스 여자만세 프로젝트’ 광고가 네티즌들로부터 거센 비판을 받고 있다. 무엇보다 표현이 상식수준을 넘어 보기 민망할 정도로 지나치고 심지어 남녀 역차별을 조장하고 있다는 점을 들어 포털사이트 다음 아고라에서는 ‘디오스 여자만세 프로젝트’ 광고 중지를 요구하는 청원 서명까지 벌이고 있다.
Netizens have strongly criticized the “Dios Woman Cheer Project” advertisement that has recently been playing on Korean TV. On the Daum Agora discussion forum, they have complained that the things said in it defy common-sense standards of decency, even going so far as to promote discrimination against men, and so have set up an online petition calling for it to be taken off the air.
광고에는 ‘여자들이여 까다롭게 굴어라, 더 욕심 부려라, 게을러져라, 딴 생각해라, 우습게 보라, 기다리지 마라, 거들떠보지 마라, 큰소리 쳐라’ 등의 문구가 여성이 남성을 인형처럼 조정하는 자극적인 장면과 함께 등장한다.
In the advertisement, the voiceover and the text say: “Hey, women! Be picky! Embrace your desires! Be lazy! Think differently! Look at them (men) humorously! Don’t wait! Don’t even look up (at him)! Shout!”, and so forth. In one scene women are even encouraged to treat men like puppets.
서명을 주도하고 있는 네티즌 ‘꽃순이’는 “‘여성만세 프로젝트’라는 거창한 이름으로 좋지 않은 말들만 열거하고, 그 대상을 남자로 유도하고 있다”며 “방송에서 안볼 수 있게 해 달라”고 요청하고 나섰다. 또 다른 네티즌은 “만약 남녀 반대로 광고가 만들어졌다면, 사회적으로 큰 파장이 왔을 것”이라며 “남녀 역차별을 조장하고 있다”고 주장했다.
According to the netizen “Flower-Suni” that initiated the petition, “The grand-sounding ‘Woman Cheer Project’ advertisement merely lists and induces negative behavior towards men”, that “people don’t really want to see on their screens”, and demanded that it be taken off the air. Another netizen added that “if an advertisement portraying the same sentiments towards women had been made, then all sectors of society would have been quickly up in arms and insisted that “it promotes inequality”.
광고 내용이 눈에 거슬리기는 여성들도 마찬가지다. 여성이라고 밝힌 네티즌들 대부분 “저런 광고는 여성들에게도 달갑지 않다”, “괜히 여자 안티를 만드는 광고”, “광고가 무척 거슬렸다. 된장녀를 만드는 것인가”라고 비난했으며 “남녀평등이란 서로 만드는 것이다, 한쪽만 강조하는 평등은 또 다른 불평등을 가져온다” 고 지적했다.
By no means is it only men that feel that the contents of the ad were inappropriate. Of those female netizens who have made their gender public on discussion boards, most criticized it, saying things like “it is unacceptable to women just as much as men”; that “the advertisement will make people anti-women”; and that “the advertisement is very offensive, and encourages women to be Bean-paste Girls”. Finally one netizen pointed out that “men and women have to become equal together, and if you overemphasize only one aspect of that then it will actually only lead to further inequality.”
Readers, I’m sure, are familiar with many of the biological and cultural explanations proffered for differences in mental abilities between the sexes. Here’s an an article in the Economist magazine with some strong evidence for, well…both sides to the debate, and with some surprising conclusions about Korea too:
Girls are becoming as good as boys at mathematics, and are still better at reading
TRADITION has it that boys are good at counting and girls are good at reading. So much so that Mattel once produced a talking Barbie doll whose stock of phrases included “Math class is tough!”
Although much is made of differences between the brains of adult males and females, the sources of these differences are a matter of controversy. Some people put forward cultural explanations and note, for example, that when girls are taught separately from boys they often do better in subjects such as maths than if classes are mixed. Others claim that the differences are rooted in biology, are there from birth, and exist because girls’ and boys’ brains have evolved to handle information in different ways.
Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute in Florence and his colleagues have just published the results of a study which suggests that culture explains most of the difference in maths, at least. In this week’s Science, they show that the gap in mathematics scores between boys and girls virtually disappears in countries with high levels of sexual equality, though the reading gap remains.
Dr Guiso took data from the 2003 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. Some 276,000 15-year-olds from 40 countries sat the same maths and reading tests. The researchers compared the results, by country, with each other and with a number of different measures of social sexual equality. One measure was the World Economic Forum’s gender-gap index, which reflects economic and political opportunities, education and well-being for women. Another was based on an index of cultural attitudes towards women. A third was the rate of female economic activity in a country, and the fourth measure looked at women’s political participation.
As long-term readers will know, I usually have problems with virtually anything the Economist says about international comparisons of education standards, its consistent praise of the high scores of South Korean students, for instance, undermined by South Koreans themselves finding their education system appalling (a fact which a whole five minutes of checking on the internet would reveal). There’s little scope for misinterpretations of correlations between reading and writing scores and measures of sexual equality though, but still, as you can see, the researchers were at pains to keep the variables down to a minimum (source, right: Tattoo Lover; CC BY-SA 2.0).
On average, girls’ maths scores were, as expected, lower than those of boys. However, the gap was largest in countries with the least equality between the sexes (by any score), such as Turkey. It vanished in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the sexes are more or less on a par with one another. The researchers also did some additional statistical checks to ensure the correlation was material, and not generated by another, third variable that is correlated with sexual equality, such as GDP per person. They say their data therefore show that improvements in maths scores are related not to economic development, but directly to improvements in the social position of women.
That was quite surprising, and confusing. For sure, in terms of its gender empowerment measure, Korea is one of the most sexist countries in the world, and although it was less than a generation ago that girls’ university and even high-school educations were often sacrificed for the sake of their brothers’, I’ve heard from many different sources that the Korean education system today is relatively meritocratic. Indeed, Michael Seth in this must-read book on the subject, argues that it is one of its greatest strengths, albeit one unfortunately (and ironically) at odds with the great respect, status and deference given to high achievers also.
I’d imagined, then, that young Korean women confront sexism more once they enter the workforce, as despite their educations there remain strong societal expectations that they will be happy to work at non-advancing jobs in their twenties and then effectively retire upon marriage, not unlike the situation in Western countries in the 1950s and ’60s.
But then these tests were for 15 year-olds, so clearly there is some sex-based factor at work in the Korean education system that I wasn’t aware of. Why do Korean girls do so badly at math then? I’m open to suggestions.
The only clue I have is that Maths (and English) is considered a hard and difficult subject for students, which is why in its 19-year history the chain of institutes I work for didn’t hire any female teachers to teach it until literally last week, only men being considered authoritative enough to get students to study in class. Certainly, the institutes I work for are quite unique in that regard, and much more demanding of students than most, but still: I think it’s quite telling that the policy was in place. And if students of either sex disliked it so much, then I can’t imagine that girls with interest and/or ability in it would have been particularly encouraged to pursue it, given their relative absence in engineering and scientific fields in Korea. Perhaps Korean education isn’t quite as meritocratic as I thought?
(On a side note, it says a great deal about the sort of English taught at my institute that only men were considered capable of teaching that also, despite — I assume — a majority of English {and languge} teachers in Korea {and probably the world} being women)
The one mathematical gap that did not disappear was the differences between girls and boys in geometry. This seems to have no relation to sexual equality, and may allow men to cling on to their famed claim to be better at navigating than women are….
Again, surprising in a Korean context. I’ve been teaching 13 and 14 year-olds, on-and-off, for a good eight years now, and I’ve noticed that their math textbooks are always just full of geometry, far more than I ever had to do at their age. For sure, frantically copying each other’s answers in breaks between classes doesn’t equate to real learning, something they’re forced to do because they wouldn’t possibly have enough time to do all the homework required of them (let alone — heaven forbid — eat and sleep too). But still, if there’s one country where I’d thought girls would have been good at geometry, it would have been Korea. Something is clearly up (source, right: unknown).
The article gets more interesting (and controversial) after that:
….However, the gap in reading scores not only remained, but got bigger as the sexes became more equal. Average reading scores were higher for girls than for boys in all countries. But in more equal societies, not only were the girls as good at maths as the boys, their advantage in reading had increased.
This suggests an interesting paradox. At first sight, girls’ rise to mathematical equality suggests they should be invading maths-heavy professions such as engineering-and that if they are not, the implication might be that prejudice is keeping them out. However, as David Ricardo observed almost 200 years ago, economic optimisation is about comparative advantage. The rise in female reading scores alongside their maths scores suggests that female comparative advantage in this area has not changed. According to Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management in Illinois who is one of the paper’s authors, that is just what has happened. Other studies of gifted girls, she says, show that even though the girls had the ability, fewer than expected ended up reading maths and sciences at university. Instead, they went on to be become successful in areas such as law.
In other words, girls may acquire an absolute advantage over boys as a result of equal treatment. This is something that society, more broadly, has not yet taken on board. Mattel may wish to take note that among Teen Talk Barbie’s 270 phrases concerning shopping, parties and clothes, at least one might usefully have been, “Dostoevsky rocks!”
I’m very much a proponent of the existence of some fundamental biological differences in aptitudes between the sexes myself, and do believe that even in a perfect world that there will always be, say more female nurses than male ones, and more male engineers then female ones and so forth. Not for a moment does that mean that I will ever stop or even not positively encourage my daughter to, say, be an engineer, or not take seriously a male nurse, but the above is yet another inconvenient truth against the argument that all difference is due to prejudice.
For more on that I recommend the book The New Sexual Revolution, by Robert Pool (1994), and especially “The Real Truth About The Female Body” in Time Magazine, March 8 1999. I especially recommend checking out the (naturally) numerous comments to the Economist article; as you have to be a subscriber to make a comment, then the dialogue is a lot more intelligent and civilized than you’ll find on most blogs and forums! I especially like this one of Tom West’s, a healthy cautionary message against what I’ve written above:
“Do all feminists rail against the idea that men and women might actually be inherently different?”
The trouble with acknowledging differences is that human beings tend to turn a generality into a specific rule. As soon as you say that it’s natural that men are over-represented in higher math, it becomes instantly harder for any woman to be even average at math. The meme is simplified into “women can’t do math”, and you soon end up with teacher’s wjho won’t work hard to teach girls math, boys and girls that reject those who are good at math as weird and different, and of course, dissuade many from putting in the effort to become good at math because they themselves believe they can’t do math.
As an aside, in my opinion, that was why Larry Summers deserved to lose his job for his remarks. Not that he was necessarily wrong. It was that by virtue of his widely circulated speech, he had legitimized “women can’t do math” in the minds of many, regardless of what he actually meant or believed. (And that people in authority have to be aware of not what their words say, but of what their words will do.)
(Note: Having my blog posts regularly copied and pasted by others myself, normally I’d be loathe to paste an entire article here. But it was of an annoying length that made simply giving excerpts difficult, yet pasting all of it too much. After much time and repeated links wasted on trying the former, I gave up and chose the latter!)
For new readers, Part 1 was an outline and discussion of the first part of the 2003 journal article “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society“ by Taeyon Kim. To quickly recap it, she argues that women weren’t really thought of as individuals in Joseon Dynasty Korea, as the state ideology of Neo-Confucianism considered them incapable of the spiritual transcendence that men were. Instead, the best they could aim for in life was continuing a husband’s “ki”, or spirit, through the production and upbringing of sons and the efficient management of his household. Hence Kim describes them as “subjectless bodies,” as not only were they not really individuals but their physical bodies were not really their own either, merely being vessels for and tenders of the more precious ki instead (source, right: jingdianmeinv)
In terms of the ideals for women’s appearance, this meant that the physical attributes required for those were prized more than beauty. On top of that, adornment and/or alteration of the body was not condoned for either sex, as the physical body was one’s inheritance of ancestors’ sacred ki. And herein lies the paradox, as on the one hand Neo-Confucianism still pervades all aspects of Korean life today (I’ll take readers knowing and agreeing with this as a given), but on the other hand, modern Korea appears to be in the midst of a decidedly non-traditional celebration of youth and the female form. What gives?
Neo-Confucian Consumption Motives
The short answer is that appearances can be deceptive. It is certainly true that modern media images of Korean women are not Neo-Confucian in the 19th Century sense described above, and it’s difficult to argue just by looking at them that advertisements, for instance, are any different to their counterparts in Western countries. Of course, systematic cross-country analyses of numbers and types do reveal significant and telling differences, and if readers are interested in those then I highly recommend reading the 2006 journal article entitled “Content Analysis of Diet Advertisments: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” by Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon, downloadable here. But surveys like those do not chronicle average Korean and Western women’s reactions to them, and herein lies the essential differences between them.
As a rule, in Western countries most (although not all) advertisements for a product have to actively suppress and disguise the notion that people may feel compelled, influenced or forced into purchasing that product, whether by the ad, by peer pressure, or some other unwritten social rule. Instead, people are encouraged to conceive their purchase in terms of personal choice, individuality, empowerment, and — especially if the target consumer is young — maybe liberation and rebellion too. And of course, these advertising norms undoubtedly operate for a good proportion of advertisements in Korea too. But in the case of advertisements for products related to one’s appearance, be they cosmetics, clothes, or plastic surgery, it turns out that a great number of Korean women make purchases for precisely the opposite reasons. Indeed, not only is there no stigma in doing so, but they positively embrace the opportunity to conform to and harmonize with social norms through their consumption choices (source, right: Kiran Foster).
Lest that assertion sound like a typical exaggeration of a Caucasian male, surveys that Kim cites indicate that most Korean women explicitly justify their choices in those Neo-Confucian terms, and definitely not the individual empowerment, entitlement, and personal assertion of one’s individual choice that Western women tend to do in similar surveys. That is not to say that Western women (or men) can’t and don’t also passively follow fashions, and it’s not necessarily a negative or dehumanizing thing either. But very few Westerners would admit to it.
I see no reason to doubt the results of those surveys (which I can provide the details of if readers wish), and while my own female Korean friends for instance, are certainly as liberal and free-willed as any Westerner in their clothing and cosmetic choices — and lifestyles; indeed, that’s why we’re friends — they can’t counter the mass of empirical evidence Kim provides, and even the anecdotal evidence from the media and on the streets of Korea. If Neo-Confucianism is pervasive in modern Korean life then, and Korean women consume cosmetics, clothes, and undergo plastic surgery operations largely for the sake of Neo-Confucianist motives, then it’s time to call a spade a spade and argue that Korean society’s new emphasis on women’s appearances is (somehow) Neo-Confucianist too. Indeed, it would be strange if only this particular aspect of Korean life was so different.
Hence the second part of Kim’s article is about how this modern phenomenon is a warping of and adaptation of Neo-Confucian ideals of women’s roles to new capitalist and consumerist circumstances. But while I originally wanted to outline and discuss that in this post, I’ve moved that to Part 3, because first I wanted to place those circumstances in their historical context, which I think considerably adds to and strengthens Kim’s argument (source, right: Jacob Bøtter).
The Developmental Context of East Asian Consumption
I’ve already demonstrated that although Korean women and, say, American women, can both be labelled as “consumers,” they can and do both make radically different consumption choices; or, make the same choices, but for radically different reasons. Sure, this is obvious, but I’m as guilty as anyone in generalizing and using labels here, so it’s good to remind ourselves of it. But if we shift our attention to the differences between most Westerners and most Koreans (and East Asians) as a whole, the first fact of note is the fact that most Korean university students’ parents easily recall the days when possession of some must-have items like a fridge, radio, color TV and car were essential signifier that one’s family had made it into the then swelling ranks of the middle-class. On that basis, it may be fair to say that they still imbue their consumer goods with much more status and importance than most Westerners do. (Hell, many of the university students themselves too.) This explains Koreans’ love affair with big cars and SUVs for instance, and in one of the most oil-lacking, mountainous and densely-populated countries in the world.
(Update, April 2013: Actually, the Korean preference for big cars is more due to the [inordinate] socialstatus they provide.)
On top of that, Korean governments since 1961 have explicitly and fervently extorted Koreans to consume these items, provided that they were made in Korea. It’s easy to simply attribute this to and write off as mere nationalism, only different in degree to, say, the “Buying Kiwi-Made” campaign in New Zealand, or Democratic presidential candidates in the US criticising NAFTA in election year. But this is quite wrong. If you’ll bear with me for a moment, to properly understand women’s fashions in Korea you need to understand a little of it’s well, political history first. No, really.
When Park Chung-hee/박정희 took power through a coup in 1961, while his military regime of course relied on the use of force, it would be naive to assume that it didn’t have a great deal of popular support. And so, originally at least, his military regime’s sole claim to legitimacy was its perceived ability and capacity to produce the economic development seen as necessary for national security after the chaotic years of the Syngman Rhee/이승만 presidency. While linking the economy and security this way may sound absurd in 2008, it’s important to be aware that North Korea was actually ahead of South Korea economically until the late-1960s, and in addition to this Park was (justifiably) deeply concerned about the US possibly withdrawing its security guarantees to South Korea in the wake of its foreseeable withdrawal from Vietnam. Hence the development of POSCO and the Korean steel industry for instance, which, far from being the carefully planned and coordinated developmental success story it is often touted as today (it is the third largest steel producer in the world), was pursued despite the advice of Korean economists at the time, let alone American ones. Instead, as Mark Clifford explains in chapter five of this must-have book, Park didn’t care about the economics of it; he simply wanted the ability to produce tanks and ships should the US no longer provide them.
This is why Korea is often known as a “Developmental State,” as too are Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, which faced similarly dire circumstances in the Cold War and reacted in similar ways. Neo-liberal economists in particular are loath to admit that state-led development can be successful, and so they continue to critique the economic policies of these Developmental States decades later, but this excessive focus on economic minutiae has overshadowed the fact that they were and are primarily socio-political, not economic, phenomenons (right: Posco Center, Seoul, by Ian Muttoo).
Hence consumerism has links to national security in Developmental States, and all the choice government slogans like “Consumption is Virtuous” that I saw in old photographs of Korea from the ’70s in economic journals in the archives room of my university library. And while the corollary of Park’s developmentalism was authoritarianism, and average Koreans were expected to be content with and prolific buyers of Korean goods, imports being shut out by high tariffs in order to develop Korea’s own industries (which is why such a stigma remains on imports today), what I want you to take away from all the above is that:
Koreans are used to being told what to buy.
These choices have often been couched in terms of contributing to a higher purpose.
Those that didn’t subscribe to these higher purposes were given few alternatives, and the state was encouraged in stigmatizing them.
It is no great conceptual leap for Neo-Confucian women to go from being subservient to the higher purpose of ki, and their bodies to be imperfect versions of men’s, to furthering the higher purpose of improving the economy and maintaining national security by consuming Korean goods, and finding common identity in a turbulent century by following the new fashion industry’s edicts to improve their imperfect bodies by following their rules for fashion, cosmetics, and body shapes. Those will be the subject of Part 3.
…essential reading for anyone wanting to know more about the 1990s in Korea, and in particular the frequent government and media campaigns against over-consumption (in practice aimed almost exclusively at women, these were important precursors to the “beanpaste girl” stereotypes of the 2000s)
See my “Revealing the Korean Body Politic” series for more on those campaigns and stereotypes in the 2000s, especially Parts 3 and 4.
From page 3 of the September 12, 2007 Busan Focus:
출산휴가가는男: 내년7월 배우자 3일 부여 ‘남녀고용평등법’등 의결
내년 7월부터 남성근로자도 배우자 출산휴가를 사용할 수 있으며, 육아휴직을 나눠 쓰거나 육아휴직대신 근로시간 단축방법도 사용할 수 있게 된다.
정부는 11일 오전 중앙청사에서 한덕수 총리 주재로 국무회의를 열어 일과 육아의 병행을 위해 이 같은 내용을 핵심으로 하는‘남녀고 용평등법’개정안 등 20여개 안건을 심의, 의결했다. 이 개정안은 그간 사업장별로 임의로 시행해 오던 남성근로자의 출산휴가를 3일간 부여하는 것으로 의무화했으며, 현행 전일제 육아휴직 대신 주 15~30시간 이내의 범위에서 근무하는 육아기 근로시간 단축을 신청할 수있도록 하고, 육아휴직이나 육아기근로시간 단축제를 1회에 한해 분할 사용할 수 있도록 하고 있다.
또 육아기 근로시간 단축을 이유로 해고나 불리한 처우를 하는 사업자의 경우 3년 이하의 징역이나 2천만원 이하의 벌금, 육아기 근로 시간 단축 종료 후 같은 업무에 복귀시키지 아니할 경우 500만원 이하의 벌금, 그리고 배우자 출산휴가를 주지 않을 경우 500만원 이하의 과태료를 부과하도록했다 (image source: On Being; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
또 국제화 시대를 맞아 ▲ 회사의 설립·운영 등에 사적 자치를 폭넓게인정하는 유한책임회사 등 새로운기업형태를 도입하고 ▲무액면주식 제도의 도입과 최저자본금제도의폐지 등 상법 개정안도 심의했다.
Men on Paternity Leave: To fulfill the requirements of the law on gender equality in the workplace, a 3 day paternity leave is to be available from next July
From next July, the spouses of women taking time off work to give birth can also take time off from work, either for the birth itself or by shortening their work hours by an equivalent amount.
On the Morning 11th of September, the prime minister Han Deok-Su, opened a session of Congress focusing on work and childcare. Congress members deliberated on a bills regarding the law on gender equality in the workplace and on 20 other matters, and passed a law that will require all workplaces to provide paternity leave to male employees. They will be given the option of either taking 3 days at the time of the birth of the child, or have their working hours reduced by 15-30 hours at alternate times when it is convenient to them. These 15-30 hours will not have to be taken all at once.
If employers use this reduction of work hours as a pretext to fire an employee or treat him unfairly, then the employer will be liable for a jail sentence of up to 3 years or a fine of 20 million won. Also, if an employee is not allowed to continue in the same position after returning from paternity leave, or if paternity leave isn’t granted at all, then the employer will be liable for a fine of up to 5 million won.
Since we are in a globalized age, Korean companies need to introduce more scope for employee’s personal autonomy in their establishment and operations. Also discussed at the congress was the introduction into commercial law of a no-par stock system and the discarding of a minimum capital stock system.
For the sake of comparison, see here for a table showing different countries’ parental leave provisions.
Found in passing while flicking through a discarded copy of the Korean version of the Metro International, a free daily newspaper. While it’s obvious what it’s advertising, I was sufficiently curious to find out what it was saying exactly:
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With that background and strong inclination however, there is always a danger of taking similarities as a given. And particularly in this case, where the authors of the study point out that:
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(Updated, January 2014)
Korean women taking responsibility for contraception…only in the movies?
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The Grand Narrative 
