Tonight at 7pm I’ll be on Busan e-FM’s Let’s Talk Busan again, this time talking about bans on alcohol consumption on Korean campuses, and then Korean weddings. You can listen on the radio at 90.5, or online here (please note that you’ll have to download Windows Media Player 10 first), and I’ll add a link to the archived version once it becomes available.
Sorry in advance for my voice (I’m still recovering from a cold), and I should finally be able to catch up with comments and emails tomorrow!
(Source: Stuff No One Told Me, via My Journal)Sorry for the slow posting everyone: I’ve had a bad cold for 3 days. But I’m nearly better :)
Announcements
— Film Screening: Sa Bangji/사방지, Korean Queer Archive, Friday 26 October (The Kimchi Queen)
Body Image, Health
— Angry Little Asian Girl pokes fun at the Asian stereotype (Mochi Magazine)
— Beware of Image Changes (Seoulbeats)
— On Our Radar: DVF and China (Thick Dumpling Skin)
— Music Video Lessons: Ailee’s “I Will Show You” teaches us that it’s okay to be an asshole (Asian Junkie)
— Girls’ Generation, SECRET & more reveal their diet meal plans (My Journal)
— Roundtable: Picture Perfect (Seoulbeats)
— Modesty in Australia vs. China (Speaking of China)
— Hong Kong woman dies after shady ‘beauty’ treatment intended for cancer patients (Jezebel)
Censorship, Media
— Erroneous report of the murder of COOL’s Yuri basically sums up the state of the Korean media (Asian Junkie)
— Media manages to make false story of COOL’s Yuri’s murder worse by outing victim’s details (Asian Junkie)
— 40 Months for stealing Korean broadcasts (The Marmot’s Hole)
— This year’s collection of foreign teacher cartoons (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
— More cartoons full of needles and gropers (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
— Why not the Corea? (Expat Hell)
— YG Entertainment & Lee Michelle may be having issues, so let’s invent narratives! (Asian Junkie)
— South Korea: Professor Acquitted in Obscenity Case (The New York Times)
— Bias Tracker: Why does allkpop trash certain events but not others? (Asian Junkie)
— Trending: China Skepticism (Seeing Red in China)
Crime
— Alarming Rise in Sex Crimes Committed by Teens (The Chosun Ilbo)
— Park Geun-hye pledges to expand police force to bolster public safety (The Korea Times)
— It’s Not Easy Being a Yakuza Boss, Part 1 (Japan Subculture Research Center)
Dating, Relationships, Marriage
— Black and Asian Couple, Lily and James’s love story (Facebook Page)
— 10 examples of how lovers match their outfits in South Korea (MSN Now)
— Why Korean Men Marry Foreign Women (The Chosun Ilbo)
— Feeling Sexy as a Mom (Geek in Heels)
— Asian Women “Too Tempting” To Husbands/Boyfriends? Please (Speaking of China)
— Ask the Yangxifu: My Chinese Boyfriend Doesn’t Express His Feeings (Speaking of China)
Education, Parenting, Demographics
— Spending the Last Year as a Teenager Outside of School (ILDA)
— Is Corporal Punishment Good or Bad? (Koreabridge)
— On Getting Behind in the Parenting Game (On Becoming a Good Korean (Feminist) Wife)
— ExamiNation: A short documentary (Lost in Traffic Lights)
Economics, Politics, Workplaces, Ladygate
— Korean Professor Uses Twitter to Critcise Online Misogyny Trend (Korea BANG)
— Cook, clean, and be pretty (The Korea Times)
— Seniority-based Promotions being Replaced by Merit-based Promotions in Korea (The Korea Law Blog)
— ‘Testosterone is the problem’ [in the finance industry] (The Korea Times)
— Cracks in the Asian glass ceiling (Business Without Borders)
— Feminist Feels Pity For Men in Continued Online Misogyny Debate (Korea BANG)
— “I’d rather sell my c*nt than my paintings”: Women artists’ position in China 20 years ago and today (The F-word)
— The All-China Women’s Federation, propping up patriarchy since 1949 (Shanghaiist)
— It’s easier for Chinese women to become astronauts than members of the Standing Committee (Shanghaiist)
— China’s ‘Leftover’ Women (The New York Times)
— Powerful Chinese men still straight pimpin’, all about the bitches (Shanghaiist)
Gangnam Style
— Why ‘Gangnam Style’ Didn’t Catch Fire Instantly in China and Japan (Asianaut)
— Gangnam Style out of the most viewed music chart due to YouTube changes (Omona They Didn’t!)
— How YouTube Just Screwed “Gangnam Style” [Update] (Kotaku)
— Should We Be Scared of Gangnam Style? (Seoulbeats)
History
— Cut your hair or go to jail (The Hankyoreh)
LGBT, Sexuality
— Interview with Harry: Being gay is nice because I don’t have to deal with aegyo (The Kimchi Queen)
— Chinese sex fair shows how prudishness and liberation sit side-by-side (The Guardian)
— K. Will’s New Single is Fantastic (The Kimchi Queen)
— Reaction to Seoulbeats Review of K.Will’s Please Don’t music video 케이윌 이러지마 제발 (Korean Gender Cafe)
— The Shifting Terrain of Sex in China (Scene Asia)
— Reading List: KoreAm Journal- The Queer Issue (The Kimchi Queen)
— Director set to marry his boyfriend (Korea Joongang Daily)
— How to come out to a Korean friend (Lost in Traffic Lights)
Miscellaneous
— My Korean identity: Michael Hurt (Groove Magazine)
— The 정 Challenge (Gord Sellar)
Pop Culture
— Unpopular Opinion: Enough with the Aegyo Bashing! (Seoulbeats)
— The Five Faces Of E.via (Frank Kogan)
— Working hypothesis on appropriation in pop culture: response to Occupied Territories (Occupied Territories)
— A Response to Occupied Territories (Frank Kogan)
— K-Pop Boot Camp: Video (Nightline)
— The grim reality behind the rise of the entertainment market (Omona They Didn’t!)
— Video: K-Pop Group 2NE1 Discuss Breaking Into the U.S (Wall Street Journal, Forbes, MTVK)
— Are Lost Foreigners a Lost Case in Variety? (Seoulbeats)
— Why would anyone sign up with SM Entertainment? (Angry K-pop Fan)
— Perspectives: K-pop in Japan (And a Bit About the World) (Seoulbeats)
— Dear Kpop Music Industry: Why is it so hard to find out the director of a video? (YAM Magazine)
Social Problems
— Daegu parents seek solution to student suicides (The Hankyoreh)
— Court Bans Sign Language Interpreters (Human Rights Monitor)
— A Few Things to Realize About Bullying (Gord Sellar)
(Links are not necessarily endorsements)
(Sources, edited: left, right)With so much attention on restrictive censorship in K-pop these days, it’s easy to overlook how much standards in movies have actually been relaxed in recent years. See my latest column in Busan Haps for more information, especially if you’ve never heard of Shortbus before…
But please let me reiterate here though, that the freedom to show more sex and nudity in popular culture is just one aspect of becoming a more sexually liberal society. For sure, it’s a step in the right direction, and can have positive knock-on effects, just like the first kiss in a Korean ad in 2009 lifted the taboo on PDA for a lot of young couples for instance. (Yes, only anecdotal; but prove me wrong). But on the other hand, with the (re)criminalization of abortion by the Lee Myung-bak administration, recent attempts to limit access to the contraceptive pill, and the continued stigmatization of single mothers, you could reasonably argue that Korea is really just as sexually conservative as ever. No matter how much T&A you can see on the silver screen now, and which is often (usually?) just for financial reasons anyway.
In short, it’s complicated. Anyone that’s been here more than a couple of years, what impressions do you get? And how do you think things will change after the elections?
(Source)For any Polish speakers amongst you, I was interviewed about K-pop, sexual objectification, and — of course — Gangnam Style by Radiowa Trójka the weekend before last. Check me out in translation in section 3 here, and let me say again how nice it was to meet reporters Katarzyna Borowiecka and Marcin Pospiech, who look like they’ve produced quite a comprehensive show! :)
(While you were sleeping 10 by Shin Sun Mi, 2011. Source)As I missed last week’s KGR, I decided to add last week’s links here too. Ending up with roughly one hundred and thirty of them though, rest assured I won’t ever be doing that again!
Announcements
— Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea — Presentation by Ruth Barraclough, 4-5:30pm, Monday October 22 2012, University of Minnesota
— BOOb Crawl : 붑 투어, Saturday October 13, Itaewon 9pm (Bras for a cause)
— The Sae Gil Womens Shelter Charity Drive (Busan Haps)
Body Image, Health
— Defending My Daughters from the Media/Fashion-Industry Complex (Thick Dumpling Skin)
— SECRET’s Hyosung asks portal sites to edit her weight (Omona They Didn’t!)
— Shin So Yul of ‘Reply 1997′ reveals her weight loss story on ‘Strong Heart’ (Allkpop)
— More Men Opt for Plastic Surgery (Korea Realtime; Jezebel)
— Vignettes on Weight-Loss: 1, 2, 3 (My Journal)
— Gap in Receiving Health Care Services (Human Rights Monitor)
— Diabetes Creates More Stress for Married Korean Women (Newswise)
— Breast cancer quadruples in 15 years (The Korea Herald)
— Is Korea the most beauty obsessed country? (Whatawaygook)
— Dr. Wang Shuping: How I Discovered the HIV Epidemic and What happened to me Afterwards (Seeing Red in China)
— Cosmetic surgery bookings surge over the holiday week (Want China Times)
Censorship, Media
— Can the Government Stop the Objectification of Minors in K-pop? (Seoulbeats)
— “Previewing” MVs (Angry K-pop Fan)
— Banned: Is the KMRB’s Intervention a Good Idea? (MTVK)
— JYJ’s Xia Junsu Denied Coverage From SBS? (MTVK)
— The National Para Games apologizes to JYJ’s Junsu and his fans (Omona They Didn’t!)
— K-Data Blackout: A Necessary Measure? (Seoulbeats)
— YG Disappointed in KBS Review Standards for G-Dragon (Soompi)
— Psy’s “Right Now” and 2PM’s “Hands Up” cleared of previous ban (Allkpop)
— MOGEF Gives Second Chances to Banned Tracks (MTVK)
— Appeal by 8 Members of Tajinyo Rejected and Declared Guilty Ending Tablo′s Controversy (Enewsworld)
— Media reliance on Naver growing concern (The Korea Herald)
— Don’t believe the 하이프 (The Marmot’s Hole)
— Asia Institute Seminar with Robert McChesney “Korean Media in Comparative Perspective” (Korea: Circles and Squares)
— Why is Lee Min Jung considered a victim in her relationship with Lee Byung Hun? Netizens! (Asian Junkie)
— Asia Institute Seminar with Noam Chomsky: “The Problem of the Media in Korea” (Korea: Circles and Squares)
— Korea: Wired (AlJazeera English Video)
Crime
— New crime stats for teachers, both Korean and foreign (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
— On-street questioning revives after a series of sex crimes (Human Rights Monitor)
— Korean police crack down on men who hit their foreign wives (Asian Correspondent)
— Convicted rapist claims he was treated unfairly because of his nationality (The Marmot’s Hole)
— For Whom Does the Death Penalty Exist? (Human Rights Monitor)
— Hawaii job offer becomes a nightmare for women (Korea Joongang Daily)
Dating, Relationships, Marriage
— Korean girl seeks fake apartment to fool protective parents (Asia News Network)
— BIFF Movie Review: In Another Country (Busan Haps)
— Familiar ad trope: Pairing white men and Asian American women (Tales of Wonderlost)
— Uzbek Wife Married to South Korean Man a Hit on Korean TV (KoreaBANG)
— Seeking: Attractive Asian male. Why you’ll never find the above on Craiglist (The Daily Pennsylvanian)
— Give Us A Chance! Why You Should Date an Asian Man (The Steel Closet)
— I am an Asian Woman and I Think Asian Boyfriends Are Superior (Well, Mine Is Anyway) (xoJane)
— Korean lonely-hearts feel cheated by pricey matchmakers (The Korea Herald)
— [Movie] “Time” (시간) by Kim Ki-duk, 2006 (Out of Korea)
— Interracial Dating in China is Not Just for White Men (Speaking of China)
Education, Parenting, Demographics
— Academy seeks local role models to help young Koreans (The New Zealand Herald)
— School where South Korea’s dropouts flourish (BBC)
— What makes Korean unwed mothers give up their children? (Ilda)
— What to do with Anti-Japan Sentiments in ESL Classes? (Ask a Korean!)
— The plight of abandoned Korean babies (The Marmot’s Hole)
— Foreign schools show Korea’s social divide (The Korea Herald)
— 1 in 3 students at Seoul National University is a binge drinker (The Marmot’s Hole)
— Mekong Delta girls “eager” in learning to become wives of Korean men (Vietnam Net)
— A Society Where Multicultural Students Can Live Without Difficulties (Human Rights Monitor)
— Vietnamese Migrant Wives Now Outnumber Chinese (The Chosun Ilbo)
— University Entrance Exams Near, Netizens Share Education Jokes (KoreaBANG)
— Lack of Teachers for Students with Disabilities (Human Rights Monitor)
— No comment necessary. An entire class of high school students receive IV drips while cramming for exams (Ministry of Tofu)
— The Unintended Consequences Of China’s One-child Policy (io9)
Economics, Politics, Workplaces
— New generation quits boring jobs quickly: Report (Korea Joongang Daily)
— SKorea: Elite schools still dominate national prosecutors’ office (Asian Correspondent)
— Leaving the Chaebol (Korea Realtime)
— Women in finance cut off from executive posts (Korea Joongang Daily)
— Young Koreans: Give Us Freedom, Not Mortgages (Korea Realtime)
— Busan vs. Seoul (Meet me at the Wall)
— South Korean Voters Call for Longer Poll Hours (Global Voices)
— Women in China Face Rising University Entry Barriers (The New York Times)
— The Importance of ‘Face’ for Chinese Jobseekers (China Real Time Report)
— Japan’s Lost Art of Innovation (The Diplomat)
Gangnam Style
— AAK’s definitive guide for PSY and Gangnam Style (Ask a Korean!)
— Asian Stars and The USA: A History (Hootvintage)
— Psy tries to trademark “Gangnam style.” Oh, and he gets wasted on stage too. (Korean Law Today)
— Ten things you need to know about PSY’s Gangnam Style and Korean hip-hop (The Telegraph)
— Why China Lacks Gangnam Style (The New Yorker)
— Pop Music Brings a Lot More Readers than Social Science: Follow-up on ‘Kangnam Style’ (Asian Security Blog)
— Gangnam Style Tops Global Charts, Korean Twitter Reactions (KoreaBANG)
— Is ‘Gangnam Style’ the Peak of K-pop’s International Success? (Asianaut)
— South Korea puzzles over oddball success of ‘Gangnam Style’ (Los Angeles Times)
— Gangnam points to our future (Brisbane Times)
— Where to Find Your Gangnam Style (Korea Realtime)
— His Style Is Gangnam, and Viral Too (The New York Times)
— Why BBC Radio 4 Is Wrong about “Gangnam Style” (The Unlikely Expat)
— Where to Find Your Gangnam Style (Korea Realtime)
History
— Power & Gender in the Early Korean State (Korean Gender Cafe)
— The good daughter. The fascinating life of Park Geun-hye. (Korea Law Today)
— On Gisaeng and Ginyeo (Lost in Traffic Lights)
— Reading List: Male Concubinage: Notes on Late Choson Homosexuality by an American Naval Attache (The Kimchi Queen)
— What’s the story behind those hats Korean men used to wear? (Lost in Traffic Lights)
LGBT, Sexuality
— The Number of Room Salons and Hostess Bars at All-Time Highs In Korea (The Korea Times)
— BIFF 2012: Park Chul-soo’s B·E·D (Modern Korean Cinema)
— Gayspeak: Talking About 세이프 섹스 in Korean (The Kimchi Queen)
— Reading List: Memento Mori and Other Ghostly Sexualities (The Kimchi Queen)
— Chongqing University providing free condoms, admits students all be sexing each other (Shanghaiist)
— Watch: Taiwan Pride 2012’s campaign video for same-sex marriage (Shanghaiist)
Miscellaneous
— Report Reveals South Korean Soldiers Fed Poor Quality Food (KoreaBANG)
— What Counts as Racially Offensive in Our Postracial World? (Korean Bodega)
Pop Culture
— Factory Girls: Cultural technology and the making of K-pop (The New Yorker)
— The New Yorker Rides the Hallyu Wave (SNSD-FFA)
— The New Yorker examines K-pop (Korea Law Today)
— K-Town Cast and K-pop Fans (Seoulbeats)
— From Ikea to Korea: Writing for K-pop (Mark Russel’s Website)
— Jun-jin, Joo-hyun, and The Idol Dating Game (Seoulbeats)
— “An argument could be made that, historically, the vibrancy of any given pop scene can be measured by the amount of appropriation going on.” (Occupied Territories)
— Tiger JK’s Sorry, But Where’s the Real Apology? (Seoulbeats)
— ‘Middle Powers’ Like South Korea Can’t Do Without Soft Power And Network Power (Global Asia)
— K-pop’s Rooted Use of Labels: [insert title here] Idols (Seoulbeats)
— “Sometimes I really don’t think K-pop labels know what they have on their hands…” (Occupied Territories)
Social Problems
— What Keeps South Koreans Up at Night? (Korea Realtime)
— Why does Korea interpret netizen comments as public sentiment? (Omona They Didn’t!)
— Our Homeland shows family torn by N Korea-Japan relocation program (Visual Anthropology of Japan)
— The lives of female runaways in Seoul, Part 2 of 6 (The Hankyoreh)
— Why Koreans Are Angry: The Social Cost of Spectacular Growth (KoreaBANG)
— The Good sans the Bad and the Ugly: September (Seoulbeats)
— Social Workers’ Human Rights (Human Rights Monitor)
— Asia Institute Seminar with Dr. Eckhard Schroeter: “Korean Social Welfare in Comparative Perspective” (Korea: Circles and Squares)
— Dogani and South Korean culture’s major problems with abuse (The Unlikely Expat)
(Links are not necessarily endorsements)
(Source; edited)If recent BBC coverage is anything to go by, marriage in South Korea is like a business. It’s also becoming a bit of an explosive topic as social mobility slows down and the traditional image of the male breadwinner becomes eroded by the increasing participation of females in the labour market. Some of the most widely publicised scandals and controversies on the Korean internet seem to have been, in some way or another, due to this intensifying gender friction.
(KoreaBANG; my emphasis)
My apologies for singling out Justin at KoreaBANG, whose post is still excellent overall. And as you’ll soon see, I often make mistakes too.
But that comment I’ve highlighted? Frankly, it just infuriated me. Because even though it’s completely wrong, I seem to hear it all the time these days.
In reality, the Korean female workforce participation rate has stagnated at one of the lowest rates in the OECD ever since 1997-98, when women were overwhelmingly targeted for layoffs during the Asian Financial Crisis. Back then, the logic was that wives would be provided for by their husbands, and 20-something daughters by their fathers. And 10 years later, in the latest crisis, to a large extent this logic was reapplied, although on this occasion there was a clearer economic – not just patriarchal – logic in that women formed the bulk of irregular workers (see here, here, and here for much more information).
Or so I’ve often written. But naturally, it was difficult to find definitive statistics on that when I first reported on it three years ago. At that time, my most up to date source was my copy of Working Korea 2007, published by the Korea Labor & Society Institute. Here is my scan of page 19, which has a graph of the male and female workforce participation rate of 1970-2006:
In hindsight, although it does show a big drop in the female rate in 1997-98, it shows an equally large (even slightly larger?) drop in the male rate too. With my apologies, I’m very surprised I didn’t notice that earlier, and, although it does contradict most of the literature I’ve read about the Asian Financial Crisis, and is just from one source too, it still definitely bears further investigation.
That aside, a year later I found a source going up to 2008 (it shows a fall of 50.3% to 50.0% in 2006-2008; see below also). And today, spurred by Justin’s comment, I tried looking again, and found the following at the National Statistics Office’s website:
(Source)The blue bars represent the economically active female population, in thousands (i.e., the first figure is 10.75 million), the pink line the female workforce participation rate. Although the choice of right scale gives the false visual impression that the rate has changed a great deal, as you can see from the numbers it has remained within a narrow band of 49% to 50.5%, last year’s rate being just lower than that of 2002. Also, clearly a 0.9% drop between 2008 and 2009 isn’t quite as big as I’ve been making out, and again is something that bears further exploration.
But still, one thing is clear: the number — well, percentage — of Korean women working has little changed in the last 15 years, and remains very very low by the standards of other developed countries. So it can not be the cause of increasing gender friction.
The perception that Korean women are making significant inroads into the Korean economy though? That’s entirely possible, and indeed I highly recommend KoreaBANG for much more on that (indeed, especially the remainder of Justin’s post), as well as many posts by Gord Sellar too (source, right).
(For more posts in the Korean Sociological Image series, see here)
(Source)Starring: Bae Doo-na (Nozomi), Itsuji Itao (Hideo), and Arata Iura (Junichi). Written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda (original manga by Yoshiie Gōda). In Japanese with English subtitles. 126 minutes.
Less than four minutes into Air Doll, middle-aged owner Hideo has sex with the inflatable doll he’s named Nozomi, with all the crunching of flesh against plastic and washing of detachable vaginas that that implies. It’s as if director Hirokazu Koreeda was deliberately encouraging the squeamish to walk out of the theater.
It’s also ironic, as the very next scene reveals it to be a very erotic, albeit knowingly voyeuristic movie too, the camera luxuriating on Nozomi’s nude form as she magically comes to life (see the telling juxtaposition in the NSFW screenshot below; the subtitle actually refers to some dew she’s touching). She’ll proceed to spend a disproportionate amount of the next two hours topless, even for a movie about a sex-doll.
Yes, still an inflatable sex-doll, not a woman. For as she proceeds to leave Hideo’s apartment in a maid costume, and encounter a succession of sad, desperately lonely characters, her literal hollowness proves to be a poignant metaphor for all their lost, empty souls.
But she deliberately appears palpably, sensually human too, and you just can’t have it both ways. Especially in a movie that already so heavily relies on viewers’ suspensions of disbelief.
So, even if is nitpicking to wonder how she goes from learning speech and what clothes are in the morning, to getting a job at a DVD store in the evening, a scene in which a beautician covers her suddenly visible* seams with make-up is nothing but confusing and distracting. As is another when she pumps herself full of air one morning (naked, of course), yet somehow had a meal at a restaurant with co-worker Junichi the night before. And so on. Suffice to say, her new form is ambiguous, but much more human than not.
When she accidentally punctures her hand and rapidly deflates fifty minutes in then, it’s jarring, and it’s asking far too much of the viewer to pretend that she’s been nothing but a walking, talking balloon all that time.
*With the benefit of 4 viewings, the seams are visible earlier, but only in some scenes. Appearance-wise, the movie is rife with continuity errors.Granted, Air Doll is fundamentally an allegory. But, rather than aiding it, here the confusing content simply gets in the way of the message. Koreeda, who borrowed only the initial concept from the original manga, really should have considered alternative methods of conveying it.
One possibility would be having Nozomi become fully human at the beginning of the movie and during the day, but often uncontrollably and reluctantly reverting a little, then changing back completely at night. Indeed, this is actually very similar to what happens in the first half of the movie, and then making her transformation progressively more unstable would suit the second half — and narrative as a whole — very well too.
Crucially, the nagging questions also distract the viewer from fully appreciating one of the movie’s great strengths, which is how Nozomi never really stops the innocent, childlike exploration of her new world, nor finding beauty in it. And her exquisite mimicry of its inhabitants is simply priceless.
Yet despite those, she also shows, as Tirdad Derakhshani of The Inquirer puts it, a sublime progression “from a childlike naif who plays with toddlers in a sandbox to a sophisticated woman who devours books, draws portraits, and philosophizes about life,” (my emphasis) and I’m not alone in thinking that Bae Doo-na is one of the few actresses that has the skill and versatility to pull the combination off (Tom Miles of Midnight Eye suggests Rinko Kikuchi or Hanae Kan, while Yuna at The Marmot’s Hole calls Aoi Yuu “a Bae Doo-na equivalent in Japan”).
(Source)The practicalities of that process are that, despite everything, she soon establishes a routine of leaving for work at a DVD store once Hideo leaves, learning about the world through the strangers she meets on her breaks and/or days off, and especially by constantly asking questions of her unfazed, endlessly patient coworker Junichi, who soon starts taking her out to see the things she asks about. Finally, she has to rush home to lie passively for her “master” before he returns home, finding him increasingly repulsive, but using the time to ponder her discovery that she is/was a cheap “substitute for handling sexual desire;” to learn about love, mortality, and desire; and to determine why she found herself “with a heart [she] was not supposed to have.”
(Source)(Minor Spoilers Begin)
But then, with the combination of a rare form of cunnilingus and strategically-placed tape, Junichi saves her from her puncture. An obvious turning point in their relationship, albeit more because Nozomi thinks she’s found a kindred spirit rather than because of their new intimacy per se (indeed, Junichi is so enigmatic that she initially thinks he is a sex doll too), unfortunately the movie, already convoluted, becomes very difficult to follow. And, crucially, not because of the depth of the message, but rather because Koreeda seems to be deliberately encouraging mistaken readings of the plot. In particular:
And there’s many more confounding examples. Perhaps, certainly, the misreadings are just due to my own dull-wittedness, but I don’t think I’d be alone in needing two — actually three! — viewings of this movie just to figure out what the hell is going on. In contrast, Inception (2010), say, has many deep messages, but somehow I still understood the plot in that on the very first try (source, right).
In combination with obvious questions about her human or doll form then, and the problems of continuity with Nozomi’s image, this is a third red flag that points to laziness and/or arrogance on Kareeda’s part. Or alternatively, with a hat tip to Gomushin Girl’s comment in my review of Kim Ki-duk’s Samaria (2004), perhaps he simply got too caught up in his own message to think about how it might look to a less-informed audience member.
But he redeems himself with a powerful message just before the end of the movie, and one that I’m amazed that other reviewers (at least the 25+ I’ve read) didn’t pick up on
.(Major Spoilers Begin).
While, again, it’s delightful to watch Nozomi learning to be human, in the process noticing the hidden joys and beautifies of life that most of us have chosen to ignore, that’s increasingly tempered by her realization that her own purpose is nothing but to sate the sexual desires of the men around her, who do nothing to disabuse her of that notion. It’s vividly shown in the dead expression on her face when the DVD store-owner blackmails her into sex, threatening to tell Junichi about Hideo, and also partially explains why later, having finally left Hideo, she tells Junichi she’ll do absolutely anything for him.
(Source)When he replies that he’d like to deflate and then breathe life into her again, she’s visibly shocked and — I’d say — disappointed that he’s ultimately no different from all the other men she’s met. But of course agrees, and appears to enjoy the ensuing “sex.”
Yet then, when he’s sleeping, she cuts an equivalent nozzle into his own navel, ultimately killing him from, presumably, loss of blood. But not before blowing into it herself, climbing on top of him, and unequivocally orgasming to the ensuing “conventional” sex (which, despite his tremendous pain, he’ll also do his best to actively participate in).
While it may sound minor in isolation, and I don’t want to be so glib as to take loudness, frequency, and duration of moans as a barometer for women’s sexual pleasure, it is the only moment in the entire movie she imposes her own will and/or sexuality on others, rather than being a mere, literal, receptacle for theirs. As such, It stands as a rare and very welcome final moment of defiance in the somewhat inevitable and predictable path to her coming suicide. (Update: on that last, see io9 for a curious case of life imitating art.)
(All Spoilers End)
(Source)To the extent that it exists at all then, it is precisely here that a feminist reading of the movie could be further explored. In contrast, John Esther’s point at Jesther Entertainment that “Air Doll stands for, among other things, as a metaphor for women who are to look pretty, say nothing, stay home and wait for the patriarch to return home and breathe his breath into her lifeless a(i)rea” is true, but a bit of a dead end. As is Nick Davis’s comment at Nick’s Flicks Picks, which I thought was a misguided — and very forced — interpretation:
If you know anything about the Pacific fronts in World War II and a history of chauvinist disavowals by Japanese governments, the casting of a Korean actress as a Japanese man’s inert, unresisting erotic receptacle can’t help trigger distasteful connotations.
That aside, and in conclusion, while it’s a little harsh for Kelly Vance of East Bay Express to describe the movie as a “dreary, middlebrow allegory,” it is true that the movie is at least thirty minutes too long, many of those spent in vignettes showcasing the emptiness of the characters’ lives, while Nozomi drones on about — wait for it — how empty life is, all to the accompaniment of languid, sickly-sweet music in the background. Also, in a review at Antagony and Ecstasy that I highly recommend, Tim Brayton rightfully points out that the movie only provides observations and not actual insights, whereas plenty of Pinnochio-like movies have given both before, and with much more skill too.
(Source)So, with the important qualification that you may need a lot of help with the plot before watching, Air Doll can a pleasant enough movie, albeit one lacking much of a vision, and inexpertly conveyed at that. Instead, think of it more as an invitation to form your own.
And, in the process, do take time to notice the superb cinematography too. For as Tom Miles at Midnight Eye Review explains, it’s set:
in one of Tokyo’s remaining shitamachi, an old neighbourhood of little independent houses, while ominous high-rises wait on the other side of the river for the aging abodes to crumble, impatient to take over the turf.
On that note, see above for my favorite location in the movie, which even someone as literal-minded as myself could appreciate!
(Source)With island disputes between China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan so dominating the news recently, it’s nice to see something that puts a positive, optimistic spin on those relationships. Let alone one that does so by having Japanese salarymen strutting like robots around the streets of Tokyo and Seoul:
The group is World Order, a Japanese band formed by Genki Sudo, who also directed and produced the video (with choreography by Ryo Noguchi). Just the latest in a series of similar videos performed all around the world, Tofugu, a Japanese pop-culture site, describes them as “the most innovative dance and music troupe in Japan,” and adds that their appeal is not just their dancing, but also:
…the people watching them dance. They just go out in public areas for the most part, do their thing, and then leave. People walk by, look at them all confused, take video/pictures, ignore them completely, and all kinds of other hilarious things if you pay close enough attention. Try to watch and you’ll see some entertaining reactions.
See Tofugo for many examples. Meanwhile, the very cool cartoonist Jen Lee (of Dear Korea fame), whom I’m very grateful to for finding the video, has managed to find a rare translation of the lyrics too:
(Source)A blue shine on my fingertips
As I touch the side of your pensive face
When I look up to the gray sky
A blue sky spreads out over the east sky
Keep changing
Permanent Revolution
Without stopping
Keep walking
Permanent Revolution
To a single world
Gather the accumulated lies
Keep erasing them among the pluses, without making a sound
Keep believing
Permanent Revolution
Without wavering
Keep loving
Permanent Revolution
Open your heart
Keep changing
Permanent Revolution
Without stopping
Keep walking
To a single world
As The Daily What put it:
It seems now that we’ve moved beyond parodies and imitation for Gangnam Style, descending into bizarre postmodern art.
Not unrelated, earlier today I saw a Klingon parody…
…and when I did, I seriously had to sit down for a moment, and just marvel at how weird, wonderful, and utterly surreal and sublime it was to be living in 2012. How could I ever have imagined that, one morning, I’d be dancing along to people dressed in Star Trek uniforms (of all things), imitating a South Korean music video, that over 320 million people had seen? Then in the same evening, staring in horrified fascination — and laughing myself silly — at another version that had no actual music?!!
Best Chuseok EVER!
(Via: My Current Insanities)
(“Oohlala Spouses makes best poster ever” — Dramabeans. Source)This new theme is AWESOME, yes?^^ Have a happy Chuseok everybody!
Body Image, Health
— Seoul Cosmetic Surgery Clinic Looking for (Naked) Before and After Models (The Marmot’s Hole)
— Why the Rise of Asia In Fashion Isn’t As Beautiful As It Seems (Speakeasy)
— Korean eunuchs reveal clues to why women live longer than men (BBC; see also Science)
— What rejuvenates my vagina?!?! Not Lasers!!! (Korean Gender Cafe)
— It takes hundreds of employees, thousands of hours and millions of dollars to launch a mass market lingerie line. And one blogger to take it all down. (Racebending; see also Bitch)
— How do you explain the Gramscian concept of hegemony to a 10 year old? (Tales of Wonderlost)
Censorship, Media
— Teen sexualization on TV faces stronger censorship (The Korea Times; see also The Korea Herald)
— New Term: “White Endorsement Monkey” and “White Defamation Monkey” (Gord Sellar)
— Men finally behave badly (The Korea Times)
— “Unqualified foreign instructor” problem…in 1973 (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
Crime
— I cannot remember a period of time in my life when I was not scared by older ahjussis (Lost in Traffic Lights)
Dating, Relationships, Marriage
— Culture and Language Issues in Foreign/Korean Relationships (I’m No Picasso II)
— Dating Asian Women When You’re an Asian Guy (Radical Ramblings)
— Marriages between North American(?) men, Korean women top 2,000 in 2011 (The Korea Times)
— Male writer and I have a Korea / dating column starting in October’s 10mag (Meet me at the wall)
— What’s the REAL appeal of a Samsung or LG guy? (Dating in Korea)
— SECRET’s Hyosung says her ideal type is a stalker … great (Asian Junkie)
— Ask the Yangxifu: Chinese Parents Refuse to Meet Me (Speaking of China)
— Why I have no female Chinese friends (Seeing Red in China)
— Are Yangxifu (The Western Wives of Chinese Men) More Difficult Wives? (Speaking of China)
Education, Parenting, Demographics
— Breaking the promise of universal day care (The Hankyoreh; see also Korea Joongang Daily)
— Funny, sad, and revealing answers to questions from Korean students (South Korea)
— Adventures in Parenting Abroad Pt. 3: The End is Just the Beginning (The Three Wise Monkeys)
— “The Challenges of Korean Education in Historical Perspective” Asia Institute Seminar with Professor Michael Seth (Korea: Circles and Squares)
— A Trojan Wall of Separation: The Battle Over South Korean Textbooks (Busan Haps)
— South Korea to probe corruption in international high schools (Asian Correspondent)
Economics, Politics, Workplaces
— Low Unemployment Rates, But No Jobs for Youths or Women (The Korea Economic Daily)
— Park Geun-hye: Female President, Patriarchal Society? (Roboseyo)
— Feeling the pinch: The housewives of Japan are giving less spending money to their husbands (The Economist)
— Asia Institute Seminar on ‘Women in Science’ in Seoul (Korea: Circles and Squares)
Gangnam Style
— The Obligatory Gangnam Style Post (Ask a Korean!)
— PSY And The Acceptable Asian Man (Racialicious)
— Is “Gangnam Style” a Hit Because of Our Asian Stereotypes? (Mother Jones)
— Growing Up Gangnam-Style: What the Seoul Neighborhood Was Really Like (The Atlantic)
— Dead horse (Liminality)
— Gangnam Style’s Irony is Missed b/c of the Publicity Wave (Asian Security Blog)
— On Gangnam Style (The Korea Times)
— What’s so funny about Gangnam Style? (The Guardian)
— Why Psy and not JYP? (The Korea Times)
— A Few Things JYP Can Learn From Psy for Wonder Girls’ American Venture (Seoulbeats)
— The Gangnam Phenom (Foreign Policy)
LGBT, Sexuality
— A Different Color of Sexual Identity (The Yonsei Annals)
— Former senior police officer: “Registered brothels needed” (The Korea Times)
— Queering Korean Literature: Author and Activist Yi Gwang-su (The Three Wise Monkeys)
— Beware of people asking you for 키알 / 섹알 (Hangukdrama and Korean)
— Why are men so obsessed with breasts? (io9)
— Reading List: Mapping the Vicissitudes of Homosexual Identities in South Korea (The Kimchi Queen)
— Dirty Little Secrets: A variety of Korean Sex Links (The Marmot’s Hole)
Miscellaneous
— The death of the red ink taboo in Korea (The Marmot’s Hole)
— Meeting the Mannam Cult: My Korean volunteerism at an end (Travel Blog)
— Crazy beautiful: Understanding the Korean mind (WND Diversions)
Pop Culture
— The Korean Wave and the Question of Soft Power (Seoulbeats)
— Nice Guy: Han Jae Hee Character Analysis (Idle Revelry)
“Courtship is usually portrayed (in heterosexual pairings) as something a man does; it’s an act he performs, while the woman is passive and simply receives his love. If she rejects him, it doesn’t mean he should stop, it simply means he has to try harder.”
— Review: Words of Farewell Fiction by Korean female writers (Korean Modern Literature in Translation)
— Revisiting the women who changed Korea with their pens (Yahoo!)
— I ain’t here to make you honkies laugh! (The Marmot’s Hole)
— Review: “Style” by RaNia (Mixtapes and Liner Notes)
— Review: T-ara’s “Sexy Love” is the sound of the girl group in crisis, and the song’s mock-seductive chorus goes just a step too far (Occupied Territories)
— Nothing like a healthy dose of fangirling (Hangukdrama and Korean)
— This is why you can’t lump “Asia” together (SNSD Free For All)
— How to make sure there are more “Pieta”s for the Korean film business (The Hankyoreh; see also this interview of Cho Min-soo)
(Links are not necessarily endorsements)
Just a quick note to let you know that in addition to my regular feature articles at Busan Haps, I now have a K-pop music column too. See page 41 of the latest issue here (scroll down to “current issue”) for my first review of After School’s Flashback, before it’s replaced next week with my second of Secret’s Poison in the October edition.
At just 200 words though (thank God for mini-albums!), unfortunately it’s difficult to say much more than the bare minimum. So, please feel free to add any rants or raves here, and, to get the ball rolling, I think that Eyeliner is much better than the title track, and singer Nana vastly underrated by most other reviewers. But, since first writing, I’m beginning to see what people mean about Rania and Jungah complimenting each other in Timeless too, although the song itself still leaves me feeling rather empty.
Here’s all the songs in the mini-album (and the Japanese version of Rip Off), in the order I mention them in the review:
Related Posts:
(Source: Munhwa Ilbo)Alas, this brief article from today’s Munhwa Ilbo isn’t exactly a scathing critique of Korea’s body-labeling craze, and I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t much more substantial ones out there. But still, it’s good to be quickly reminded that perhaps “V-lines” aren’t as necessary as pop-culture icons would like us to think (e.g., see ZE:A in Brazil below), and I hope the photo makes it to the front page of major Korean portal sites.
See here or here for better quality versions, or here and here for pictures of the 1957 and various 1970s contestants respectively.
60년대 미스코리아는 ‘V라인 아닌 건강미’ / In the 1960s, Miss Korea Had a Healthy Beauty, not a V-line.
‘미인’의 기준은 문화와 관습에 따라 다르지만 시대에 따라서도 변합니다.
The criteria for a beautiful woman depend on time, culture, and customs.
사진을 보면 1960년 미스코리아 선발대회에 나온 여성들은 건강미가 넘쳤습니다. 당시에는 서구적인 마스크를 선호했다고 하죠. 1980년대 이후 한동안 도시형 미인이 인기를 끌었고, 요즘은 ‘V라인’의 작은 얼굴과 뚜렷한 이목구비가 대세라고 합니다. 성형미인도 많아졌고요.
If you look at this photo of the 1960 Miss Korea contest, you see women overflowing with healthy beauty, [even though] it is said that people preferred Western masks [looks?] then. [But] from the 1980s, for a while urban beauties were preferred, and these days having a V-line and distinct facial characteristics are huge trends. There are many cosmetic surgery beauties.
1957년 시작된 미스코리아 선발대회는 초창기 큰 인기를 모았습니다. 공중파 TV를 통해 전국에 생중계됐고, 수상자들은 카퍼레이드까지 하며 미를 뽐내기도 했었죠. 그러다 여성단체 등의 ‘성상품화 조장’ 반발로 2002년 이후 공중파에서는 중계를 하지 않고 있습니다.
(Source: Yufit)Starting in 1957, from the beginning the Miss Korea contest was very popular. From being shown live on TV, to winners taking part in car parades, their beauty was shown off. However, later women’s groups denounced it as promoting sexual objectification, and from 2002 it was only allowed to be shown live on cable.
예전에는 미스코리아 선발대회를 통해 연예계로 진출하는 경우도 많았지만 요즘은 오디션 프로그램 등 연예계로 나설 방법이 다양하게 생겨났습니다. 그래서인지 대회의 인기가 예전만 못합니다.
In the past, there were many cases of Miss Korea contest participants entering into the entertainment industry through the competition, but these days there are a variety of audition programs that provide the same opportunity. Because of that, the contest can’t reach the level of popularity that it enjoyed in the past. (End.)
Update: Here’s a video of the 1981 to 2008 winners. As one of the commenters on YouTube put it, it’s interesting to see how much their faces seem to change from the late-1990s onwards.
(Source)Yes, my KTX tickets and hotel are all booked. Hope to see you at Gyeongbokgung Station (경복궁), exit 3, at 6pm tomorrow! :D
Announcements
— Korean Unwed Mothers Families’ Association looking for 10 volunteers to go on this year’s Chuseok camp to Yeoncheon (Tales of Wonderlost; see also What is KUMFA)
Body Image,Health
— Pandora by KARA: Appropriate for Playing on City Buses? (Alleyways)
— Hands, Hips, Legs and Butts: Girl Groups’ Dances (Seoulbeats)
— Beautiful Genes? But ‘Idol’ Looks Good On Everyone (Seoulbeats)
— G-Dragon receives attention for his womanly curves in “Crayon” MV (Allkpop; see also Occupied Territories)
Censorship, Media
— Does Secret Need To Change Their Choreography? (Seoulbeats; see also What’s Your Poison and SB Exchange #25: It’s Secret Time)
— Sadism, incest, bestiality, oh my! (The Marmot’s Hole; see also The Herald Voice on Facebook)
— Regulation of Users Required to Use Real Name Online Abolished (Human Rights Monitor)
— New Regulations on Downloading Porn Confuse Netizens (Korea BANG)
Crime
— More sex offenders to be chemically castrated (The Hankyoreh)
— Sexual Assault Against Children (Human Rights Monitor)
— Random Stabbings in Seoul Brings Social Instability (Human Rights Monitor)
— So, did banning prostitution lead to increase in sex crimes? (The Marmot’s Hole)
— Sex Criminal Escapes from Jail In Daegu (ROK Drop)
— Amy Arrested for Illegally Using Propofol (Omona They Didn’t!)
— Foreign teacher sent to prison for molesting students (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
Dating, Relationships, Marriage
— Comparing Marriage in the Middle Ages and Korea’s Choson Dynasty: 서양의 중세 초기와 조선의 결혼비교 (Korean Gender Cafe)
— Craigslist ad (Dating in Korea)
— Guy Talk: I Date Outside My Race Because My Race Doesn’t Want To Date Me (The Frisky)
Education, Parenting, Demographics
— Tiger mothers in Singapore: The prime minister goes into battle against pushy parents (The Economist)
— Non-traditional families on the rise in South Korea (Asian Correspondent)
— Why the Korean School System Is Not Superior (New Politics)
— Korean-Australian woman finds she was falsely adopted (Tales of Wonderlost)
— Went to see 미쓰마마 (Bittersweet Joke), a documentary about unwed mothers in Korea (Tales of Wonderlost)
— Babies’ Lead Levels: Who knew baby-proofing could reach such heights? (Shotgun Adventures)
— Schools successfully experimenting with vegetarian meals (The Hankyoreh)
— Multicultural students jump 5-fold over past 6 years (The Korea Times)
Economics, Politics, Workplaces
— Mother’s Job Most Important Factor in Having 2nd Child (The Chosun Ilbo)
— Mistreatment of Part-time Workers (Human Rights Monitor)
— Nobody Told Asia About “The End of Men”: Mara Hvistendahl takes on Hanna Rosin (Foreign Policy)
— Directing all my rage at Slate’s logrolling of “The End of Men” (Feminéma)
— The-End-of-Men-Richer-Sex Reality Check #6 (Sociological Images)
— What is Violence in the Workplace? 2-Page Guide Translated into Korean (Worksafe BC; PDF)
LGBT, Sexuality
— Reading List: Korean Lesbians and Heteronormativity: From the Experiences of Six South Korean Lesbians (The Kimchi Queen)
— Queer Offerings at the Busan International Film Festival (The Kimchi Queen)
— Survey: Japanese school girls having less sex (Asian Correspondent)
— South Korean host bars – for women (BBC)
— What is a Room Salon? (Korea Law Today)
— S Korea transgender show scrapped after protests (The Hong Kong Standard; Korea Joongang Daily)
Pop Culture
— Koreans Have No Idea Why Americans Love Psy But They Can Learn From It (Asian Junkie)
— Commentary: Psy and the Acceptable Asian Man (Init_Music)
— Viral Video Gets North Korean Propaganda Treatment (The New York Times)
— Korean wave and the Gangnam style (ABC Radio Australia; radio program)
— Graphic: Number of views of K-pop Videos on Youtube, 2011 (SERI World)
— An Ode to the Stellar Females in Variety (Seoulbeats)
— Why have Korean dramas eclipsed even Mexican or Latin American serials and long-running American soaps? (Philippine Daily Inquirer)
— Review: Wayfarer: New Fiction By Korean Women (Korean Modern Literature in Translation)
Social Problems
— The Truth Behind Students’ Suicide (Human Rights Monitor)
— September Issue: Opening the Dialogue on Suicide (KoreAm)
— Runaways flee abuse at home, end up in prostitution (The Hankyoreh)
— South Korea: Golden Lion Winner ‘Pieta’ Reveals Society’s Dark Side (Global Voices)
(Links are not necessarily endorsements)
(Source)In The Associated Press today. Please see here if you would like a fuller explanation of my comments in it though — naturally, author Foster Klug had to miss out a great deal of what was discussed in our interview!
Update: By popular demand, here is the quintessential kkotminam commercial, from 2003:
The black-haired man is now retired soccer player Ahn Jung-hwan (안정환), the blonde actor Kim Jae-won (김재원).
(Source)On the 27th of September, at 7:45 pm, there is a gay short-film festival taking place at the Seoul Art Cinema in Jongno, with all the films recorded on cell phones. See The Kimchi Queen for further details.
Meanwhile, I’ve rejigged the categories a little to make things easier to find, although of course there is still a lot of overlap: please let me know what you think. Also, with 1/3rd to 1/2 of the stories coming from outside of Korea, and with most not really being about “gender issues” per se (or maybe they are — it’s a very vague term really), I’ve been thinking of renaming these posts for a while now. If anyone has any suggestions for a new name, please let me know!
Update: Please let me know if you have any suggestions for Korean dating and relationship blogs to follow too. Not that Speaking of China isn’t a great site of course, but I would like to include some more Korean links here!
Body Image/Health/Socialization
— Female Restaurant Workers Tell Customers ‘Don’t Call Us Ajumma’ (Korea BANG)
— A Racist Little Outfit: Victoria’s Secret’s “Sexy Little Geisha” Lingerie (Bust)
— Korean Movie: Beautiful/아름답다 (Journey Into the Well)
— Thinking Pink: A History of Products “For Her” (Bitch)
— Fat For an Asian: The pressure to be naturally perfect (Escher Girls)
— Boys Throw Better Than Girls. Good Job? (XX Factor)
— The Omniscient Breasts: The Male Gaze Through Female Eyes (SF Signal)
Censorship
— Sex and Censorship During the Occupation of Japan (The Asia-Pacific Journal)
— More on vice. Eminem, Lady Gaga, and more. (Korea Law Today)
— S. Korea to beef up age-rating system for music videos (10Asia)
China/Taiwan
— Feminism Around the World: Awesome Activists Protest in China (Bust)
— Internal child trafficking in China (International Institute for Asian Studies)
— Surge in demand for British milk from China (The Telegraph)
Crime
— Street harassment in Incheon (I’m No Picasso II)
— Only 1/3 of Child Sex Crime Victims File Charges (The Chosun Ilbo)
— Government to toughen penalty for raping minors (The Korea Times)
— Crackdown alone can’t solve child abuse issue (The Korea Times)
— Amy was Threatened by an Attempted Rapist (ENewsWorld)
— Does the ROK Army Have A Sexual Assault Problem? (ROK Drop)
— Physical and Sexual Absuse in the ROK Military: A conscript’s perspective (Sorry, I was drunk)
— SKorea: Govt moves to expand prosecution of sex offenses (Asian Correspondent)
— How should Korea combat pedophilia? (The Korea Herald)
— Child Rape Survivor Sends Stuffed Toy to Naju Rape Victim (Korea Bang)
— Castration would reduce sex crimes: Saenuri reps (Korea Joongang Daily)
Dating/Relationships/Marriage
— From the Archives: On Finding Courage in Love (Speaking of China)
— Double Happiness: The Volunteer Who Went to China and Found Her True Love (Speaking of China)
Demographics/Multiculturalism
— One-child Policy Encourages Trafficking of NK Women (Mercator Net)
— 10 myths of the UK’s far right (The Guardian)
— Ignorance breeds racism (The Korea Times)
— The Gender Politics of Moving Back Home (The F-word)
— Grown Korean adoptees return to birth country to fill in the missing gap (Alleyways)
Education/Pregnancy/Childbirth/Parenting
— No. of Elementary School Students Hits Record Low (KBS World)
— South Korea will keep evolution in its high school textbooks! (io9)
— Grandmother gives birth to her own grandchild (io9)
— Why do fathers’ testosterone levels drop when sleeping near their children? (io9)
History
— Namsan: Of vanished history and unfulfilled plans (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
LGBT/Sexuality
— Sexually aroused women find everything less disgusting (io9)
— Reading List: En-gendering re-gendered romance of multiple lives: reincarnation in Bungee Jumping of Their Own (The Kimchi Queen)
— 17 Euphemisms for Sex From the 1800s (Mental Floss)
— Getting Tested for HIV/AIDS in Korea (The Kimchi Queen)
— Study Reveals Teens’ Warped Perceptions of Sex (The Chosun Ilbo)
— The problem with Naomi Wolf’s vagina (New Statesman)
— Men Like Heavier Women…Especially When Stressed Out! (Psychology Today)
— First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage: A Night at the Drive-in (Nursing Clio)
— Video: Gay in Korea (ROK On!)
— MBLAQ’s Lee Joon reveals his mom gifted him with birth control for college entrance (Omona They Didn’t)
North Korea
— Jennifer Lind on the DPRK government’s resilience (and women in IR) (Korean Kontext)
— Professor Robert Kelly’s Trip to North Korea (Asian Security Blog; continued in part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5)
Politics/Economics/Workplaces
— For 40-something women, jobs scarce (Korea Joongang Daily)
— Korean women buy large, imported cars to avoid being bullied by male drivers (The Star)
Pop Culture
— Is It Too Soon for T-ara to Come Back? (Seoulbeats)
— Hallyu Tsunami: The Unstoppable (and Terrifying) Rise of K-Pop Fandom (Grantland)
— Roundtable: The Broken Fountain of Youth (Seoulbeats)
— Parade’s End director says sexism is still rife in [UK] drama world (The Guardian)
— Golden Time ponders extension — dude, you have one episode left (Dramabeans; see also “Golden Time confirms three-episode extension“)
— Tough Ladies Report to the Dance Floor (Seoulbeats)
Social Problems
— South Korea’s Blight: Suicide Gets Worse (Korea Real Time)
— Solbi speaks against suicide on World Suicide Prevention Day 2012 (AllKpop)
— Celebrity Suicides: An Unfortunate Trend (Seoulbeats)
— Suicides among Japanese students hit record level in 2011 (The Japan Times)
— Killing Yourself To Make A Living: In Japan Financial Incentives Reward Suicide (Japanese Subculture Research Center)
— 89% of US Army Suicides Are By Soldiers Who Never Saw Combat (ROK Drop)
— Living in a closet, tape a window to the wall (The Hankyoreh)
— Everyday Sexism: It isn’t restricted to adults – even young girls in school uniform share their experiences (The Telegraph)
— Ilyo Sisa denounces the barbarity of white men against Korean women (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
— Chuseok and 차례 and sexist traditions (I’m no Picasso)
— Korea’s new war on vice (Alleyways)
— Seoul adopts rights ordinance (The Korea Times)
(Links don’t necessarily imply endorsements)
(Source)Yes — I’m happy to announce that next Saturday, I’ll be coming up to Seoul for an interview by Nele Hecht, a German documentary-maker based in the UK, when I’ll talk about things like S-lines and the appalling photoshopping in that poster. And, as I so rarely get the chance to come to Seoul (the last time was last summer, also for an interview), it would be great to make most of the opportunity and meet old and new TGN fans while I’m there too.
The plan is, we’ll all meet at Gyeongbokgung Station (경복궁; at the center of this map), exit 3, and take it from there (the time hasn’t been decided yet; probably 5 or 6 Update: it’s 6). If by any chance you miss us or want to join later, just email or tweet me. Hope to see you there!
Meanwhile, here is a short bio of Nele Hecht, who will hopefully also be joining us:
Nele Hecht is a German filmmaker working in the UK. She has made several short films, trailers for books and music videos. She is currently working on a documentary about gender identification.
The documentary will be following few individuals and investigate their struggle with the traditionally set norms of gender. Simultaneously it will feature different voices discussing the issue from various angles, particularly the role of feminism in regards to gender perception.
The aim is to stress and support the individual interpretation of gender, challenge traditional perceptions of male and female roles and portrait a picture of a diverse society outside those boundaries.
This documentary is independently funded. Seoul is the start of the filming progress, which will carry on in London and Berlin.
As it’s independently funded, that means I’ll be paying my own way (about 180,000 won all up), so let me again remind readers (for just the second — and final!— time this year) that any donations towards that, or running the blog in general, are much appreciated, no matter how small. Forgive me for asking, and of course I’ll still come regardless, but unfortunately the reality is that only one person (thank you!) has clicked on those donate buttons since I last asked in April!
(For the record, I’ve received about $190 in donations so far this year, minus Paypal commissions)
(Source)Via Tales of Wonderlost, who also passes on a translation by Opress-Crackatron3000:
Protesting sexual harassment and violence against women
ETIQUETTE FOR MEN AT NIGHT
1. Remember that your presence can be threatening to women walking alone at night
2. If a woman is walking in front of you alone at night, slow down. You walking quickly or speeding up can be and in most cases is threatening
3. If you’ve been drinking and are drunk, go straight home.
4. Do not pick a fight or aggravate women walking at night
5. Do not take off your clothes or publicly urinate
6. Be careful to make sure you do not touch or hit someone, even on accident.
7. If, late at night, you come to a situation in which you and a woman have to ride an elevator together, let her go up first and wait for the elevator to come back down.
8. If there’s a woman in a public restroom (There are Korean public restrooms with no gender or sex markings that are open to all people), wait for her to finish and come out first before using the restroom.
9. Report broken streetlights to the police
10. Tell other men about these rules and that they have a responsibility to not threaten women walking at night
Please share as much as possible!
Related Post: Groping in Korea: Just How Bad Is It?
(Source*)Always interested in how objectification is portrayed by the Korean media, here’s my translation of a brief article about the opening of Hollister’s first Korea branch last month, written just before the news emerged of how reprehensibly some of its models acted during their stay here.
While short, I found it strange that the article would raise the absurd possibility that the half-naked models were guilty of any offense, which could be interpreted as implied criticism of the event. But on the other hand, the author may well have mentioned that just for the sake of creating a story; after all, keeping the company’s name anonymous throughout the article, but including it in a photo caption from another news service, isn’t exactly stellar journalism.
Anybody that finds a better source on the objectification angle in the story, please let me know!
Update: Apparently, Hollister has used this shirtless stud gimmick in Asia several times. And, as Nathan McMurray of Korea Law Today puts it, it “always seems to drum up some controversy. That is likely their objective.”
해외 브랜드 개점 이벤트… 모델 끌어안고 촬영까지 “낯 뜨겁다” vs “신선하다”
Foreign Brand Opening Event…From Hugging Models to Being Photographed with Them: Just Embarrassing, or a Fresh Marketing Method?
31일 낮 12시쯤 서울 여의도 복합쇼핑센터 IFC몰의 해외 의류 브랜드 H사 매장 앞에서 직원 안내에 따라 20∼30대 여성 20여명이 긴 줄을 섰다. 그들 앞에는 근육질 외국 모델 2명이 웃통을 벗은 채 서 있었다. 한 20대 여성은 반바지만 입은 두 모델 사이에서 한 손으로 모델의 허리를 감고 다른 한 손으로는 ‘V’자를 그리며 사진을 찍었다. 구경꾼 30여명은 매장 앞에서 그들을 에워싼 채 연방 휴대전화 카메라 셔터를 눌렀다.
At about midday on the 31st of August, about twenty women in their twenties and thirties were standing in a line in front of foreign clothing brand “H” company’s new store at the multi-shopping center International Finance Center Mall in Yeouido in Seoul. Two half-naked, muscular foreign models were standing there. One twenty-something woman stood between the two men, who were only wearing shorts, and had her picture taken while making a V-sign with one hand and wrapping the other around the waist of one of the models. Thirty other women surrounded them and took more pictures of the scene with their cellphone cameras.
이 ‘조각 미남’ 모델들은 H사 본사에서 마케팅을 위해 기용한 이른바 ‘판촉사원’이다. 지난 30일 IFC몰 개장과 동시에 국내에 처음 들어온 H사 매장은 입점 기념 이벤트로 매장 앞을 지나는 이들에게 반라(半裸)의 모델과 함께 사진 찍는 기회를 제공하고 있다.
Described as “sales promoters” by the company, these ‘beautiful male sculptures’ were employed by the head office to market the opening of the store, the company’s first in Korea. On the 30th, the day of the IFC mall itself opened, they stood outside to attract the attention of passers-by and give them an opportunity to be photographed with them.
Caption: 30일 오전 서울 영등포구 여의도동 서울국제금융센터(IFC 서울)에서 열린 IFC몰 오픈 행사에서 국내 첫 입점한 홀리스터의 모델들이 해양구조대 복장으로 점포를 찾은 고객과 사진을 찍는 이벤트를 진행하고 있다./뉴시스
Caption: On the morning of the 30th, at the opening of the Seoul International Finance Center in Yeouido, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Hollister models dressed in lifeguard style stand outside the Hollister store to mark the opening of the company’s first branch in Korea
이날 같은 층의 다른 매장과 달리 H사 매장 앞은 손님들로 붐볐다. 모델과 함께 사진 촬영을 한 대학생 김수영(24)씨는 “모델이 멋있어서 친구까지 데리고 왔는데, 신선하고 재미있었다”고 했다. 회사원 박미정(35)씨도 “점심시간에 짬을 내 쇼핑도 하고 사진도 찍으니 기분 전환이 된다”며 좋아했다.
Unlike different stores on the same floor, on that day the outside of H comany’s store was crowded with onlookers. University student Kim Su-yong (24), who came to have her picture taken with the models, said “Because the models were so cool I even brought my friends. It was fresh and fun,” while company worker Park Mi-jong (35), also explained that “I made time in my lunch break to so some shopping and have my picture taken, I feel great now!”
하지만 “공개된 장소에서 뭐 하는 짓이냐”며 문제를 제기하는 목소리도 많았다. 회사원 조모(39)씨는 “(여성들이) 팔짱을 끼는 것은 예사고, 아예 대놓고 모델을 끌어안기도 한다”며 “아무리 마케팅이라지만, 남성의 성을 이렇게 상품화해도 되는 거냐”고 했다.
But voices of complaint were raised over its appropriateness in a public place. Company worker “Mo” (39) [James’s wife: “Probably a man”] said “[Women] wanting to hold arms with the models is just trashy, as is shamelessly hugging them,” and added “It may well be a marketing stunt, but isn’t using male sexuality like that simply objectification?”
(Source)일각에서는 이런 이벤트가 현행법 위반 아니냐는 지적도 나온다. 경범죄처벌법상 ‘몸을 지나치게 내보여 다른 사람에게 부끄러움이나 불쾌감을 준 경우’는 과다노출죄를 물어 10만원 이하의 벌금을 부과하거나 교도소 등에 최장 29일까지 수감할 수 있다. 또 형법에서는 ‘공공장소 등에서 음란한 행위를 해 다른 사람에게 수치감과 혐오감을 주는 경우’ 공연음란죄로 1년 이하 징역이나 500만원 이하 벌금 등에 처하도록 규정하고 있다. 서울남부지법 황승태 공보판사는 “이번 사례의 경우 두 법 모두 적용될 여지는 있는데, 정도를 따져볼 때 과다노출죄에 더 가깝다고 볼 수 있다”고 말했다.
From one perspective, this event breaks the law. According to the Misdemeanor Punishment Law, if someone “shows an excessive amount of their body to people, and causes them to feel embarrassed or upset as a result,” that person can be charged with excessive exposure and face a fine of up to 100,000 won and/or a jail term of up to twenty-nine days. Also, according to criminal law, if someone “commits a lewd act in a public place and causes feelings of shame or repulsion to others,” that person can be charged with public lewdness and face a fine of up to five million won and/or a jail term of up to one year. According to Seoul Southern District Court information officer Hwang Sung-tae, “In this case both laws apply, but based on the degree of the offense the Misdemeanor Punishment Law is the most applicable.”
모델을 매장 앞에 세우는 마케팅은 실제로 미국·일본 등 해외에서는 성행한다. H사 측은 2일까지만 이벤트를 계속한다는 계획이다.
This type of marketing which uses models in front of stores is common in the US, Japan, and other foreign countries. H company plans to continue this event until the 2nd of September. (End.)
*Apologies for the creative license, but the first image actually comes form the opening of Hollister’s Beijing store in May.
Not really related to Korea sorry, but Derek Kim and Les McClaine, two of my favorite cartoonists, do need to sell 8-10,000 physical copies of the first chapter of Tune to keep the excellent web-series going. Just $9.86 on Amazon, or — I’m very happy to report for Korea-based readers — 20, 390 won at What The Book, I’m just about to order a copy for myself and (hopefully) my daughters. See here for the details, and please: don’t click on page 1 of Chapter 1 unless you’ve got a few hours to spare!
Announcements
— Video: Girls’ Generation? Gender, (Dis)Empowerment and K-pop by Dr. Stephen Epstein (Royal Asiatic Society)
— Busan Biennale 2012, September 22 – November 24 (Busan Haps)
Body Image/Health:
— Breast in show: the art of plastic surgeon Han Xiao (Want China Times)
— Queer Corner: Gendered Beauty Standards (Korean Gender Cafe)
— Plastic-Fantastic or Robotronic-Loverholic? (Seoulbeats)
— How Savvy Chinese People Avoid Toxic Food, Goods Produced in China (Asia Society)
— German magazine rethinking ‘no models’ policy (The Korea Herald)
— Objectifying Cyclist Jenny Fletcher (Sociological Images)
— Firms focus more on employees’ health (The Korea Times)
— Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History by Florence Williams (The Guardian)
— The Daegu International Body Painting Festival 2012 in South Korea (The Telegraph)
— Look at Me! I’m on a Diet! The Girls Generation Diet!! (The Unlikely Expat)
— The Mosquito Truck (Ask a Korean!)
Censorship/Protest:
— G-Dragon new MV ‘That beeeeep’ will be censored with lots of annoying beeeeeeeeeeeps (Omona They Didnt)
— Protecting Sources & Risking Lives: The Ethical Dilemmas of Japanese Journalism (Japan Subculture Research Center)
— Constitutional Court of Korea Declares Internet Real-Name Online Identification System Unconstitutional (The Korea Law Blog)
— Military’s moral education has a political agenda (The Hankyoreh)
— Protests, public space in Seoul, and cyberspace – Part 5 (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
— Filming curtailed in ‘suicide forest’ (Visual Anthropology of Japan)
Crime:
— Suspect in Naju’s child abduction-rape case admits to crime (Yonhap)
— Drunk Man Kidnaps, Rapes and Leaves Girl with Internal Injuries (Korea Bang)
— Police request arrest warrant against child rape suspect (The Korea Times)
— Police revive stop and search to help fight violent crimes (The Korea Herald; The Korea Times)
— Need systematic crackdown on child pornography; South Korea is world’s sixth largest distributor of child porn (The Hankyoreh)
— Courts slammed for light sentences on sex offenders (The Korea Times)
— The War on Crime (The Marmot’s Hole)
— Crimes rekindle debate over capital punishment (The Korea Herald; The Korea Times; The Hankyoreh; Korea Real Time)
— SKorean juries give sex offenders harsher punishments (Asian Correspondent)
— Ex-doctor proposes surgical castration (The Korea Herald)
— Government to recruit 1,250 more police, probation officers (The Korea Times)
— Korea’s new war on vice (Korea Law Today)
Dating/Relationships/Marriage:
— Ask the Yangxifu: Should I Wear a Qipao in My Chinese Wedding? (Speaking of China)
— Korean Hugs vs American Hugs (Gyopo Keith)
— Reply to “I’M AN ASIAN WOMAN AND I REFUSE TO EVER DATE AN ASIAN MAN” (AMWW Magazine)
— A Story of Sexism, Chinese Men and Who Should Wash the Dishes (Speaking of China)
— Does Waiting Six Months To Have Sex Improve Relationships? (XX Factor)
— A love letter from the past (The Marmot’s Hole)
— Yangxifu Pride: Pinterest Boards on Chinese Men and Western Women in Love (Speaking of China)
History:
— The Anti-Rising Sun Flag:Are the ghosts of the past still haunting us? (The Marmot’s Hole)
LGBT/Sexuality:
— Tokyo women weigh in on the possibility of participating in porn pictures (The Tokyo Reporter)
— K-dramas and “Pseudo-Homosexuality”: What Gives? (Seoulbeats)
— Gay groups up in arms over sexuality education textbook in Hangzhou (Shanghaiist)
— Reading List- Remembered Branches: Towards a Future of Korean Homosexual Film (The Kimchi Queen)
— K-Drama’s More Literal (And Laudable) Takes On Homosexuality (Seoulbeats)
— Queer Corner: Violence in a Label – 마짜, 때짜, 올 (Korean Gender Cafe)
— More to learn about LGBT travel trends from South Korea (Travel Daily News)
— Gayspeak: 떼박/Orgy (The Kimchi Queen)
— Gender-bendy hijinks from Oohlala Spouses (Dramabeans)
Miscellaneous:
— A Culture of Copying (ZenKimchi)
— In the Victorian Age, astronomy and nudity went hand in hand (io9; NSFW)
— Paper Tigers: What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends? (New York Magazine)
— Goodbye Reverend Moon (1920-2012). Let’s consider what happens next. (Korea Law Today)
— Do men and women really (literally) see the world differently? (io9)
Naomi Wolf’s Vagina:
— Ariel Levy on Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” (Bitch)
— Neuroscientists take aim at Naomi Wolf’s theory of the “conscious vagina” (io9)
— Naomi Wolf: ‘Neural wiring explained vaginal v clitoral orgasms. Not culture. Not Freud’ (The Guardian)
— Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina: self-help marketed as feminism (The Guardian)
— Tunnel of Love (The Economist)
Politics/Economics/Workplaces:
— For ‘losers’, Korean society is unforgiving (The Hankyoreh)
— In Japan, Retirees Go On Working (Bloomberg Business Week)
— How the 5-day workweek changed Korean employment (The Hankyoreh)
— Cancer, Death and Samsung’s Semiconductor Factories (The Three Wise Monkeys)
— Inside Korean Work Culture: Overworked and Underappreciated (The Three Wise Monkeys)
— The Greying Radicals in Korea and How they May Harm Your Korean Business (The Korean Law Blog)
— Female muscle: Now is not a good time to be a man (The Economist)
Pop Culture:
— Unpopular Opinion: Psy Isn’t Doing K-pop Any Favors (Seoulbeats)
— Gangnam Style: After 100 million downloads, maybe I should say something (Korea Law Today)
— There is No Such Thing as ‘Gangnam Style’ (The Three Wise Monkeys)
— What does Gangnam Style mean? (Cute in Korea)
— Why do the opinions of netizens bear so much weight on the K-Pop industry? (Netizen Buzz)
— Korean Culture Through K-pop 102: Will You Marry Me? (Seoulbeats)
— Why It Makes Me Sorry That Hwayoung Is Sorry (Seoulbeats)
— Netizens label YG Entertainment’s Jennie Kim a bullying bitch based on … uh … nothing (Asian Junkie)
— G-Dragon, “One of a Kind”: a 3-and-a-half-minute ego trip (My First Love Story)
— Is K-Pop Sustainable? Tom Coyner by IPG’s Senior Adviser (The Korean Law Blog)
Pregnancy/Abortion/Childbirth/Demographics/Parenting/Education/Multiculturalism:
— South Korea Struggles With Fewer Troops; U.S. Military With Fewer Dollars (Real Clear Politics)
— Dinosaurs and indoor pools – the lighter side of childhood in China (Seeing Red in China)
— Grown Korean adoptees return to birth country to fill in the missing gap (The Korea Times)
— More Or Less: Why, as people get richer, do they have fewer children? (The Economist)
— As education levels rise, fertility drops (Korea Joongang Daily)
— Number of women giving birth over 40 doubles in a decade (The Korea Times)
— Statistics on foreigners in Korea, and the ROK before the CERD (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
— On Feeding (On Becoming a Good Korean (Feminist) Wife)
— Multiracial families and military service (The Korea Times)
— Korean scientists counter creationists on textbook controversy (The Hankyoreh)
(Links are not necessarily endorsements)
(Source)…[the character of] Chi-Yong’s mother sees marriage as a way to achieve social advancement and material prosperity, as it was in the Victorian era. These ambitions have come to the forefront in Korea since the 1970s, due to rapid economic development and consequent aspirations to class mobility and consolidation during the last thirty years. This novel [Marriage/결혼 by Kim Su-hyeon, 1993] is a good illustration of how, given the pace of change of change in Korea, everybody has a different point of view on marriage, depending on their gender, class, and generation. The issue of communication across generations has become a serious matter. Generation is an important attribute of identity in Korea, like race in the United States. (My emphases.)
(So-hee Lee, “The Concept of Female Sexuality in Popular Culture” in Under Construction: The gendering of modernity, class, and consumption in the Republic of Korea, ed. by Laurel Kendell, 2002; page 146 of 141-164)
With apologies to So-hee Lee for variously attributing that quote to either her editor, to Hyun-Mee Kim, or to Nancy Abelmann over the years, it still very much applies 10 years later. It’s also why studying and living in Korean society can be so exciting sometimes.
For someone who’s been writing about the place for over 5 years though, it means that many of my posts need updating. Let alone mercifully deleted as reader feedback, further research, and greater use of Korean sources have exposed gaping holes in my knowledge and confident preconceptions. And from a practical standpoint too, links will die, embedded videos will get deleted, and my theme will always highlight recent posts at the expense of older ones, no matter how good they may be after going through my culling process.
With all that in mind, once a month I’ll be highlighting posts from the corresponding month in previous years. Not all of them of course (hey, I’ll still like some material to work with in September 2013 and 2014), and to some there’s no new news to add; I include them just to draw attention to for new and old readers, especially as they’ve since been slightly edited for this post with the benefit of several year’s of hindsight. Others though, I’m adding a great deal of new news and commentary below, as you’ll see.
Please let me know what you think!
Alas, not really my own article, but about Grace Duggan’s for Bust Magazine. While I’d often criticized the body-labeling craze in South Korea previously, I didn’t realize just how offensive this particular term was until she pointed it out (source, right):
Sexualizing young women for having childlike features sets off all kinds of alarms, regardless of whether or not they are over 18. The “bagel girl” label does more than infantilize women. It compartmentalizes them by applying two irreconcilable ideals: looking like a baby and a full-grown woman at the same time.
Granted, that may make it sound no more harmful than any other “line.” But, as I explain in a later comment, in the context of how it’s actually used it ends up sounding almost pedophilic:
…there’s nothing wrong with looking young per se.
But consider who the label is applied to: not, say, women in their 30s and 40s and older, for whom – let’s be real – wanting to look younger than they are is understandable (hell, for a 35 year-old guy like me too), but rather it’s women barely on the threshold of adulthood that are being praised for looking like children. And, not to put too fine a point on it, what the FUCK is great about a 21 year-old looking younger than she is? And when her body is simultaneously praised for being developed? That is a seriously flawed ideal to aspire to, and, moreover – as I hint at in the post – it’s no coincidence that it occurs in an environment with strong expectations of childish behavior from women too. Indeed, the end result strongly reminds me of child and teenage female manga characters, with personalities appropriate for their age, but somehow the sex drives and physiological development to act on them of women 10-15 years older.
(Source)Meanwhile, by coincidence just yesterday I finished the excellent An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality by Jill Fields (2007), which explains how the word “glamour” — where the “gul/글” in Bagel Girl comes from — came to be closely associated with large breasts by Hollywood in the 1930s to 1950s. Something I’d previously chalked up to a Japanese and then Korean mistranslation of the word, see the above pages for more on that, or all of Chapter 3 on brassieres at Google Books here.
If I do say so myself, I’m very proud of the way I describe my feelings when child singers do aegyo:
…cutesy aegyo is bad enough coming from a 21 year-old singer, but simply surreal when you see it done by a 14 year-old.
Yes, surreal, not merely awkward and inexperienced: essentially, you’re watching a child pretending to be an adult pretending to be a child.
Thank you very much.
Thanks again to the (necessarily anonymous) reader who wrote about her experiences, and I’ve had dozens of inquires about the Seoul clinic she used since. Please just email me if you ever need to know the details yourself.
(Source)Once someone points out the “head cant” to you, it just can’t be unseen. Usually inoffensive in itself though, and frequently done simply for photographic and stylistic reasons (which I’ve under-acknowledged in the past), it’s the fact that it’s overwhelmingly women it that makes it problematic. Just one of a number of typical poses for women in ads, ultimately it serves to reinforce gender stereotypes.
Probably, that’s why these recent Giordano ads stood out to me: in the example above for instance, Shin Min-a (신민아) is the one in control, staring at the viewer, while So Ji-sub (소지섭) is distracted (it’s usually the guys that are presented as more focused). And, desperately seeking examples of pro-feminist advertisements for a TED presentation I may be giving next month, in which I have to — grrr — conclude with a positive message rather than just criticize, this made me realize that feminists and advertisers don’t necessarily have to be at odds with each other. Just a sense of balance by the latter would be a huge step forward.
Really about “lewd” advertisements, 2 years later (this June) I translated another article about how their numbers had surged 3 times over the previous 12 months. With no apparent sense of irony, just about every news site that reported on that had so many examples themselves that the text was difficult to read.
One of my most popular posts, anybody (especially men) who thinks street harassment isn’t a problem should just reflect on the opening cartoon, let alone female readers’ comments about their own negative experiences.
(Source: unknown)A short, harmless commercial for Shinhan Bank at first glance. But, once you take the time to analyze it, it has a clear message that men do the thinking at Shinhan while the women simply look good. Indeed, it’s such a classic example of gender stereotyping that I’m still using it in presentations today.
Here’s the slide I would present after providing that analysis:
But in the next presentation, I’ll be updating it with the recent news that the banking industry still has the largest gender pay gap in Korea, with women making an average of only 57% of what men make.
Not that I’m against skin by any means. But these remain very sweet ads!
Again one of my most popular posts, ironically soon after writing it trends in the Korean entertainment and music industries meant that Koreans would replace Caucasians in many of the modelling roles that sustained those Occidentalist stereotypes. Also, in my own (admittedly limited) experience, there’s far fewer Korean male – Western (invariably Caucasian) female pairings in popular culture now, after a spate of them in the years after Misuda first appeared. (There were never very many of the opposite.)
However, of course many of the stereotypes still do remain.
(Sources: left, right)When I read on Yahoo! Korea this week about pregnant Hollywood star’s “D-lines”, for a moment I did try to hold my tongue about seeing the label.
After all, this, for example, is just an advertisement for an event for expecting mothers (albeit one where likely body-shaping products are promoted); these D-line fashion shows were surely perfectly harmless; many of those Hollywood stars were indeed glowing, as was pregnant Moon So-ri (문소리) in Cosmopolitan last year; and finally, yes, I can see the humorous side — it is often applied to extremely obese men.
But although the Western media too promotes pampered celebrity mothers-to-be as ideals to follow, and I can certainly accept that pregnant women overseas may likewise feel under some indirect pressure to watch their weight, that post is about how pregnant Korean women were dieting as early as the late-1990s. One can only shudder at what things are probably like now.
Suddenly, talk of D-lines sounds a lot less funny.
One of my first attempts to grapple with the origins of the kkotminam phenomenon (꽃미남; lit. flower-beauty-man), which culminated in this piece by friend and ANU professor Roald Maliangkay 2 years later.
By coincidence, both of us will be quoted in a related news article to be published next week. Watch this space! (Update: and here it is!)
And indeed there was. Unfortunately however, attitudes didn’t change with it, so fathers feel compelled by management to either ignore it entirely or to come back to work early, despite it only being 3 days (source right: unknown).
Note though, that the “paternity leave” in the original article I translated was a bit of a misnomer, it really meaning time off for a child’s birth. “Real,” paid paternity leave has been available since 2001 (or possibly 1995), but sources vary on specifics. Sung So-young in the Korean Joongang Daily, for instance, wrote in April 2011 that:
According to Korean law, all employees with a child under the age of 3 are eligible to take a year off to care for their children. Up to 1 million won ($919) in salary is provided monthly.”
But that is contradicted by a slightly later report in the Chosun Ilbo, which states that:
…those on leave can get up to 40 percent of their salary, or a minimum of W500,000 and a maximum of W1 million, and parents can take leave until the child is 6 years old.
And both in turn are contradicted by Lee Hyo-sik’s earlier report in the March 4 2011 Korea Times, which says:
Regardless of income levels, both male and female salaried workers are currently given 500,000 won per month during parental leave. This is expected to go up to one million won next year.
As for the maximum age of the children in order to be eligible, the same article states that it was 6 rather than 3. This is confirmed by an earlier February 2010 article by Kwon Mee-yoo, again in the Korea Times, which stated:
The Ministry of Labor passed a revision on Wednesday to the Act on Equal Employment and Support for Work-Family Reconciliation, or the Employment Equity Act for short, which will expand the range of workers eligible for parental leave. Now parents with preschoolers under six years old can benefit.
The leave allows employees to take a certain number of paid days off from work to care for their children. The parents can also take unpaid leave if they use up all of their paid days. This includes maternity, paternity and adoption leave. Currently, at private firms only workers with children 3 years old or less qualify for the leave.
Surprisingly, parents with adopted children weren’t eligible before this revision, and still, “only those who gave birth to or adopted children after Jan. 1, 2008 [were to be allowed] parental leave,” despite those (then) 2 to 6 year-olds obviously being of age. Which all sounds very tight-fisted, although logical during the worst of the financial crisis.
Kwon Mee-yoo also notes that it was in 2008 that the government increased the age restriction for (only) public servants, allowing them “to take time off for parental purposes if their children were under 6 years old.” I’ll assume that it previously only applied if their children were under 3 years old, like Kwon notes was the case for employees at private firms.
Finally, quibbles over details aside, Sung So-young’s and Lee Hyo-sik’s articles in particular remain excellent discussions of why Korean fathers are forced to avoid taking paternity leave, despite wanting to spend much more time with their kids. Against that though, just like in most other countries there’s still a pervasive attitude that childcare is primarily women’s work, with insidious manifestations in our daily lives.
And on that note, have a good weekend, and the Korean Gender Reader post will be up on Sunday!
The Grand Narrative 