Faced with the unenviable task of somehow making soju cool, Jinro (진로) did a pretty good job with the launching of its new “J” (제이) brand back in October, but its latest efforts to associate the brand with losing weight may well require too big a suspension of disbelief from most consumers!
Or at least, that was my first gut reaction. But then if faced with a choice of two equally priced and similar brands of any strong alcohol, probably I would indeed choose the slightly weaker one: I am slightly overweight, and it’s not like 5 per cent less alcohol wouldn’t still have the desired effect on me. How about you?
As you’ll soon see though, it’s not that which made me first notice the ad:
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Look familiar? To put it mildly, commercials featuring female celebrities lounging around in their underwear aren’t exactly common on Korean television, and so I don’t think the similarities with this advertisement with Han Ji-hye (한지혜) from March – actually, the only other example – are any coincidence. Here, the actress and model featured is Shin Min-a (신민아), as it happens in the entertainment news a great deal as I write this for her first screen kiss with Won bin (원빈), and as you can probably tell, the idea is that a 1 per cent reduction in alcohol content (from 19.5 to 18.5) somehow results in the following:
Admittedly I don’t like high heels in the first place, but that last is probably overdoing it, as I can’t see how drinking less alcohol than normal somehow makes you taller as well as thinner? Regardless, below is a accompanying poster for the new, weaker soju that you may have seen around, and for the sake of adding to my conversation with commentator Seamus about Koreans’ (relative) lack of awareness of the amount of photoshopping in everyday advertisements and magazine images, would be grateful if you could show it to your Korean friends, students, colleagues, and/or lovers and so on: among other things, do they think Min-a’s legs have been lengthened and made thinner in it or not?
Update: Sorry, but in hindsight it was sloppy and quite strange of me to write about this ad without translating the voiceover first, and if I had then what I wrote above would have been quite different:
1kg 빠져도, 다른데?
If you lose 1kg, are you different?
1인치만 줄어도, 좋은데
[Even] if you shorten your skirt by only one inch, it looks better.
1cm만 낮아도, 편한데
[Even] if you reduce the length of your high heels by only 1 cm, they’re more comfortable.
그리고 1도만 더 부드러워져도
처음보다 1도 더 부드럽다
And also if you soften [soju] by only one degree, it’s one degree softer from the first sip.
18.5도 진로제이
진로제이처럼 더 부드러워지세요
18.5% Alcohol Jinro J
Like Jinro, please make your life a little softer.
Placing the ad in a wider perspective, as much as 90 per cent of all alcohol consumed in Korea is soju, and Jinro sells 50 per cent of that, so this latest marketing drive may well reflect the saturation of the market more than anything else (no pun intended). In such circumstances, a company can either start selling in new markets or repackage its product in different varieties if it wants to increase profits (or to ensure that they don’t decrease: examples like this are how I learned about the Marxian “inevitable tendency of the rate of profit to fall” at university), a good example of which is the number of different Coca-cola drinks available and their (very very) rough correlation with an economy’s level of capitalistic development and competition, as evidenced by, say, the precisely two available in New Zealand when I entered university in the mid-1990s against the plethora available in the US decades earlier.
And so with equivalents in other Northeast-Asian countries, and little appeal outside of the region, diversification is probably the most logical path for soju producers. True, the above ads in particular reflect a desire to create a new market before reaching that stage – only 30 per cent of soju drinkers are women – but given that…
The word soju to most Korean women produces something approaching a mild panic – an explosive squeal of disgust, a deeply pained expression, head shaking, hand waving. That’s not to say they don’t drink it. It’s just they don’t seem particularly like it, even as they pour it down their throats (source).
…then I have my doubts as to whether that figure will ever go up to 50 per cent. Here’s hoping that the Korean alcohol industry is indeed on the verge of offering more choices and variety then!
Update: Here is a related graphic showing decreases in soju’s alcohol strength over time. For more information (in Korean), see here.
Update, February 2013: Please see here, here, and many other posts in my “Revealing the Korean Body Politic” series for my considerably updated, hopefully much more nuanced thoughts on Korea’s alphabetization trend, especially in light of what I’ve learned about historical Western precedents!
The original version of my article for today’s Korea Times:
Well known for donning corsets on stage since her comeback in May last year, few can deny that there is much to find cute in singer Son Dam-bi (손담비) tightening a miniature one around a bottle of ‘Today’s Tea’ in her latest commercial.
But while modern corsets lack the uncomfortable body-shaping functions of their Victorian counterparts, they remain an enduring symbol of the pressures women can be under to conform to often impossible ideals of appearance. And despite its lightheartedness, this commercial provides an excellent illustration of a distinctly Korean spin on this (source, right: kjutaeng3)
Beverage producer Lotte Chilsung invented the term ‘bellyline’ for use in this commercial, and it is this that the corset and supposedly the drink help with slimming. In itself, doing so is not at all worthy of any criticism, nor is the term dissimilar to, say, the English equivalent of ‘waistline,’ which would actually have been a much more appropriate choice here. But with that perfectly good term existing already, then why invent a new one?
The reason is that the term is merely the latest in a spate of naming particularly female body parts after English letters in recent years, a very curious fashion that seems unique to Korea so far. Consider the following best known examples of this:
M-line (abdominals, for men)
S-line (breasts and buttocks, viewed from the side)
U-line (exposed lower back)
V-line (one for face, and another for the line in-between breasts)
And so integral to Korean pop culture are S-lines and V-lines in particular, that within five minutes of turning on a television you are likely to see either female celebrities strutting them on talk-shows, or prominent ‘S’s and ‘V’s displayed in commercials. Indeed, such is the current mania surrounding them that you can even come across examples completely unrelated to the original body parts involved, including in commercials for cell-phones, school uniforms, and even gas boilers!
Although this practice seems frivolous on the surface, says blogger Javabeans “it actually belies much more pernicious trends in society at large,” and something is surely seriously amiss when, rather than the media, you have a majority of female celebrities “vocally espousing their alphabet-lines and therefore actually objectifying themselves as a conglomeration of “perfect” body parts rather than as whole, genuine people.” But, why their alacrity in doing so? (source, left: 여자가 좋다. 남자는 필요없다.)
A clue is that this quote was made in the context of a breast cancer fund-raising party in October last year, the producers of which saw absolutely no irony in naming ‘Love Your W.’ And if nothing is viewed as untoward in doing so for an event supposedly about empowering women by encouraging them to respect more and take better care of their bodies, then you can imagine that there are few inhibitions for promoting the use of ‘lines’ to teenagers and young girls either.
Accordingly, there are even educational videos that promote healthy food such as fermented bean paste (dwenjang/된장) to elementary-school children that mention that eating it will be good for their S-lines and V-lines also. And one probably direct effect of this is the fact that many Korean middle-school girls have ‘face rollers,’ the repeated application of which is supposed to flatten one’s face towards a desired, angular, ‘V’ shape.
To be sure, the Korean media is not unique in placing undue emphasis on women’s appearances rather than their intelligence — the American media obsession with Michelle Obama’s fashion choices being a notorious recent example — nor is it in providing often unobtainable and unnatural role models and body ideals for women and girls. But the contexts in which those are received are important, and whereas videos like the above would rapidly be banned in schools in many other developed countries, and/or educators that criticized children because of their appearance rapidly fired, unfortunately both are par for the course in Korea.
To an extent, this lack of awareness and/or concern is understandable when a child’s entire life prospects are almost entirely determined by a single exam: parents have other priorities. But on the other hand, when a majority of netizens did not take pride in astronaut Yi Soyeon for being the first Korean to go into space last year, but instead criticized her for her appearance during the flight, then teenage girls will hardly be encouraged to study harder.
And on a wider scale, as Korea again faces an economic crisis, in order to recover it is worth pondering what lies behind Korea long having one of the lowest rates of working women in the OECD. Surely a good start to using this underutilized human resource, one of the best-educated in the world, would be to encourage both sexes to stop judging women, and women expecting to be judged, entirely on their appearance?
My previous commentary on this “Today’s Tea” commercial was woefully out of date, so it’s since been mercifully deleted(!). But many of the themes expressed remain just as potent in the Korean media today, including the encouraging of teenage girls and children to be dissatisfied with their bodies; the constant invention of new, often impossible, body shapes and “lines” for females of all ages to strive for; the over-reliance on celebrity endorsements, to the extent that the one chosen here, Son Dam-bi, is portrayed as somehow having a superior body and face to an equally-attractive, almost identical woman; and finally, albeit admittedly minor here, the reinforcement of gendered dieting roles by portraying the (single) male humorously—confirming that dieting is something only women need should be serious about.
Think I’m exaggerating? Just see for yourself:
Those problems aside, note that the “34-쏙/ssok-34” is a clever wordplay on women’s “vital statistics” (bust/waist/hip measurements), with one use of the word “ssok” being to stress how concave something is. In fairness, it’s quite apt for a slimming product.
(For more posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)
(Source: Korea Times, 25/02/2009, p. 20; see full advertisement here)
A classic case of sociologist Erving Goffman’s notion of “The Ritualization of Subordination” in depictions of the sexes together, although you don’t need to have heard of either to tell who’s the boss in this particular advertisement!
One slightly less obvious point of interest though, is Han Ye-seul’s (한예슬) use of the “bashful knee bend,” a common motif for women in advertisements, and which according to Goffman:
…can be read as a foregoing of full effort to be prepared and on the ready in the current social situation, for the position adds a moment to any effort to fight or flee. Once again one finds a posture that seems to presuppose the goodwill of anyone in the surround who could offer harm. Observe…that a sex-typed subject is not so much involved as a format for constructing a picture (Gender Advertisements, 1976, p. 45).
Which I read as it being used in advertisements to show women feeling safe and secure in the presence of their male protectors, in this case Song Seung-heon (송승헌). And why not? To claim that the depiction of that natural feeling is sexist in itself is absurd, but Goffman’s point was simply that the knee bend, and a host of other means of active/passive dichotomies in depictions of the sexes like that—such as men almost always being portrayed as taller than women, far more than in real life—were still overdone in advertising, and not exactly compensated by images of women as assertive, aggressive and/or as instructors, superiors and leaders either.
Or at least in 1976; as that last link explains and the advertisement on the right (source: popseoul) with Lee Min-ho (이민호) makes clear, things have certainly changed a great deal since, having one person on a bed and/or lower than the other also being a common way of showing ranking. Which is not to say that—now that you have it in mind—you won’t still find many many examples of women with the knee bend in advertisements (or, indeed, in a bed).
But even more interesting though, is the fact that it is Song Seung-heon at all that is advertising the Whisen (휘센) air-conditioner, for actually I only noticed the ad because is the first Korean one for an air-conditioner that I’ve seen in which a man is the center of attention. Sure, that they’re dominated by women is no surprise, as it’s also true of their Western counterparts, albeit to a much lesser extent (but a difference one would expect given Korea’s deeply patriarchal society). But then bear in mind that the process of modernization that electronics and electric appliances still epitomize—especially in a society as development-obsessed as Korea—has always involved “housewifization” and the nuclearization of the family, and so while it’s certainly true to say that owning one’s first washing machine in the 1960s in the UK, say, was also a definite signifier of status and upward mobility, Korean advertisements for the same should be placed in the context of a society where consumerism has been equated with national security, and in which the lowest numbers of women in the world work (for a developed society). Hence not only are Korean examples almost hyperreal advertisements for modernity itself, but so far they’ve overwhelmingly featured female-centered narratives, Korean housewives’ need for the self-fulfillment that Betty Friedan saw that their purchase provided being all that more the greater here, and other manifestations of which would be an obsessive focus on real-estate speculation and on children’s educational achievements.
Which might sound a little to take in all at once, but I assure you, once you’ve seen a few examples like the one below then you’ll get a sense of how surreal they consistently are, and why this deserves explanation (and have also reminded me personally of how advertisements really area reflection of the zeitgeist of an era). So, why the change in that particular advertisement?
My first thought was because it was for the “Luxury” (럭셔리) model, as the instant I learned that in fact a scene from science-fiction novel I read as a teenager came to mind, which opened with a conversation between a couple in which the woman explained to her fiance that, while women did the bulk of shopping, men still bought the important expensive things like houses and cars. As it happens, the couple were in a decidely backward parallel universe where, among other things, American women had never gained the vote(!), but obviously it still has echoes in real life, and indeed this logic does especially apply to Korea: for instance, while I’m not sure to what extent this tradition is followed, I’ve repeatedly heard that it is expected that before a wedding a new wife’s family must provide for the furniture for their new apartment, whereas the husband’s family must provide the apartment itself. Does the expense of this model then, draw it from the female realm to the male, thereby appealing more to the latter? Or is the advertisement still primarily aimed at women, this supposedly luxurious model possessing a male and/or sophisticated aura that other, cheaper ones lack? Or is there still some other factor that I’m missing?
Unfortunately, the K-pop blogs (see here, here and here) do little more than provide more pictures and links to related commercials, so I’d be happy to hear your own thoughts. And I’ll make sure to keep an eye out for mention of it in next month’s Korean advertising magazines.
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!
The 14-year old girl is Park Seo-jin, the controversial photoshoot from the Mnet reality show I Am A Model. It’s already covered in numerous “news” articles though, so let me just quickly highlight one element of it here: that for all the recent and historical mania about protecting underage girls against foreign pedophiles, the Korean police seem strangely reluctant to respect their own laws banning the nude photos of minors that would (presumably) encourage them. The most obvious examples being one of the promotion posters for—let alone various scenes in—Samaritan Girl/Samaria (2004), all shot when actress Kwak Ji-min was still in high school, and therefore legally a minor.
Like with those, no-one will ever be prosecuted for Park Seo-jin’s photos. Unlike those though, they do seem to be creating much more negative reaction. Most likely, simply because she is just sooo young.
What do you think?
Update: In case of any confusion, note that while she’s 16 according to the (strange) Korean age system, her birth date is actually 11 March 1994.
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.
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!)
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.
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The Grand Narrative 
