Is contemporary Korean dance always as hypnotic as this? Have I been wholly misjudging it all these years?
Actually, if you’re at all knowledgeable, please reserve your answers for the comments. Better that most readers approach the video with no preconceptions like I did, puzzled at the notification from an unfamiliar YouTube channel on my phone. Better still, that first they turn off the lights, get close to their screens, plug in their headphones or ear buds, are slightly sleepy, drunk, or high…and be ready for their jaws to hit the floor:
The choreographer and performer is Jinyeob Cha (차진엽) founder of Collective A, an interdisciplinary dance performance group, and who is probably best known for having been the director of the choreography for the opening and closing ceremony of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games. But the reason I personally was subscribed to her channel was because in March 2022, London Korea Links wrote about her and Collective A’s performance there of “MIIN: Body to Body,” in which Cha:
“…examines perceptions of beauty and femininity beyond societal norms and traditions.”
“Accompanied by a hypnotic soundscape created by two acclaimed musicians based in Seoul, Eun-yong Sim, from Korean Avant-rock band Jambinai, and haihm, an electronic musician, six female dancers flit between precise, discreet, feminine poses and aggressive, erratic movements to embody all aspects of a woman.”
“Miin (미인) is a Korean word meaning ‘beautiful person’, but is more often used as a synonym for ‘beautiful woman’. This work challenges the meaning of ‘beauty’ and encourages women to embrace their bodies as they are without succumbing to unrealistic expectations.”
She’d slipped my mind though, because this was the first upload on her channel in a year. There seems to be little information specifically about the “원형하는 몸: round1” (“Body Go-round: round 1”) performance in English available too (or at least that I could find), which is surprising because it was actually first performed in 2021. What I could find then, was a quick explanation in the blurb to another UK performance in September 2022, that explained it was:
“…a genre-bending, mixed reality, dance spectacle inspired by the process of melting to evaporation in the water cycle.”
“Looming above the stage, a giant ice formation slowly melts as performers respond to the process of circulation and transition through dance. Each drop shaping the sound and visual landscape of the stage influences the interaction of each body in the space.”
And in Korean, a blurb from the tumblbug page used to raise funds for it, that at least hints at feminist themes:
차진엽 작업의 중심은 한 인간으로서의 인간성, 여성으로서의 여성성을 둘러싼 몸의 안과 밖을 연결하기 위해 몸을 둘러싸고 있는 세상에 관심을 두며, 몸/몸짓 을 통해 끊임없이 존재에 대해 질문한다. 이는 곧 예술행위를 통해 자기 자신의 본질적 가치를 찾아가는 여정이며 collective A의 궁극적인 모토이다.
The center of Cha Jin-yeop’s work focuses on the world surrounding the body in order to connect the inside and outside of the body surrounding humanity as a human being and femininity as a woman, and constantly questions existence through body/gesture. This is a journey to discover one’s own intrinsic value through artistic activities and is the ultimate motto of collective A.
And finally, a in-depth making-of video on her channel, in which she likely expands on those themes at some point:
Only “likely” though, because of her background (so…very likely!), and because I haven’t had the chance to watch myself yet sorry—powerpoints for tomorrow’s lectures beckon. But please do let me know if you’re interested but can’t speak Korean, and I’ll watch properly and translate the relevant segments as soon as I can. (I’m interested too!)
In the meantime, why not check out more of her performances on her YouTube channel? ;)
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
It seems my blog is devolving into rambling book recommendations about life, the universe, and female sexuality. Sorry not sorry!
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes. Photo by John Cahil Rom at Pexels.
But seriously, longform Korea-related content is coming soon.
In the meantime, you may recall one of my most recent longform posts was on how we talk about biological, sex-based differences. Like men’s slightly better ability to mentally manipulate 3D objects, or women’s to endure long-term pain.
I’d recently been forced to confront beliefs about those I’d held for nearly 30 years, and found them wanting. In the process, I learned so much from so many sources in so short a space of time, that I just had to share.
Naturally then, almost no one read it!
So, not going to lie—my first of six goals today is highlighting it again for anyone who may have missed it the first time.
To help persuade you, the spark was a passage in Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (2019), about how gender role expectations and social pressure prevent most girls and women from devoting themselves to their passions, whereas boys and men are giving much freer reign to obsess. So, more of their numbers going on to dominate in and excel in various stereotypical male fields like chess or coding was no simple consequence of those sex differences alone. Also, I read elsewhere that, despite the differences being very real, and many of them undeniably innate, people’s brains were remarkably pliable too, requiring surprisingly little training to overcome them.
And if that sounds interesting, let proceed with my second goal—availing myself of the opportunity to not only recommend Invisible Women, but also Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon (2023), which I’ve recently ordered because reviews (Undark, The Atlantic) indicate it discusses many of those themes. Let me recommend The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality by Randy Thornhill and Steven W Gangestad (2008) too, which I’ve also just ordered because it’s actually what Eve first reminded me of, and because it’s easily the most thorough, most challenging and demanding, but also most rewarding tome I’ve ever encountered on its subject. (Much more academic and narrowly focused than Eve though, see here for a positive review, here for a negative one, and here for the authors’ response to the latter.)
Which is all quite the introduction to why today’s title quote jumped out at me from “Haven” by Alice Munro, part of the short story collection Dear Life (2012), which I’ll give the full passage it’s from in a moment. All that explanation felt necessary to fully convey the connection I felt though, and why it brought me the frisson of joy it did, which I wanted to share—my third goal today.
But before I do pass it on, frankly it feels more important to explain how I came to be reading Dear Life in the first place. Which was actually because I first read the lesbian classic, The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952; renamed as Carol, 1990), and specifically because this passage from Chapter 10 really resonated with me:
Therese watched Abby’s fork cutting the scaloppine into small bites before she picked up any. “Do you take trips a lot with Carol?”
“A lot? No, why?” Abby asked.
“I should think you’d be good for her. Because Carol’s so serious.” Therese wished she could lead the conversation to the heart of things, but just where the heart of things was, she didn’t know. The wine ran slow and warm in her veins, down to her finger tips.
“Not all the time.” Abby corrected, with the laughter under the surface of her voice, as it had been in the first word Therese had heard her say.
The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was stranded on the brink. Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.
I return to it often, because—please bear with me a moment—I’ve lived in Korea for most of my life, where house parties are just not a thing. Compared to what I remember of social gatherings in my 20s in New Zealand then, those I’ve been to here have tended to be quite structured, where most people already knew each other. Yes, I’m generalizing, and, now that I’m in my late-40s, maybe it’s just that I don’t get invites from the cool kids anymore. But add that Koreans generally don’t strike up conversations with strangers in coffee shops or on the subway either, least of all bald middle-aged white men they assume can’t speak any Korean, then I do so miss the opportunities parties gave for meeting interesting strangers and having deep conversations. Having the type of encounters that render evenings so memorable and magical for being pregnant with possibility, with friendships, romances, careers, and hopes and dreams hinging on what’s said—or not said—in a moment, before fracturing into a multitude of unreachable, mysterious alternate timelines and what ifs ever after.
Everyone has books and films that are merely good for them, until a passage, moment, scene, glance or you name it renders it great instead. For Carol the book, the above passage is that tipping point for me. And I type it all out here, rather than being content with photographing the page in the book for you, in my fourth goal, or rather hope, that somewhere out there are others who feel exactly the same way about it, and that one day we’re able to make a connection through them googling it :)
Alas, I haven’t actually watched the film yet—ironically, the better adaptations are, the less enthusiastic I am about watching, because I know what to expect. My fifth goal then, is to ask those that have watched, does that scene get included? How are the inner dialogue and tension conveyed? Please let me know!
Which finally brings me to the blurb to Dear Life then.
Thank you for reading this far. And, if you have, you’ll see why I was instantly sold on it:
And here’s the specific passage from “Haven” which precipitated this whole post. For context, the main character, a girl in her late-teens, has to live with her uncle and aunt while her parents spend a year abroad. Her uncle, perhaps not so much patriarchal as deeply controlling, has a sister (Mona), a gifted classical musician, and an unusually tall woman, whom he resents for vague, largely undisclosed reasons. So much so, that the main character only learns of the very existence of her aunt by accident:
Some of my ideas had changed during the time I had been living with my aunt and uncle. For instance, I was no longer so uncritical about people like Mona. Or about Mona herself, and her music and her career. I did not believe that she was—or had been—a freak, but I could understand how some people might think so. It wasn’t just her big bones and her big white nose, and the violin and the somewhat silly way you had to hold it—it was the music itself and her devotion to it. Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.
And earlier in the same story, for even more context, and the obvious parallels with the inexplicable hatred all too many obsessive middle-aged male fans of, say, American football share, with anything whatsoever teenage girls like:
“…They’ve got too much sense, your parents. Too much sense to join all these people who are fussing and clapping and carrying on like [classical music concerts are] just the wonder of the world. You know the kind of people I mean? They’re lying. A load of horse manure. All in the hope of appearing high-class. Or more likely giving in to their wives’ hope to appear high-class. Remember that when you get out in the world. Okay?”
I agreed to remember. I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people thought that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it. so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra—I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it.
But I didn’t go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.
Did my providing a photo of the blurb, rather than my typing it out à la the passage from Carol, foreshadow my ultimate disappointment with the book though? Or did my adorable cats distract?
Because in so many of the stories, the characters just didn’t feel fully-formed, particularly in the senses that we could predict their actions and know what they were feeling. While the promised “unexpected turns” were very real then, I tended to find them jarring. And those “quiet depths”? Only the results of our own imaginations, which we’re forced to project into the voids that are the characters’ back stories. What does—can—a reader take away then, with say a married female character having a sudden tryst with a random man, when we know so little about ther, let alone her husband or the state of their marriage?
But I realize grandiose, evocative blurbs are ripe for criticism, and easy to feel duped by. I also realize the book is critically acclaimed, that I’m in a minority of bibliophiles in disliking it, and that having to fill the blanks with one’s own imagination would actually be a draw for many people. (Before I’m pigeonholed for having supposedly blunt, direct, and altogether much too shallow tastes though, its a draw for me too actually. But I do have limits.) So my sixth and final goal is to please hear from and engage with anyone who has read Dear Life themselves. Until then, I’m forced to google for definitive analysis instead. And find vindication in my charges of overprojection, or should I say unconcious need to compensate for those voids, in the very first hit being a two-hour long video. No, not about the book, which would be reasonable. Just about the first, 28-page story:
To be fair, I haven’t watched it yet. I only have a suspicion that the length is the result of overanalysis. And I know I can go on and on myself sometimes (cough). So, I will watch, and will be happy to learn something, and/or proven wrong about my dismissal of the book.
Or not. I write today, only to connect. To seek further conversations about Dear Life, or my takes on any of the half-dozen books I’ve mentioned.
So whether rants or raves, please do get in touch. About any of them!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
At an annual rate of 49 abortions per 1,000 reproductive-aged women, China has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. This phenomenon is often attributed to the One Child Policy (1979-2015), yet even when abortion was illegal in the early twentieth century, it was already commonplace. This talk traces the history of contraception and abortion in China from the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 to the present. Rodriguez demonstrates how inconsistent state policies and patriarchal norms have historically worked in concert to normalize abortion as birth control.
More information and registration are available here and here. Also, check out an interview of her about her book at Made in China Journal, and a long podcast interview at New Books Network.
Next, and finally for today, onThursday 12 October, from 07-08:30 Korean Time, Dr. Kyunghee Eo, assistant professor of East Asian languages and literatures at Yale University, will give a virtual talk entitled “Politics of Purity: The Making of the South Korean Sonyŏ Sensibility”:
Eo will demonstrate how we can enrich our understanding of Korean culture and society through a critical engagement with the figure of the girl (sonyŏ), a subject position that seldom takes center stage in official narratives of history. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, Eo will trace how girls were represented in various types of cultural texts, from canonical literature and popular magazines of the postwar period to the contemporary K-pop industry. By doing so, Eo will show how the unique girl sensibility (sonyŏ kamsŏng) that we see in South Korean cultural production today is not just a byproduct of hetero-patriarchal discourse, but rather, a cultural form that has articulated the desires, erotic fantasies, and political aspirations of women and girls in Korea over the past century.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Photo (cropped) by Juliana Malta on Unsplash.
Without further ado, let me introduce Erica Stevenson of Moan Inc. (lovethe name), who “dives into the mythology, philosophy, [and] history [of] the ancient Greeks & Romans” through “videos uploaded every Tuesday & Thursday (sometimes Sunday).” Overall, she “aims to show [her] viewers that the ancient world isn’t as tough or complicated to study as one may think,” and seeks to act “as the middle man between the myths we are told as children and the university lecture space you all try to avoid.”
I highlight Erica’s YouTube channel for you here, because despite—as far as I know—never explicitly aiming to give ‘ancient modern’ women or goddesses their due, or analyzing the ancient Greek and Roman worlds through a feminist lens, in practice she seems to do a hell of a lot of both. She’s also funny, has an infectious enthusiasm for her subject, and invites a lot more female than male experts to appear in her videos, which I’m guessing from all the memes is quiteunusual. For instance, she recently collaborated with one of yours and my favorite book reviewers, Willow Heath of Books and Bao:
What originally brought her to my attention though, was her enthusiasm for a recent biography on Plato, due to the author’s rare acknowledgement of the difficulties in making any definitive, factual statements about someone for whom so little information was actually available. Which, indirectly, mirrors some of the ways I compensate for my background in writing and researching the subjects that I do (8:51-10:57):
(Update, January 2024: To my chagrin, Erica Stevenson seems to have quietly deleted the original review video, possibly because she interviewed the author himself a few months later, which I include below. I’ve decided to keep this post up though, as the points she was making still stand!)
My transcript:
Moving into what I thought of the book itself…I loved it. Right, to keep this as short as possible, I thought it was absolutely fantastic, and the reason why I thought that this study was so good is because…something that I worry about when reading non-fiction, [and] something that I’ve heard a lot from non-fiction authors, is that publishing houses…push authors to write more definitively, and to write clearer. So, by that I mean, you know I spoke to Tim Whitmarsh about this, that with his book, about atheism in the ancient world, there were lots of sentences he wanted to keep very nuanced, that the publishers, the editors were kind of like, “You’re going to need to hammer that down.” To be a bit more clear, to be a bit more certain, because for a wider audience, they don’t want to have to read your silly “This might be…,” or “This could be interpreted…”. You know, they just want facts basically, to leave the book with a solid story, as opposed to you over-complicating it with so much nuance in there. And lots of other authors have mentioned that to me, so, whenever I go into non-fiction I’m always trying to see like “Errrr….How much did the editor have a say in this? How much did the publisher have a say in this? Are we going to get any real nuance here…what’s gonna haaappen?”. And with this book we did not have that problem, at all.
I don’t know who Robin Waterfield works with, but they allowed him to leave all of the questions in the book, right? He makes it very clear after any ‘facts’ he puts forward about Plato, that there’s no real way of knowing that, and the reasons why we can’t know those things. Or, what other people have latched onto in order to claim that that was a fact about Plato. So, it was really fantastically well-done. There are so many wider references, there’s a huge index sort of, you know, sort of thing at the back, which you can then check what ancient works he gets things from, what other scholars did he get things from. You know, all of that was just done so well, and that’s obviously so necessary for a study like this when absolutely nothing is certain.
And which would seem a strange place to end this post on. Sorry. But, well, in a previous version, three times as long, I went on to explain the epiphanies this led to when I first watched the video in July, the confidence that gave me, the exciting plans I have for my writing now, and how enthused I was about fulfilling those. Only then I realized I was actually sabotaging those plans, wasting the better part of a day writing about my least favorite subject instead—myself:
Ahem. So, lesson learned, I’ll wisely shoehorn this ending here. And have another post up for you up very soon!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
First, on Friday September 29, from 09:00-10:15 Korean Time (Yes—very soon!). The University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies welcomes Monica Liu (University of St. Thomas Minnesota) to share her latest research on why Chinese women seek Western men (details; registration):
China has undergone a striking transformation over the past four decades, growing from a poor country to the world’s second-largest economy. Despite its ascendance on the world stage, a significant number of women are still desperately seeking to marry Western men and immigrate abroad. To pursue their elusive dream, these women are turning to global internet dating agencies. From 2008 to 2019, Liu conducted research at three different transnational dating agencies in China, interviewing 61 Chinese female clients, the majority of whom were middle-aged and divorced. In this talk, she will address how emerging inequalities brought on by China’s transition from state socialism toward a global market economy shaped these women’s desires to leave their country. Ultimately, their desires to pursue marriage migration not only reveal their longing for a better life but also cast a revealing light on the pervasive gender, age, and class inequalities that continue to plague modern-day China.
Next, onWednesday October 11 at 07:30 Korean Time, IFA Contemporary Asia is presenting Happening Now: A Conversation with Kyung An and Sooran Choi, on the occasion of the exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through January 7, 2024 (details; registration):
The air was fidgety in 1960s and 1970s South Korea. While the nation urgently anticipated new breakthroughs from the rapid socioeconomic transformations, Park Chung Hee’s dictatorial grip on the young republic tightened. In response, the new generation of young artists embarked on innovative and often provocative approaches to art making by experimenting with radical artistic concepts and a wide variety of mediums, including but not limited to video, installation, photography, and performance. Featuring approximately eighty works, Only the Young examines the works born out of both individual and collective experimentations, which were bounded not by a single aesthetic, but by their engagement with the dynamic social atmosphere of South Korea and the world beyond.
This discussion seeks to explore Experimental Korean art in the 60s and 70s as a unique moment in Korean history while situating it within the broader discourse of global art history, to question: How has the term “Experimental art” been forged and developed? How do we navigate between the artists’ local distinctiveness, yet avid engagement with concurrent global art movements? How does the exhibition engage with the current sociopolitical climate? The event will begin with a brief presentation and walkthrough by the exhibition curator, Kyung An, Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim, followed by a conversation between her and Sooran Choi, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History in the School of the Arts at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT.
Finally, on Friday October 13, from 19:00 to 20:30 Korean Time, Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni (Professor, Tel Aviv University) will discuss her paper Househusbands and Breadwinning Mothers: (Un)doing, Displaying and Challenging Gender in Japan, which is:
…a study of Japanese heterosexual couples self-defined as “role-reversed couples” (fūfu gyakuten). As the term suggests, these couples are surely not representative of the normative gender division between work and care in Japan. In fact, in the Western Anglo-American context, role-reversed parenting has been recently described as “statistically rare,” but of growing practical and theoretical significance.
The paper will present these couples against a shifting background in Japan, which includes the growing participation of women in the workforce and an ongoing vibrant public discourse about re-defining the role of the father in the family, largely encapsulated in the popular neologism ikumen.
Examining couples who respond, challenge, confront, perform and even negate what they perceive as their ascribed “roles,” the paper will pose the question of doing and undoing gender at its focus, the presentation will aim to challenge or problematize the allegedly too-narrow binary opposition of doing/undoing.
See here and here for further details and registration. (Image, above-right: Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni’s latestbook.)
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
Turning Boys Into Men? The Performance of Gender for South Korean Conscripts, Part 8
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Photo (cropped) by Jim Flores on Unsplash.
Am I just projecting when I say Koreans too? Or that it’s mostly Korean and Japanese women, and especially young women, that suffer from this “involuntary consent”?
But first, I want to acknowledge that, of course, everyone has had the experience of being asked by bosses, relatives, and/or professors for unseen, undervalued, and usually unpaid labor, which social pressure prevented them from refusing.
There’s nothing specifically Korean or Japanese about this. Nor is expecting it of women the exclusive purview of Korean or Japanese men.
Korean academia, for instance, remains notorious for all the verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and demands for personal errands professors inflict on their grad students. I want to convey my curious mix of relief and rage too, over learning that it’s not just me that notices it’s mostly female students that have to run those errands. And, as discussed in Part 2 of this series, I’ve already noticed the welcoming of prospective students that my female students are expected to do in the freezing cold every winter.
In Japanese society, where people are conventionally inclined to avoid conflict and prioritize social relationships over their own self-interest, the attitude that can lead to unforced but involuntary consent is ubiquitous. Japanese American anthropologist Dorinne Kondo has captured how Japanese people, especially women—herself included, as she became enmeshed in Japanese society as a “daughter” of her host family over the course of a two-year homestay in the 1980s—avoid saying no in their day-to-day lives. Similarly to the young Japanese women who become involved in AV, Kondo was not overtly coerced but nevertheless pressured to involuntarily agree to do things for others such as teaching English, fulfilling her duty as a filial “daughter,” and taking on the role of a ‘proper’ Japanese citizen. Her frustration grew as she felt herself becoming “trapped by social convention.” Kondo then realized that there was a profoundly different way of thinking about the self in Japan: individuality was valued only insofar as social relationships were not compromised. Under such circumstances, she “had no choice but to comply.” Kondo’s ethnographic moment vividly recaptures why [former AV actress Kozai Saki] could not say no or walk away when she faced her won dilemma. Her resistance would have deeply upset relational others at the filming site. Each time she convinced herself that everything would be fine if she would only yield to their demands.
(page 51; italics in originals)
But really, it released a cascade of thoughts. Next was that the biggest problem for vegetarians and vegans in Korea is not so much finding ingredients or suitable restaurants, but all the pressure bosses, coworkers, and family members will inflict on them to eat meat for the sake of avoiding causing awkwardness and inconvenience for everyone. And then, all the parallels with how to determine consent in the K-pop industry.
But if you’re still reading, I’m guessing it resonated with you too, right? If so, please do take a moment to let me know what it reminded you of, either in the comments or on social media. But I’ll be glad to have just gotten you thinking. And thanks for reading!
p.s. (My bad that the titular quote actually comes from a must-read interview of the author!).
The Turning Boys Into Men? Girl-groups and the Performance of Gender for South Korean Conscripts Series:
One of these Korean men is not like the others? 🤔 Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably already well aware of the emasculation and feminization of Asian men in US popular culture—which my image search for a “Korean man” at Unsplash above almost seems to be rubbing in.* But a few brief mentions towards the end of a book I just finished, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back by Julia Serano (2022), suddenly reminded me of a powerful passage about that from the novel Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017), which I want to share with you.
But first, to set the tone, here’s two of those mentions from Sexed Up, starting with (p. 153, Chapter 7):
…hypersexualized stereotypes are projected onto Asians (particularly East Asians). While there are occasional examples of Asian men being depicted as dangerous or predatory, they are more routinely depicted in an emasculated or desexualized manner, likely as a result of Asians more generally being stereotyped as “feminine” relative to other ethnicities.
…within white-centric gay male dating scenes…men of color often encounter sexual exclusion, or else find themselves pigeonholed into particular sexual roles (tops, bottoms) in accordance with previously discussed racial stereotypes (Black people being perceived as “masculine” and “aggressive,” and Asian people as “feminine” and “submissive”).
Which suddenly brought me to the titular passage from Little Fires Everywhere, at the top of page 267, Chapter 16 (in the top-right of the last picture; apologies that my camera skills weren’t the best on the subway that cold day in March!). For context, much of the novel revolves around Chinese immigrant Bebe Chow fighting to regain custody of her baby daughter that she put up for adoption when she was destitute. Mark and Linda McCullough are the girl’s adopted (Caucasian) parents, and Edward Lim, the angry, articulate, powerful Asian-American man, is Chow’s pro-bono lawyer:
I’ve since learned that the book was also made into a mini-series in 2020:
Has anyone seen it? Do you know if that scene, and/or the racist tactics used by the McCullough’s lawyer are included or conveyed somehow? Please let me know!
*(In fairness to Unsplash, the inclusion of a Caucasian woman was just random—once a search request starts running out of hits, Unsplash starts offering increasingly less related photos rather than just empty space. Personally I just find that frustrating, but I guess Unsplash judges that users may realize they could use some of those other photos instead.)
Today I learned that Vitamin-D, produced in the skin through exposure to sunlight, is vital for staving off depression. But various lifestyle and physiological changes complicate the effects of supplements on postmenopausal women, let alone applying recommendations from studies based on men.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Photo by Alonso Reyes on Unsplash.
Oh, the photo? Well, free-to-use images of Korean women avoiding the sun seem surprisingly hard to come by. Which is ironic, considering how many I can see doing so at I type this, assiduously touching up their SPF makeup as they wait for the crosswalk lights. (My apartment overlooks a busy intersection.) Some will even spend 1-2 minutes fiddling with awkward parasols at each side of the road too, all for the sake of avoiding 10 seconds of sun exposure as they cross it.
Skincare as self-care starts with skin protection and preventative maintenance. Koreans take sunscreen more seriously than do people in any other place I’ve ever been on earth. “The people of the entire nation wear sunscreen all year round with a devotion bordering on religious fervor,” writes Korean dermatologist Hae Shin Chung. On average, 90 per¬cent of Korean women and 56 percent of men apply sun¬screen at all times, compared to the 30 percent of women and 14 percent of men who wear sunscreen in the United States. Chung came to the United States to advance her experience specifically because it’s rare to encounter skin cancer patients in Korea. In the U.S., skincare—compared to makeup or haircare—accounts for 20 percent of the beauty market; in Korea, it’s 50 percent of the market. And prevention—in the form of sunscreen and its various form factors—is the biggest segment.
It’s not unusual to see men and women carry sun umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun on bright days. Staying out of direct sunlight is culturally and even governmentally supported. During the muggy, sun-drenched summers in Seoul, the city puts up giant umbrellas or erects sun shade sails over the sidewalks at intersections, helping block pedestrians from being in the sun while awaiting a traffic light change. Going to outdoor pools felt like entering a weird vortex, because no one seemed to wear swimsuits to swim. Koreans covered their bodies by wearing rash guards as swimsuits, sometimes with full-length pants, giant sun visors, and a thick coating of pasty white sunscreen.
So, when my image search led me to a Korean model looking just fabulous in the Mexican sun instead, I didn’t need to think twice. Less obviously incongruous though, is that my clickbait statistic actually comes from 2006 (sorry), which my 17 year-old daughter especially likes to remind me wasn’t “just a few years ago.” Yet a whole decade later, it didn’t seem out of place to the authors of the source I actually found it from. And in 2021 too, another study found Vitamin D deficiencies in a very similar 89% of 20-45 year-old Korean, female nurses specifically. I’ll wager that today then, although one or two other countries may well have surpassed Korea in terms of female vitamin-D deficiency rates, not least because the Korean Wave has been so successful in promoting Korean beauty ideals overseas, that unfortunately Korea will almost definitely remain in the top 3. (Photo, right: Movie Review: Our Body/아워 바디, 2019.)
Still, until the 2023 article “The Difference between Serum Vitamin D Level and Depressive Symptoms in Korean Adult Women before and after Menopause: The 5th (2010–2012) Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey” by Sumi Lee et. al. (Korean J Health Promot 2023;23(1):18-27) randomly appeared in my feeds, the link between vitamin-D levels and depression hadn’t really registered, frankly. (Because, yes, there may well be 1.8x more female than male patients being treated for it in Korea at the moment—but there’s many, good, non vitamin-D related reasons for that.)
Open-access, and just 10 pages, I highly encourage interested readers to download the article for yourself. But for those of you too busy to, I’ll pass on the most relevant passages:
When dividing all adult women based on their menopausal status, premenopausal women tended to show decreased rates of depressive symptoms experience as serum vitamin D levels increased; however, it was not the same case in postmenopausal women. After confirming this trend, all female participants were divided into two groups; and the relationship between serum vitamin D concentration and experience of depressive symptoms was analyzed using multivariate logistic regression.
As a result, in premenopausal women, the increase in serum vitamin D was associated with the reduced prevalence of depressive symptoms. On the contrary, in postmenopausal women, the increase in serum vitamin D was associated with the increased prevalence of depressive symptoms….
This division is significant and useful because it’s the first such age-differentiated study of its kind of Korean women. And, alluding to my mention of men in the lede, seeing how of course that division is not experienced by them (who just show a direct, inverse relationship between vitamin-D and depression symptoms, across all age levels), this points to a much narrower applicability of studies of men than researchers may have previously realized.
As for possible explanations of the division, the authors mention the wide variety of effects of decreased estrogen levels among older women, including a decreased ability to produce vitamin-D:
Postmenopausal women show a major characteristic of decreased estrogen, which causes 80% of women to undergo physical, hormonal and mental changes. Several studies have shown that estrogen is strongly related to the pathogenesis of mental illness, including emotion and behavior control especially in older women, when they reach menopause….
Decrease in estrogen is also related to a decrease in serum vitamin D. During menopause, women experience thinner skin and lower ability to produce vitamin-D, in addition to reduced intestinal absorption of vitamin D and decreased vitamin D hydroxylation in the liver and kidneys. Vitamin-D reportedly reduces depressive symptoms in postmenopausal women by controlling the concentration of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, which increases the production of sex hormones and reduces the frequency of depression-associated receptors, within the pituitary gland in the brain….
The combinations of various supplements used to counter those further complicate matters. Including—I think implied—an excess of vitamin-D:
Postmenopausal women with low serum vitamin D may have experienced related symptoms, which could have increased the use of dietary supplements, including vitamin-D, or treatments for depression. This tendency may have disturbed the association between serum vitamin-D concentration and depressive symptoms, and eventually showed a different trend in premenopausal women.
Finally, now in my late-40s myself, I can confirm that the changes my own body is undergoing are no joke (photo, right, by Michael Amadeus on Unsplash). But Korean society’s negative judgments and stereotypes about my particular demographic group pale compared to those reserved for ajumma, which have a palpable effect on their levels of depression:
Postmenopausal women had a higher mean age; therefore, they had a high percentage of underlying chronic diseases, and were likely to belong to low-activity groups. Depressive symptoms are subjective problems affected by various physical and social factors, which can cause emotional instability combined with stress of chronic diseases, lack of confidence due to social and environmental changes, and reduced activity due to physical changes. These conditions in postmenopausal women were found to affect the rate of depression experience and have a greater impact than serum vitamin D concentration, resulting in different results from other groups in postmenopausal women. In this study, we tried to adjust for these factors by using social characteristics, underlying chronic disease and exercise and activity data.
Via City Koh, an interesting recent addition to my TBR list—I had no idea there were such intimate connections between events in Korea and US immigration and racial policies a century ago. Enjoy!
The Allure of Empire traces how American ideas about race in the Pacific were made and remade on the imperial stage before World War II. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the United States cultivated an amicable relationship with Japan based on the belief that it was a “progressive” empire akin to its own. Even as the two nations competed for influence in Asia and clashed over immigration issues in the American West, the mutual respect for empire sustained their transpacific cooperation until Pearl Harbor, when both sides disavowed their history of collaboration and cast each other as incompatible enemies.
In recovering this lost history, Chris Suh reveals the surprising extent to which debates about Korea shaped the politics of interracial cooperation. American recognition of Japan as a suitable partner depended in part on a positive assessment of its colonial rule of Korea. It was not until news of Japan’s violent suppression of Koreans soured this perception that the exclusion of Japanese immigrants became possible in the United States. Central to these shifts in opinion was the cooperation of various Asian elites aspiring to inclusion in a “progressive” American empire. By examining how Korean, Japanese, and other nonwhite groups appealed to the United States, this book demonstrates that the imperial order sustained itself through a particular form of interracial collaboration that did not disturb the existing racial hierarchy.
Update: How could I have missed this interview of the author at New Books Network back in June??
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
Don’t claim women are “naturally” inferior to men in any intellectual endeavor, argued pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, unless you first grant girls the same opportunities to master it as boys. Today, that includes not chiding them as “unfeminine” for being chess geeks. Or, for not taking things seriously when they’re not, and want to learn the game in their own ways.
Very few girls and women have ever made it to the ranks of the top 100 chess players. In fact, at the moment there aren’t any at all. For some pundits, including alltoo many of those top players, this is all the evidence they need to argue that women are “naturally” inferior at the game to men.
Alternatively, some people place a lot of weight on the fact that there’s only one female chess player for every nine males. Yes, some truly exceptional girls and women do make it to the top 100 players sometimes, they’d have to concede. (Most notably, Judit Polgar, who became a grandmaster at a younger age than Bobby Fischer, and who was once ranked #8 in the world.) They may even admit that the proportion that do, compared to all female players, is actually quite comparable to the proportion for male players that do too.
But that only further begs the questions of why more girls and women aren’t attracted to chess in the first place, or why they don’t stick with it.
Yes, there is rampantsexism in the sport. But surely no more than many other sports, and not enough to account for such a massively lopsided sex ratio? Maybe the main reason it doesn’t appeal is because, overall, they really are worse at some of the various attributes required for success in chess?
I frame the arguments like this because, until I started writing, I didn’t realize their connection. For whereas I’m a decent human being, and so have always rejected out of hand the notion that women are naturally inferior at any intellectual activity or profession whatsoever (or that any sex is, for that matter), the reality that there are indeed many various, incontrovertible, very specific skills and attributes in which men tend to perform better than women, and vice-versa, has also made a great deal of sense to me. Only, until today, I didn’t realize my own cognitive dissonance—that those slight differences in performance could be seized upon to justify those arguments that girls and women don’t belong in chess.
But also until today, I didn’t realize their awesome rejoinders, which is what I’ll cover here:
That there’s far, far more to becoming a professional chess player than, say, being able to mentally rotate a three-dimensional object while doing a math test.
That those methods girls and women tend to favor, despite what you may hear, are in no way less effective than those boys and men do.
That a dominance of boys and men in any intellectual field, is not, ipso facto, evidence of their natural superiority in it. Because the barriers to girls’ and women’s participation in it can be far more insidious and subtle than most men, including myself, are aware.
And that our brains have an enormous plasticity. To the extent that, once girls and women do fully participate in hitherto, naturally “masculine” intellectual activities (or boys and men in “feminine” ones for that matter), they are fully able to overcome those initial sex-based differences.
Here goes…
What do I Mean by Biological, Sex-based Differences?
So, despite that introduction trashing them, why do I also say those biological, sex-based differences still make a great deal of sense to me?
Well, first and foremost, because they jibe with my own experience as a chess nerd as a teenager, when I spent most of my free time at clubs and tournaments instead of driving lessons and dates. In between, I’d pore over my books into the small hours, rather than bothering with minutiae like completing homework, or doing more than the bare minimum to pass my high-school classes. Rest assured, I also noticed the almost complete lack of women playing chess, let alone girls my age. But I just took it for granted.
So today, whether posited as a misguided explanation for their relative absence as we’ll see, or just as a reasonable observation to add to the debate as to why that is, when chess trainers, professional players, and commentators alike routinely mention an obsessiveness they see in boys interested in chess but which seems almost non-existent in girls, I can’t help but nod in agreement.
Indeed, it’s a point made so often on chess YouTube or Twitch, I can’t pinpoint a specific clip to link to sorry. But desperate googling reveals a similar observation has been attributed to former world snooker champion Steve Davis, about why his sport is likewise so overwhelmingly male-dominated:
…[when] once asked to explain why men dominate snooker, even though it doesn’t require great strength…he gave a controversial but great answer that applies to snooker, chess and many other fields of endeavor.
He said, essentially, “Men are the idiots of the species. Men have a certain obsessiveness that women lack. We happily spend hours, months, years to become great at things that are a complete waste of time (like hitting balls into holes with a pointed stick).”
The Quora commenter who posted that continued:
Women COULD become elite chess or snooker players, but it requires a degree of obsession and an insane amount of work/practice that most women don’t see the value in. Women may enjoy playing chess or snooker, but not enough to devote their lives to it. And devoting your life may be exactly what it takes to become a champion.
But this also made sense because of my intellectual baggage. Specifically, in the form of the book, The New Sexual Revolution by Robert Pool (1993), that I picked up during my halcyon, impressionable first years at university, thinking women would be impressed by the title and cover. (Hey, this line of thinking did work eventually.) From it, I learned for the first time about multiple science, evidence-based examples of men and women tending to approach various tasks differently. Or, in many cases, having incontrovertible advantages over each other when performing the same task. An example of the former is that men usually navigate by streets and grids, women by landmarks. And of the latter, that overall men have demonstrably better greater spatial ability, as well as the ability to shoot moving targets, both of which prove to be independent of prior exposure or later training. What science says about those differences three decades later though, and their implications, I’ll get to soon. But crucial is that then—as now—Pool’s own speculations from those seem perfectly reasonable (pp. 61-62):
The male advantage in spatial ability probably has greater practical implications than other sex differences because it is one of the largest differences and because spatial ability is important in many jobs….Researchers have found…that the high school students with high spatial ability are the ones who are most successful in geometry, mechanical drawing and shop classes….the skills learned in those classes are important for careers in science, engineering, drafting and design, and studies have shown that high spatial ability is related to success in such diverse jobs as automotive mechanic, architect, and watch repairman.
The sex difference is spatial ability may spill over into mathematics, where males have a medium-sized edge….
Later still at university, those lessons would be reinforced by my finding myself in lectures about gynocentric feminism, which was presented to me as a school of feminist thought which was likewise concerned with highlighting sex-based differences, and positively revaluing what its advocates considered the ensuing core tenets of ‘femininity.’ In hindsight though, it was a much more fringe than my sympathetic professor suggested in the late-1990s, and was already well on its way out even then. But, you could also say it was just a twist on the nature-vs-nurture debate really—that all things being equal, would or do men and women gravitate towards different activities and professions based on these differences, and regardless that those dominated by women shouldn’t be undervalued—and which is still very much ongoing. Perhaps most interestingly and controversially at the moment, in the fact that even in Scandinavia, it is women who are still overwhelmingly plumping for caring, nurturing professions like teaching and nursing instead of those related to STEM. (Just because Jordan Peterson is oneofthemanypeople pointing this out, doesn’t make it untrue.)
To be clear, although Pool’s book was clearly formative, and I’ve been very receptive to the notion of fundamental, sex-based differences ever since, I’ve never been naïve either. Not about how absolutely no level playing field exists for entry into and success in hitherto “naturally” male-dominated interests and professions like chess, snooker, coding, engineering, and so on.
Or at least, I thought I’d never been naïve.
There’s More than One Way to Skin a Cat
Because today I learned that in addition to all the other, more obvious barriers and hurdles that discourage girls and women, that this extends to them even displaying the necessary character traits to succeed too. That it’s not that they don’t also want to geek out over the things only boys are “supposed” to like, necessarily. Just that if they do, they’re much more likely to be criticized for their obsessiveness. Whereas among boys and men, that same obsessiveness tends to be seen as a virtue instead.
See what I mean from this passage from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (2019), the inspiration for this post. If you’ll please bear with me, it’s five paragraphs long. But totally worth it for the aha! moment in the final two (pp. 95-96):
In 1984 American tech journalist Steven Levy published his bestselling book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Levy’s heroes were all brilliant. They were all single-minded. They were all men. They also didn’t get laid much. ‘You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space,’ Levy explained. ‘Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,’ one of his heroes told him. ‘How can a [default male] hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?’
Two paragraphs after having reported such blatant misogyny, Levy nevertheless found himself at a loss to explain why this culture was more or less ‘exclusively male’. ‘The sad fact was that there never was a star-quality female hacker’, he wrote. ‘No one knows why.’ I don’t know, Steve, we can probably take a wild guess.
By failing to make the obvious connection between an openly misogynistic culture and the mysterious lack of women, Levy contributed to the myth of innately talented hackers being implicitly male. And, today, it’s hard to think of a profession more in thrall to brilliance bias than computer science. ‘Where are the girls that love to program?’ asked a high-school teacher who took part in a summer programme for advanced-placement computer-science teachers at Carnegie Mellon; ‘I have any number of boys who really really love computers,’ he mused.55 ‘Several parents have told me their sons would be on the computer programming all night if they could. I have yet to run into a girl like that.’
This may be true, but as one of his fellow teachers pointed out, failing to exhibit this behaviour doesn’t mean that his female students don’t love computer science. Recalling her own student experience, she explained how she ‘fell in love’ with programming when she took her first course in college. But she didn’t stay up all night, or even spend a majority of her time programming. ‘Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won’t.’
Beyond its failure to account for female socialisation (girls are penalized for being antisocial in a way boys aren’t), the odd thing about framing an aptitude for computer science around typically male behaviour is that coding was originally seen as a woman’s game. In fact, women were the original ‘computers’, doing complex maths problems by hand for the military before the machine that took their name replaced them.
While I don’t know anything about coding, I’ve been dying for a chance to flex that I’m still a pretty damn good chess player. (And single; 진짜 뇌섹남 인데…) So, although chess too is not all it appears, and there are many ways to fall in love with it (a common sentiment is that it’s equal parts an art, a sport, and a science), I like to think I have some rare authority when I say that I still can’t see any real alternatives to its mastery other than long hours spent practicing, studying, and committing thousands of games, opening variations, tactical motifs, positional themes, and endgames to memory.
But then I thought again about how I did those, and took Perez’s point about staying up all night not being all it’s cracked up to be. Because in hindsight, much of what I worked on when I did was completely useless, even counterproductive, and made my schoolwork and non-existent social life suffer. At university later, it meant I failed easy classes, and am still suffering the consequences through my student loan repayments today. So, someone more mature and self-disciplined than I was back then, and more well-rounded, with actual friends and mentors to talk about learning, training, and—heaven forbid—topics unrelated to chess, would undoubtedly have made far more progress in chess in a fraction of the time that I did, let alone in many other aspects of their life.
Historically, Women Literally Couldn’t be Geniuses, Despite Ticking all the Boxes
Still wanting to flex how smart I am though (did I mention I’m single?), I want to causally convey how there must surely be a reason why chess is still considered a symbol of high intelligence, even genius too, at least in the West (I concede that Go is more complex. Or baduk as it’s known here, which all the geeks in Korea who would be playing chess are playing instead, damnit.). Also, to smoothly segue through that into the fact that we are indeed so wedded to the notion that related skills, talents, and traits are only virtues when possessed by men, that even the histories of the concept of “genius” and of the word itself contain this bias, especially in the last two centuries. As Christine Battersby explains in her pioneering 1989 book, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (pp. 8 & 11):
Starting from the persistence of sexual prejudice in art and literary criticism today, [in this book] I move back in time to explore the way our modern notions of creativity are modeled on notions of a male God creating the universe, and the devious tricks used to represent all creative and procreative power as he attribute of males….
Women’s inferiority had been rationalized by the writers in the Aristotelian tradition as a deficiency in judgement, wit, reason, skill, talent, and psychic (and bodily) heat. Women had been blamed for an excess of passion, imagination, sexual needs, and for vapor-induced delusion and irrationality. But if we look at the aesthetic literature of the late eighteenth century, we will see that the greatest males (the natural “geniuses”) were being praised for qualities of mind that seem prima facie identical with Aristotelian femininity. I discuss the new qualitative distinctions that were developed, that used different types of passion, imagination, frenzy, and irrationality to account for the difference between geniuses and females. A man with genius was like a woman—but was not a woman….the revalued “feminine” qualities of mind were appropriated for a supermale sex….
Why does it matter that, whereas ordinary males have been blamed for effeminacy, in (male) geniuses femininity has been transformed into a virtue? I hope this book will make clear how women have been presented with contradictory evaluative norms against which to measure their attainments.
Or indeed, this very accessible 2021 lecture:
“Hard-wired” Differences These Ain’t
Remember those incontrovertible sex-based differences Pool discussed in 1993 though? To follow this audacious history of belittling, denying, and hiding women’s genius by pointing out the verdict of 2023 is…that these differences very much still exist, feels churlish, almost rude. But here’s the rub: they’re easily overcome. As Andrew Curry explains in, given my own 30-year fixation with those differences, an even more eye-opening—I want to say shocking—article at Nautilus:
George M. Bodner, a professor of chemical education at Purdue University….stresses it’s important not to perpetuate the myth that a gender gap implies all men are better than all women at spatial cognition tasks. Stereotypes about spatial ability can have an insidious effect. “When women hear myths, such as the idea that they have ‘poor spatial ability when compared with men,’ they often believe this will be true for themselves, and it often is not true,” Bodner says.
Had [Sheryl Sorby, a professor of engineering education at Ohio State University] been a little less stubborn, she might have left engineering altogether. Instead she went on to earn a bachelor’s and then a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Michigan Tech, and was later hired as a faculty member. As Sorby took more engineering courses, she got better at spatial cognition tasks, until eventually she found herself teaching engineering graphics, the very course that almost derailed her as an undergrad. “The brain is pretty plastic when it comes to spatial skills,” Sorby says. “I have improved my spatial skills vastly as an adult.”
That initial experience never left her, though. As a professor, she noticed talented young women struggling the way she had. So she set out to find a solution. “The fact that there are these gender gaps is a challenge, but it’s not a death sentence,” she says. “I know it’s something we can fix.”
With her colleague, Beverly J. Baartmans, she developed a spatial visualization course to help her students develop their spatial cognition skills.
That course was just 15 hours long, and even improved men’s abilities as well, despite being given a biological head start. And, because I can’t even begin to convey the magnitude of what this brain plasticity implies for future sex and gender roles, let alone playing chess? I can’t think of a better way to end this post than recommending you head straight over to Nautilus to read the rest of the article!
Well, we don’t, actually. But for those who want to learn more about why not, and laugh themselves silly in the process, Nipple War 3 (젖꼭지 3차대전) is available for streaming on indieground until July 30!
“Nipple World War 3″ it should really say, otherwise the “3” makes no sense. After appearances in over 30 film festivals though, the misguided English title has stuck, so I’ll roll with it.
It’s very crude and slapstick too. But I’m not complaining about that either.
For there’s nothing subtle about the absurd double standards regarding male and female nipple exposure, in Korea or anywhere else for that matter. But it’s only relatively recently it’s become a real issue here, as explained by Jo Yeong-joon in hercolumn about the 2021 film yesterday at Oh My Star:
2019년쯤이었나. 여성 연예인들의 노브라가 사회적인 이슈가 된 적이 있었다. PD 출신인 백시원 감독도 당시 방송에서 이 문제를 다루는 방식을 놓고 상사와 의견을 나눈 적이 있었다고 한다. 당시에 상사는 두드러지는 여성의 젖꼭지에 모자이크를 처리하라고 했지만 취지에 옳지 않다고 생각한 감독은 극 중 인물처럼 적극적인 행동을 하지는 못했지만 속으로 불편함 감정을 느꼈다고 한다. 이 영화 <젖꼭지 3차 대전>은 그런 사실적 상황 속에서 태어나게 되었다. 코미디적 연출과 다양한 상황을 제시하기 위해 결과적으로 많은 부분이 각색되고 픽션화되기는 했지만 당시에 경험했던 사회에 만연해 있던 은근한 성차별에 대해 들여다보고자 한 것이다.
“Was it around 2019, when female celebrities not wearing bras in public became a social issue? [The ‘no-bra‘ movement?] Director Baek Si-won, a former producer, said that the ‘problem’ of a woman not wearing a bra came up in a program she was working on at the time; after discussing with her boss about how to deal with it, she followed his instructions to use mosaics to cover the women’s prominent nipples. But she was uncomfortable with doing so, and, although she didn’t object quite as actively as the characters do in her short film, it was from that real example that Nipple War 3 came about. Indeed, although much of the film is heavily dramatized and fictionalized for the sake of comedic affect, and for presenting a wider variety of scenes and situations, the intention in doing so was to better highlight the subtle sexism and double standards that were—still are—experienced every day in Korean society.”
영화는 연예인의 젖꼭지가 도드라지는 방송 화면을 모자이크 하라는 마정도 부장(정인기 분)에 맞서 자신의 의견을 피력하는 용 피디(최성은 분)의 모습을 다루고 있다. 영화의 구조도 그리 복잡하지 않다. 서로 다른 의견을 가진 두 사람이 총 세 차례에 걸쳐 부딪히는 것이 뼈대의 전부다. 대신 각각의 지점이 (영화의 표현을 빌리자면 세 번의 대전) 던지는 문제의 화두는 모두 다르다. 갈등의 중심에 놓인 매개는 여성의 젖꼭지 하나이지만, 감독은 이 과정을 통해 여성의 특정한 신체 부위가 드러나는 것에 (실제로는 여성의 자유와 권리, 평등을 보장하는 일에) 반감을 가지는 이들의 주장이 얼마나 차별적이고 비합리적인지를 드러내고자 한다.
“[As can be seen the opening scene above, which has English subtitles], the movie deals with Producer Yong (played by Choi Seong-eun) who disagrees with her manager Ma Jeong-do (played by Jeong In-gi) when he asks her to mosaic out a female celebrity’s prominent nipples under her t-shirt. From then, the film is structured around people with different opinions having an argument (having a ‘battle,’ to borrow the parlance of the film) a total of three times, each on a different aspect of women’s nipples—the central characters if you will. Through this variety of situations and arguments, Director Baek wants to make that it clear that only allowing men to expose certain parts of their body is extremely discriminatory and irrational, and ultimately fundamentally undermines their guarantees of freedom, rights, and equality.” (My emphasis and slight embellishments—James)
I’d just love to translate the full column. But unfortunately copyright is a thing, translation apps and plugins are more than adequate, and the reality is that if you don’t understand the Korean yourself, then you’ll struggle to make much sense of the film dialogue either, which has no Korean or English subtitles. (Sorry—I’m disappointed too.) I would like to highlight just a few more points from her column though, just in the remote case that you’re not already convinced to watch the film whenever and in whatever language you do get the chance:
Part of the the reason for Yong’s clash with her manager is because of the ambiguity of the Korea Communications Commission’s regulations. While they do say male and female genitalia [and pubic hair] are strictly forbidden, the criterion for excluding female nipples—and only female nipples—are far more open to interpretation. In the film, this is highlighting by showing a screenshot of topless African women from a previously-aired documentary, but one of Venus’s nipples in the famous Sandro Botticelli painting being mosaiced in another. Not only are—James here again—these examples probably real, but they also raise the element of racial hypocrisy and double standards, which are by no means confined to Korea.
Amidst all their handwringing about some women not wearing bras for their health and/or comfort, few self-appointed guardians of Korean morals seem to recall that even exposing navels on TV was technically banned when singer Park Ji-yoon‘s song Coming of Age Ceremony (성인식) was released in 2000, resulting in said body part sometimes getting mosaiced (or—James—I’m guessing, covered in a mesh, like in the second video below.) Similarly, singer Kim Wan-seon had the same problems with her ripped jeans in the late-1980s and early-1990s.
The film is absolutely not intended to inflame Korea’s “gender wars.” It’s a comedy. The men are not at all universally portrayed as dogmatic, conservative sexists, nor the women as universally progressive and beyond reproach. In particular, Ma is clearly very much in a bind, Yong is somewhat stubborn and self-righteous, and her male assistant is completely sympathetic and helpful to her cause.
Tired of feminazis pushing their nipples in your face? Don’t understand the big deal? Recall that female newsreaders couldn’t even wear glasses on Korean TV until 2018…
Honestly, with this topic I feel a personal connection to my first few years in Korea, in the early-2000s. Which I realize sounds…let’s generously say “somewhat odd.” But that’s when I was single just like now, but unlike now coming home after midnight a lot. And often when I did, I wouldn’t be sleepy, but would be somewhat at a loss with no computer, no 1500+ books, nor yet to be invented smartphone. So I’d turn on the TV to suddenly find…Las Vegas cabaret shows featuring topless dancers. Naturally, their breasts would be misted over. Only, there was so much dancing involved, so many breasts, and so many cuts between different dancers and different cameras, that the hapless censors (misters?) just couldn’t keep up. So,the misted circles would quite literally be chasing the dancers’ breasts across the TV.
If I’d had a cat, its eyes would have popped out of its head. But it’s probably best I didn’t then—I probably would have injured it, rolling around on the floor laughing too much. And, having just arrived from New Zealand, where I’d rarely had to think about censorship at all, I’ve continued laughing at its hypocrisy and ridiculousness ever since.
Much kudos to director Baek Si-won for continuing that tradition then, while also providing some much needed social commentary that won’t make any viewer feel like they’re being made fun of—or laughing too much to care even if they did.
It’s tough impressing guests at my cocktail parties these days.
By definition, all of them are already bibliophiles—why else would I invite them? But that also means some guests don’t so much as bat an eyelid at my paltry 1500+ tomes, no matter how strategically I arrange their titles.
Hitherto my main trump card, and source of cultural capital, suddenly being exposed as neither smart nor well-read has become a real source of concern. And, when I do sense a guest’s moment of realization is finally arriving, my cats, trained to pose for Instagram, can only distract them for so long.
(From 28:10) “Into the Twentieth Century, I write about the culture of…Japanese modernism, as expressed in these two icons, the mobo and the moga, and the era of what’s called ‘Erotic Grotesque Nonsense.’ One of the arguments I make in the book, is that if you went to Japan in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s, you would recognize a lot of the forms of entertainment, because they were…at least originally, they came from other parts of the world, particularly North America and Europe. But they also looked different. Scholars call this ‘vernacular modernism.’ Where [something is] part of a global movement, but is articulated in very specific ways in specific places and for specific reasons. And so, even though these people look like flappers and dandies…and they evoke some of the same moral panic, they also were challenging very specifically Japanese norms and were fulfilling particular Japanese needs.”
I hear your thoughts, all half-dozen or so of you still reading: what grown adult only hears of vernacular modernism for the first time in their late-40s? How can I even call myself a man? Have I no shame at all??
“How could he string me along like that? I really thought he would have more books…(Sigh) Men can be such pigs…”. Photo (cropped) by Killian Pham on Unsplash.
But I’ll be way ahead of any guests voicing the same, already reaching for their raincoats and umbrellas. For I’ll use a cunning trick on them I’ve learned from a local book club I recently joined.
In those meetings, which are twice a week. we read our own books silently for an hour, then have a quick bathroom break, then go around in turns quickly summarizing our books, before finally posing a related question to the other members to answer. The ensuing discussions generally last until we’re kicked out of the various coffee shops. And—you guessed it—the most interesting and lively conversations tend to spring from questions that actually have no relationship to people’s books at all. So too, given how obvious my need for constant validation is, you can also guess that a not inconsiderable amount of my free time between meetings is spent preparing the most popular questions. Then, on procuring related books I can bring along to feign they just spontaneously came to me from my casual, cursory hour’s reading.
So, I will distract and impress my more discerning cocktail party guests not with big words, but by posing the first titular question: How were Korean new women and modern girls different…to their equivalents in other countries? Other than so many of their new fashions, beauty products, consumer goods, new education and employment opportunities, new beliefs about family life, sexuality, and women’s rights, being so closely associated with, forced by, enabled through, and/or utterly tainted by the Japanese colonial regime that is?
“Interesting questions James,” my guests will reply, stumped. “We misjudged you. Let’s bring your cats back for some more cute photos, then brainstorm some ideas. Oh, you already have a whiteboard and markers set up in the next room you say?”
Yes, I’m vastly overgeneralizing. But I know you too are intrigued by the prospect of learning the extent of the similarities and differences between Korean women and their Taiwanese and Manchurian counterparts in the 1920s and ’30s, let alone between those living in other colonial regimes. Indeed, the party will only just be getting started.
Left: “The various types of ‘girls’ in the 1920s to 1930s”; scan, 예쁜 여자 만들기, p. 245. Right: Actor Hideko Takamine, Japanese White Powder Foundation advertisement, 1930s; via The Flapper Girl.
Unfortunately, my desire to learn from my guests’ answers will be so genuine, that I’ll quickly forget all my pretensions to aloofness and sophistication. So, when we move on to the next question, I’ll be quite unable to restrain my joy at recently (re)discovering an exceptional background source, and wanting to repay by sharing. Namely, albeit again vastly overgeneralizing, one that elaborates on how Korean women’s rights were put on the backburner in the first half of the Twentieth Century for the sake of focusing on liberation from the Japanese, then in the second half for the sake of democratization—which has basically informed just about everything I’ve ever written about Korean feminism here for the last 16 years. That is, Colonial Modernity in Korea, edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (1999), and more specifically Chapter 7. “The Price of Legitimacy: Women and the Kunuhoe Movement, 1927–1931” by Kenneth M. Wells. Fortunately, much of the chapter is available via Google Books, including the following four pages (192-193, and 203-204) that will surely persuade you to buy your own copy:
But only embarrassed by myself to myself, because clearly I’m already way past being worried about my reputation among you, my dear readers. And glad to have had the opportunity to recommend a book too you, or more generally to have shared something useful and/or interesting. Because no matter how long I sometimes take to get there, that, after all, is always the point.
“Pretty weird guy, but…yeah, that does sound like a good book. I must order it post haste.” Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.
On which note, so what if, technically speaking, I haven’t actually had a single guest in my home since moving in six months ago? Or that my toasting my cats with Pepsi lime zero and cheap whiskey every other evening for, say, not vomiting over my meager possessions that day, doesn’t exactly qualify as my hosting “lavish cocktail parties” either? These are mere minutiae in the pursuit of great art. Or, indeed, of great books!
Hey, I’m annoyed too. But here’s hoping how I got over my writer’s block inspires your own breakthroughs!
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Photo by Wei Ding on Unsplash.
So, we all know real writers leave piles of books and papers lying around their homes or workspaces, right?
After all, how else to impress real women?
When I tried that however, there’d be a lot of vomiting involved. By my cats on my books and papers I mean. Which meant they had to go on my “temporary,” set-up and put-away as you need it “writing table” instead, which had limited space.
June 13, 2023
It wasn’t enough. Instead of encouraging resolution of the epiphanies and writing ideas contained therein, old piles would simply get pushed aside for new piles as inspiration stuck me. Then pushed under new piles once I had even more new ideas, destined to be forgotten.
July 6, 2023.
Eventually, the prospect of clearing my literal physical and mental space just became overwhelming. Some of those piles you see above had even endured my divorce, somehow emerging unscathed on my table—the table—from one apartment to the next. (Joking not joking.)
If I couldn’t follow through on any one writing idea though, then I couldn’t come up with any new ones either, lest the books and papers collapse and crush me under their weight. Which, in a sense, happened anyway: having a constant physical reminder that I was unable to ever follow through on anything, was like an albatross around my neck, robbing me of all passion and motivation. Love continued to forsake me. As did my friends, embarrassed at my naivete when choosing my bookcases.
I consoled myself in drink.
But then one evening, looking up from my couch in a drunken fog, I made out an unused space through the haze. And then a Facebook alert about someone in the neighborhood selling furniture brought sudden, rare clarity…
From that point on, things proceeded quickly:
To secure the bookcase, I had to reserve it before getting approval from my roommates. Fortunately though, that would soon be granted after arrival:
I made other changes around the apartment too. From now on, visitors to my humble abode will no longer think they’re entering a cat cafe:
Rather, they will be greeted by at least one guard, to whom they must submit themselves for inspection. Once they have been given approval though, and allowed to proceed, they’ll immediately be subliminally influenced by whatever books I’ve placed on my new bookcase for their arrival…
Don’t worry—I’m not a total monster. I still regularly leave the cat tunnels out for the guards, especially late at night when regular visiting hours are over. I leave the (now clear) temporary table out for them to jump on too, and they appreciate having more room to jump on and off it.
But in all seriousness…I have been serious throughout this post. I really have been in quite a funk these past few months, and the act of clearing the table, and sorting and moving those piles really does feel like I’m finally emerging out of it. I haven’t even had a drink since that day either.
So, if simply buying a small bookcase proves to be such a catalyst for personal change, I’ll happily take it.
And I’m not ashamed I needed this crutch at all. Rather, I’m sharing so that, if it feels like some things are holding you back in life too, you may be more inspired to pinpoint what they are, and less embarrassed to act on them. However simple and mundane they may seem to other people.
Good luck!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
Knowingly or unknowingly, how do you think you react differently to people depending on their sex?
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Photo by leah hetteberg on Unsplash.
“When you’re communicating with someone, but don’t know if they’re a man or woman, you feel a little guarded. You can’t help it. Until you can resolve their identity, your conversation is stilted and awkward, because you just can’t be yourself. ”
Or something like that—I can’t remember when and where I read it, but it resonated with my experience of chatrooms in the early days of the internet, or phone calls before Caller ID. Over the next decade, as realistic-sounding, AI-based chatbots become increasingly common in customer service roles, along with all their inherent gender biases and stereotypes, I expect younger generations will also experience the same moments of confusion and hesitation I did.
Or will they? Is it just me that sees sex first, and reacts to that? Do moments of ambiguity mean I actually behave and talk fundamentally differently around men and women, once their identity is resolved? I’ve often wondered. So, I was interested recently when I was listening to a New Books Network interview of Julia Serano, a transsexual woman, about her, well, new book, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back (2022), and learned that it was her experience that people reacted to their perception of her sex before anything else. Listen from 15:40 to see how, or read below:
“When I was about to begin my [male to female] transition, I really didn’t know what personally to expect, other than I figured there’d be this period of time where I’d be in, like, a gender limbo, when people wouldn’t be able to figure out if I was a boy or girl. And I had a couple of instances like that, but much to my surprise, almost always people would make the determination that I was male or female [for themselves]. It’s just that their determinations often differed from other people in the exact same room. So I describe a lot of anecdotes I had, including…having a conversation, for instance, where someone who knew me as male before I transitioned and wasn’t aware that I was transitioning, introduced me to…another man, who—he was very flirty with me. And I could tell, because of what I was going through at the time, that he was reading me as female, but, like, my friend didn’t pick up on that…because from my friend’s perspective, we all obviously knew that we were [just] three guys talking together. And there’d be a lot of situations like that where people would read me as one way or the other, and they’d really believe whatever their initial determination was, that’s what they believed and that’s how they viewed me, and it was really hard a lot of times to convince people in the other direction.”
“….The conclusion I came out of [those experiences], is that first and foremost, we don’t really see people—we see men and women. And that’s kind of how we’re socialized to see the world, and becomes really unconscious…and, you know, the fact that we automatically categorize people as male or female, obviously this has implications for trans people, and for non-binary people—it creates a lot of obstacles in our lives. But more generally, if we categorize people [like this], it really shapes a lot of the assumptions that we place on people, and it results in us filtering out other aspects of their person…like once I transitioned, there were aspects of my person that people couldn’t really see any more, that they used to react to.”
The title of the book, not to mention its description, is actually a little misleading—the book is no prudish, anti-sex tirade. Instead, it’s more her observations and thoughts about sexualization, objectifiction, sex and gender roles, socialization, pornography, and so on based on her experiences before and after transitioning. In other words, fascinating, and more than enough to decide I couldn’t wait for a paperback version to come out.
As for my own answers to the various questions I’ve raised? Actually I completely disagree with Serano that we’re socialized to see people’s sexes first. Women, in particular, who didn’t immediately register someone as a man, and weren’t more wary of the potential danger a man represented, were more likely to be a victim of violence, and less likely to pass on their genes. Also, with the exception of asexuals, our well-documented, subconscious reactions to other’s heights, signs of youth, indicators of wealth, and other attractiveness criteria demonstrate that most people can’t help but immediately consider others as potential mates or rivals, even if we don’t consciously frame them as such.
Or, very, very consciously once suddenly becoming single again, at a frequency that surprises even myself…
But I stress that to acknowledge these gut reactions, usually so short-lived to even notice them, doesn’t mean they aren’t easily overcome. Nor should they ever provide excuses for boorish behavior. For instance, I’m acutely aware that many men dominatewomen’s personal spaces, whether through being unaware or through deliberately taking advantage of their male privilege to do so. So, when I’m around women, I constantly try to check myself from manspreading, and so on. Also, befriending mostly women for most of my adult life, because of reasons, I’ve often questioned if I talked and behaved differently around them, and if there were subjects that I wouldn’t broach with them that I would with men, and vice-versa?
Recently starting to make more male friends again because I suddenly have a social life now, I’m leaning towards that I actually treat everyone pretty much the same. Which is to say I don’t actually have ‘friends’ so much as “like-minded folks [that] fill very specific needs,” at varying levels of closeness, with whom their sex is only one of many factors influencing how I behave around them and what we talk about. And which in my experience is much less important than nationality—at least amongst Westerners.
So, although I haven’t met any yet, I don’t think I would feel compelled to ‘assign’ any openly genderfluid or non-binary people at all. And, to those I am fortunate to meet, I can only apologize in advance for not lacking the restraint to want to immediately ask you all these questions too. Including the most important one:
Wasit necessary for Jane Austen to avoidconversations between men in her novels? Well??
Now, the most important thing to take away from this post is to appreciate what good taste I have. For *I* decided I liked this film, and booked a ticket, weeks before it became cool.
Next most important is the secret of how I learned of it: by subscribing to the YouTube channel 문다무비. Focusing on trailers of arthouse films with limited runs, and/or of repeat screenings of popular movies, if you live in Korea then it’s an absolute must.* How else, after all, can you persuade your dates that you’re smart and sophisticated? Other than by showing them selfies of you in empty theaters that is?
Unfortunately for my otherwise carefully-crafted persona, I am an alcoholic, so was much too busy to post about the film while it was still under most people’s radar. Fortunately for you though, it’s only just been released, so there’s still a week or so to see it. Also, in addition to glowing reviews by overseas critics, as well as a surprising amount of coverage in the Korean media, there’s Jia H. Jung’s Korea Times interview of Korean French adoptee Laure Badufle, co-writer and inspiration and inspiration for the film, which will do a much better job of persuading you to watch the film than I ever could have.
Especially when I haven’t actually mentioned the trifling detail of what the film is actually about yet:
Again unfortunately for my persona, I can’t hide how giddy with excitement I am to learn that Laure Badufle was born in the small town of Sacheon in South Gyeongsang Province before she was adopted, where I taught from 2001-2003; that will likely feature in the film, while neighboring Jinju, where I lived, definitely will. Also, because of the mixture of English, French, and Korean used, I’m relieved to see that Korean subtitles will be used, which will frankly make watching it much easier for me (I don’t know of anywhere with English subtitles sorry).
Yet despite all the recent attention, there’s still only 6 CGVs screening the film in Seoul, only 1 in Busan, and, ironically, none at all in Jinju. My fellow sophisticated Busanites at least though, will appreciate the perks that come with their fine tastes—in the form of an exclusive 44-person theater, with luxury armchairs!
*Update: I’ve just discovered artninecinema/아트나인 (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook), which is even more focused on arthouse films, and also hosts various related events. Unfortunately most for Return to Seoul are already over, but on Tuesday the 16th there’s a screening with critic Jeong Seong-il in Seoul.
Sorry for the last-minute notice for tonight’s opening from 6 to 8pm. But fortunately the exhibition itself, about “women’s sexuality and life stories reinterpreted through traditional Buddhist lacquer (통 옻칠로 재해석 된 여성의 성 그리고 삶 이야기),” will be held at @gallery_gwangan until Wednesday May 10. All are welcome, and tonight will also feature free wine and food!
Unfortunately, I’ve been having trouble finding any more information about artist Gabby Chu (가비추) and her work.* But presumably she’ll be there tonight, and she will also be present at the gallery for the entire exhibition (note the opening hours in the blue poster). On Saturday the 6th, she will be giving a talk (in Korean) about exhibiting overseas too.
See you there!
*Update: Gabby’s Instagram can be found at gabby_chu_ottchil, and her personal website at Gabbychu.com. I can also confirm she’s every bit as amazing and creative as I expected, and is very happy for you to visit and chat in English or Korean about art, feminism, and/or sexuality :)
Kim Jiyoung: Born 1982 scores points for its raising of numerous feminist issues, but its treatment of them is frequently quite superficial. Here’s how one scene should have been handled differently, shattering stereotypes and suggesting solutions in the process.
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes. Photo by Gabe Pierce on Unsplash.
It’s basically a Korean Feminism 101 compendium, which means it didn’t really teach me anything new. Its constant shoehorning of facts and statistics into the narrative ruined it as a work of fiction too. But the biggest flaw was Jiyoung’s constant, infuriating lack of agency, with its flipside that author Cho Nam-joo didn’t really offer any solutions to the numerous hardships she faces either.
That doesn’t mean those hardships aren’t well-described. Like I said in my earlier review, I don’t think it’s a bad book at all. If you personally learned a great deal from it, and/or laughed, cried, and seethed in anger alongside Jiyoung, then I’m hardly going to claim that my own disappointment and frustration mean I’m somehow a much better, more knowledgeable feminist than you.
But Jiyoung’s lack of agency, and Cho’s lack of solutions, are absolutely a hill I’m prepared to die on. One scene in the film set in a subway toilet, albeit not mentioned in the book, illustrates both very well.
In it (55-56:00), Jiyoung (played by Jung Yu-mi) has to get off the subway to change her bawling infant daughter. Once that’s done, she realizes she needs to pee herself, but struggles in the narrow cubicle to hang up her heavy bag with her daughter strapped to her chest. Then, before she attempts again, she eyes the walls and lock nervously, remembering a recent molka (spycam) incident at the place she used to work. The scene then shifts to her home, implying she gave up and went there instead.
At first viewing, it’s difficult to find any fault here at all. Given that the burden of childcare falls overwhelmingly on women, then more men—or, indeed, more unsympathetic childless women—sometimes really do need to be literally shown just how much effort that actually involves. So too, do more men need to realize how stressful it is having to worry about being secretly filmed literally every single time you used any toilets outside of your home, as well as the potential health consequences if you understandably chose to avoid them.
Admittedly, that may seem like a lot to ask of a one-minute scene. Yet with just a little tweaking, it could have achieved those aims very effectively and forcefully. Instead, it largely fails, for three reasons.
The first is because, ironically, guys can relate to the practical difficulties. The indignity of using a cubicle while wearing a suit and carrying a backpack, desperately trying to prevent either from touching all the urine and smokers’ spittle on the floor, is absolutely no joke. As for childcare specifically, my ex-wife would naturally take our daughters with her to the female toilets when they were young, but it’s not like I wasn’t often in just as awkward and uncomfortable situations with them in other cramped locations.
Devoid of any wider context then, which I’ll provide myself in a moment, men’s own issues with using cubicles can mean women’s complaints fall on deaf ears, let alone calls to make women’s toilets bigger than men’s. (In fact, some men even consider the proposal to be reverse-sexism.) This lack of sympathy is misguided, of course, but I can understand it—unless men are flat out told or shown why not, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that more cubicles in place of urinals suffice for women’s need to sit down. That women somehow still have to queue nonetheless, delaying everyone? Pop culture reveals that’s just their own fault, thanks to all the primping, preening, and gossiping that really goes on in there.
Next, the scene doesn’t do enough to convey the visceral fear of spy cameras. This is indeed much harder for men to relate to, because they never have to think about them when using public toilets. So, something much more forceful than Jiyoung’s brief nervous glances was required.
Best would have been a tweak to an earlier scene, which I’ll outline in a moment. But as an emphasis in this one, a more realistic cubicle should have been shown, with every nook, cranny, screw, bolt, and indent jammed with toilet paper and gum. Rather than the toilet the scene was actually shot in, which, complete with a rare heater, was easily the most pristine in Korea, seeing what it’s actually like in women’s toilets would surely have rammed home just how big of a problem spycams are in Korea—in a way that abstract news reportsnever could.
That earlier scene (44:30-47:30) is where Jiyoung’s former coworkers discover a spycam had been set up in one of the female toilets, and that their male coworkers had been sharing the videos, followed by meeting Jiyoung in a coffee shop to let her know. In hindsight, it’s all over surprisingly quickly. Whereas in the book, the incident is dealt with over three pages, and among the many grave consequences the coworkers reveal in those is that one victim overdosed on meds—possibly intentionally. This is omitted entirely in the film, but fits with the film’s much more kid-gloves, family-friendly tone overall (In particular, Jiyoung’s husband, played by Gong Yoo, is a vastly more sympathetic and likeable character than in the book. Perhaps a truer portrayal was rejected as harmful to his image?). In its place, the coworkers are not so much in tears as almost laugh off the affair, one joking about borrowing Jiyoung’s daughter’s diapers from now on.
Not only would I have absolutely kept that line about the coworker’s potential suicide instead, I would have devoted a minute to visiting her in hospital too. Was that not worth it to show that spycams have very real, devastating effects on people’s lives?
But if I only had an extra minute’s grace, I would use it to shift Jiyoung’s toilet scene to a few years earlier in her life, before she stopped working to have her daughter. She would be in her smart workclothes and high heels at a hweshik, an (effectively mandatory) after-work dinner with her boss and coworkers, and have to go to the toilet as everyone was preparing to leave to go to a second round at a bar. She would take longer than many of the men would like, because—and herein lies that context, as explained by Sora Chemaly in Time. Because, yes, it really does need explaining, as it’s not at all just about sitting vs. standing:
Women need to use bathrooms more often and for longer periods of time because: we sit to urinate (urinals effectively double the space in men’s rooms) [notealso, “Women empty their bladders more frequently than men and take longer – an average start-to-finish time of 60 seconds for men, but 90 for women”—James], we menstruate, we are responsible for reproducing the species (which makes us pee more), we continue to have greater responsibility for children (who have to use bathrooms with us), and we breastfeed (frequently in grotty bathroom stalls). Additionally, women tend to wear more binding and cumbersome clothes, whereas men’s clothing provides significantly speedier access. But in a classic example of the difference between surface “equality” and genuine equity, many public restrooms continue to be facilities that are equal in physical space, while favoring men’s bodies, experiences, and needs.
So when Jiyoung did rejoin the group, one of those impatient men could have made an all too common complaint or joke about holding everyone up for the sake of putting on her lipstick. To which she could have angrily pointed out it wasn’t her fault, for any number of the above reasons she could have chosen to highlight (and/or by having to spend time ramming toilet paper into all those potential camera holes, would have killed two birds with one stone). She could have followed that the obvious solution of “potty parity”—mandating 2:1 or 3:1 female to male toilet size ratios in all new building plans, and/or building more shared toilets—wasn’t at all reverse-sexism, but would benefit both women and the men who had to wait for them.
Indeed, this scene would not be unlike the—MILD SPOILER—final scene in the film, in which Jiyoung actually does confront a guy who accuses her of being a “mom roach,” living the high life gossiping in coffee shops, a parasite on her rich husband and the hard workers who pay the taxes for her holiday of maternity leave. Which is a rare credit to the film, and certainly a better alternative to her just slinking away in shame like in the book, then getting gaslighted by her husband when she complains about it. However, as it’s the conclusion to what’s actually an extremely saccharine-feeling film overall as discussed, it’s somewhat underwhelming as a climax—SPOILER ENDS.
With an extra minute still, I would also add a scene of her as a teenager, suffering from bladder and dehydration problems that her much fawned-over brother avoided, because he could obviously better endure Korean schools’ notoriously dirty and outdated toilets. But I digress. The point is, Jiyoung in the subway toilet with her daughter is just one scene of many that could have been dramatically improved. I curse having read the book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World by Leslie Kern (2020) in particular, which means I can just no longer unsee the flaws in the scenes in either the book or film. Although, given the former’s popularity, now I do appreciate the value of seeing one’s own lived experiences represented in print, even if Cho neither presents Jiyoung as a role model nor offers any potential solutions to what she faces.
Those responsible for the film however, could have and should have responded to the backlash by taking up that mantle, exploiting the potential of the new visual medium to shock and shame. Instead, they wasted the opportunity by making it as saccharine as possible, all for the sake of people who had probably never actually read the book and were even less likely to watch the film.
Do any of you reading this in Korea volunteer for a local feminist organization?
As a Western male feminist, or feminist ally if that’s your jam, frankly I’ve never seriously considered it. I’ve always just assumed my presence would be more awkward and complicated than helpful, and probably quite rightly so. There’s visa restrictions against non-Koreans participating in “political” activity too, even for permanent residents.
But are my assumptions correct? Or are they really just excuses?
Because I’ve recently become more interested in contemporary Korean feminist activism than ever. Perhaps, the day I get off my armchair and test those assumptions will come sooner than I think.
If you do ever see my bald head pop up on mutual Instas we follow then, blame Ito Shiori’s Black Box: The Memoir That Sparked Japan’s #MeToo Movement. Not just because because it well deserves its seminal title, but because I was shocked to learn just a few weeks later of therelativefailure of that movement compared to South Korea’s. Why? What are the similarities and differences between #미투 and #KuToo? What mutual lessons do they offer for each other? I have to know.
In 2017, the MeToo hashtag spread across the globe. However, it showed limited success in the Japanese Twittersphere and instead inspired local initiatives such as #WeToo and #Furawādemo (“flower demo”). To understand this reformulation, we analyzed 15 interviews with Japanese social media users and 119 Japanese newspaper articles. The results corroborate the framework we label VTM (values, topics, media), suggesting that an intersection between perceived Japanese values, the topic’s gendered and sexual nature, and media affordances explain the movement’s local development. While perceived Japanese values clash against those associated with #MeToo, new formulations “soften” the protest by blending in values such as reserve and harmony. Overall, we show how perceptions of popular values rather than values as essential orientations shape activism. Finally, we discuss the study’s implications for understanding cultural variance in cyberactivism, highlighting how divergent notions of “safe space” shape such movements.
Saki Mizoroki is a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo and a visiting research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her research focuses on feminist media studies, drawing on her extensive experience as a journalist. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Sophia University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as a journalist for a top-national Japanese newspaper, The Asahi, as well as internet media, BuzzFeed Japan.
This talk is organized by David H. Slater (Professor of Anthropology, FLA).
*Mizoroki, S., Shifman, L., & Hayashi, K. (2023). Hashtag activism found in translation: Unpacking the reformulation of #MeToo in Japan. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231153571
…Allow me to recommend the “Love Story in Spring” art exhibition at Objecthood (오브제후드), a small gallery in Mangmi/Suyeong-dong, which unfortunately finishes on Sunday (not the 23rd like the website suggests).
Please see the exhibition description for more information (scroll down for English), the about page for a map, and here, here, and here for Objecthood’s Instagram and those of featured artists Kyung Hee Min (민경희) and Minzo King (민조킹).
Perhaps I’ll see you there on Saturday? If so, then please make sure to say hi—rest assured, the surroundings won’t at all make me feel too shy or embarrassed to talk! ;)
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
A medley of steampunk, fantasy, and magic realism? And featuring multiple animal characters? Frankly, none of those I like at all, let alone when all put together. But, expanding my literary horizons was of the main reasons I started this book club, as was supporting more LGBTQ representation in Korean and Korean-American fiction. So I was already well sold on Phoenix Extravagant (2021) by American writer Yoon Ha Lee (Wikipedia; interview) for this month’s book choice, only then to be even further persuaded by the following excellent, quick review by a fellow club member (posted with permission):
The genre is new to me, a giant leap really. Lots of norm transgressions, in the best possible way. Is it Steampunk, SciFi- Fantasy, Alternative History, Parody…??? Or none/ all?
American-Korean author Lee is not just transgressive in genre blending, but in the themes and characters of his story here. Lee himself identifies an a trans man/ queer (choosing “him/ he”) and his protagonist here is a gender neutral “them/they”. This was less confusing than the anti-woke mob might presume when reading. Non traditional nuclear/ heteronormative families, relationships and people populate this story with disarming naturalness. The whole book eschews complicated narrative and linguistic features, offering an ostensibly straightforward plot and “young adult” level vocabulary (albeit with some rather clever invented vernacular for the world described).
But the themes and historical parallels it clearly (maybe too obviously for a Korean audience) makes to Korea’s colonial experience are also subtly transgressive. It questions the ideas of nationalism and independence (for whom), as well as whether a foreign tyranny is worse than an indigenous one. In historical parallelism, it also questions who or what a loyal citizen/ collaborator is, in the face of daily needs to survive. The role of art also arises, and whether the effects of art can be attributed/ blamed on the artist?
There’s escapism and juvenile fantasy too – if you chose to read it that way. Worth a read!
Please see LibraryThing, The StoryGraph, and/or GoodReads for further reviews, and then, if Phoenix Extravagant still appeals, I’d like to invite you to our meeting on Wednesday 26 April, at 8:15pm Korean time. Just a small, informal event, with a limit of 12 participants to help ensure that they remain as safe a space as possible, please contact me via email or leave a comment below (only I will be able to see your email address) if you are interested in attending. I will contact you to confirm, and will include you in the club reminder email with the Zoom link a few days before the event.
See you on Zoom!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Image source: tumblbug.
Source: Collective A
Image source: tumblbug.
The Quora commenter who posted that continued:
Because today I learned that in addition to all the other, more obvious barriers and hurdles that discourage girls and women, that this extends to them even displaying the necessary character traits to succeed too. That it’s not that they don’t also want to geek out over the things only boys are “supposed” to like, necessarily. Just that if they do, they’re much more likely to be criticized for their obsessiveness. Whereas among boys and men, that same obsessiveness tends to be seen as a virtue instead.
Still wanting to flex how smart I am though (did I mention I’m single?), I want to causally convey how there must surely be a reason why chess is still considered a symbol of high intelligence, even genius too, at least in the West (I concede that 
The Grand Narrative 
