Korea has a deserved reputation for plagiarism, but it can surprisingly hard to provide definitive reasons for why this is the case. For example, had I been asked, I would have ventured that it was a combination of:
• the discouraging of creativity and the overwhelming use of rote-learning in Korean schools.
• the emphasis on results rather than processes, as evidenced by the university you attend being considered more important than what you learn there, or alternatively TOEIC scores being used by companies to select new recruits regardless of their actual spoken English ability, or if the job even requires it.
• the reality that university is widely regarded as a brief respite between studying for the entrance exam and corporate life, with much less of a workload than high school.
• a chronic lack of funds meaning that universities are extremely reluctant to expel students.
• and the Korean route to academic advancement, which far from having the egalitarian relationships that prevail in the West, can involve an almost slave-like dependency on professors by postgraduate students. The tasks they can be expected to perform for them can range from the mundane – like making their coffee – to doing the bulk of professors’ actual work, such as the marking of undergraduate essays, and usually for little or even no financial compensation. In such circumstances, it is no surprise to learn that Korean newspapers regularly feature cases of prominent academics being caught plagiarizing their students’ work.
And for more on most of those points you can see this earlier post of mine on the Korean education system, and also this one by Seamus Walsh on the role of Confucianism in it. But they are all very much open to debate (and I encourage you to do so in the comments), and most importantly can probably be added to: the nature of the Korean music industry, for instance, is probably the real main factor behind this recent alleged case by Korean singer G-Dragon (G-드래곤). And so it proves that there is also a quirk specific to the advertising industry that encourages it there too.
Naturally, after two years of writing about Korean advertisements I’ve already discovered an example of plagiarism by a Korean advertising company, but that one pales by comparison with this on the right by Lotte Chilsung (롯데칠성음료) for its Scotch Blue Whiskey, which a spokesperson had the audacity to claim was only inspired by Louis Vuitton’s advertisement with Sean Connery above (with the tagline “There are journeys that turn into legends. Bahama Islands. 10:07”). It has since been withdrawn, but the Korea Times notes that “according to the Korea Advertising Board (KAB), companies accused of plagiarism are subject to penalty only when the original creator files a request for review.” Moreover, and herein lies the quirk, “in most cases, companies see the plagiarism of commercials as a win-win situation. They like their commercials to be copied and replayed by other companies, because it reminds consumers of their products,” said Kim Se-won of the KAB in 2006.
One wonders in this case though, as the single example available on the internet suggests that it must have been withdrawn rather quickly, perhaps indeed because of threatened legal action. But regardless, do you think the association of Scotch Blue with Louis Vuitton does detract from the latter? How about only in Korea specifically?
Update: With thanks to Florian for making it, here is the original Louis Vuitton advertisement resized and superimposed onto the Lotte Scotch Blue one:
Like he says, at this level of similarity it’s more accurate to talk of copyright infringement rather than plagiarism!
(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Images series, see here)
1) If You’ve Got it, Flaunt it? The Potential Mainstreaming of Assertive Female Sexuality in Korea
As the live performance below demonstrates, even sans the sex scene of the music video, the dance routine for the Brown Eyed Girls’ (브라운아이드걸스) Abracadabra (아브라카다브라) remains compelling viewing. Spoken from the perspective of a heterosexual male of course, but also in the sense that it presents a rare, more assertive side of women’s sexuality to the faux coy, innocent, and inexperienced one that is the standard for the Korean media:
But given that, the original furor it generated, and the fact that many much tamer songs have been censored and/or banned from being broadcast on public television and radio recently, then last month I and VixenVarla at Seoulbeatsand I naturally expected the same for what is easily the most sexually explicit Korean music video I’ve ever seen. Instead, and in some rare positive news, quite the opposite has occurred: the Brown Eyed Girls have become very much the darlings of the Korean media (see here, here, here, here, and here for just a handful of their recent television appearances), with their dance routine very much mainstreamed in the process. For which I present as Exhibit A the fact that it is starting to be parodied:
Do such parodies dilute the much-needed message that Korean entertainers – and, by extension, Korean women – can flaunt rather than hide their sexuality? To the extent that there was a deliberate “message” in the first place of course, as the music company involved has proved all too ready to make tamer versions of the video for the sake of quick sales. The question is pertinent in the context of Western dance moves and gestures frequently being parroted by Korean performers without being aware of their sexual connotations, of which Extra Korea! recently gave some examples, although the first he gives may be erroneous, as G-Dragon {G-드래곤} has quite a reputation for gender-bending. But the pelvic thrusts at 2:45 in the next one do indeed seem rather forced and awkward:
For more on the disassociation between sexuality and sexual iconography in Korea, see #7 here, to which I would add this observation by Misuda (미녀들의 수다 ) member Vera Hohleiter (more on her in a moment) on the irony of Korean women wearing mini-skirts, only to cover themselves up constantly while doing so, and also the fact that in Korea any blatantly sexual dance move, gesture and/or piece of clothing is instantly rendered cute and innocent in the public imagination merely by being on a teenage girl, as to view it otherwise would be to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality of their sexuality.
********
I think the criticisms are a little harsh though: if you want to look for dancing that is genuinely “the vertical expression of a horizontal desire” in Korea, then you don’t have to look very hard. And context is very important, as even the most provocative of Western singers would be hard pressed to inject some sultriness into their performance under the harsh, almost antiseptic lights of a Korean talk-show studio, and moreover one in which the 3 year-old above may well have strutted her hips and thrust her non-existent breasts out at the audience 10 minutes earlier (not to condone that by any means, just to point out the myopic asexuality of such shows, which discourages questions of how problematic such performances really are). Finally, there’s the constant repetition and routine that would ultimately render ostensibly sexually provocative dance moves and so on somewhat artificial and forced for any performer. As such, it’s not like they can’t be learned: like I noted in an earlier post, there’s a good reason Singer Son Ga-in (손가인) of the Brown Eyed Girls spreads her legs and rides the stage floor like a porn star in the first video (at 2:06), despite claiming to be a virgin (update: apparently that was all only a rumor).
2) Misuda: Half of it’s Fake
I haven’t actually seen the show myself, but I get the impression from those that have that the first season of Misuda did have its good points, and in particular sparked a lot of interest by Korean women in—and consequent dialogue with—foreign women living in Korea (easy to overlook if you’re a guy). Unfortunately its more fluent, intelligent and interesting members were replaced in favor of mere photogenic ones and more tabloidish discussion topics in Season 2 though, and in was in this vein that was widely regarded as foreign male-bashing on the show occurred in Season 3 last month, which naturally provoked a vehement response in the Korean blogosphere: see #1 here for links, to which I’d add this commentary at Diffism that I overlooked, which makes the crucial point that much of the vitriol, albeit by no means undeserved, stemmed from from an intentionally skewed Korean newspaper report on the episode.
Among the hundreds of comments on those sites, I’d imagine that some would have argued to the effect that much of what is said on the show was scripted and for the sake of playing to its vacuous audience, and it turns out that that is indeed the case, as revealed in a book by German panelist Vera Hohleiter on the right. Unfortunately though, Korean netizens, albeit hardly representative of Koreans’ opinions as a whole, are concentrating on the few negative comments about Korea in it. Even though, as commenter Martin at Brian in Jeollanam-do’spost on the subject puts it:
….I am German and have read Vera’s book a few weeks back. When I bought it, I thought it would be the usual crap that we normally get from books about Korea but it was a decent read and the picture she draws of Korea is VERY positive. The few negative aspects she points out do not stand out at all, though I’m not surprised that some random Korean netizen picks up on them and the Korea Time publishes a story based on that person’s opinion/interpretation. Unreal….
….Anyway, the whole story is unsubstantiated as the book really doesn’t say much negative about Korea or Koreans.
On a positive note though, for its flaws Misuda is belatedly producing a male version. And Javabeans notes that foreign men are already becoming more prominent in the Korean media in recent months, increasingly portrayed positively and in romantic relationships with Korean women (see this movie also).
Update: And even the negative comments about Korea in Vera’s book may have been deliberately mistranslated and/or taken out of context. For more information, see doggyji and orosee’s comments on this forum thread.
Last year 465,892 babies were born in Korea, 27,297 less than in 2007. As a result, the national fertility rate, which is the average number of babies that a woman gives birth to during her reproductive years between age 15 and 49, has declined from 1.25 children per woman to 1.19. After shooting up in 2006 and 2007 because of the belief that those were auspicious birth years, the rate has fallen again. Moreover, 10,000 fewer babies were born during the first five months of this year compared to the same period a year ago. This has prompted dire projections that Korea’s birth rate could fall to 1.12 this year….
….In order to boost the birth rate we need to create a social environment favorable to child birth and raising. Child-rearing costs must be lowered, while women should not be the only ones responsible for raising children. Corporate practices must also change so that women with babies are not discriminated against. But it will take quite some time and effort as well as a change in public thinking to create such an environment. The most practical measure at present is to provide reliable low-cost, high-quality childcare facilities for parents. In a 2005 report on Korea’s low birth rate, the OECD said that increasing childcare facilities alone could boost the rate by 0.4….(Source above: Naver).
And as someone who’s written about Korea’s exceptionally low birth rate and childcare issues for quite some time (see here, here, and here for some lengthy posts), then my instinctive reaction was to agree, but I have to admit that this response to it had some merit:
That’s a load of crap.
If child care was any cheaper in Korea, it would be free. Most daycare centres and kindergartens receive government subsidies, and for that reason, fees normally hover at around 200 000 won per month. Moreover, the government offers additional subsidies to families whose total income is less than about 3.6 million won per month, granting up to a 50% reduction in fees (so, about 100 000 won per month) and even offers additional subsidies to families that have more than one preschooler enrolled.
Sure, there are many daycare centers and kindergartens that charge more (one of the most popular gimmicks used to double and even triple fees being lessons in English), but they are not the norm.
Let’s be more specific. At the moment my wife and I send our 3 year-old daughter to a kindergarten (유치원) from 9:20 am to 4:40 pm Monday to Friday, and that costs us 420,000 won a month (340,000 if we only sent her until 2), which we consider a small price to pay for the sake of our sanity! Her kindergarten is unusual in that it accepts 3 year-olds instead of the standard 4 years, and also as a kindergarten it provides more of a structured educational program than a daycare center (어린이집), but unfortunately that means that we receive no subsidies from the government. If we sent her to the latter though, on my single income of, well…embarrassingly not much more than a 21 year-old new English teacher would make, then we’d only have to pay something like 50-60% of that. As far as my wife knows, there is actually no threshold on the percentage of subsidies that can be received on even lower incomes.
(Source: Unknown)
I grant then, that costs are not the issue per se, at least to those on a double income and/or with much higher ones than mine. Recall that Korea has the lowest rate of working women in the OECD though, and that Korea has among the longest hours in the world spent at the workplace (note: not working, which is why Korea’s productivity per hour is only average), and I’d be surprised if there is childcare of any sort available at the late hours required. Or indeed if there ever will be, regardless of how many new facilities are created (albeit still urgently required), and so it behooves me to yet again point out that this aspect of Korea’s workplace culture, presenting a stark choice between motherhood and a career, arguably remains Korean society’s biggest stumbling block to raising its birth rate. In the meantime though, as the 2004 Social Policy and Administrationarticle “A Confucian War over Childcare? Practice and Policy in Childcare and Their Implications for Understanding the Korean Gender Regime” makes clear, just actually enforcing the childcare and maternity legislation already in place would be an important first step:
We ask about the development of childcare policies in Korea and what these mean for our understanding of the gender assumptions of Korean governments. Women’s labour market participation has been increasing rapidly, with married women now much more likely to be in the labour market. The provision and regulation around support for women’s employment, and especially for mothers’ employment, is a key issue and problem for Korean women and for governments. A number of policies give the impression that the Korean government is moving rapidly towards a policy for reconciling work and family based on a dual-earner model of the family. But we argue that a close inspection of these policies suggests that the state is still playing a residual role, legislation is not effectively implemented, and government is giving way to the private sector and to the family in responsibility for childcare. Mothers’ accounts of their lives centre on a childcare war played out beneath the apparently harmonious Confucian surface, with resisting husbands supported by powerful mothers-in-law, and daily struggles over the management of services. The Korean government and its policy-makers, far from moving rapidly towards a dual-earner model of the family, are still rooted in Confucian ideals.
Unfortunately that is just the freely available abstract, as I’ve long since lost my electronic copy of the article (update: thanks to reader John Bush for passing this copy on). But I discuss it in detail here, and provide examples of the regular scandals of poor or even rotten food being provided to school students, and the fact that at the time of publication at least civil servants only had the resources to inspect facilities once a year, if at all, with the net result that finding a reliable facility among the insufficient number available plays no small part to play in Koreans’ decision to (not) have children. Things may well have changed in the 5 years since that article was written of course, but given that the Lee Myung-bak administration originally planned to abolish the then Ministry of Gender, Equality and Family (see here and here), only to retain it as the Ministry of Gender Equality (여성부) at the last moment, handing its family-related responsibilities to what became the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs (보건복지가족부), then I highly doubt that there has been the political will to make the necessary changes.
Update: See thisKorea Times article on for more recent information on Korea’s declining number of newborns.
(Source: Unknown)
On that note, apologies for the relative lack of subjects this week, less than I intended, but it’s been extremely difficult to write with both the heat and the 2 Energizer Bunnies masquerading as my daughters. And to be frank, the data-collecting for the Korean Gender Reader posts meant that writing them was becoming more of a tedious chore than something to look forward to – never good for the longevity of a blog and/or readers’ enjoyment of it – so from now on I’ll be sticking to the original format, which lets me both look at things in depth and have my own voice. I hope you enjoy the change!
Lest the last email from a reader featured here gives you the wrong first impression, Jacob Lee of California clearly put a lot of thought and attention into this one on the subject of Korean women’s body ideals, and has never ceased to be polite as he patiently waited almost 2 months(!) and many excuses from me before responding to it properly. Given the wait, he may be surprised to learn that I actually agree with most of the points he makes, although we draw very different conclusions from them.
For the sake of both making the email easier to read and distinguishing my interspersed comments from it, I’ve decided to preface the latter with pictures of myself, and, lacking a picture of Jake, one of popular Korean heart-throb Lee Seung-gi (이승기) to represent him. But no means do I mean to give the impression that I’m treating Jake’s email facetiously with that choice though, nor by the format that this was actually a two-way conversation. And I warn you: Jake’s email was over 2500 words long, and my response here brings that up to over 4300, so this post is definitely not for the faint-hearted!
Jake: Hello, Mr. Turnbull. I was browsing through your site the last few days when I came across your post, “From Asian to Caucasian,” at the end of which you wrote:
So although I’m always open to changing my mind, and think I have a pretty good record on this blog for admitting when I’ve been mistaken and/or changing my mind upon hearing new evidence, until someone actually addresses that point at all then I’ll continue to believe that “Caucasianness” is a very strong, albeit usually subconscious and/or indirect, influence on modern Korean women’s cosmetic surgery choices.
Well, hopefully, I can add a new, well… wrinkle to the topic of modern Korean women’s cosmetic surgery choices.
James: For readers’ sakes, let me reiterate that point here, which was that arguments that modern Korean ideals of appearance are merely extensions of historical associations of light skin and so forth, must confront the:
…big, fat, white elephant in the room that is America and the West. You have to consider how having white skin here in Korea is not simply a matter of lightness anymore, of being a sign that one doesn’t have to work outside in a field. The relative pallor of one’s skin is now inevitably linked to notions of civility and class that are also reflected against the very real presence of white people, who are not surprisingly, positively associated with notions of civility and class.
As Michael Hurt wrote in 2005. And so readers know what to expect, my main critique of Jake’s email is that while he does indeed add a great deal of new information to the subject, the points he make are essentially ahistorical, and he certainly doesn’t address that issue above.
Jake: First of all, let me just say that I do appreciate the work you are doing. I may not always agree with your conclusions, or the way you couch your arguments, but I do believe that for the most part, you are doing work that needs to be done, and saying things that need to be said as it pertains to Korean culture.
If you haven’t guessed already, I’m ethnically Korean. I’m a 23 year old guy living in Southern California. In the past few months especially, I’ve been interested in the question of Asians wanting to be Caucasians. Rather, I’m interested in the perspective of Caucasians regarding this topic. I suppose it wasn’t a really big surprise to learn that there are many Caucasians out there who firmly believe, as you do, that Asian women (in your case Korean women) are strongly influenced by “Caucasianness.” And no matter how vehemently these Asian women deny wanting to look white, the response invariably seems to be, “Yes you do. You just don’t know it b/c it’s subconscious, or you don’t want to admit it.” From youtube videos, Tyra Banks, the racist website stormfront.org, the list seems interminable.
To you and other non Asians, it seems that because many Asian women want larger eyes and a straighter nose, this is very strong evidence for their wanting to be white since these are deemed to be white standards of beauty…
James: Let me stop you there for a moment, as I think you’re careless with your choice of words here, unnecessarily and probably unintentionally generalizing myself and other Caucasians. Yes, I have indeed said that Korean women are strongly influenced by Caucasianness, but that’s not quite the same as saying that they subconsciously want to look White, and as far as I’m aware I’ve certainly never intentionally asserted such, either online or in person. I do agree that discussions on the subject by myself and others can certainly seem to have that dynamic you describe though, but in my own experience that’s frequently the result of either a misunderstanding or even a deliberate misrepresentation of non-Asians’ views.
Having said that, I do believe that the plethora of cosmetic surgery advertisements marketed towards Northeast-Asians but featuring Caucasians would suggest that – surely – some Koreans do indeed deliberately or subconsciously “want to look White.” But I’m not going to labor that point: it’s unnecessary. Rather, however cliched it is to do so, consider, say, that women wanting to look sexually aroused (and thereby more arousing) and men’s fondness for phallic symbols undoubtedly had big roles to play in origins of the modern habits of lipstick and tie-wearing respectively, but that doesn’t mean men and women deliberately or even subconsciously do so for those reasons now: instead, they are merely following cultural practices and/or norms surrounding them that have considerably evolved since. And in that vein, I’ll readily admit that the vast majority of Korean women that get lighten their skin and/or get cosmetic surgery operations that, to my eyes, make them look more Caucasian, actually do so to look more like Korean celebrities and/or merely follow Korean cultural norms. But while those certainly built on preexisting Korean ones, especially associations of light skins with an indoor, non-agricultural elite, they have also been heavily influenced by notions of class, civility and wealth literally embodied by Caucasians, as Michael Hurt pointed out.
That may all seem to be mere semantics, but because of the heated and often quite vitriolic debate this subject invariably seems to generate in the blogosphere, I want to remove that emotive element from any discussion immediately: I am not claiming here that Korean women simply want to look White, nor have I ever done so. With that out of the way then:
Jake: …But in the last few months, I’ve found that there has been some significant research done, mostly by evolutionary psychologists, which seem to strongly support the idea that there is, generally speaking, no white standard of beauty, Asian standard of beauty, black standard of beauty, or Hispanic standard of beauty – there is only a universal standard of beauty that is innate, recognizable by most, and aspired to by many.
I highly recommend the book, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty by Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist and faculty member of the Harvard Medical School and of Harvard University’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative.
Here’s an excerpt:
Despite racism, misperceptions, and misunderstandings, people have always been attracted to people of other races. Today the world is a global community where international beauty competitions have enormous followings (although many complain that these contests favor Western ideals of beauty). There must be some general understanding of beauty, however vaguely defined, since even three-month-old infants prefer to gaze at faces that adults find attractive, including faces of people from races they had not previously been exposed to. In recent years scientists have taken a deep interest in the universality of beauty.
It turns out that people in the same culture agree strongly about who is beautiful and who is not. In 1960 a London newspaper published pictures of twelve young women’s faces and asked its readers to rate their prettiness. There were over four thousand responses from all over Britain, from all social classes and from ages eight to eighty. This diverse group sent in remarkably consistent ratings. A similar study done five years later in the United States had ten thousand respondents who also showed a great deal of agreement in their ratings. The same result has emerged under more controlled conditions in psychologists’ laboratories. People firmly believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and then they jot down very similar judgments (image right: source).
Our age and sex have little influence on our beauty judgments. As we have seen, three-month-old babies gaze longer at faces that adults find attractive. Seven-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, seventeen-year-olds, and adults do not differ significantly in their ratings of the attractiveness of the faces of children and adults. Women agree with men about which women are beautiful. Although men think they cannot judge another man’s beauty, they agree among themselves and with women about which men are the handsomest.
Although the high level of agreement within cultures may simply reflect the success of Western media in disseminating particular ideals of beauty, cross-cultural research suggests that shared ideals of beauty are not dependent on media images. Perhaps the most far-reaching study on the influence of race and culture on judgments of beauty was conducted by anthropologists Douglas Jones and Kim Hill, who visited two relatively isolated tribes, the Hiwi Indians of Venezuela and the Ache Indians of Paraguay, as well as people in three Western cultures. The Ache and the Hiwi lived as hunters and gatherers until the 1960s and have met only a few Western missionaries and anthropologists. Neither tribe watches television, and they do not have contact with each other: the two cultures have been developing independently for thousands of years. Jones and Hill found that all five cultures had easily tapped local beauty standards. A Hiwi tribesman was as likely to agree with another tribesman about beauty as one American college student was with another. Whatever process leads to a consensus within a culture does not depend on dissemination of media images.
James: Not that this detracts from either the points made in the book or in your email, and in fact I agree with all of those made in this *cough* rather lengthy excerpt, but let me point out here how I’m increasingly skeptical of the validity of any reports on the body and face preferences and so forth of isolated jungle tribes. Primarily, this is because of the way in which they are almost invariably used in the media, literally thrown into the discussion to support almost any hypothesis. Just this June for instance, Newsweek used some other South American tribes to argue the exact opposite, arguing that men’s ideals of women’s hip-to-waist ratios were heavily dependent on women’s economic position in their culture.
Cross-cultural studies have been done with people in Australia, Austria, England, China, India, Japan, Korea, Scotland, and the United States. All show that there is significant agreement among people of different races and different cultures about which faces they consider beautiful, although agreement is stronger for faces of the same race as the perceiver.
In the Jones and Hill study, people in Brazil, the United States, and Russia, as well as the Hiwi and Ache Indians, were presented a multiracial, multicultural set of faces (Indian, African-American, Asian-American, Caucasians, mixed-race Brazilian, and others). There was significant agreement among the five cultures in their beauty ratings and some differences. For example the Hiwi and the Ache agreed more with each other than they did with people in Western cultures. This is not because they share a culture – they don’t – but because they have similar facial features, and they are sensitive to the degree of similarity between their facial features and the features of the people in the photographs. For example, although the Ache had never met an Asian person, they were curious about the Asian-American faces, attracted to them, and aware of a similarity between these faces and their own. The Ache gave less favorable ratings overall to African-American faces, and they called the Caucasian anthropologists “pyta puku”, meaning longnose, behind their backs. One Caucasian anthropologist was given the nickname “anteater”.
Since the Hiwi and the Ache had never encountered Asians and Africans, had met only a few Caucasians, and were not accustomed to using the scientists rating scales, any level of agreement with the Western cultures is intriguing. Jones found a number of points of agreement. People in all five cultures were attracted to similar geometric proportions in the face. They liked female faces with small lower faces (delicate jaws and relatively small chins) and eyes that were large in relation to the length of the face. Jones called these “exaggerated markers of youthfulness”, and they are similar to the features mentioned in other cross-cultural studies of beauty. For example psychologist Michael Cunningham found that beautiful Asian, Hispanic, Afro-Caribbean, and Caucasian women had large, widely spaced eyes, high cheekbones, small chins and full lips.
People tend to agree about which faces are beautiful, and to find similar features attractive across ethnically diverse faces. The role of individual taste is far more insignificant than folk wisdom would have us believe.
Jake: And you can find the NYTimes book review here which offers some more insight (James: free registration required). Her book was even the basis for a discovery channel special which discussed the idea of a universal standard. Popseoul! (which I believe you are familiar with) even talks about it here.
No surprise that Kim Tae-hee (김태희) fits the standard perfectly, eh? Well, it wasn’t for me at least.
There might be the question, Do Caucasians fit the universal standard more than any other race? It doesn’t appear so. I can’t find the study anymore, but I’ll include it anyways just on the chance that you’ve come across similar studies or made comparable observations yourself, however informal. This study (one that was unrelated to this idea of universal beauty) suggested that 3 out of 4 people, regardless of race, were deemed to be either plain or ugly by participants who, themselves, were from various racial backgrounds. And only a very small percentage (less than one percent in each racial group if I recall correctly) was given the highest rating of beautiful.
My interpretation of this data is that since there are roughly 25% of people in each racial group who are considered somewhat attractive or beautiful, all racial groups have about the same proportion of people who fit the universal standard. It’s just that when we miss these standards, we miss them in different ways, e.g., small eyes for Asian women and big noses for Caucasian females.
Since I don’t have the source for this study, I wouldn’t blame you for ignoring it. But even if people want to believe that Caucasians fit the universal standard more than any other race, that still doesn’t change the fact (or at least what I believe to be a fact) that Asian women are trying to reach a universal ideal and not a white ideal.
James: I don’t mind that you don’t have the source for the study – I trust your interpretation of it – and I definitely agree that there are many features of human’s bodies and faces that are universally preferred: worldwide, people find symmetrical faces more trustworthy for instance.
But with that last sentence especially, I really think that you begin to carry the notion of universalism too far, as it leaves little room for what can be very influential culturally-based ideals, however malleable. And who exactly said that Caucasians fit the “universal standard” more than any other race? I know I certainly haven’t, and I challenge you to provide sources. The only sense in which I’d regard them as a universal standard is because of people’s associations of class, civility and wealth with Caucasians as explained, but that’s very different from saying that people have preferences for Caucasian features and so on for innate, biological reasons.
Update: One important thing I should add is that if Caucasian women have noses bigger than the universal standard, one would expect that Caucasian women would be getting operations to have them reduced with the same alacrity that Korean women, say, get double-eyelid surgery. I have no figures at hand and am frankly not inclined to search them out, but I’d wager that that isn’t at all the case. This ties in with the next quote by Michael Hurt I give a little later also.
Jake: So to paraphrase Nancy Etcoff, which is more likely? That a select group of men on Madison Ave. and in Hollywood determined what the ideal beauty should be and was able to influence countless billions of men and women over the next fifty years, even infants as young as one week old, even people living in the remotest parts of the world, such as the jungles of South America, people whom the only Caucasians they’ve seen were the few researchers who contacted them, researchers who were called “anteaters” behind their backs, but because of the stong influence of “Caucasianness, these people from all around the world, consistently chose what you consider to be the white standard of beauty, as their ideal standard of beauty, and they didn’t have the awareness, nor the capabilities, nor the will to resist such an influence, even knowing, perhaps only on a subconscious level, that they will never be able to measure up.
(“Qi BaiShi vs. Marilyn Monroe”, by Zhang Wei, Oil on canvas 2006. Source)
Or, could there be a universal standard of beauty, a certain facial structure that the significant majority of the people from all races and cultures find attractive, something that we are all born with, something we’ve always had even before the “westernization” of the world, just like we’ve always had an innate universal preference for the taste of fat and sugar, and a universal preference for certain sounds, rhythms and smells, and a universal enjoyment for the feeling of a soft fabric on bare skin, and a universal understanding of a smile and expressions of sadness and anger. And perhaps these advertising people on Madison Ave. and in Hollywood were as influenced by these standards as the rest of us?
Now I know that this is a gross simplification of a very complicated issue, and the “westernization” of the world is much more complicated and has many more facets including cultural, political, and economic imperialism, but at its core, the question that Nancy Etcoff poses needs at the very least to be considered….
James: Sorry, but “a gross simplification” is putting it mildly. And what’s to consider? Nancy Etcoff would find no disagreement from me that there are universally appealing facial features and shapes and so on. I’d even concede that double-eyelids, for instance, may not be quite as “Caucasian” as I first thought, and that Korean women may get the operation simply to make their eyes look bigger (and thus more attractive, by universal standards or otherwise) and/or just out of cultural habit…Caucasian ideals be dammed. But there’s so much more to the Caucasianness of the cosmetic surgery choices of Korean women then mere eyelids. As Michael Hurt points out (yes, him again, but then his post would be a adequate critique of your email in itself):
Deference to white skin here is so alive and well [here], how can one deny that it plays any role in the decision to get one’s eyes cut larger, nose Romanized, old-school high cheekbones shaved down to size, breasts enlarged, asses and lips pumped full of silicone, and nerves in the calves snipped? One can say that plastic surgery in the States or the West is also in major effect these days, but the crucial difference is that Westerners aren’t getting their epicanthic fold removed, breasts reduced, cheekbones raised, nose bridges removed, or calves fattened up. Let’s get real here – cultural sadaejuui (사대주의; flunkyism, toadyism, deference) goes in one direction. That’s what makes the case so sad when it comes to one culture trying to attain a beauty standard set by another one.
Moreover, as he eloquently puts it, you’re simply ignoring the big, fat, White elephant in the room that is America and the West:
You have to consider how having white skin here in Korea is not simply a matter of lightness anymore, of being a sign that one doesn’t have to work outside in a field. The relative pallor of one’s skin is now inevitably linked to notions of civility and class that are also reflected against the very real presence of white people, who are not surprisingly, positively associated with notions of civility and class.
In particular, I fail to see how a preference for light skin, taken to such extremes here that Korean women have among the lowest Vitamin D levels in the world, is anything but culturally determined.
Jake: To be sure she and her book are not without their critics, the most prominent being feminists (such as Naomi Wolf) and certain academics who have tried to downplay the importance of beauty for various reasons in the last few decades (James: see Popmatters for a recent feature article on this subject). But no one to my knowledge has been able to dismiss or discredit the significant amount of research she has included in her book. And judging by your other posts and your references to and criticisms of scholarly or journalistic pieces of work, I’m sure this won’t dissuade you from trying, lol. This book came out ten years ago, and since that time much research has been done which have only strengthened her conclusions. A couple of examples: first, from Psychology Today, and the BBC’s The Human Face documentary:
It is very Caucasian centric, but the conclusions Dr. Stephen Marquardt reaches parallels those of Dr. Escott in many ways.
Let me also say that I don’t want to give the impression that I believe “Caucasianness” had no influence on Korean women. Clearly, there has been. I think hair and eye colors are good examples of that. These aren’t universalities, so the fact that Korean women started dying their hair en masse during the eighties and started wearing colored contacts in the 1990’s tell me they were strongly influenced by white standards in this regard.
However, as Nancy Etcoff and others have pointed out, these culture specific standards (e.g. foot binding, lip plates, piercings, etc.) have a way of changing, sometimes very rapidly, to take on an altogether different meaning, such as what happened with the perception of a woman’s weight here in the U.S (source right: Scoubi).
In a similar way, I think the reasons why Korean women started dying their hair also changed along the way. Now, I think they do it for the same reasons Caucasian women do it – simply because they believe it makes them look better and they just want to try a different look. I also believe that they change the color of their hair to look more like Korean female celebrities. I don’t have anything to base my conclusions on because as far as I know, there hasn’t been any studies done on this issue. I’m only going by the word of the Korean women themselves and my understanding of how greatly Korean women admire the beauty of many Korean actresses.
And regarding colored contacts, that fad seems to be largely over.
James: Well, you can’t have it both ways. You’ve certainly made your point that some aspects of women’s facial and/or body ideals are really innate and universal, but like you and Nancy Etcoff say, others can be culturally determined. The onus is now on you to provide a list of which is which, otherwise it’s difficult to continue the discussion.
I strongly suspect though, that most of the cosmetic surgery operations that Korean women undergo (that to my eye make them look more Caucasian) will be extremely difficult to explain in terms of adherence to a universal standard, and which is in itself probably very much open to interpretation. If you do admit that some choices are culturally determined though, then again you really need to address the question posed at the beginning of this post.
Jake: In one of your posts, you wrote:
But I think the point that average Korean women are whitening their skins and undergoing cosmetic surgery because they want to look like rich and famous Korean women is, to be blunt, irrelevant: it merely changes the focus of our attention, but doesn’t answer the question of why rich and famous Korean women (rather than average Korean women) are doing so.
Well, to me, the answer is quite clear.
Anyways, I support what you are trying to do as it relates to women’s and children’s issues in Korea. Even though I’ve lived most of my life in the U.S., I still feel a deep connection to the country of my birth, and I have a great amount of respect for what it has been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time, especially since I sense an earnest attempt to continually improve itself. But that doesn’t blind me to its faults, and unfortunately, there are still too many.
Hope to hear from you soon concerning this topic. Take care.
Jake.
James: Apologies if I ultimately seem a bit dismissive of all your efforts, but I do really appreciate all the time and effort you put into your email, which I learned a great deal from on. And I really hope to keep the discussion going with yourself and other readers, either in the comments or by email. Naturally my preference is for the former, to make it a real discussion and all, but if you or anyone else would like to send further emails to be published here on this subject (or anything else) then by all means please do so. Preferably ones at least *cough* 50% shorter than 2500 words though!
Update:This post at Ask a Korean! about the differences in beauty standards between Koreans and American gyopos (ethnic Koreans living overseas) is a healthy reminder to be more specific about exactly which groups of ethnic Koreans we are discussing in the future. For the record then, I’ve only ever been referring to Korean women in Korea.
What is the first thing that goes through your mind when you hear of a“power drink” for men?
If you live in Korea, then I’d wager some form of aphrodisiac, testament to the large number of drinks claiming to improve “men’s power” or “men’s stamina” that are available here. In the particular case of the advertisement on the left though, that would be quite wrong, as Huksaeng (흑생) is the name of a health drink from Hyundai Pharm (현대약품) made with huksam (흑삼), or black-red ginseng (흑삼), and it has no prior history of being marketed to men specifically. Here you can see a women’s taekwondo team extolling its virtues for instance, albeit that of a different company.
But compare that with Hyundai Pharm’s other product Miero Fiber (미에로화이바) on the right, which in its 20-year history has only ever been marketed towards women. Currently placed alongside each other at the Busan Ad Stars 2009 website, the accidental juxtaposition of the two advertisements provides an interesting contrast. And given Koreans’ overwhelming preference for health drinks over multivitamin pills also, then the insights to be gained have more relevance to Koreans’ body images than may at first appear to overseas observers.
My own first reaction was that I was at a loss to think of an Korean advertisement for a health drink aimed at women that uses the analogy of recharging one’s batteries. This is a minor point though, and by no means do I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Korean advertisements, so I would be grateful if readers could pass on any examples that I may have missed. But with the proviso that Huksaeng is supposed to provide more of a mental and general health boost rather than improving one’s body per se, both that and any counter-examples from readers would not detract from the obvious and correct inference that Korean advertisements for “men’s drinks” generally feature men as sporty, active participants in the process of achieving that perfect body and/or losing weight. With those for women however, it’s genuinely difficult to find any that don’t promote the idea that drinking the product is the only step required.
Don’t just take my word for it though. Consider recent popular commercials with girl-group Girls’ Generation (소녀시대) for Miero Beauty N (미에로뷰티엔) here and here for instance, and more importantly the evidence provided by the journal article “Content Analysis of Diet Advertisements: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” (Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, October 2006), by Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon, which I discuss in great detail inpartsOne, Two, and Three of my series on Korean women’s body images from last year. More recently, I discuss it in passing in this post about an advertisement for a diet clinic and this one about the advertisement below for a slimming tea-drink also:
Unfortunately the article is no longer freely available at the link above, and I’ve long since lost my own copy of the original PDF file. I can scan my copy if anybody requests it though, but in the meantime hopefully the abstract will suffice:
Content analysis of diet advertisements was performed to examinehow diet advertisements portray the Western ideal of femininebeauty and promote dieting in Korean women’s magazines in comparisonwith U.S. women’s magazines. Results showed that the Westerncultural ideal of feminine beauty and dieting were prevalentin Korean women’s magazines. Diet advertisements in Korean magazinesappear to promote more passive dieting methods (e.g., diet pills,aroma therapy, diet crème, or diet drinks) than activedieting methods (e.g., exercise). Results further indicatedthat women may be misled to believe that dieting is simple,easy, quick, and effective without pain, if they consume theadvertised product. This study suggests that there is an urgentneed to establish government regulations or policies about dietproducts and their claims in Korea. Magazine publishers alsoneed to recognize their role in societal well-being and acceptsome responsibility for advertisements in their magazines.
In especially part Two of that series above I discuss that passivity in more detail and extend it to Korean exercise culture, further continued in this recent post about a device that electrically massages breasts in order to make them grow bigger. No, really:
Let me also pass on this post at Sociological Images about the similar gendering of energy drinks in the US, with more of a focus on those targeted towards men, and this one at Feministing about the fact that laxatives there are almost exclusively marketed towards women, with the implicit purposes of losing weight. To which I’d add that their Korean equivalents are both ubiquitous and completely lacking of the usual euphemisms, instead providing computer graphics of bowel movements that leave little to the imagination. Rather than continuing in that vein though(!), let me close with a question prompted by the latter post: what is the reason that products like these are marketed specifically towards women?
(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)
Being at 8:30am on Sunday morning, then my presentation at the ICAS 6 Conference in Daejeon last weekend wasn’t exactly well attended, but at least I did get to meet Professor Douglas Sanders of the University of British Colombia, a noted author on human rights and LGBT issues, and as it happens also the first openly gay person to speak at the UN. He later passed on a paper he has just written on the development of LGBT issues and activism in Korea in the 1990s and 2000s, and I recommend it for the chronological overview of the subject it especially, and which I wish had been available before I read the rather denser (but also excellent) article on the subject in the Autumn 2005 Korea Journalarticle “Intersectionality Revealed: Sexual Politics in Post-IMF Korea” by Cho Ju-hyun. Combined, you probably couldn’t ask for a more comprehensive look at the subject, although of course please pass on any more resources if you know of them!
Not to imply that G-Dragon (G-드래곤) of the Korean boy-band Big Bang (빅뱅) above is anything but heterosexual by the way, but that’s certainly an interesting photo of him above (source), and which as someone growing up in the UK in the 1980s instantly reminded of noted LGBT celebrities Boy George and Julian Clary. For the story behind the photoshoot, see here.
With thanks to reader Ezra de Leon for passing the news on, a new Korean drama called Tamna the Island (탐나는도다) appeared over the weekend, and for readers of this blog especially it is noteworthy in many important respects.
The most obvious is for having a foreigner in the lead role, a 24-year-old French model named Pierre Deporte, who has already appeared on Korean screens in the one-off male version of the Misuda (미녀들의 수다; Chatting With Beautiful Women) talk show. Here, he plays a 17th-Century Englishman who washes up on the shores of Jeju Island, and crucially he has some form of love relationship with the local female diver (haenyo/해녀) who finds him, played by teenager Jang Beo-jin (장버진). This is nothing short of revolutionary for Korean screens.
I haven’t found any confirmation of that relationship beyond thisKorea Herald article unfortunately, but the first episode did feature an underwater kiss between them, albeit for the sake of giving him oxygen while hiding. But regardless of the ultimate form of their relationship though, Extra Korea! is correct in noting that it will probably be the first non-negative portrayal of a Western male on Korean television in a long time.* In addition,Javabeans,a rare non-tabloidish source on Korean dramas, also appreciates the drama’s reversal of gender roles:
…in Tamna, the women are hard-working and tough, at all ages from moms down to young girls. The men are painted a little more cartoonishly, but I think there’s potential for more than just comic relief in the setup that shows them as the weak ones in terms of the gender balance. They cower and defer to the ladies, who, while not quite Amazonian, have agency over their own lives and families. I hope the drama explores that dynamic a little more — they don’t have to make a big issue of it, but it’s a refreshing change.
Unfortunately I missed the first two episodes, which played on MBC at 7:55 on Saturday and Sunday night. But never fear, for in that above link a description of the first is provided that is so detailed it will surely take as long to read as it would have to have watched the episode itself!
Personally, I’ve been more than convinced to watch the 20-episode series in full, and I plan to download the first two episodes from the MBC website and watch them for myself before this Saturday. Admittedly, the descriptions of the “excruciating English” and “very silly, goofy” style of the drama would normally have put me off, but then I’ve recently learned that it’ s also true that “progressive” Korean directors have a habit of introducing radical social themes through comedy, and I’ve realized that I’ve probably been too dismissive of the genre previously. Certainly that may be reading too much into this particular drama though, so I’ll try to watch it with an open mind.
In the meantime, have any reader seen episodes 1 and 2 already? What did you think?
Update: My wife and I watched Episode 1, and we agreed that it was not without its charm: in particular Jang Beo-jin’s character was very cute, and difficult not to take an instant liking to. And I confess, it was difficult not to keep my eye off her lithe body also, which we got to see rather a lot of. Not to imply that the producers sexed her costume up by any means, but presumably a haenyo’s clothes would indeed have been more functional than modest, and so not without reason have generations of (male) Koreans grown up to images of scantily-clad Jeju divers!
Unfortunately though, the Jeju slang used in the drama was so thick and frequently used that explanations were given for mainland Korean speakers(!), and this rendered the drama very bad for studying Korean, which was my other main aim with watching it. I’ll still follow it via Javabeans then, but personally I’m going to switch to Brilliant Legacy (찬란한 유산) instead, which just finished with record ratings.
Update 2: Invariably a mere ploy to create interest in a drama, I usually never pay attention to rumors of its stars dating, but for what it’s worth Jang Beo-jin was rumored to be dating Im Joo-hwan (임주환) before Tamna aired. He’s the third member of its anticipated love-triangle with Pierre Deporte.
*See here for a positive portrayal of a Southeast Asian man on the big screen recently. Unfortunately those are equally rare, and ironically the movie also features the typical negative stereotypes of Western male English teachers.
( Poster for Wedding Campaign [나의 결혼 원정기 ], a 2005 movie about finding brides in Uzbekistan; Source )
Back to normalcy after the conference.
Demographics
1) “Seoul Increases Support for Muliticultural Families”
Or to be more precise, the Seoul Metropolitan Government is paying Korean men marrying foreigners 1 million won to attend a 20 hour course on multicultural marriages. But it is not available to Korean women.
Obviously this is discriminatory, but as some commenters at The Marmot’s Hole pointed out, not only are (2)Nine in Ten foreign spouses women, mostly Southeast Asian (see Korea Beat also), but it is even at the behest of the Women and Family Affairs department, and is based on preexisting programs run in other parts of Korea by the Ministry of Gender Equality (여성부) in cooperation with local governments. In addition, a crucial difference with this program is that it is targeted at husbands-to-be, with the aim of preventing problems before they occur.
3) Probably not by coincidence, last week all foreign spouses in Korea would have been visited by an official from the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs (보건복지가족부), with an individual survey in their own native languages to be completed, although clearly orientated towards Southeast-Asian wives judging by the questions. Here are scans of the covers of information sheet, a Korean sample version, and my own English survey I made while waiting for them to be collected:
Meanwhile, see here for German blogger Madang’s take on his own survey.
4)Divorcees Face Asset Seizure for Neglect of Rearing Children
A new civil law went into effect Sunday, empowering a court to seize the assets or salary of a spouse failing to share expenses for the raising of their children after divorce.
Under the law, it will be legally binding for divorcees to shoulder the expenses of bringing up children. In the past, there were no legal grounds to enforce payments if a spouse did not keep his or her promise to help pay for the costs.
Good news of course, but on the other hand it’s telling that I’m no longer shocked that no law existed previously.
Mostly attributed to recent economic difficulties.
Sexuality
7) The image on the right is from a popular recent advertisement for a promotion for Nate.com, a Korean portal site, showing how one can learn how to dance seductively (유혹댄스) simply by searching on the internet. I think that that’s debatable myself, and it begs a lot of commentary on Korean attitudes to sexuality and dance, but Brian in Jeollanam-do has largely already provided that for us. But it’s still amusing, and you may recognize it as part of the series that prompted this post (source).
Update: Perhaps it does work. Singer Son Ga-in (손가인) of the Brown Eyed Girls (브라운아이드걸스), the main character in the music video for Abracadabra (아브라카다브라; see #9 below), claims to be a virgin and to have learned her provocative dance moves simply from watching adult films!
Vodpod videos no longer available.
I think it might have been more effective if it had finished with the women in the pink dress successfully seducing the object of her affections (at some point in the future) though, not him grinding with the better dancer that she resorted to desperate measures to distract him from in the first place!
8) After reading yet another excellent meta-post at Ampontan, this time about why Japan is consistently misrepresented in the foreign media, then I’m inclined to take this article at abc News on “the new trend of Konkatsu, or Marriage Hunting” with a grain of salt, especially over whether it is quite as big a “departure” for Japanese singles as claimed. Is it really only in 2009 that Japanese singles actively sought marriage partners?
9) Yet Another Band Uses Faux-Lesbian Pictures to Market Itself
Like PopSeoul!, I think that this means of getting attention is now probably counter-productive to the groups involved, and has finally run its course. But new readers, please note that I definitely don’t include the Brown Eyed Girls (브라운아이드걸스) in that category for their recent song Abracadabra (아브라카다브라): while it was easily the most erotic Korean music video I’ve ever seen, it was also very creative and refreshing, and more importantly provided a much needed kick against the limits on how women’s sexuality could be presented in the Korean media (see #2 here for a fuller discussion of that).
10) Singer Ivy Finally Ready for her Comeback
I’ve mentioned the false sex-tape scandal that derailed Ivy’s (아이비) career on numerous occasions, so rather then link to all of those here see Dramabeans for a succinct summary of both that and how she’s managed to overcome it recently (source).
Seriously though, if there has indeed been a spate of thefts as reported, it’s good that a female student finally complained about it publicly, and which got results.
Body Image
12) Who is the Sexiest Korean Man Over 30?
Voting still open at AllKpop, with extensive galleries and bios available (source).
13) More Taipei Youth Undergoing Cosmetic Surgery This Summer
From the Taipei Times. While I’d be wary of the accuracy of the figures in either report, see #7 here for a July poll of Korean university students, with comparable percentages in both countries.
14) Living with Curly Hair
A Korean woman with naturally curly hair, who spent her childhood in the US, discusses how she was forced to get her hair straightened because of peer pressure when her family came to Korea, and more generally about pressures to conform. To place these into perspective, see here for some historical and religious factors specific to Korea that exacerbate those, especially for women.
15) Young Generation Confused Over What an “Average” Spouse is?
According to a Korea Times poll of 20 and 30-something that is, but I seriously doubt that “91.7 percent of males and 83.7 percent of females want Mr. or Miss Average as their spouse” as the article claims. Is it really much of a surprise then, that both sexes’ ideal partners are much taller and richer than average brides and grooms in reality?
Media
16)Roboseyo rarely writes long posts, but when he does they are invariably worth the wait. See here and here for a much needed sense of perspective on recent racist depictions of foreign males in the Korean media.
17) Saharial at London Korean Links provides a great how-to guide to choosing which Korean drama to watch. And after reading that, make sure to check out the comments to this post for some recommendations made by my readers.
18 Also well worth the wait, Korea Pop Wars has an in-depth post on the slave-like contracts of most Korean stars.
19) Not that she’s the only Korean female celebrity doing so by any means, but literally every time I have seen Han Ji-Hye (한지혜) on television, she has been wearing fewer and fewer clothes (see here and here), and I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t the deliberate policy of her management company.
20) As expected (see #1 here), having made her mark by getting banned from TV because of the sexual innuendo and heavy breathing in the first version of her her song “Oppa, Can I do it?” (오빠! 나 해도 돼?), rookie rapper E.via (이비아) is to releasean edited, tamer versionof her entire album.
For the article in full, on Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon’s “Happy Women, Happy Seoul” plan involving more women’s toilets and the notorious pink parking spaces, see here. Meanwhile, for readers coming from there, see #2 here for the specific quote of Lee Myung-bak’s for which the blog was mentioned, and #2 here for more information on Korea’s disproportionately low Gender Empowerment Measure.
I would also add—with no offense to reporter Veronica Zaragovia, who necessarily had to omit most of what was said in our interview—that the argument that “the plan may end up reasserting South Korean women’s secondary status more than boosting it” is also one that I made in our phone conversation. I based it on the knowledge that the pink parking spaces were made wider in order to better accommodate loading and unloading pushchairs and so on (see #3 here), which had reminded me of this post from Sociological Images about the images in our daily lives that serve to subtly reaffirm the notion that childcare is primarily women’s responsibility. In that vein, while the extra space may well be appreciated by mothers, consider that if I were to park in one of those spaces myself, with just as pressing a need for the space to deal with my two young daughters in the back as my wife would have, then as a man I would be likely either be fined or shooed away.
I grant you, it sounds innocuous. But place that into the context of Korean women having the lowest workforce participation rate in the OECD, the result of a combination of a lack of childcare facilities and an enduring male-breadwinner mentality that forces a stark choice between motherhood or a career, then the underlying sexist logic becomes apparent. Moreover, with Korea in turn having the lowest birthrate in the world, the economic effects of which will be felt soon, then one might reasonably ask if the money could have been better spent.
p.s. Apologies in advance for some light blogging this week; I have a conference presentation to give this weekend.
Update, January 19 2010: See TheJoongAng Dailyhere for all the ways in which programs like this have been considerably expanded since this post was written, now including pink spaces for women at bus stops, on buses, in parking lots and special pink taxis under the rubric of improving women’s safety (via: The Marmot’s Hole).
2) Transgender model Choi Han-bit (최한빛) reached the final round of competition in the 2009 Asia-Pacific Supermodel Contest in Seoul, which will be held on September 25. See AllKpop for more pictures and videos, and FeetManSeoul translates an article that questions if contest organizers are simply making a poor attempt at imitating the sensation caused by Isis King from America’s Next Top Model.
Meanwhile, Lee Na-young (이나영) will take on a transgender character in her next film role, called Dad Likes Women (아빠는 여자를 좋아해).
5) Recently, a civil organization called Citizen’s Movement for No Prostitution published an “escort businesses map” of Gangnam, a wealthy part of Seoul; see here for an account of a visit to one.
Chris in South Korea has an inventive solution for what to do with the business cards that such businesses litter the streets with every morning.
6)Mnet, a Korean music channel, is to launch a program for 20-something women called Men Who Come From the Sky Like Rain (하늘에서 남자들이 비처럼 내려와) in which the hosts will find out from the requester the criteria that they are seeking for their ideal man, and then head to the streets themselves to find him. Somehow I doubt that it will “try to solve problems or issues that women in their twenties face” as claimed though.
7)Lee Hyori gave her first on-screen kiss, to American-born Taiwanese pop star Wilber Pan, with whom she is also rumored to be dating. Good for her, on both counts, but given that she is easily Korea’s number one sex symbol, and in a country where – to put it mildly – the media frowns on relationships between Korean women and foreign men, then the relative lack of media attention is quite bizarre really.
…frankly I find it bizarre to see Korea — a nation noted for its dedication to the maintenance of pure bloodlines — going ga-ga over a pretty crude overseas reaction to one of its biggest stars.
Any thoughts on what accounts for the contradiction?
8)Naked News Korea suspends operations after just one month of operation.
12) Presumably because of the slave-like contracts which Korean celebrities often have with their management companies, actor and model Yoon Eun-hye (윤은혜) is forming her own managment company.
13) In a warning to never underestimate the power of teenage girls, fans of boy band TVXQblock the street outside the group’s management company, with whom they are having a legal dispute.
16) Two dermatologists in Seoul have been accused of causing facial injuries to 10 women by applying a skin-peeling treatment which they had developed themselves. Not only did were patients not informed of its origins, but it was also non-tested. No mention of the KDFA is mentioned in the article, which implies that mere, biased, in-house testing would have been acceptable?
17) A commentary on the teenage runaways and the recent news that 2 in 3 Korean men feel the urge to flee home as a result of the stress of keeping their jobs during the recession.
19) With apologies for the poor quality of the scan, this illustration on the packaging for a food container I bought this evening must be the singularly most unappealing use of Photoshop I’ve ever seen:
See here for a famous recent example involving a Korean celebrity.
It’s amazing how quickly things can change in Korea sometimes.
Granted, you’re unlikely to see an eye-catching kiss akin to the above on primetime TV at the moment, but at the rate things are going then it won’t be too much longer. It was only at the end of May that Shin Min-a (신민아) for instance, made waves for her first screen kiss with Won Bin (원빈) in the coffee commercial below, and it seems like pop culture blogs have literally been full of similar examples ever since:
See here, here, #10 here, and here if that’s given you for a taste of more. Indeed, in one of those links, I lamented that with so many commercials with kissing appearing these days, it’s difficult to keep track — but it wasn’t really until I saw this next commercial that I realized just how mainstream it had suddenly become:
No, I couldn’t keep a straight face either…
But what might one gain from this, other than merely passing on notice of a new trend? Well, most if not all of those commercials above are aimed at 20-somethings, either explicitly in the tag-line (a new trend in itself) or by the admission of producers. And while they are hardly unique in that regard, the combination of the two personally reminded me of the perceptive point made by Korean sociologist So-hee Lee made in her chapter in Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class and Consumption in the Republic of Korea:
Generation is an important attribute of identity in Korea, like race in the United States. (p. 146)
Obvious perhaps, but arguably only with the benefit of hindsight, and in the decade or so I’ve been reading about Korean society I’ve only come across a handful of authors making the same point, and never so succinctly. Moreover, despite having been written in the late-1990s, this commercials prove that it is more relevant than ever, and I’d argue that it should be included in the first lecture on any undergraduate course on Korean society.
For more on Lee, see here for my take on her work on female sexuality in Korean popular culture. Meanwhile, I accept that my memories of Korean commercials may be lacking, and so I am happy (and fully expect) to receive earlier cases of kissing in Korean commercials from readers: surely the first wasn’t just this May? And in that vein, I also accept that their recent numbers may also have been inflated by my imagination, and regardless by no means precipitated by that one with Shin Min-a and Won Bin either, which may have been merely the first I noticed.
On a final note, I’m also curious in your opinions on what impact – if any – these commercials with have on the acceptability of kissing in public. Personally I think that that’s some years off yet, but then I rarely go drinking these days, and may well be surprised at what goes on in my local university district on Friday nights!
(For more posts in my “Korean Sociological Images” series, see here)
One of these pictures from Shoo’s (슈) recent photoshoot is not quite like the others: take a closer look, and if nothing sticks out then see these classics of the genre for hints, or #6 for the solution.
1) In that vein, for me last week really stood out for the number of excellent points raised about the subjects of women’s body images, censorship, and Korean sexuality by Korean bloggers. But first, I should of course mention that a South-African woman was raped in her home in Ulsan by a neighbor earlier in the month, and early indications were that the police were at best lukewarm in handling her case, which naturally provoked lively discussions in the Korean blogosphere about rape in Korea, women’s and foreigner’s safety, and the Korean police ‘s attitudes to both. Lest I appear indifferent by not discussing those subjects in more detail myself though, lengthy but often informative comments threads on these already exist at Korea Beat and The Marmot’s Hole if you’re interested. Moreover, it appears from this Facebook thread devoted to the issue that claims of police indifference were complete fabrications by The Chosun Ilbo, as were quotes from the victim, who hadn’t actually spoken to any news outlets.
2) First up then, in a post I’m embarrassed not to have written myself, VixenVarla of Seoulbeatsasks if Korean society is really ready for “women” idols, and thinks not: noting the netizen furor over the above Abracadabra (아브라카다브라) music video by the Brown Eyed Girls (브라운아이드걸스), which features a sex scene (and rather more than the mere lesbian kissing scene I reported last week sorry), she argues that while provocative, both that and Chae-yeon’s (채연) new music video Shake (흔들려) were at least alternative representations of Korean women to the coy, innocent, and sexually inexperienced ones normally presented. But while teenage groups’ blatantly sexual dance moves are usually instantly praised as being “hip”, “sexy”, and “cool,” Abracadabra will probably have to be heavily edited for television (despite protestations that it won’t be), as indeed much tamer Shake was recently (see #1 here). She concludes:
….when Korean “women” choose to project a more sexualized side of themselves they are looked down upon by censors and neitizens. Is Korea so afraid to show adult women in control of their own sexuality that they would prefer to cast scantily clad little girls in heavy makeup, to play “grown up” in their place?
See here for the full post. But please note that by reiterating it’s main points I (and I’m sure VixenVarla would concur) am not attacking expressions of teenage sexuality per se: rather, I’m just saying that they don’t deserve the kid gloves with which they are treated with by the Korean media (see here for my most recent post on this issue). Possibly Abracadabra was a bad choice with which to make that particular point though, as it’s easily the most sexually-explicit mainstream Korean music video I’ve seen in the whole 9 years I’ve lived here:
Of course, 9 times out of 10 such a video would be used to disguise the poor quality of the music itself, but this song is actually good, and – I confess – I heard it on the radio and thought it was (forgive the temporary lapse in sophistication) cool well before I saw the video above. Meanwhile, here is a live performance if you’re curious as to how all that translates to the stage (see PopSeoul! for the details):
3) In case you’re confused by the Korean media praising moves by, say, The Wondergirls (원더걸스) or Girls’ Generation (소녀시대) as “sexy” while criticizing, say, Chae-yeon’s dancing as too sexual though, Brian in Jeollanam-do has an excellent post on how Korean uses of the word have become almost entirely divorced from its English meaning.
4) In related news, while discussing a promotion in Seoul involving women dressed as Paris Hilton to celebrate the Korean airing of MTV reality show “Paris Hilton’s My New Best Friends Forever,” Brian also makes the point that:
…while Korean celebrities are held to pretty high moral standards, you have a woman like Paris Hilton regularly on TV and endorsing Fila Korea.
Like he thought, he’s not the first or the last person to mention that (see #18 here), and after reading this post on her by Michael Hurt at Scribblings of the Metropolitician I would also no longer, well, slag off Paris Hilton as readily as most people are inclined to either. But still, the point stands regardless of the celebrity involved, and is worth remembering.
5) Also making big news were some Southeast-Asian men being arrested for taking pictures of women at Haeundae Beach in Busan, whereas – as numerous bloggers have pointed out, Korean newspaper photographers regularly (and excessively) do so, and particularly of Caucasian women also. See Brian’s post (yes, again – a productive week for him it seems!) and Korean Media Watch for more.
6) No, that’s not an alien on the right, but Choi Ji-woo (최지우) promoting cosmetics brand Vidi Vici. Speaking of which, if you haven’t figured out what was wrong with the opening image of Shoo, see AllKpophere for the solution.
7) Also on the photography front, many Korean newspapers (and particularly the ones that denounce Western men as sexual predators and deviants: see #1 here) are increasingly posting “upskirt” pictures of celebrities and members of the public on their websites. Apologies for not providing links (even I have my limits), but I mention this because PopSeoul! has raised the point of PR managers and so on increasingly providing only high stools for stars to sit on at press conferences, which there can only be one reason for given that it is now de rigueur for female stars to wear something short and skimpy to them.
8) Spare a thought for North Korean women: among numerous other frustrations of daily life there, they also have to contend with being forced by government to wear skirts at some times of the year, and traditional clothing at others.
9) A while ago I mentioned a post at Sociological Images about the Tokyo City Government’s appointment of three young women as “cute ambassadors” for the city, the better to promote Japanese kawaii (cute) culture and project Japan’s “soft power” abroad. Now Ampontan – my personal choice for the best blog on Japanese society, politics, and culture – has a great meta post on what issues the policy raises, noting, for example:
I’d rather the Japanese had chosen other parts of their culture to present to the rest of the world—festivals, for example—but might there be a bigger picture that we’re missing?
Plug the word kawaii in English into Google and you’ll get 7,590,000 hits. Do the same with cosplay and you’ll get 24,200,000. Yes, I was astonished too. When the words kawaii and cosplay are so commonly known and accepted around the world, I think it’s safe to say we’re dealing with a phenomenon that transcends Japan.
10) I’m still generally against cosmetic surgery, but largely through reader’s comments I’m much more sympathetic of it and understanding of people’s reasons for having operations (especially in an appearance-obsessed society as Korea) than I was before I started the blog. In that vein, see AllKpophere for winner of the title of “prettiest celebrity after female surgery,” with the important point that contestants were only those that openly admitted their surgery.
11) Given the amount of photoshopping that was necessary for him to do so, I possibly was a little harsh in my opinion on Park Ji-sung’s (박지성) appearance in this post on his modelling for Gillette Korea. But I have to say, he looks quite dapper in his latest photoshoot for Gentlemen’s Quarterly (via KP Culture):
12) While apparently sexual relations with 13 year-olds are okay (see #3 here), Extra Korea! notes that from next year, solitciting teenagers for sex will be punishable, even if no sexual act takes place. Hey, at least it’s consistent with laws for adults…
13) Widely reported in the Korean media, Koreans as a whole are becoming more overweight. Considering that Korean women were among the lest obese women in the OECD (let alone the world) as recently as 2005 though, then the new data needs to be taken with a grain of salt (no pun intended).
14) With apologies for this being the largest picture I could find, Andrew Lim recommends you buy the (self-explanatory) “Asian Men Redefined 2010 Calendar,” the proceeds of which will go to charity. For the details, see Ninginhere.
15) Singer Ivy (아이비) is trying to make a comeback after being forced to put her career on her hold by a sex-tape scandal…which didn’t actually exist. If the latter is news to you, then see DramaBeansfor the background.
I’m wondering if they’re insinuating the wage of female workers should decrease to save the national birthrate…
“Working mothers who prefer to offer quality education or living environment rather than having more children has also contributed to the declining number of second children.
The report said the increase in the women’s wages has negative impact the births of a second child but the increase in paychecks from husbands increases the chances of having more than one child. ”
That’s quite the justification for the disparity in salaries.
Meanwhile, see here for Tom Coyner’s article on the effects of the recession on young people, to which he adds in his email on it in his “Korean Economic Reader” mailing listthat:
To be candid, one of the ulterior motives to write this column was to plug my firm’s “Rising Star Coaching” program that helps organizations lacking the budgets to go out and hire specialists while needing to recycle bright, younger employees to assume new roles as their employers adjust to new challenges.
Should the reader know of anyone who lacks internal mentors for developing a specific skill set in a younger manager or employee, please let me know. We can provide senior Korean executives who have been trained in coaching skills to mentor junior employees on a short-term contractual basis.
17) Finally, in news that I should have placed much earlier in the post sorry, Brian notes that a pregnant 18-year old Cambodian woman was given a 4-year sentence for killing her abusive husband, and also that 2 sisters-in-law and a stepdaughter of a Vietnamese immigrant wife were fined for beating her after she allegedly failed to tend to her mother-in-law’s needs. That second link is just factual really, but in the first has many interesting points about Southeast immigration to Korean and the international marriage trade.
If you’re a long time reader of this blog, then you’ll be aware that I’m a big advocate of people’s preferences in the opposite sex being very much biologically determined. For instance, the almost universal appeal of an hourglass figure to men is undoubtedly a reflection of the fact that women blessed with both large breasts and a relatively low waist to hip-ratio are by far the most likely to get pregnant, as they have 30 per cent higher levels of the female reproductive hormone estradiol than women with other combinations of body shapes (see here and here). Similarly, for men high levels of testosterone can result in them having a well-defined “masculine” jaw, but the flip-side is that testosterone also compromises the immune system, and so therefore a man with such a jaw that has survived to adulthood – say, Harrison Ford – must have particularly high resistance to disease, a valuable survival trait for mothers to pass on to their children.
But of course, cultural factors and one’s upbringing play a huge role in one’s preferences too, as is the fact that the vast majority of sexual encounters are no longer for the purposes of reproduction (were they ever?). In addition, friends of mine have justifiably argued that if certain body and face shapes confer such huge reproductive advantages, then why don’t all men have large muscles and well-defined jaws and all women have large breasts and hourglass figures (and so on), and my answer that there is always natural variation and that, once evolved, advantageous traits take a long time to become standard in a population, felt somewhat unsatisfying even to me, despite both being true.
Hence I should have paid much more attention to this study when it came out last month, which found that while beefier men tended to both lose their virginity at an earlier age and have more sexual partners than their skinnier counterparts, on the other hand those muscles both increased their appetites and meant they tended to produce fewer infection-fighting white blood cells. In a nutshell, this means that for the over 99% of human’s evolutionary history that occurred before the advent of modern medicine and an (over)abundance of food, beefier guys often either starved to death or died from an infection before having children, or alternatively before helping in raising them. So, I don’t think it’s presuming too much of women to say that in fact skinnier men could sometimes have been more of a turn-on for them(!), particularly in times of scarcity.
I’d image that other traits that are advantageous in modern times similarly had their downsides in the past, and perhaps still do: hence the variation. I’ll be very interested in finding them out, and if any readers do know of any parallels then please pass them on.
(First image from the 2004 Korean film “Everybody Has Secrets” {누구나 비밀은 있다}: see here for a review)
Granted, that soju posters have been becoming increasingly risqué in recent years is by no means news (see #1 here), and it’s also true that advertisers tend to rely more on consumers’ baser instincts during recessions…but still, even I did a double take when I saw this latest one (source) with Ha Ji-won (하지원), and it makes one wonder what the summer of 2010 will bring if present trends continue.
Ironically however, it is actually rather tame compared to what Korean musicians have been doing recently to get themselves noticed, such as the Brown Eyed Girls (브라운아이드걸스) having a lesbian kissing scene in their latest music video, or former “race-queen” Jung Eun-joo (정은주) producing a music video that is literally soft porn, her management agency (not unreasonably) arguing that she wouldn’t get noticed otherwise. And yet while the latter in particular is complete trash that will never make it to Korean screens, and like Chae-yeon’s (채연) new music video Shake (흔들려) for “suggestive dancing” (see #1 here) and TVXQ’s songs for their “lewd content” (see #2 here), the Brown Eyed Girl’s effort may similarly also end up being banned from television, those represent just a handful of cases that have cropped up just this year, as cultural producers really do seem to be testing the limits these days. Hence, although Korea’s various state bodies involved with censorship certainly do have corporatist interests in exerting their authority, they may well have their hands full at the moment, and I wonder if as a result we might be about to witness a tectonic shift in the liberalization of the Korean media similar to what happened in 2004, when the following commercial for Hong Kong clothing company Giordano with Jun ji-Hyun (전지현) and Jung Woo-sung (정우성) was banned:
But which resulted in so many clones shortly thereafter that censors seemed to give up on them. Here’s an example from the following year for 17차 for instance, again with Jun Ji-hyun:
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True, the former is very sexual, whereas the latter merely glorifies objectifies the female body…a distinction that I’m only just realizing as I type this, and one that I suspect I really haven’t given enough thought to previously: it deserves further exploring. Regardless, lest you think that I’m exaggerating about the potential for a shift, recall that it also occurs in a context where the Lee Myung-bak’s increasingly authoritarian policies towards the media are creating a backlash, and standards for movies have been liberalizing without pause for breath (see #1 here, #8 here, and #7 here for starters).
In other news:
1) Bending over backwards to satisfy his readers, Ask the Expat provides a very comprehensive and clearly well-researched guide to cruising for gay sex in Korean bathhouses.
2) Approaching things from a different angle, Korea Beat translated a lengthy article from The Chosun Weekly about Lesbian clubs in Hongdae, a major night-life area of Seoul.
3) Lee Myung-bak pledged Thursday to increase state subsidies for working mothers and provide more nurseries and daycare centers in an effort to boost the country’s birthrate, but given that (among numerous other things) married women have been overwhelmingly targeted for layoffs in the current recession, then I suspect that this will have minimal effect (see numerous past Korean Gender Readers for more information, but best are #1 here, #2 here, and #2 here, and here is the most recent newspaper article on the subject). It also doesn’t help that, with dwindling numbers of newborns, women’s hospitals are blatantly refusing to deliver babies in favor or easier and more profitable skin care and cosmetic surgeries either.
4) Again, Korea’s adultery laws continue to be baffle: apparently one can have sex with others if one is in the process of a divorce, but not if one’s husband or wife puts “proceedings on hold.” As a commenter at Extra! Korea reasonably points out, in this latest case did the husband even know his wife had done so? Indeed, what if the estranged spouse is in the act while being informed? Hopefully, upon hearing that the recipient is otherwise occupied, then the FedEx guy would have the decency to wait for a few minutes before knocking on the door and handing over the legal documents…
No seriously, it’s hypotheticals like this that demonstrate the law’s absurdity, let alone the arbitrariness with which it is by definition applied in a country with one of the world’s largest prostitution industries.
5) The issue is a little old (see here for an earlier discussion), but still, Kim Heung-sook does a good job of summarizing what is problematic about the choice of Sin Saimdang on the new 50,000 won bill.
6) With parallels to affirmative-action politics in the US, some male students preparing to enter law school are preparing to file a petition with the Constitutional Court against Ehwa Womans University Law School for only admitting, well, women. I can see both sides’ arguments, but given that only 17% of the Korean legal judiciary are women, then personally I’m more in favor of retaining the restriction. It is after all, the only law school in the country that has it.
7) I’m usually very wary of articles about polls in Korean newspapers, but for what it’s worth this one of 921 university students revealed that 30% planned to get some form of cosmetic surgery this summer. Broken down by gender, the figures are 40% of women and 19% of men.
8) Choi Han-bit (최한빛) on the right (source) has passed the preliminary stage of the 2009 Supermodel Contest. Nothing remarkable about that you might say, except that she was actually born a man, undergoing a sex change in 2006. See here and here for more pictures of her, including when he appeared dressed as a woman on a television show in 2005. To their (rare) credit, the consensus of netizens is that she is no more artificial a woman than all the other contestants that have had cosmetic surgery operations.
9)Korea Beat has translated the Chosun Ilbo’s response to the avalanche of criticism to its week-long attack on foreign teachers, which naturally created some lively discussion (165 comments and counting); don’t miss Korean Media Watch’s take on it also, and for those few of you that all this is news to, see #1 here for many links to get you started.
10) In a strange article that may well have been written – ipso facto – with the intention of actually creating the trend it is ostensibly merely describing, the Chosun Ilbo reports that 30-something salarymen are now avid shoppers and consumers at department stores. I’m not sure I give much credence to an article that prints the opinions of someone who attributes this to the fact that “men in their 30s are for the first time able to go shopping without the help of a woman” though, even if it did come from a professor at SNU.
11) Completing the transitions between the sexes as it were via the images in this post, let me finish here by passing on two photoshoots of Korean men that both made waves last week. First, these pictures of SHINee (샤이니, pronounced “shiny”) from Vogue Girl (source):
(Update: Here’s an interview where SHINee explain the concept behind the photoshoot)
While it’s not for me to judge women’s tastes, I am sorely tempted to mention that, lacking pictures of actual transexual men with which to complete the set of woman-transexual woman-transexual man-man, then SHINee certainly provide a pretty decent alternative…!
For those of you that are interested in the title topic, then let me mention that I’ve finally finished the rather lengthy post on it that I started back in May, which you can read here. Apologies for taking 2 months rather than the promised 2 days to do so, and by why of compensation you can expect a flurry of related posts from me over the next 3 weeks, which by complete coincidence I’ve just realized is all the time I have left to prepare a presentation on the subject for a conference in Daejeon…
Seriously though, while it is a much more academic post than usual, even if you just give it a quick scan then you may be simply amazed at how much Korean television and movies have changed in the last 10-15 years, and how important dramas in particular have been at subverting traditional ideologies of female sexuality. This provides a precedent for the impact of things like Friends and Sex and the City on Korean gender relations and consumerism a little later, and hence also myself a newfound respect for them: see here for some recommendations for more recent ones in the same radical vein as the ones mentioned in the post.
Remember this video? While flawed, it made a decent effort at highlighting the hypocrisy of the Korean media, which by dint of a lack of criticism can be said to generally condone relationships between Korean men and foreign women (like that of Lee Min-ho and Jessica Gomes above, from this commercial for “2X” beer), but which on the other hand often explicitly portrays Western men as sexual predators and the Korean women that enter into relationships with them as either naive and in need of protection, or alternatively as cold and calculating, providing sexual services in return for English lessons and/or, eventually, foreign citizenship.
Well, the creator “Steroidmaximus” has created a new video, and with it he has clearly taken into account some of the (justifiable) criticisms of the first, while still retaining its positives:
Most importantly, he has also created a Korean version:
What do you think? As I type this I’ve yet to have my first cup of coffee, and in all seriousness have my daughter on my lap drawing trains and asking me to help, so my own analysis will have to wait until later this afternoon I’m afraid. But I would like to look at it much more closely than I did the first video, so I’ll come back and update this post later accordingly.
Update: Charles, K-man and Seamus have already done most of my work for me! If I might add things to the discussion that people haven’t already then:
– Like Charles said, I would remove most the American back-story, particularly the part about Neo-Nazis from 0:20-0:45. While I naturally don’t consider myself a racist, I and 99% of other foreigners in Korea have probably never even seen a Neo-Nazi, let alone confronted one, so this comes across as very contrived, and strains the video’s credibility, particularly given that it’s in the introduction. There were other, shorter and more believable ways to get the message across that the vast majority of foreigners in Korea do not support racism.
– Somewhere at about the 1:00 to 1:10 mark, I would have written something along the lines of “Just like Koreans would [work and have an adventure abroad rather than work in a cubicle] if they could.” Its absence is not critical of course, and in fact you could well argue that that specifically would be superfluous, but still, it’s the first of numerous cases of careless wording and sloppy editing (eg: putting “but” before “After their marriage…” at 3:00), the cumulative effect of which is to seriously detract from the overall message.
– Still laughing at the scene from Daespo Naughty Girls (다세포소녀) at 2:00…soooo true!
– It would have been better to have placed the 5:50 Gangnam club picture with an almost-naked Korean hostess entertaining a Korean man before beginning the shots with Westerners and their similar debauchery at 3:13 instead, which would better highlighted their similarities and the implied fact that, unlike the latter, all Korean men are not portrayed as sexual predators etc. because of the actions of a few. This message is lost a little by jumping straight from an ad and a photoshoot for a men’s magazine featuring Korean men and Caucasian women instead.
– And finally, from 3:27 I found the narrative really gets lost and the message somewhat repetitive personally. In particular, the “certain incongruities:” that Jerry and Ji-eun noticed from 5:09 are, well, a bit incongruous, because I don’t think the fact that the Korean media demonizes Western male English teachers as sexual deviants and molesters has been adequately demonstrated previously. So even if the titles of the (overused) untranslated Korean articles – which untranslated are of little use in the English version anyway – then things like “sexual abuse of disabled woman” at 5:37 seem a bit out of place.
But still, a much better second attempt, and I too look forward to further videos from Steroidmaximus, and not just on this issue either.
Look familiar? If not, then on the left you have Mahbub Alam, co-star of the recent movie Bandhobi(반두비), which challenges many Koreans’ stereotypes of and prejudices towards workers and immigrants from developing countries. Here he is in a public service commercial from the Korean Broadcast Advertising Corporation (KOBACO) below, and while it won’t change the world, in terms of the time and money invested at least it will probably prove much more effective at promoting Korea overseas than all the millions lavished on the “Korea Sparkling” slogan.
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In Korean, the commercial says:
우리는 달라졌지만…더 달라져야 합니다.
우리는 가까워졌지만…더 가까워져야 합니다.
우리의 가슴은 뜨겁지만…더 뜨거워져야 합니다.
Korea보다 더 자랑스러운Korean
코리아 브랜드 당신이 만듭니다.
And in English:
We are very different…but we need to be more different.
We are closer…but we need to be closer still.
We have warm hearts….but they need to be warmer.
Instead of being proud of Korea, we should be prouder of being Korean.
We, ourselves, have to create Korea’s brand.
Make sure to see the movie at the cinema while you still can!
Update: In case you missed it, see here for further information about the 4th Migrant Worker Film Festival (MWFF) that Mahbub Alam is the director of, and which will shortly be touring several Korean cities, starting with my wife’s hometown of Jinju (진주) on the 26th.
I didn’t catch his name sorry, but if you’d like to know more about the winner of the “4th Men’s Health Cool Guy Contest” above, then click on the picture or the Men’s Health Korea site itself for many more like it. In the meantime, with so many stories to report on this week I’ve decided to put them into loose categories to make it easier to find what you’re interested in:
Sexuality
1) Of course, the two biggest stories of the last week were: first, the foreign women on the Korean show “Global Beauties Chat” (미녀들의 수다), who chose to complain about both the foreign (Caucasian) men who supposedly come to Korea because they can’t get a job or girl back home and the Korean women that naively fall for them; and second, intern reporter Choi Hee-seon’s series of articles in The Chosun Ilbo saying much the same thing, as well as accusing said men of sexual crimes against students and Korean women. Needless to say, both provoked an instantaneous and vehement response in the Korean blogosphere (for starters see here, here, here on the former, and here and here on the latter), and with 165 comments at that first link alone I’m not going to enter into the fray at this late stage.
In passing though, let me mention that in response Chris in South Korea offers 8 reasons, and then 8 more reasons, why Korean women might prefer Western guys over Korean men. But while I haven’t read either post nor the comments in any great detail, and I’d be surprised if I didn’t think that there was something to all of them, let me offer a word of caution: when actual Korean women themselves aren’t providing most if not all of the input into such lists, they can very quickly and easily devolve into simple narcissism.
Not that Chris is guilty of this by any means, and in fact I write because I speak from experience, having waxed lyrical on similar points with a Korean female friend years ago only rightly to be told to STFU, and that most Korean women that liked Western guys did so simply because they tended to be taller. Just something to keep in mind.
(Above: Park Si-yeon {박시연} models for High Cut. For more information about the photoshoot, see here)
3) Consensual sex with 13 year-olds is legal. Yes, apparently so, given a recent acquittal of a Busan man for doing so with a runaway in his (unofficial) care and, as Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling notes in the most comprehensive look at the case, mirrors a similar decision 8 years earlier. For further discussion, see this article in the Korea Times by Michael Stevens, and this post at The Marmot’s Hole.
4) Infidelik at FeetManSeoulreports on the perils of not wearing a bra on the streets of Korea. If you’re interested in that, then you may also want to check out this post at Sociological Images about how, in contrast, visible nipples have became more accepted in Western countries since the 1990s.
5)Rules on abortion toughened. Somewhat surreal, given that there are already very few circumstances under which Korean women can legally have an abortion, and yet Korean has one of the largest abortion industries in the world. To put it mildly, the article is somewhat lacking by not providing that context (see here for that).
6) The Marmot’s Hole reports that the police would like to close down a Swinger’s Club in Seoul, but unfortunately there is currently no law allowing them to do so. Again, somewhat surreal, given that adultery is actually illegal in Korea, albeit usually with entirely arbitrary prosecutions.
Meanwhile, Brian in Jeollanam-doreports that Education Ministry officials formed the largest group of civil servants caught paying for sex.
7) Not that these are recent news items by any means, but while we’re on the topic you may be interested in the fact that Korea used to be a much more sexually freer place; indeed, as Frog in a Well points out, “just because a society has a reputation for sexual restraint doesn’t mean that it is and always was asexual.” Also, here and here are two excellent Andrei Lankov articles from TheKorea Times about how military governments allowed much racier films in the late-1970s and early-1980s (in an opium for the masses sense) and the development of the prostitution industry in Korea before the Japanese colonial period respectively.
Censorship and Media
8)Dramabeansreports that the star-studded Ogamado (오감도) continues with its provocative promotional material (see #7 here also). For a review of the movie, (which is really 5 movies in 1) see here, and given some of their subject matter then as a commenter over at Dramabeans (#17) noted, it is strange that the posters are as per usual fetishizing the female form and not the men, which leads her(?) to worry that all the sex is only from the perspective of the men.
9) The Korea Communications Standards Council announced on Monday they will commence deliberations on the fate of “Naked News Korea,” which started its racy services late last month both online and mobile. As Brian notes, there far more explicit and sexually suggestive programs are readily available 24/7 on Korean cable television, so this scrutiny is rather strange. Is it because its whole raison d’être and discussions of sexuality are just too blatant for censors’ tastes? To wit:
According to the communications watchdog, the contents of the site have been closely monitored since it began and an episode in which its presenters discussed female orgasms was deemed vulgar and inappropriately suggestive.
In all seriousness, I’d be interested in seeing that. I have the strong suspicion that the notion of women sitting around talking in a no-BS Sex and the City style was a bit too much for Korean censors, and hence any discussion of female orgasms by them would have been deemed vulgar and suggestive regardless.
10) Another commercial featuring kissing…well, actually there’s so many these days that I’m losing track (see here for another recent one). Here is the latest one (via PopSeoul!), featuring AJ and Min Hyo-rin (민효린) and with the tagline “Cool (refreshing) for 20 year-olds” (“스무살을 상큼하게”, at 0:17):
11) As predicted (see #1 here), rapper E.via’s (이비아) latest song, featuring a lot of innuendo and heavy breathing, was indeed deemed inappropriate for Korean TV. For further details, see Extra! Koreahere.
12) More on Choi Jin-sil (최진실), who was notoriously sued by a company she had a modeling contract with for ruining their reputation by making her husband’s beating of her public (see here and here, the latter of which has puts the case into the context of domestic violence in Korea). For two opinion pieces in The Korea Times, see here and here.
14) Apparently, Abusive Words Over The Phone Are Punishable. Meanwhile, and more understandably, a cartoonist was summoned by the police after drawing a cartoon insulting the president. As a commenter here notes, regardless of the freedom of speech issues involved, the police in any country are obliged to investigate cases as blatant as this one.
Politics and Economics
15) Korea has the biggest wage gap between men and women in the OECD. See the Korea Times and the JoongAng Daily for more, and see Brian in Jeollanam-do for more information about conditions in Jeollanam-do specifically, which has the biggest gap (image source: J. David Allen).
In addition, Lee Hyo-sik of the Korea Times reported that male temporary workers are more likely to lose their jobs than women because of the industries they tend to be in, but on the other hand reported a few days later that women are still more likely to lose their jobs overall because they form a disproportionate number of temporary workers. The graph on the right comes from the latter report, and while useful, would have been more so had it been placed into context, which is that Korea has one of the lowest rates of female participation in the labor force in the OECD. For much more on that, see here(source, right).
Not unrelated, the Chosun Ilbo reported that “Korean Women’s Status is Still Low Among OECD Nations”.
16) Korea is to become most aged society in OECD by 2050. Also:The Hankyorehhas an editorial on how its record-breaking low birth rate – “unparalleled to anywhere else in the world” – requires employment policy revisions; there is a list of related recent articles at the Hub of Sparkle!here; and Japanianwrites on the implications of the aging and shrinking Japanese population, with obvious parallels in Korea (via Global Voices).
18)Brand Confucianreports that KT recently promoted 3 women to top-tier executive positions.
19) However miserly it sounds, something that may have a lasting impact on the rate of young Koreans living independently before marriage is the raising of the minimum wage to 4,110 won per hour. See Judy Han at Otherwise for the details.
20)ROK Dropdiscusseswhether the Korean Army should also conscript women, or do away with conscription altogether. Given conscription’s role in a pervasive militarization of Korean society, as I discuss in this series of posts beginning here, then I’m much more in favor of the latter.
Events, Movies, and Fashion
21)FeetManSeoul’s cover model Lee Seul-gi (이슬기) becomes Miss Korea 2009. I’m a little confused though, because the Korea Times reported that a different woman won.
22) Chris in South Korea (naturally) visited and took many pictures of the Wild Women’s Performing Arts Festival that I mentioned last month (see #17 here).
24) Rebecca Voight at The New York Timesloses her head and claims that Korean menswear is innovative. Meanwhile, Five by Fifty says that pink is both Japanese women’s most and second least-preferred color on Japanese men.
25) (Male) actor Yoo Ji-tae (유지태) is to receive Seoul Women’s Prize.
26) Apparently, Kim Yu-na (김연아) is a champion skater primarily because of her small face. For the details, see here, and see here and here for where such a crazed logic stems from.
27) Keeping Korea Beautiful: read here for an interview with Klaus Fassbender, president and executive director of L’Oreal Korea.
29)Breathless(똥파리 or “shit fly” in typically earthy Korean), a Korean movie about domestic violence that I wrote a little about here, has won its 13th award, this time at the New York Asian Film Festival.
30) Finally, in news outside of Korea, Matt at On My Way to Korea has a post on the way women are presented in North Korean propaganda posters; EqualWrites explains why being catcalled in Vietnam is not flattering; Shanghaiistwrites about “homowives”, or heterosexual women married to gay Chinese men (hat tip to Left Flank); and finally, the Economist has an article about Gay rights in China and last month’s Shanghai Pride Week.
With those top two panels reminding me of the futuristic Blade Runner, it’s ironic that the ad is actually based on the decidedly archaic belief that one’s bloodtype determines one’s personality. What’s more, it’s a surprisingly deeply-held one too, with some Korean women even rejecting all B-type men as potential marriage partners because of it, as I discussed when I wrote about a similar marketing campaign for kiwifruit back in May. In short, it’s not quite the same as having a good laugh at your daily horoscope, and can’t be so easily dismissed.
A strange {and slightly disturbing} advertisement for Tandy found on this site about the 2005 movie My Boyfriend is Type B {B형 남자친구}. See later in the post for one more, and here for a review of the movie.
Lest one is tempted to jump to conclusions about Koreans’ critical-thinking skills though, then consider this blog post on the subject that was featured on the front page of Yahoo! Korea about a month later, which I’ve translated below. It is from the 12th most popular Korean blog according to its own blog ranking system—by way of comparison, this one is currently ranked 87,378 out of 4,644,184—so it would have been read by a lot of people:
우리나라에서만 볼 수 있는 ‘혈액형’ 광고의 불편함…
It’s discomforting how Korea is the only country in the world with advertisements about bloodtypes…
A형, B형, AB형, O형이 한자리에 앉아서 식사를 하고 있었다. 갑자기 AB형이 밥을 먹다 말고 벌떡 일어나 뛰쳐나가자 O형이 AB형을 뒤쫓아간다.
남겨진 A형이 B형에게 조심스레 묻는다: “쟤 혹시 나한테 화난거야?”
온라인과 오프라인을 막론하고 이젠 귀에 딱지가 앉을 정도로 듣게되는 혈액형별 성격에 관한 유머다.
일본에서 들어와 국내에 뿌리내린 혈액형별 성격 분석은 독일의 우성학에서 출발해 일본에서도 1970년대에 확고히 자리잡았다고 하는데 이런 성격 분석이 국내에 유입되어 뿌리내리며 우리나라를 전세계에서 몇 안되는 혈액형 신봉 국가를 만들어 버렸다. 사람 둘 셋만 모이면 혈액형에 대한 이야기가 쏟아져 나오는 그런 나라…;;
그렇게 보면 다음 CF들은 어쩌면 우리나라에서만 만날 수 있는 광고의 유형은 아닐까?
Four people, one with bloodtype A, one with B, one with AB, and one with O were sitting down having a meal together. Suddenly, “AB” stopped eating and got up and ran outside, and “O” decided to follow (him).
“A” and “B” remained, and A nervously asked B: “Is (he) angry with me?”
(James: No, I don’t get it either. But, for the remainder of the cartoon version on the right, see here, and here for many more like it.)
Needless to say, online and offline, there is so much humor about blood types that people are very tired of it.
Blood type and personality analysis originally derives from German eugenics, but it became firmly rooted in Japan in the 1970s, and from there in Korean culture, making Korea one of just a handful of countries that haven’t thrown such beliefs away. Indeed, get two or three Koreans together, and invariably they’ll end up chattering about blood types…
In this sense, you can only really see commercials like the following in Korea, right?
혈액형으로먹는다… 제스프리골드키위/Eat according to your blood type…Zespri Golden Kiwi
키위를 먹는 방식을 혈액형 성격 분석에 맞춰 유머러스하게 풀어놓은 제스프리의 CF다.
Here’s a humorous commercial by Zespri saying different blood types eat Kiwis in different styles (James: see my earlier post for the other 3 in the series):
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혈액형으로마신다… 2% 부족할때/Drink according to your blood type…2% “Near Water”
제스프리가 코믹이란 콘셉트를 내세웠다면 이쪽은 혈액형과 치환되는 단어와 사랑을 엮고 빅뱅을 얹어 광고를 내놨는데 실제 빅뱅 멤버의 혈액형에 맞춘 광고란다.
Whereas the Zespri commercials had a comic concept, the following ones with the band Big Bang (빅뱅) has each member falling in love and romancing women according to their bloodtypes (James: this video combines all 4 commercials in the series):
재학습되는혈액형성격분석…/These commercials help perpetuate public belief in the bloodtype and personality theory
평소 귀가 얇은 편이라 혈액형별 성격 분석에 종종 혹하는 편이지만 ABO식 혈액형의 고작 4가지 패턴으로 60억 세계인의 성격을 모두 분류할 수 있다고는 생각치 않는다. 또 이론적 뿌리도 부실하고 지나친 일반화와 선입견 듬뿍 담긴 규정으로 혈액형 별로 사람을 가늠해 버리는 것 자체가 혈액형에 기준한 성격 분석이 갖는 문제점이라고 생각하는 편이다.
Normally I’m a little gullible, so I’m often convinced of the validity of the bloodtype and personality theory, but still, I can’t believe that all 6 billion people in the world can be compartmentalized and categorized into just four types. And it is a problem that people are influenced by and follow the rules of their prescribed personality when the theory is based on insufficient evidence, is too generalistic, and rife with prejudices and preconceptions.
그런 이유로 이번에 소개한 혈액형에 관한 CF들은 왠지 불편했는데…감각적인 영상과 유머 코드로 적당히 버무려 광고를 바라보는 이들에게 쉽게 퍼지고 기억되는 이런 영상들이 결국 사람들 사이에 회자되는 혈액형별 성격 분석을 재학습시키고 있는게 아닐까란 생각에 이르렀기 때문이다.
For this reason, seeing these commercials made me feel a little uncomfortable…when sensible (if misguided) notions of bloodtype and personality are mixed with humorous ones in a sort-of cultural code and then utilized in commercials like these, they help to keep the theory on everyone’s minds and thereby perpetuate artificial divisions.
물론 사회에서 익숙한 코드를 반영해 상품을 홍보하는 건 일반적인 광고의 특성이니 어쩔 수 없는 부분이 있었겠지만 그래도 “이 혈액형은 이렇고 저 혈액형은 저래. 그러니 너는 이렇지?”라는 식으로 세상 모두를 4가지 성격군으로 분류할 수 있다고 생각하는 것 자체가 문제 아닐까?
훗~ 평범한 O형의 한마디였다. 응?
Of course commercials will always reflect a society’s cultural codes, but nevertheless isn’t it a problem when we say “this bloodtype behaves like this, that one like that, so that’s why you do what you do, yes?”, and that we want to compartmentalize the whole world into just four types?
I’m O by the way. Is that a typical thing for an O type to say? (Finish)
Not exactly the piercing critique I anticipated when I began translating, but that wasn’t my point really, which was more to provide a healthy reminder that just like back home there is a healthy diversity of opinions in Korea on just about every subject, but which it’s very easy to overlook if you only rely on English-language sources. Indeed, I’ve just found yet another, longer news report on the same two advertising campaigns, which I’m happy to also translate if anyone’s further interested (it’ll be good revision).
In the meantime, while finding some images for this post I couldn’t help but notice that, once again, apparently the powers that be felt that only young women in tight t-shirts and/or miniskirts could persuade persuade Koreans to perform their civic duty on “World Blood Donor Day” this year (left) and last (right). Come to think it though, that particular advertising convention doesn’t exactly detract from the aim of getting people’s blood flowing…
Sorry, I couldn’t resist it. And in fairness, this year’s ads did feature boy-band Super Junior (슈퍼주니어) also. For some big pictures of them promoting donating blood, albeit together with Girls’ Generation (소녀시대), see here.
Unfortunately, my two young daughters have never really granted me the spare weekends, money, or energy required to pursue my fledgling interest in creative Korean art, but I still subscribe to the odd art and/or photography blog, and am particularly interested in the theme of juxtapositions. Still, I’ve never really seen anything quite like this “Real World” series by Back Seung Woo though, in which the juxtapositions are so subtle and so well blended together that they can take a few seconds to register, however glaring they may be in hindsight. Someone unfamiliar with Korean-style apartments for instance, and/or the area around the base of the Eiffel Tower, could well take some convincing that that’s not the real thing above…let alone that it’s actually a 50cm high model.
For more images and information about his work, see the Asian Photography Blog here (image source: Gana Art).
( Source: Nevermind )
And for more on most of those points you can see this earlier post of mine on the Korean education system, and also this one by Seamus Walsh on the role of Confucianism in it. But they are all very much open to debate (and I encourage you to do so in the comments), and most importantly can probably be added to: the nature of the Korean music industry, for instance, is probably the real main factor behind this recent alleged case by Korean singer G-Dragon (G-드래곤). And so it proves that there is also a quirk specific to the advertising industry that encourages it there too.
its more fluent, intelligent and interesting members were replaced in favor of mere photogenic ones and more tabloidish discussion topics in Season 2 though, and in was in this vein that was widely regarded as foreign male-bashing on the show occurred in Season 3 last month, which naturally provoked a vehement response in the Korean blogosphere: see #1 
After shooting up in 2006 and 2007 because of the belief that those were auspicious birth years, the rate has fallen again. Moreover, 10,000 fewer babies were born during the first five months of this year compared to the same period a year ago. This has prompted dire projections that Korea’s birth rate could fall to 1.12 this year….
5) 
19) Not that she’s the only Korean female celebrity doing so 
7) 
( 
3) Lee Myung-bak 
8) Choi Han-bit (최한빛) on the right (
Four people, one with bloodtype A, one with B, one with AB, and one with O were sitting down having a meal together. Suddenly, “AB” stopped eating and got up and ran outside, and “O” decided to follow (him).
The Grand Narrative 
