First Korean Man Convicted of Spousal Rape Found Dead

(Source: danle; CC BY 2.0)

Not the outcome I expected when I first wrote about this on Sunday. From Yonhap news:

BUSAN, Jan. 20 (Yonhap) — A South Korean man, the first to be convicted of spousal rape in the country, was found dead Tuesday in an apparent suicide, police officials said.

The 43-year-old man, identified by his surname Lim, was found by his mother hanged at his home in southern Busan around 2:40 p.m., according to the police.

This is just breaking news, so I’ll add more tomorrow once more than just the bare details become available. In the meantime, here is a brief Korean news video with a transcript for those of you that speak Korean.

Update: Rather than simply repeating what he mentions, for more information let me direct you to Robert Koehler’s post on the subject here.

Update 2: See also #2 here.

Korean Comics for Adults

(Source: ppassu; left, right)

While it’s been a long time since I’ve translated “articles” about photoshoots of Korean women in bikinis for the purposes of learning Korean, I’m still always on the lookout for more stimulating study material than the temple tours, making kimchi, and the joys of wearing a hanbok that are the normal fare for Korean textbooks. I’ve also long lamented that comic books known as manhwa are largely considered a child’s pursuit in Korea, whereas tens of millions of Japanese adults from all walks of life read manga daily (it would be interesting to learn why), and so I am happy to report that I have finally found poptoon (팝툰), a bi-weekly, book-like collection of over a dozen comics (plus columns and articles) for only 3300 won, in its own words “full of things that children don’t know are fun for adults” (“아이들은 모르는 어르의 재미 팝툰”), and which I’ve been happily getting stuck into on my daily commute for the past month or so now.

Don’t be misled by the attention-grabbing image above though, not actually from one of the comics but merely the artwork that accompanies a regular column called “pop-ing city,” albeit a spunky one that in the first edition I bought happened to be about one-night stands. In fact, although most of their female characters do tend to be on the voluptuous side (not that there’s anything “wrong” with that), most of the comics in it—ranging from Korean-style slapstick comedy, critiques of Lee Myung-bak, and gangster stories to science-fiction, and with very different artistic styles—barely so much as mention any sexual subject at all, let alone have any risqué pictures in them, and in fact I’ve only ever come across one panel that I’d rather the halmoni sitting next to me on the bus hadn’t had seen, and even that one simply of a nude woman (albeit spreadeagled) being painted by an artist. But once you know which regular cartoons with the rare *cough* naughty bits are, then it’s a simple matter to avoid brazenly sharing them with your fellow commuters (source, right: dableman).

The downside of that variety is that there’ll undoubtedly be some comics among them that you simply don’t like, and I’d have to admit that at the moment at least there’s about half that I’d happily have removed for the sake of having something less tiring to hold. But still, there’s plenty in each edition to keep me occupied for two weeks, and my own personal favorite cartoonist in it is 하혜연, whose comics seem to have a focus on early 20-somethings pondering their pretentiousness and angst, something which I still happen to be rather good at. Regardless of what particular comic does it for you though, naturally the language used in all is very contemporary, with slang that you won’t find in any textbooks but which you’ll be very likely to encounter in your daily life.

To see what it actually looks like, and get a little more information about its contents (albeit all in Korean), go to its homepage here. I’d be surprised if your local bookstore didn’t stock them, but the ones in mine do seem to disappear pretty quickly!

Korean Gender Reader

(Source: Carolyn Speranza; CC BY 2.0)

Three news reports to start this series with, in order from the most negative to the positive. All are originally from the Korea Times, here, here and here:

1. Textbooks Hit With Gender Bias Accusation

By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter

Textbooks for primary school students have been accused of containing illustrations that could create a gender bias.

Male characters appear about 30 percent more often than girls in textbook illustrations and are portrayed as main characters, according to a paper coauthored by Prof Kwon Chi-soon of Seoul National University of Education and Kim Kyung-hee, a teacher at Euncheon Elementary School in Seoul.

”Male characters play important roles in many cases while female characters often play passive roles,” the research team said in the paper. ”Children are vulnerable to the biased role models and textbook writers have to remove those sexual stereotypes.”

The paper said men are depicted as a president, politician, judge, doctor and university professor, while women appear as a teacher, nurse and bank tellers.

Male characters play the main roles about 60 percent more often than their counterparts in textbooks, it said. In social studies textbooks, male characters appeared twice as often as females.

But textbooks for domestic affairs and arts have more female characters than male figures in their illustrations, the paper added.

As a teenager in the early-1990s in New Zealand, I remember reading some school social studies textbooks making much the same points about New Zealand science textbooks of the late-1970s, after which they were (presumably) thoroughly updated. On the one hand this just goes to show how far behind Korean institutions are in their knowledge of and/or concern about gender issues (see more on that here) but on the other it may well presage belated moves to correct that, recent immigration, for instance, leading to an end to Korean school textbooks extolling the virtues of ethnic homogeneity and maintaining pure racial bloodlines (no, really) in 2006. So, although this highlights a problem, surely at least acknowledging that a problem exists is an important and necessary first step? Especially in Korea, where so much is routinely swept under the carpet for the sake of saving face?

Or so I thought before I began writing this post: now that I have, I’m somewhat less optimistic, as I’ve just discovered that the changes to the sexist depictions of gender roles were in fact already supposed to have been made in the 2007 editions! Sigh. Were they been made or not? Were they originally so bad that the recent editions criticized above are in fact the improved versions? If any readers are interested in finding out, please let me know and I’ll do some further investigating, but in the meantime if anyone wants to read more on the subject then here, here and here are some journal articles putting gender roles in Korean textbooks into comparative perspective for you, here and here are two articles explaining why textbook revisions in general are so problematic in Korea, and finally here is Michael Hurt’s convincing visual explanation of where some of Korean children’s stereotypes about race come from.

2. President Lee Calls for Job-Sharing korean-woman-fuck-you

By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak called for wage cuts Thursday to create more jobs, one day after a government report showed the country’s employment market shrank for the first time in over five years, according to Yonhap News.

“The most urgent issue on our hands is to create jobs for the heads of households,” the President was quoted as saying at a meeting of the Emergency Economy Management Council. The presidential body was set up last week to paddle the country out of the economic crisis.

Lee suggested the government promote “job-sharing” among workers, according to the presidential office spokesman.

“I believe we should think of ways to promote job-sharing by cutting wages,” Lee was quoted as saying by spokesman Lee Dong-kwan. The President added that wage cuts would prompt employers to hire more workers.

The remarks come one day after the National Statistical Office said the country lost 12,000 jobs last month, marking the first contraction since October 2003.

Unless you’re familiar with my thesis topic, then the inclusion of this article here will probably make little sense, but — with the proviso that I’ll have to go to the original Korean source(s) to confirm that that was indeed what he said — if accurately translated, that otherwise innocuous-sounding statement of Lee Myung-bak’s that I’ve highlighted above may have huge long-term implications for Korean feminism.

In a nutshell, this is because it echoes similar statements during the “IMF Crisis” a decade ago, when women were the first to be laid off by Korean companies, under the explicit and oft-repeated assumption that they would be provided for either by their father if they were unmarried (Koreans generally live at home until they’re married), or by their husbands if they were. Being such a comparatively recent entrant into the labor market, and in an environment where women were still overwhelmingly expected to quit their jobs upon marriage or becoming pregnant, then the latter especially would be targeted, to the extent that many desperately kept their marital status a closely-guarded secret from employers, and doing so became a theme of many popular dramas a little later.

My thesis is specifically about how women’s anger at this fundamentally changed Korean women’s perceptions of their ideal Korean men, ultimately giving rise to Korea’s own distinct brand of metrosexuals, but in terms of Korean feminism as a whole the strong reaffirmation of the men as breadwinner and women as homemaker mentality arguably put the cause of women’s right back by at least a decade. Or to be more precise, put them in stasis: not that it’s the only indicator that should be considered when looking at the last decade, but I do think it’s telling that, according to my copy of Working Korea 2007 by Kim Yoo-Sun of the Korea Labor and Society Institute, the gender wage gap shows a slow but steady improvement in the two decades before the crisis, with women making 45% of what men made in 1980; 48% in 1985; 53% in 1990; 60% in 1995; and finally peaking at 64% in 1998…only to stay there for next 8 years. Unfortunately nothing says that like the graph itself, with the straight diagonal line up from 1980 to 1998 and then a virtually horizontal line from 1998 to 2006, but I haven’t been able to find a similar graphic on Korean government websites, nor do I recommend users installing the numerous ‘ActiveX’ programs I reluctantly acquiesced to just to be able to see any statistics at all. I did however, find this corroborating evidence on the English version of the Ministry of Gender Equality website:

As far as I know, so far employers are not again targeting women for layoffs in the recent financial crisis, and while it is certainly severely affecting the Korean middle-class as a whole, I don’t expect the crisis to be remotely as bad as that of 1998. Moreover, the Korean labour market fundamentally changed as a result of that crisis, in the decade since Korea going from having the largest number of job-for-life, male-breadwinner salaryman-style jobs in the OECD to having the most irregular jobs instead (see here), a huge change that has meant that – even though Korean women do still have the lowest labor participation rate in the OECD – families with dual incomes are now the norm rather than the exception, which, combined with there being virtually no political support for working mothers, has meant that the Korean birthrate has plummeted to being the world’s lowest. So it is certainly ominous that, despite this new reality, the Korean president still seems to see women’s economic – and thereby political – empowerment not as something fundamental to a modern, democratic and capitalist nation-state, but instead as almost superfluous to requirements, to be denied to them with every downturn of the economic cycle. In hindsight, given his statements around the period of his election victory, kind of predictable too: see my posts on those here, here, and then here in chronological order.

Despite the potential doom and gloom though – remember the jury’s still out on the current crisis’s effect on women, and on Lee Myung-bak’s specifc remarks – ironically it will actually be a huge boon to my thesis. One problem with attributing any social change anywhere to a backlash is that, no matter how plausible it may be, how to find direct evidence? Given how tightly constrained Korean women were (and still are) in any open public criticism of men after the IMF Crisis, then even women’s magazines of the period are unlikely to have had any scathing editorials on the subject. But today, in 2009? If I’m right, then I’m very confident that as you read this at least some female netizens will have picked up on this, and be writing all over forums that, well, Lee Myung-bak can go fuck himself…all examples of which will will take pride of place in my bibliography!

(Update: see here for Korea’s gender wage gap worsening in 2007, and here on it also being the biggest in the OECD)

3. Court Convicts Man of Raping Wife

A husband who forced sex on his foreign wife has been convicted of rape, the first time that marital rape has been recognized by a local court.

To date, courts refused to acknowledge marital rape ㅡ a non-consensual sexual assault in which the perpetrator is the victim’s spouse ㅡ because it contradicted a law stating that a husband and wife were mutually responsible for faithfully responding to a request for sex from one another. In 1970, the Supreme Court did not uphold a guilty verdict in a similar rape case.

The Busan District Court sentenced a 42-year-old husband to 30 months in prison, suspended for three years, on charges of raping his 25-year-old Filipino spouse.

In the ruling, Judge Go Jong-joo said, ”the accused infringed upon his wife’s right to have sex or not. Even worse, he frequently used a blunt weapon to threaten her when she refused his request.”

According to statements in court, the husband threatened his wife with a gas gun and a knife.

The man first met his wife through a Seoul-based international matchmaking agency in August 2006 and they married that year. He was indicted in July 2008 after coercively having sex with his wife, who resisted citing her ongoing menstrual cycle. The man appealed the case.

The United Nations said in 2006 marital rape is a prosecutable offense in at least 104 countries worldwide.

To which Tom Coyner provides this excellent commentary, which I can’t really add to:

[This] article raises a lot of questions of what is afoot here. First, a ruling of this sort is way overdue. Last year there was a scandal when a Vietnamese wife of a blue collar Korean jumped to her death from her apartment building, but her family strongly believes she was pushed given recent phone calls, letters, etc. The man walked away unpunished.

In any case, one naturally wonders if this punishment of spousal violence will apply to Koreans wives. The good news, of sorts, is one no longer sees public wife beating as once did thirty years ago. But one can only shudder when thinking of what happens in the home.

But getting back to Filipina-Korean marriages, according to a Filipina friend of mine who has lived in Korea many years, the general reputation among Filipinos here is that only one in ten such marriages are viewed as being successful. Often the problems can be traced back to language problems. But in any case, drunken wife beating is a common problem. My friend knew a separate story of a Filipina wife being pushed out a third floor apartment window by her Korean husband.

Another problem is that Koreans are primarily concerned in finding a wife to produce children. After the offspring are produced, the wives are essentially discarded.

Finally, another sad aspect of this travesty is that the wives are often better educated than their husbands as a result of their families having invested a great deal to ensure their daughters get good and even advanced educations. Naive expectations include in having their daughters marry someone of a more advanced country, their daughters will fulfill their dreams. Apparently such dreams, much more often than not, turn into nightmares upon arrival at Incheon.

If you haven’t heard of Tom Coyner, then I highly recommend checking out his website and signing up to his Korean Economic Reader emailing list here; the above comes from that, so obviously it is not just about economic issues.

Update: Unfortunately, as today’s editorial in the Korea Times makes clear, the notion of spousal rape still has quite a few legal hurdles to overcome before it is definitively considered a crime by the Korean legal establishment, let alone by the Korean public.

Update 2: As I reread the report today, I began to have concerns that the issue of spousal rape might get sidelined as an issue of Southeast-Asian immigrant wives rather than of Korean women as a whole, and Baltimoron of the Left Flank blog argues that unfortunately all signs point to this so far.

Update 3: It appears that the Korean husband committed suicide on Monday. For more information, see here.

Why do so Many Korean Children Wear Glasses?

(Source: LG전자; CC BY 2.0)

Update, April 2009: In hindsight, I didn’t cover this subject thoroughly enough here, leaving some questions unanswered. For a more comprehensive overview, see this article I wrote for the Korea Times.

Update 2, June 2013: And for a much more up-to-date overview, see this article I wrote for Busan Haps.

If I’d been asked this question yesterday, then I too would have answered that it was because they were always hunched over their books, or staring at computer screens. But the surprising result of this Australian study was that those are only correlated but not causative factors.

In fact, it’s because they don’t get enough exposure to sunlight.

I confess, before I read the details of the survey, I was very sympathetic to such a result: young Korean women, for instance, have among the lowest Vitamin D levels in the world because of avoiding the sun for the sake of light skins, and given how the required behavior and body images that lead to such extremes are inculcated very early in Korean children’s lives, then if a lack of sunlight does indeed lead to myopia (short-sightedness) I’d wager money on rates being higher among Korean teenage girls than boys. Not much higher, no, but I’d still expect a statistically significant difference between them.

But technically the study never looked at Korean children specifically. And while Korea certainly shares other developed East Asian countries’ skyrocketing rates of myopia among children — virtually all my middle-school students wear glasses or contact lenses, and I bet yours do too — I was confused when I heard that the study was primarily based on Singaporean children.

How on Earth do children that live on the equator not get enough sun?

Actually, partially it’s precisely because they live there. As head researcher Dr. Ian Morgan explains in an Australian radio interview, the heat meant that:

The children in Singapore were spending about three hours a week outside, so very, very limited periods of time outside, excluding the school hours. Basically they went to school, they went home, they did their homework and then they watched television and that was life.

But this issue of climate wouldn’t apply so much to children in other East Asian countries, where the same education culture of going to school during the day and then cram schools in the evenings prevails, although that does also mean that they’re not outdoors much of course. But how to tease apart the effects of that lifestyle from a lack of sunlight specifically? Things like diet, and, say, the not insignificant fact that Korean children get the least sleep in the world, would presumably have some effect too.

Here’s the key part of the radio interview that reveals how and why researchers did that. Without it, basic summaries of the study like this and this that are all over the news wires are good introductions, but raise more questions than answers really:

DR IAN MORGAN:….we have been able to compare the prevalence of myopia in Chinese kids in Singapore, as compared to kids of Chinese origin growing up in Sydney. And at the age of six, the kids in Singapore — the Chinese kids in Singapore are ten times more myopic than the kids of Chinese origin in Australia.

INTERVIWER: But did the Singaporean children spend more time in near-work activity than the Sydney children?

DR IAN MORGAN: If anything, they spent a little bit less and this is what led in part to us looking for what other factors could be important. And the striking difference that came across was that these kids — remember they’re matched for age and they’re matched for ethnicity, they’re all of Chinese origin. The kids of Chinese origin in Sydney were spending a lot more time outdoors than the kids of Chinese origin in Singapore.

For more details, including the debunking of alternative theories that there is some genetic susceptibility to myopia among East Asian populations, and why it is specifically light intensity that is important, then I highly recommend reading the radio interview in full.

I don’t have the time to translate anything myself unfortunately, but it’ll be interesting to see how the Korea media interprets the results of this study. While it would be just one of a very long list of serious social and health problems among young Koreans resulting from Korea’s after-school institute or hagwon (학원) culture, and so unlikely to lead to any huge changes overnight, all the various English-language articles on the study point out that governments across the region already do have serious concerns about the issue. So, this may well provide just enough of a shove for Korean schools to, say, provide more outdoor physical education and field trips for students. Granted that it’s rather cold at the moment though!

Korean Medical Association: Don’t Take the Pill!

(Source: Surija / “Sray”; CC BY 2.0)

Why not? Well, because Korean women are stupid apparently, unable to do so much as read the instructions and numerous warnings about possible side-effects that come with the product, let alone do their own research and make their own choice about what contraception is best for them personally.

Or at least, that is the more benign reading of this warning from the KMA, and to be fair, given such factors as Koreans’ general reluctance to self-diagnose and be proactive about treating any medical condition that they might have themselves, and many Korean women’s complete reliance on men to use contraception, then at first glance there is nothing to distinguish the top-down, patronizing but also paternalistic tone of the KMA in the warning as any different from any other Korean institution’s relationship with the Korean public. In reality however, in its bias and scare-mongering it demonstrates an explicit and almost sinister vested interest in maintaining the huge abortion industry here.

No, really. That may sound like hyperbole, but then the Korean state already has a long history as an extremely invasive and coercive force in Koreans’ reproductive lives, its population policy in the 1960s and 1970s only slightly less draconian than that of China’s today, at many points having soldiers withdrawn from the DMZ at the height of the Cold War to deliver IUDs and perform abortions in the Korean countryside for instance (see this book for more on that). And such industry-related claims are also widely acknowledged of Japanese health authorities (albeit not so much in Japan itself), which banned the pill for three decades and which Japanese women are still scared of using, so why not of Korea ones too?

But regardless of that background, how else are we to interpret the evidence from just the KMA’s warning alone? Consider that:

It provides no information about possible side-effects that I didn’t already know about 10 years ago (and I’m a guy remember), which begs the question of why the Korea Times considered it “news” exactly.
It literally doesn’t provide a single positive medical benefit of using them, and naturally the Korea Times fails its most basic of journalistic duties by not providing them either.
It implies that somehow there is somehow something unique to contraceptive pills and not, say…amphetamines that makes women’s access to them in much more urgent need of being restricted.
And finally, that in a country where double-standards, moralistic pharmacists and medical staff, virtually non-existent sex education, and a lack of access already combine to severely limit women’s sexual confidence and choices of contraception in practice (see here)…surely it is telling that the most senior medical institution in the country is literally scaring women away from using the single safest and most effective contraceptive in human history?

Actually, I do agree that there are some benefits to women of, say, requiring a prescription from a doctor to get the pill, one poster in this forum (which I give a hat tip to for some of the above) pointing out that it means many women will usually get gynecological examinations at the same time, wheres they wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. But, one should always be very careful to acknowledge the different contexts in which they occur, and I dare say that most young British women buying contraceptives, for instance, are not asked by pharmacists if they’re married, or alternatively the same by doctors and nurses rather than a more neutral, non-judgmental inquiry as to if they are sexually active. To require a prescription in those circumstances would surely mean that many women simply wouldn’t go to get them all, which renders quick and easy access to the pill, albeit online if you don’t look 25 or older, one of the very few positives about Korean sexual culture (source, right: NEWSis).

Ending on another positive note, all trends in Korea point to continued increased use of the pill over time, and I’m not merely seeking brownie points among my readers when I say that I do have confidence in Korean women even just considering the pill not to be swayed by “warnings” like this. Given how, as I explained in my last post on the subject, half the battle is getting many Korean women to take an active role in using contraception at all, then merely thinking about all the pros and cons of the options available is an important first step. And of those that have done so, then I dare say that from that point on they will apply a more discerning eye to the ravings of groups like the KMA!

Update: In case anyone wants it, here is the original warning in Korean too.

Semi-Nude Photos of 14-Year Old Draw Controversy

The 14-year old girl is Park Seo-jin, the controversial photoshoot from the Mnet reality show I Am A Model. It’s already covered in numerous “news” articles though, so let me just quickly highlight one element of it here: that for all the recent and historical mania about protecting underage girls against foreign pedophiles, the Korean police seem strangely reluctant to respect their own laws banning the nude photos of minors that would (presumably) encourage them. The most obvious examples being one of the promotion posters for—let alone various scenes in—Samaritan Girl/Samaria (2004), all shot when actress Kwak Ji-min was still in high school, and therefore legally a minor.

Like with those, no-one will ever be prosecuted for Park Seo-jin’s photos. Unlike those though, they do seem to be creating much more negative reaction. Most likely, simply because she is just sooo young.

What do you think?

Update: In case of any confusion, note that while she’s 16 according to the (strange) Korean age system, her birth date is actually 11 March 1994.

The Scent of a Man: What deodorant commercials tell us about Korean metrosexuality

(Source: I am Goding)

As the message boards of numerous expat forums will attest, Koreans simply don’t wear deodorant, except for a few young urban sophisticates in the summer. What’s more, it’s likely almost all of those young urban sophisticates are women, as there have been no deodorant commercials aimed at Korean men yet (although Nivea did start using men alongside women for in-store promotions from 2007).

But why on Earth not? While I disagree with most prevailing explanations for the origins of Korea’s own, distinct brand of metrosexuality, that doesn’t mean that in the last decade or so there hasn’t been an explosive growth in sales of men’s skincare, cosmetic and grooming products to accompany that. It seems strange that Korean men prepared to spend the money and time on, say, wearing “masculine” sunblock for ten months of the year, wouldn’t also be concerned about how they smelled.

In Japan, even the middle-aged ajosshis are:

Explanations of why both sexes don’t wear deodorant usually focus on their (allegedly) sweating less than the average Westerner and the different kinds of foods that they eat. But personally, I give much more credence to the notion that — to the extent that most Koreans had even heard of the stuff until very recently — it was considered a luxury that few could afford, Korean consumerism in general still being trapped in the mentality of four decades ago. Back then, basic items were scarce, food barely adequate and lacking in quality or variety, and domestic monopolies and the restrictions on the imports of consumer meant that the customer was expected to be grateful for whatever he or she was given, as evidenced today by, for example: the gifting of soap, spam, cooking oil and/or shampoo (examples) on the two biggest holidays of Chuseok (추석) and Seollal (설날); a cuisine culture that — frankly — seems to consist of little more than throwing everything available together and then smothering the combination with salt, sugar or spicy pepper paste; and the often appalling customer service that still prevails in 2008 respectively.

Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, one could also argue that with virtually no-one wearing it and everyone used to the bad smell of each other to the extent that they don’t notice it, then the very minimal benefits of an individual wearing it mirror, say, the economics of my recently purchasing a videocall-capable phone: initially very expensive to myself, completely useless if others don’t have one also, but with increasing benefits to me as others do buy and use them (i.e. I can both talk to more and more people and services will probably become cheaper). Similarly, in the case of expensive Korean deodorant, as the number of users increased then Korean noses would become more and more sensitive to distinguishing between those who did and didn’t use it, and then later to lower prices and people having positive associations with and assumptions about the former group (source, left: cjswoxodwk).

Seemingly regardless of that background however, while it is true that early deodorant commercials featured – in a quintessentially Korean fashion – having a motherly figure explaining the benefits to respectfully attentive and nodding young Korean women (but which unfortunately predate the YouTube era), and that the first commercial below from just two years ago seemed to emphasize friendship more than anything else, commercials aimed at women are increasing in quantity and sophistication every summer, most like these two here and here (I can’t seem to embed them unfortunately) emphasizing deodorant’s supposed benefits in attracting the opposite sex just like their Western counterparts. Moreover, while for various reasons I personally hate any dubbed commercials, you don’t have to speak Korean to understand that the woman in the the second video opens with “What part of my body do you like the best? My legs? My ass? Or my hands?”, which, to put it mildly, you don’t otherwise hear all too often on Korean daytime television. Any wonder that it’s still the most popular deodorant commercial in Korea a year later?

But still, why aren’t deodorants marketed to men here? Actually there is a very detailed report on the Korean deodorant market available on the internet which may have the answer, and I’m quite happy to receive donations towards the US$753(!) required to purchase it and to pass on its conclusions when I do. But in the meantime, via this article on perfume science from the Economist magazine I’ve found, if perhaps not a perfect solution to the conundrum, then at least pointers towards further investigation. Here’s the gist of it, with my emphases throughout:

(Source: OHLALAMag)

THE very word “perfume” has feminine overtones to many male ears. Men can be sold “deodorant” and possibly “aftershave”, but the idea of all those dinky little bottles with their fussy paraphernalia is too much for the sensitive male ego. Yet no industry can afford to neglect half its potential market, and perfume-makers are ever keen to crack the shell of male reticence. Now they may know how to do so.

Craig Roberts of the University of Liverpool and his colleagues-working with a team from Unilever’s research laboratory at nearby Port Sunlight-have been investigating the problem. They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odor it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.

Half of Dr Roberts’s volunteers were given an aerosol spray containing a commercial formulation of fragrance and antimicrobial agents. The other half were given a spray identical in appearance but lacking active ingredients. The study was arranged so that the researchers did not know who had received the scent and who the dummy. Each participant obviously knew what he was spraying on himself, since he could smell it. But since no one was told the true purpose of the experiment, those who got the dummy did not realize they were being matched against people with a properly smelly aerosol.

Over the course of several days, Dr Roberts’s team conducted a battery of psychological tests on both groups of volunteers. They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. Not that surprising, perhaps. What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. The women in question were shown short, silent videos of the volunteers. They deemed the men wearing the deodorant more attractive. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.

For Unilever and other manufacturers of men’s scent, this is an important discovery. The firm’s marketing of its main product in this area, a deodorant called Lynx, plays up the so-called “Lynx Effect” – which is supposed to make men irresistibly attractive to women. Dr Roberts’s experiment, however, suggests that the advertised “Born chicka wah wah” of the product may have nothing to do with a woman’s appreciation of the smell, and everything to do with its psychological effect on the man wearing it.

The rest of the article focuses on the scientific theories of smell and attractiveness, not uninteresting in themselves, and I highly recommend you read the full article, especially the comments. Finally, a quick excerpt from the conclusion:

There are many useful inferences that might be drawn from this research. One would be that a woman’s choice of perfume will resist the vagaries of fashion. This may explain why most innovation in the industry involves changes in packaging and marketing, producing all that fussy paraphernalia, rather than changing what is in the bottle.

In hindsight of course, all quite obvious: I’m sure that we can all appreciate how, say, going through the process of our “date preparation routine” — showering listening to your favorite music, wearing more expensive clothes than usual, and finally putting on your expensive perfume/cologne/deodorant strictly reserved for special occasions, and so on – was a very important factor in getting into the mood for it, even though in hindsight showering immediately beforehand would have washed off natural pheromones crucial for the date’s success.

~~Hence my dismal record.~~

Also, while the reasons were unknown until know, manufacturers have undoubtedly long been aware of the effects of the phenomenon, but if not then the basic mechanics of capitalism alone — the inevitable saturation of markets and the rates of profit to fall — would constantly compel them to rebrand and repackage their products, the latest manifestations of which seem to be a decidely “Arctic” theme of absolutely any cosmetic marketed towards Western men.

But what does this tell us about the absence of such commercials in Korea?

(Source: Somang Cosmetics)

For a time, I was planning to look at the origins of Korean metrosexuality for my MA thesis (summary here), put wisely rejected that topic after necessarily watching hundreds of Korean cosmetics commercials aimed at men. Only now though, can I see that a surprising common theme of them is the almost complete absence of women in them. Or to be more precise, with exceptions such as the notorious, multi-layered one with Ahn Jung-hwan (안정환) from 2003 above (video, alas, unavailable), of the relatively few times women are featured in them most of the time they are not at all there to demonstrate the product’s alleged effects on women. Rather, generally they are effectively mere props in narratives very much focused on the men themselves.

Some examples, with and without women, starting with…yes, that one with Ahn and Kim Jae-won (김재원) that unfortunately utterly defined Korean masculinity to a generation of expats in 2002, (update: while I’m at it, I’ve added a parody by some Seoul students also) then with Ahn again and Hyun-bin (현빈) in 2006, unfortunately cutting prematurely his distinctive gesture and facial expression at the end:

Now two more commercials, both with Hyun-bin and from 2006, and the second with Kim Hye-su (김혜수). While they appear at first glance to feature women lusting after Hyun, in fact both commercials are actually for women’s cosmetics:

And finally, a exception from late 2007 with Jung Il-woo (정일우) that proves the rule: that wearing cosmetics=more hot sex with lots of women was not a theme of Korean commercials until — to the extent that there are international standards — very late in the development of metrosexuality compared to other countries:

Why is this significant? Well, because when I wondered in a previous post about why so few commercials for women’s cosmetics featured men — naively thinking attracting them was the sole reason women ever used them — I was very surprised and much impressed by Gomushin Girl’s answer (my emphasis):

…I think the main reason for male absence is the convention of putting the product itself in the ad. While some advertisements focus primarily on the made-up faces, most want to show the packaging and look of the product itself, be it lipstick, mascara, or what have you. This means that a lot of advertisements focus on the process of application, or the period just after the makeup has been put on. This process of being made up is strongly associated with the private sphere, and thus excludes men. Men are present when the results (fully made up and dressed) are there, and so can be part and parcel of clothing and other advertisements, but a make up advertisement needs to feature a woman in a private space, preparing herself for going into the public sphere. If the man were there, it would be subverting the purposes of her putting the makeup on in the first place.

And from which I now take away the conclusion that, very generally speaking, Korean cosmetic commercials for men are much closer to those of Korean (and Western) women’s cosmetics than they are of those of the “wear this and women will want to rape you” style that overwhelmingly dominate the equivalent ones Western men.

Why? We can speculate on any number of reasons. But whatever is ultimately responsible, I would argue that the difference shows that:

Korean cosmetic companies were never in the driving seat behind the rise of metrosexuality in Korea over the last decade or so (which is not to say that they ever were in Western metrosexuality either)
And that the development of Korean metrosexuality at least was always driven by and for women, and thus the manifestations of it in consumer culture have been heavily influenced by preexisting narratives in previously exclusively women-focused industries. Or in other words, it’s like cosmetic companies didn’t realize that they were actually supposed to be advertising to men now.

Both of which buttress(ed) my hypothesis in my thesis proposal…

Lest that sound a little abstract though, let me conclude by stressing that, just like you’d expect, Korean men always have and always will strive for appearances and modes of behavior that are most likely to get them laid. My thesis proposal was really just about some of the possible reasons why thee, well, requirements of Korean women for them to have a greater chance to do so changed in Korea in the late-1990s.

As for why those didn’t include wearing deodorant? Well, given that women didn’t themselves, then there was hardly the demand by them that men did. And I strongly suspect that it will be at least 10 years before a tipping point of deodorant-wearing Korean women is reached and it is seen as standard, after which men will increasingly be expected to wear it too,.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to have my parents send batches of cheap roll-ons from home every few months. But if you’re a single male in Korea? Then it sounds like it can’t harm to pamper yourself!

Why are Korean and Japanese Families so Similar? Part 1: Neo-Confucianism

(Source: LG 전자; CC BY 2.0)

According to a recent study, Japanese women living with their parents-in-law are three times more likely to have a heart attack than those just living with their husbands. This, in a country famous for its very low rates of heart problems overall.

Which got me wondering about Korea. Korean family structures and gender roles are very similar to those of Japan, so it seems reasonable to suppose that the Japanese study has great relevance to Korea, and that a knowledge of Korean family life can reliably inform our interpretation of it.

Or does it? This is the question that has occupied me for past nine days, and, for readers by definition interested in Korean social issues, it is much less abstract and pedantic than perhaps it first sounds. Let me explain.

As a writer about Korean society, but often lacking in English-language material, frankly it is always a temptation to stress its similarities with Japan, just for the sake of having something to work with. But seriously, the huge Japanese role in the development of both the modern Korean state and economy has left profound and enduring legacies. Add that I’m a big proponent of the Marxian concept of base and superstructure—basically that much of a society’s oft-claimed timeless and enduring culture (one aspect of the superstructure) changes pretty damn quickly once economic structures or modes of production change (the base)—too, then it stands to reason that, with still broadly similar economic structures centered around horizontal and vertically-integrated conglomerates known as keiretsu and chaebol respectively, then much about daily life in both societies (workplace culture, working hours, drinking-culture, male-breadwinner based welfare systems, gender divisions between work and the home, and so on) would also be very similar. And it wouldn’t take much reading of just this blog alone to find that this indeed the case.

With that background and strong inclination however, there is always a danger of taking similarities as a given. And particularly in this case, where the authors of the study point out that:

One of the overwhelming things that stands out is that it doesn’t matter for Japanese men what the living arrangements are…they’re immune from stresses in the home (source, right: Urânia – José Galisi Filho).

And from which Samhita of the Feministing blog argues:

The article feigns surprise in finding out that men don’t have these same health problems, but fails to make the obvious conclusion that women get inordinate amounts of pressure from their in-laws to live up to certain expectations that increases stress in their lives. Many women are choosing not to get married or have as many children in Japan, but the culture of expectation around how women should act in the home seems resilient. I wonder if a similar correlation can be made with women that are living with their in-laws in the states?

Which is equally true of Korean brides, where those expectations include assuming the bulk of housework duties, and utter subservience to their mother-in-laws. Naturally, the ensuing potential for domestic tension and conflict make such living arrangements a staple of Korean dramas for decades, one such playing at the moment being You are My Destiny (너는 내 운명, but not to be confused with the 2005 movie with a similar name) starring the decidedly unhappy-looking bride Yuna below. Having said that, just like the traditional hanok houses that many of these dramas are inexplicably set in, one can’t help but assume that women’s disdain for eldest sons and the nuclearization of the Korean family mean that these living arrangements are increasingly rare in practice, which begs the question of why dramatizations of them remain so popular even today.

Writing a week ago, I thought it was because, in practice, living in separate homes has not diminished many parents’ intimate involvement in their childrens’ married lives, and hence the exaggerated situations of dramas still strike a chord amongst married couples and those of marriageable age. Indeed, the combination of Korea’s small size and improvement in Korea’s transport and communications infrastructure has made this even more possible and likely over time. Note that even as recently as the 1970s, a move to Seoul might entail not seeing parents and siblings in the countryside for many years, let alone friends who moved elsewhere in the country. (Source, above: HKGolden.)

But, to spare you the reflections on my preconceptions and academic baggage that took up much of an earlier version of this post, there comes a point where you need evidence. Much of those nine days were spent looking.

Fortunately, I was successful. But in the process, I discovered the question was much more difficult than I thought. Again, to spare readers from a frankly rather incoherent argument in a previous version of this post, in sum I learned that:

According to Yoshio Sugimoto’s brilliant An Introduction to Japanese Society (2003, pp. 175-176), Japanese dramas likewise dwell on intergenerational conflicts in households with extended families.
In fact, Japan has many of more such households than Korea (which will be discussed in Part 2).
But why? Crucially, Japanese society lacks the (Neo-)Confucianist ideology that underscores such family arrangement, and the ensuing conflicts.

Or so I thought. But, after a decade of constantly reading how Korea is the most Confucian country in the world, and “more Confucian than China,” I’d considerably underestimated Confucianism’s influence on the rest of East Asia.

(Source: thomas park; CC BY 2.0)

This was revealed to me by Robert Smith in his chapter “The Japanese (Confucian) Family: The Tradition from the Bottom Up” in Tu Wei-Ming (ed.), Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons (1996), and who aims to show:

…that it is impossible to advance a plausible argument that the Japanese family today is Confucian in the strict sense. It is equally impossible to argue that it has been completely purged of the effects of attempts by the authorities to structure it in terms of selected Confucian principles. (p. 157)

Some selected excerpts to make up the remainder of this post then. Please forgive me if there’s rather a lot of them, and apologies to any Japan-based readers who already started saying “Well…Duh!” to the computer screens some time ago, but hopefully they’ll still be helpful for any readers like myself that aren’t/weren’t as familiar with Japanese social history as they thought they were.

First, on why I had that impression that I did:

I have asked a hopelessly unrepresentative sample of Japanese colleagues, acquaintances, and friends whether contemporary Japanese think of themselves or their families as Confucian. The spontaneous answer is a resounding no, often supplemented by a dismissive reference to the conservative, reactionary, or feudal (a favorite term of opprobrium in Japan) character of its teachings. The implication is that one’s grandfather or great-grandfather may have been taught Confucian ethics and might even have internalized them, but in 1945 the Japanese consigned Confucianism to the dustbin of history. (p. 157)

…

There is one obvious difference between the role of Confucianism in China and Japan, where is has always been only one of many competing ideologies, philosophies and ethical systems, and never, as in China, “a way of life encompassing the ultimate standards for Chinese social and political order.” (158)

And the Japanese tend to underplay the Confucian influence in their own society because:

Japanese Confucianism started as a cultural ideology serving the needs of the Tokugawa Bakufu (or Shōgun, or Army Commander)….Although for a time Confucianism had been discredited along with everything else associated with the shogunate, it gained currency again with the consolidation of conservative power in the late 1920s and 1930s. (p. 158-9).

The latter of which was the decade when:

…Japanese society was being reduced at the hands of fanatics to its most stifling condition of oppressive irrationalism [and] in which the ideals of the Japanese educational world were closer to those of its Togukawa past than at any time since 1870….Is it any wonder that today’s Japanese, if they have thought about it at all, are likely to view Confucianism in a negative light? (p. 159, my emphasis)

Now, why the influence of Confucianism on the Japanese and particularly the Japanese family remains pervasive nevertheless:

Were the Japanese ever Confucianists in, say, the same sense as the Koreans? No one claims that they were. Nevertheless, there are many ways in which the Confucianist concern with hierarchical relationships and its emphasis on harmonious families as the basis for harmonious states seems to have influenced Japanese society. Be that as it may, it is just as likely that the Japanese selectively utilized Confucian teachings to reaffirm and strengthen characteristics of their society, which was deeply rooted in the pre-Confucian past.

Presumably one of the domains in which Confucianism did not simply reinforce and justify older social practices is the treatment of women, for it is widely argued that they enjoyed a far more favorable position in Japanese society before the introducton of Confucianism. It may well be, however, that the decline of women’s status in Japan actually began with the popularization of Buddhism. (pp. 160-1, my emphasis)

Finally:

The question is not whether Confucianism is a religion. It is rather: Does Confucianism, broadly defined (or, perhaps better, undefined) have anything at all to do with religion in Japan?

…

The “rules” by which religions are tacitly expected to operate in Japan are, more than anything else, Confucian. As so often in Japan, Confucianism plays the role of a moral and ethical substratum that, its preconditions being met, allows a harmless surface diversity. Indeed, one could argue, as many have, that these principles go back beyond Confucian influences on early Japan to the values inherent in ancient clan structures and an agricultural society with their demands for loyalty and cooperative effort; Confucianism did not so much crate as articulate the values by which Japanese society works.

…

Virtually all religions that have endured in Japan have adapted external forms agreeable to the patriarchal family model and have made their peace with the state. (p. 171, my emphasis)

At this point, a more thorough blogger than myself would probably move onto those passages where Smith discusses that latent Confucianism within Japanese families (and the education system) more specifically, but I think that readers can reasonably extrapolate those from the big picture that I have already provided rather than requiring me to add those too. Ergo, Japanese families are indeed (Neo) Confucianist, and I’m especially glad that demonstrating that gave me a legitimate opportunity to get stuck into my recently purchased copy of Tu-Wei Ming’s book. But while 2500 words is a rather short post (for me), given the long time this one took and that Confucianism, Demographics and Biological Anthropology are much more discreet subjects than what I normally blog about, I’ll wisely end this post here!

Update

Although they’re not really related to the topic at hand, the questions of: a) to what extent the US could be described as a “Christian country” and b) whether Confucianism is a religion or not came up in the comments, and are interesting in their own rights. And while I’m usually reluctant—yes, really—to type out literally entire pages from books here, Robert Smith does answer both much better than I could:

To what extent has the Japanese family ever been Confucian, and to what extent is it today? Would that the question could be so easily answered. Even the most casual survey of the vicissitudes of Confucianism in Japan suggests the need for caution. Indeed, I was tempted to indicate just how cautious one must be by titling this essay either “Confucianism Is in the Eye of the Beholder” or “Confucian Is as Confucian Does.” That is to say, how Confucianism is described, the praises sung of it, the importance assigned to it, and the terms by which it is denounced are all very strongly colored by the historical period in which the assessments are made, the position in the social hierarchy of the person expressing the opinion, and – not least in recent times – the age and gender of those who views they are.

I hasten to add that in these respects Confucianism seems to me rather like all other philosophical, ethical, and/or religious systems of whatever time or place. An example, drawn from personal experience with one such system, involves one of the myriad subcategories of the southern United States brand of Protestantism. Fifty years ago its construction of Christianity was a finely crafted one that had no place for Catholics, who were thought of as idolaters, or for Quakers, of whom few had ever heard. Depending on the particular church and the position of its minister on the issue, it was not always entirely clear that Methodists and Presbyterians were Christian either.

Be that as it may, did my relatives and neighbors think that they themselves led Christian lives? Of course they did, or tried to. Were it to be pointed out that someone had committed some “unchristian” act, the usual explanations were that all are conceived and born in sin, that it all happened before the miscreant had found God – or perhaps it was because Christ had found him. It is all now too far in the past for me to recall the full inventory of shifting grounds on which our neighbors and relatives took their unshakable Christian stands. Would they have agreed – and do they still – that the United States is a “Christian country”? Of course. They have never doubted it….Yet I wager that in the course of conducting interviews on the subject, you could collect scores of definitions – some of them flatly contradictory – of just what the term “a Christian country” might mean. There is bound to be some overlap, to be sure, but no consensus. Are we then to conclude that the United States is not a Christian country? I think not. But I submit that consensus on the religious and ethical dimensions of Christianity is not much more likely to be achieved than agreement as to precisely what Confucianism might be and whether the Japanese family is a Confucian institution.

It is possible, of course, that I am looking in the wrong place for an authoritative definition, and would be better advised to seek it among the philosophers, the theologians, the ethicists, or the intellectual historians. My reading of the relevant sources, however, strongly suggests that consensus at the tip is even more difficult to achieve than at the bottom. In any event, my anthropological training predisposes me to start at ground level. (pp. 155-157)

Thoughts?

Backlash: The Role of the Asian Financial Crisis in the Feminization of Korean Ideals of Male Beauty

(Source: Unknown)

Just some quick good news that my presentation proposal “Backlash: The Role of the Asian Financial Crisis in the Feminization of Korean Ideals of Male Beauty” has been accepted for the sixth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) conference at Chungnam National University in Daejeon in August next year. I understand if you won’t be penciling anything in your 2009 diary quite yet though, so I’ll make sure to post a reminder closer to the date—it would be nice to meet any readers while I’m there, and to receive feedback.

In the meantime, here’s the abstract, based on this (5100 word!) post from earlier in the year:

In the mid-1990s, the dominant images of men in Korean popular culture were of strong, masculine figures that protected and provided for women, mirroring the male breadwinner ethos that underlay Korea’s then prevalent salaryman system and which, by dint of being much larger and more integral to the Korean economy than the Japanese one with which it is most often associated, had a correspondingly larger hold on the Korean psyche. Despite this, in accounting for the complete switch of dominant images of men to effeminate, youthful “kkotminam” in just a few short years after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, what limited literature exists on evolving Korean sexuality and gender roles in the last decade seems to exhibit a curious blind spot as to possible economic and employment-related factors, instead attributing it to, variously, a rising general “pan-Asian soft masculinity”, the import of Western notions of metrosexuality, and particularly of Japanese ones of “bishōnen”.

In this paper, I begin by acknowledging the validity of these factors but argue that the dominance of Japan in East Asian cultural studies has led scholars to overemphasize the latter, in turn ascribing too much agency to Korean women in their late-teens and early-twenties that were the primary recipients of such Japanese cultural products as “yaoi” fan-fiction. This is anachronistic, as public displays and discussions of female sexuality and ideals of male beauty were in reality very much proscribed in Korea for unmarried women before the 2002 World Cup, the locus of which was primarily married women instead. Indeed, as I will next discuss, in the mid-1990s there was an sudden and intense public discourse on both generated by increasingly radical depictions of married women’s sex lives in books and films, partially reflecting the coming of the age of the first generation of Korean women to receive democratic notions of gender and family life through their schooling but then encountering the reality of Korean patriarchy in their marriages, and partially also the concomitant liberation represented by increased numbers of Korean women entering the workforce: small, but growing, and symbolically significant in that they vindicated decades of the relegation of feminist concerns to the wider aims of the democratization movement as a whole, with the understanding that they would be addressed upon its success.

It is in these contexts that the Asian Financial Crisis struck Korea, and married women in particular would be the first to be laid-off as part of restructuring efforts, with the explicit justification that they would be supported by their husbands. Rather than retaining and reaffirming breadwinner ideals of male beauty as encouraged however, in the final part of this paper I demonstrate how images of men in Korean popular culture were suddenly dominated by kkotminam and such indirect criticisms of salarymen as were permitted under prevailing public opinion. This was a natural reaction to circumstances, and I conclude that explanations for the shift that do not consequently take the role of the crisis as a catalyst into account are inadequate.

(Source: Somang)

In hindsight, my overall argument about the increasing popularity of feminine ideals of Korean male beauty—that it at least partially stemmed from a sense of backlash and anger by Korean married women at their mass lay-offs and so forth—could possibly have been made a little clearer in that last paragraph, but then I was only just shy of the 500 word limit, and I’m not sure that I could have fitted everything necessary in otherwise. But it did the job! :D

Why Korean Girls Don’t Say No: Contraception Commercials, Condom Use, and Double Standards in South Korea

(Updated, January 2014)

Western journalists don’t often write about sex in South Korea. But when they do, they just love to mention how “conservative” it is. As if sexuality wasn’t really the immense concept it is. And, as if Korea, just like the journalists’ own societies, couldn’t actually be progressive in some aspects of it despite being conservative in others.

It frankly annoys then, that the advertising of contraception here does fit the stereotypes. As does what it reveals about attitudes towards its users, especially if they’re women.

The first frustration is that contraceptive commercials were banned from television until as late as January 2006. What’s more, it wouldn’t be until July 2013 that condoms actually graced Korean screens. This was especially ironic considering exceptions had already been made for the sake of HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns that played in October 2004.

The delay is interesting, and deserves further investigation; possibly, some de-facto restrictions against condom commercials remained. Either way, contraceptive pill manufacturers at least soon took advantage of the lifting of the ban, starting with this commercial by Mercilon four months later, and now nobody bats an eye seeing the pill on television or at the cinema. (Opening image source: The Hankyoreh.)

Originally, the first half of this post was devoted to that commercial, as public statements by the actress, 22 year-old SNU student Kim So-mi (김소미), appeared to indicate a false ignorance of the pill, as well as making sure to distance herself from the sexually-active women the commercial was aimed at:

하지만 정작 김씨는 광고를 찍으면서 피임약에 대해 처음으로 알게 됐다고 털어놨다

However, Kim said that she only learned about the pill for the first time while shooting the commercial.

피임약 광고로 자신의 얼굴이 알려지더라도 이중적 시각으로 자신을 보지 말기를 당부하는 것도 잊지 않았다. 어디까지나 광고모델일 뿐이라는 것이다.

Even if her face was known from the pill ad, she did not forget to ask her not to see herself in a double perspective. It’s just an advertising model.

Being slut-shamed by from someone actually endorsing contraceptives will always feel bizarre. Yet it spoke to my own anecdotal experience that all too many Korean women feigned ignorance of contraception for the sake of their reputations, the corollary of which was not insisting on condom use and relying wholly on their male partners to “take care of things.” Which, to many readers of the original post, sounded even more bizarre and outrageous than Kim So-mi did, not least because they were hearing it from a non-Korean man rather than from a Korean woman. But later I would confirm those uncomfortable truths through numerous Korean sources.

Source, all screenshots: 여자도 모르는 여자이야기

In hindsight however, her statements may be open to interpretation, and only came from one source. Add that the commercial itself is unfortunately no longer available (alas, I didn’t know how to save videos in 2008) then I didn’t need to think twice about removing that commentary, and consequently the comments (sorry). But the second half of the post was my summary of this survey on “condom-related behaviors and attitudes among Korean youths”, at the time one of the most rigorous and recent available (albeit based on data collected in 2003), and as the PDF is again no longer publicly available then I’m happy to keep that summary below for the benefit of readers.

Here goes (with only a little editing of the original post):

27% of men 7.8% of women had sex before the age of 18
“Contrary to the reported Korean situation, there are no significant gender differences in the rate of premarital sex and age at first intercourse compared to that in many other liberal, developed societies.”
“Compared to other [developed] societies, although there are fewer sexually experienced youths under 18 in Korea, there has nevertheless been an increase in premarital sex and a substantial lowering of the age at first sexual intercourse….the rate for females has risen more rapidly than that for males.”

For an excellent discussion of public attitudes to teenage sexuality in the 1990s that provide a backdrop to those results, I highly recommend reading this post at Gusts of Popular Feeling, and it’s clear that little has changed over a decade later. Moreover, it’s just a thought, but in the almost complete absence of any information or adults talking to them about sex (although I admit there have been some improvements since this post was first written), then I invite readers to speculate about just whom exactly might be providing young Koreans with most of their sexual role models instead:

Source: Textcube

In December 2005, there had been 3,829 cumulative reported cases of HIV/AIDS, of which males accounted for 90.7%. Of the new HIV infections among Korean women in 2004, all were attributed to heterosexual contact.

By August this year, the total had risen to 5717, with almost exactly the same proportions of men to women. The survey notes that with such relatively low numbers, if women “were able to ensure that their partners use condoms consistently and properly, [then] HIV/AIDS would be prevented effectively.” They’re not, as we shall see, but on the positive side it should be noted that the majority of Koreans no longer see HIV/AIDS as a mere foreign, gay disease that doesn’t affect them.

According to previous research, mostly conducted in the five years before this survey, “the percentage of consistent condom use among young people as well as in the general population was relatively lower than in other countries. It was found that only 18.6% of never married, sexually active young people aged 18-29 used condoms consistently…[and]…the reported condom use at first sexual intercourse was 18.7% for men and 13.4% for women. The reported condom use of high school students was much lower at 10%.”

Personally, I’m surprised that that last figure was even as high as 10%, given that vending machines in public toilets and from older friends would be about the only place high school students would obtain them. But of greater note already, albeit not a hugely significant statistical difference in this particular case, is the I think counter-intuitive finding (to Westerners) that more men than women reported using condoms the first time they had sex. Indeed, this disparity continued afterwards:

“More men (17.3%) than women (13.6%) reported having consistent condom use with a steady partner…for other partner types, consistent condom use was less reported by women than by men. For experience with condoms, more men than women reported having used condoms.”

Why? Partially it is because Korean men are much more sexually active:

50.4% of the single 19-30 year-old subjects reported having had sexual intercourse, but this disguises huge differences between men and women (67.3% and 30% respectively).
“Men reported a higher proportion of sexual experiences with two or more multiple partners during the previous 12 months than women did (57.2% vs 41.0%).”
“Single men were four times more likely to be [sexually] experienced than women.”
“According to a recent study, the median age at first sexual intercourse for Korean men (21.0 years) was three years lower than that for Korean women, even though men marry, on average, later than women do….This difference may be interpreted as an indication that young men have sex with prostitutes or older experienced women. About 13% of young men age 20-29 reported that their sexual partners were prostitutes.”

And this in turn led to them being much more confident and knowledgeable about using them than Korean women:

“Men were more likely to agree somewhat or completely that condoms protected against HIV and other STDs.”
“Compared with women…men reported a higher level of self-efficacy in condom use when they were drunken.”

But this is of course only half the story, and somewhat of a chicken (sperm?) before the egg one at that. For if you haven’t guessed already, the survey concludes that:

…these gender differences in sexual initiation and experience can be explained by strong, gender-based, double standards and values in the traditional culture. Single women in Korea are still expected to be passive and virgins at marriage. Although Korean women’s level of education and participation in the labor force has rapidly risen (albeit the latter still at the lowest levels in the OECD – James), the imposed attitudes on their expected social roles have not dramatically changed yet. Korean society still places emphasis on women’s virginity at marriage and women are supposed to be initiated into sex by their husbands.

And thus:

Premarital sex may be a more serious concern to women because of their vulnerability….young sexually experienced females reported that they had been pressured by their boyfriends or other men to have sex as a proof of their love and been forced not to use a condom at first intercourse.

Which makes Durex’s depiction on the right of its…er…penetration of the Korean market in August this year (source, right: The Korea Times) not a particularly accurate reflection of current Korean sexual mores, and unfortunately the women in it are less likely to be supposed role models as chosen simply because every public event in Korea requires scantily-clad females known as “narrator models.” More seriously though, the survey clears up a great deal of almost instinctive confusion I and I think many readers would have had recently over newspaper headlines such as “Women Inactive in Preventing Unwanted Pregnancy,” and “Korean Women Say Birth Control is Men’s Responsibility“, although I must confess that I never expected to be so, well…true, especially as my female Korean friends have all stated that they have to contend with Korean men often refusing to wear condoms, which unfortunately probably says much more about my choice of Korean female friends than it does of Korean men and women as a whole.

But I’m not merely covering all my bases when I say that it’s not all doom and gloom for Korean men and (especially) women, for I have seen teenage sex education centers, for instance, pop up around Busan since I first moved here, and, just like so many other Korean issues on which Koreans only appear to be unanimous and monolithic in their opinions to non-Korean speakers, the notion that contraception is solely a man’s responsibility is hardly a universally accepted and uncontested notion among young Koreans especially, as this blog post (for one) demonstrates (again, let me know if you’d like a translation). Moreover, and to put this post and myself to bed, while I may occasionally sound like a broken record when I point out this next (but someone has to), I think I’ve more than adequately demonstrated that increasingly sexual images of women in commercials and advertisements in recent years can and are having an effect on these double-standards also. Combined with knowledge that the English-language media and books on Korea especially tend to have a considerable lag behind trends in Korea then, it’s going to be very interesting to see the results of any similar survey in the future. Watch this space.

Korean women taking responsibility for contraception…only in the movies?

Back to 2014 now, if you’re after more recent surveys, there are many more translated and discussed in the “contraception“, “sexual relationships“, and “teenage sexuality” categories here (all of which come under the voluminous “Korean sexuality” one), but probably the most recent is this one conducted in 2012. Unfortunately though, no mention is made of its methodology, so the results must be taken with a grain of salt. But if any readers would like to help me rectify that by going through the original 260- page Korean report with me, I’d be very grateful!

If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

This wedding dress was cut for style…

(Source, all images: conan)

When I first saw this SKY (스카이) phone advertisement four years ago, naturally I noticed the extremely short wedding dress first, and wondered what on Earth the supposed connection to the phone was. Unfortunately though, I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to find out by getting (very) close to a poster in a phone store window and appearing — to all intents and purposes — to be minutely examining the model’s thighs, which is what reading the very small Korean text would have required of me. But soon, the poster was replaced with others, leaving me wondering ever since.

But now that I’ve just stumbled across it, I confess to being a little disappointed: the text next to the woman merely reads “스타일을 위해 잘랐다”, or “It was cut for the sake of style”, and then next to the phone “안테나를 잘랐다”, or “The antenna was cut”. Not exactly as creative, or indeed, “different” as I’d imagined.

Still, apologies if this next point is too prosaic, too crass, and/or even too much information on my part, but I think that there’s something to be said for more (clearly) physically fit Korean women in Korean advertising and real life. That aside, I enjoy the series as a whole too (all from this source), so let me finish this post by passing on more examples, for the sake of any readers who may also enjoy them:

Update: See here and here for some higher-definition versions of the final advertisement.

New Bodypainting Nudes by Kim Joon (김준)

Having waxed lyrical about his work back in May, then it would be selfish of me not to share these new pictures of bodypainting artist Kim Joon’s (김준) that I happened to come across recently. Unfortunately though, they come from the lobby of the Jeonju Hite Beer factory (“전주에 있는 하이트 맥주 공장을 견학 하면서 바디 페인팅 광고가 눈에 들어와서”) rather than from a new exhibition, although on the bright side that opens the possibility that managers of Korean Starbucks branches might get similarly moved by the Starbucks version of his “branded” works.

I am still very interested in seeing an exhibition of his for myself though, but given that even Kim Joon’s own website doesn’t mention upcoming ones then it can be very hard to find any information about them in advance. And so I apologize, for after a little digging I learned that by complete coincidence a few new pieces of his work were actually being displayed in Daegu at about the time this photo was taken, as part of a wider exhibition entitled “From the Roots to the Being Now” (근원으로부터 현제까지), but unfortunately that finished two weeks ago.

By way of compensation then, let me direct you to the 2008 page of his website, where he does seem to have added several new images since I wrote that first post, and there are many more on the website of the Boxart Gallery in Verona, Italy, where there was an exhibition of his work in June and July. On top of that, here’s a 52 page PDF catalog of much of his work available as a zip file, here’s a description of the exhibition, below is yet one more recent work (source), and finally here’s a surreal 3D video of his from 2004 too, which I confess I don’t care for myself, but which will still probably be the strangest thing you and I will ever see while listening to what seems to be chanting from a Korean Buddhist temple.

Am I forgiven?^^ Seriously though, if any readers do ever hear about any upcoming exhibitions of his in Korea then please pass on the details, for considering how many there have been overseas just in the past year then his domestic appearances must be quite rare unfortunately.

Korea’s “Lonely Geese” Families: More of them than you may think

Back in July, I wrote a lengthy post* on the reasons behind and implications for Korean society of the high numbers of “weekend couples” (주말부부) and “lonely geese fathers” (외기러기) here, the latter generally referring to fathers who remain in Korea to work while their families live overseas for the sake of the children’s eduction. Back then, no statistics on the numbers of either seemed to be available, so I speculated that the combination of both meant that a total of perhaps one in fifteen to one in ten Korean teenagers lived in a different city to their father most of the time (source, left: James Kim; CC BY-SA 2.0).

But it turns out that perhaps I underestimated that number: according to this recent survey of single women, effectively teenagers in this particular sense, for Koreans tend to live at home until marriage (although this is more for economic rather than the cultural reasons usually cited: see here and here), as many as one in eight Korean families have “at least one immediate family member living apart from the rest”. True, on the one hand that figure will include also university students living away from home, but then they are not common as I explain in those two posts linked to above, and on the other it wouldn’t contain the “international” lonely goose fathers I mention above either, so ultimately I’d wager that 90% or more of those one in eight immediate family members referred to would indeed be fathers working in different cities during the week.

There are some other interesting points made in that survey, but as it doesn’t mention the numbers and methodology (par for the course for most Korean newspapers unfortunately), then I’d take them with a grain of salt. But I think that the figures for geese families would be pretty consistent whatever the sample size.

*Since deleted sorry.

The Continuing Sexual Allure of the Caucasian Female

(Source: Naver)

On Wednesday, apparently someone over at Naver listened to my recent request for pictures of interesting juxtapositions featuring observers of Korean advertisements, and chose this as the photo of the day. True, not exactly what I wanted, but it’s a good start.

If anyone wants me to translate the three(!) paragraphs accompanying the photo, just give me a buzz. Actually, I’m a little curious myself as to what the judge found to write about it, but unfortunately I have a screaming daughter and baby to deal with as I type this (story of my life these days). With the five minutes spare that I did have though, I learned that the model’s name is Jessica Stam (제시카 스탐), and that Solezia (쏠레지아) is a Korean company (I think). Here’s a larger version of the original advertisement too:

(Source: Naver Blog)

Of course, you could argue that Jessica Stam doesn’t quite look gaunt enough there, much more so than in real life, but fortunately Solezia knew where to draw the line on good taste and healthy body images of women.

Korean Underwear Emerges from the Shadows?

(Sources: Naver, Yonhap)

Update, March 2014: First, my translation of a 2006 Joongang Ilbo article on lingerie advertisements:

벗겨라, 팔리리라! Undress the Models and the Products Will Sell!”

에로틱 광고, 잡지에서 거리로 나왔다…예술과 외설 사이 아슬아슬한 줄타기” 광고 속 에로스. Borderline indecent advertisements formerly only found in magazines are now on the streets (16 December 2006).

▶근육질의 남성과 섹시한 여성이 반라 차림으로 서로를 그윽하게 바라보는 속옷 광고 (서울 지하철 2호선 삼성역). A muscular, semi-nude man and sexy woman furtively looking at each other in this underwear advertisement (Samseong Station, Seoul Subway Line 2).

브래지어와 팬티 차림의 여성이 거리를 점령했다. 잘록한 허리에 배꼽을 드러내다 못해 엉덩이까지 절반쯤 나온 섹시한 여성의 눈빛이 버스 정류장에서 혹은 지하철 역사에서 남성들의 시선을 붙잡는다. 예술과 외설 사이를 아슬아슬하게 넘나드는 속옷 광고들이다.

Advertisements with women in just their bras and panties are to be found on streets everywhere these days, but presenting narrow, slender waists and navels are no longer enough for advertisers, and so many at bus stops and subways stations now reveal women’s buttocks too, which naturally gain the attention of more men than women. Many are not so much artistic, as bordering on the indecent.

과거 잡지 속에서나 볼 수 있었을 만한 아찔한 속옷 광고들이 당당히 거리로 나왔다. 속옷 광고뿐만이 아니다. 녹차 광고나 심지어 커피숍 광고도 일단 벗고 본다. 에로틱한 분위기의 광고는 제품과 관계없이 일단 사람들의 호기심을 불러 일으키는 법. 이것을 광고 제작자들이 놓칠 리 없다. 그러나 너무 많이 벗은 탓일까? 반라의 남녀가 넘쳐나는 거리를 행인들은 무심히 지나간다.

Such revealing advertisements used to be only found in magazines, but now you can find them on the street. It’s not just lingerie advertisements which have such revealing images either: even tea drink companies and coffee shops use them also, trying to attract the curiosity of passers-by with sexual images that have no actual relation to the products being sold. Other advertisers can’t help but notice this trend and be sucked in by it, but don’t you think it’s too much? Indeed, there are so many images of semi-nude men and women on our streets these days that in fact people may be taking less and not more notice of them.

▶위 : (주)좋은사람들이 지난해 8월 20대 후반 여성을 타깃으로 런칭한 속옷 브랜드 ‘섹시쿠키(Sexy Cookie)’의 지면 광고. 아래 : 국내 속옷시장에 패션 바람을 몰고 온 이랜드 계열의 속옷 브랜드 ‘에블린’의 광고판 (서울 지하철 2호선 삼성역). Left: An advertisement for a new kind of lingerie from “Eblin”, set to be quite a trend in the national lingerie fashion market. Right: An advertisement from August 2005 launching Korean company “Good People”‘s new lingerie brand “Sexy Cookie”, targeted at women in their late twenties (both advertisements from Samseong Station, Seoul Subway Line 2).

▶좌 : 반라차림의 여인을 전면에 내세운 속옷 광고판 앞을 한 남성이 무심히 지나가고 있다 (서울 지하철 4호선 명동역). 우 : 여성만 벗는 것이 아니다. 남성도 벗는다. 근육질의 남성 모델을 내세운 ‘코데스콤바인’의 지면 광고. Left: A man absentmindedly walks by a lingerie advertisement. Right: A muscular man in a Korean “Codes Combine” underwear advertisement (both advertisements from Myeong-dong Station, Seoul Subway Line 4).

▶좌 : 반라의 여성모델을 내세우는 것은 속옷 광고만이 아니다. 전지현의 S라인을 전면에 내세운 ‘17차’의 광고판.(서울 지하철 2호선 강남역). 우 : 화장품 광고라고 해서 얼굴만 대문짝만 하게 찍는 것은 아니다. 살짝쿵 벗어 주는 센스를 보여준 ‘라네즈’의 거리 광고 (서울 홍대앞). Left: The semi-nude women in this advertisement is not advertising lingerie, but is actually the actress Jun Ji-hyun advertising a tea drink (Gangnam Station, Seoul Subway Line 2). Right: An advertisement for Laneige cosmetics in which the model’s face has been greatly enlarged, but with which we somehow get the impression of her being semi-nude (Hongdae University area, Seoul).

▶좌 : 홍대앞 속옷가게 앞에 걸린 광고판을 뚫어져라 바라보고 있는 두 남자. 우 : 벗는 것만이 에로스는 아니다. 살며시 눈을 감은 여인의 얼굴에서 살포시 읽히는 에로틱함으로 행인을 유혹하는 커피숍 광고 (서울 홍대앞). Left: Two men’s gazes penetrate a lingerie advertisement in the Hongdae University area. Right: This women’s softly closed eyes while reading a book give a slightly erotic and seductive impression to this coffee shop advertisement, persuading passers-by to come inside (Hongdae University area, Seoul).

▶풍만한 여인의 가슴을 그대로 노출한 속옷 브랜드 ‘ Yes’의 거리 광고 (서울 홍대앞). A “Yes” lingerie advertisement exposing a woman’s voluptuous breasts (Hongdae University area, Seoul; End)

As a further example, contrast two recent bra commercials with Han Ye-seul (한예슬) for Venus (비너스) with I think a 2003 one with Go So-young (고소영). Whereas Han Ye-seul’s unabashedly presents herself — or rather, her breasts — as an object for the male gaze, Go So-young advertised the ‘Nudy Bra’ on the basis of bra-straps and lines not being visible, and therefore unlikely to attract any unwanted attention from men.

Finally, another article from the JoongAng Daily on the rapid change in fashions and attitudes:

Underwear emerges from the shadows

(September 04, 2007)

Underwear has been an integral part of the fashion industry for so long that saying “underwear is outerwear” now feels trite.

Ever since the 1990s, when Courtney Love sported a rag-doll look, wearing nothing but big red lips and a stark white slip, the boundary separating underwear from outerwear has become very thin. It now seems like the line will vanish altogether.

Looking through a rack of neon-colored swimsuits at the Galleria department store, Kim Ji-eun, 27, revealed her own summer fashion tip. “I’ve been wearing halter-style bikini tops in pretty colors under summer dresses. The little bow on the back [of the swimsuit, made when she ties the loose ends around the neck] makes a great accent and it does double duty as a bra.”

Kim, a fashion-hungry Seoul girl, went on to disclose more underwear secrets as she walked out of the department store. “Do you remember when Winona Ryder wore a bright red bra under a white tank top during an award show and the straps showed?” she said, with a smile. “To tell the truth, I’ve been copying that look all summer.”

Looking around the Apgujeong area recently, it seemed that Kim wasn’t the only one. Han Hye-seong, 25, was wearing a flowy peasant skirt with a loose top, under which her colorful bra straps were strategically placed to be noticed. “Five years ago, these [straps] would have been clear. But now, I hardly ever see clear straps being sold,” she said.

Until recently, Kim and Han did their underwear shopping at Internet sites which stock foreign underwear labels like Victoria’s Secret. “I couldn’t find underwear made by Korean labels which had any pretty patterns, bold colors or high-fashion elements,” said Kim.

It seems as though Korean companies are finally catching up. The triad of underwear brands – Try Brands, BYC and Taechang, have faltered, making room for new names.The triad’s standard white, black and beige selections with a small variety of designs couldn’t withstand the new wave of outer/inner wear. By 2005, Try Brands’ sales had fallen from 220 billion won ($24.2 million) in 2003 to 129 billion won. BYC’s sales also went down significantly, from 182.5 billion won in 2003 to 151 billion won in 2005. Taechang sold their underwear division to E-Land in 2005.

In their place, a new triad have emerged, including E-Land World (with brands like Roem, Who.A.U and Hunt), Yeshin Persons (including brands like Maru, Codes Combine and Noton) and Good People (with Bodyguard and James Dean). Yeshin Persons was in the forefront of this new group with Maru Underwear (a domestic sportswear brand) in 2004. “Maru Underwear features casual lingerie with a bit of a fashion edge and it targets women from 19 to 25,” said Lim Sae-un, a Maru media representative. Following the initial success of this brand, the company made another underwear line – Codes Combine – which also stems from one of their sportswear brands. This line, targeting people in their 20s and 30s, includes underwear with bohemian and vintage-inspired elements like fringes and neutral tones. The two underwear lines alone made the company 45 billion won in 2005.

E-Land World has been following a similar path. Besides Hunt Underwear and The Day Underwear, they launched Body Pop and Petite Lin, the former for teenagers and the latter for kids under 10. Both have been a great success. Good People launched underwear lines which target women in their late teens to 20s, including Sugar Free and Sexy Cookie.

One factor behind the success of these lines is their affordability. Along with the growing popularity of affordable cosmetics lines like Missha and The Face Shop, these underwear lines provide a sense of adventure at prices that do not involve the risk of a big investment. “Customers feel free to take risks and buy colorful items with patterns instead of your basic white or skin-colored underwear because these items are so affordable,” said an E-Land representative.

Along with domestic brands, underwear brands from other countries have also been selling well. Women’s Secret, an underwear brand from Spain, was introduced in late 2005, with its first shop in Apgujeong-dong. “Underwear is no longer hidden beneath clothes and consumers are now more daring and wear colorful, showy underwear. We decided to bring in this brand to meet these needs,” said Kim Hyun-hwa, the brand’s assistant marketing manager. “Customers are smarter as well. They don’t want cheap material or poor tailoring. Underwear nowadays has to be fashionable and practical with a reasonable price tag.”

Choi Young-jip, head of Princess TamTam Korea, an underwear brand based in France, agrees. “Customers not only look for good designs, but also for underwear that is a good fit for their body. So material and cut are very important.”

These factors have led to some adjustments in tailoring. “We have introduced a line of bras and panties just for the Asian market for this fall/winter season,” said Kim Hyeon-hwa at Women’s Secret. “The panties in this line support the hips, with more coverage, as opposed to thongs or Brazilian-style pieces which are popular in Europe.”

Adding to this boom are celebrities who have launched their own underwear lines through home shopping, the Internet or off-line stores.

Actress Park Jeong-su launched Sooanae last year, an underwear line targeting middle-aged women which offers stylish yet form-flattering foundation garments. Next was actress Hwang Shin-hae with Elypry, which was first offered through Hyundai home shopping but branched out to CJ home shopping this year. Actress Hyeon Yeong and actress/singer Um Jeong-hwa both used their sexy image to full advantage by launching underwear lines this year. “Finally, there are now lots of choices [for underwear] in Korea.” said Kim Ji-eun as she flipped her hair and continued to search for the perfect bikini/bras to match her new shoes.

Reporting by Lee Eun-joo

By Cho Jae-eun Staff Writer [jainnie@joongang.co.kr] (my emphases)

Giving the Consumer What She Wants? Korean Women’s Role in the Westernization of the Korean Media

(Source: LG 전자; CC BY 2.0)

If you’ve followed a link here, please note that this post was deleted and completely rewritten in January 2012, but unfortunately I’m unable to do automatic redirects for single posts sorry. Instead, please click here for the new version.

Naver’s Photo of the Day

(“하늘위로훨훨 ~ 날아올라” / “Flying to the Sky”. Source: Naver)

I’m afraid that I’ve been pretty sleep deprived since my baby daughter came home from the hospital sorry, and it’s making my next post take much longer than expected. Having said that, I confess that I liked Naver’s photo of the day above so much that I just had to post it as soon as I saw it, and it’s a pity that the only slightly larger version you can see by clicking on it is the highest resolution available.

Here’s what photography judge Kim Yeong-su (김영수) had to say about it on Naver:

이 사진은 아름다운 여인을 보기 좋게 꾸며서 적당하게 어울리는 장소에서 촬영한 인물사진입니다. 상업적인 목적의 사진 분야에서는 이와 같은 종류의 사진은 패션사진 분야에서 많이 촬영됩니다. 전문적인 패션사진가 경우에는 프로 모델, 스타일리스트, 메이크업 담당자와 같이 전문가 그룹이 함께 움직입니다. 물론 유행에 앞서 가는 멋진 의상은 기본적으로 준비가 되겠지요.

“This picture is a very human one, and at a location well matched for the beautiful woman made up for the shot. It is of a kind often used in commercial and fashion photography, and in the case of the latter a fashion photographer will be working as part of a production team with the professional model(s), stylists, and make-up artists. And of course, trend-setting clothes are also available to them, aren’t they?”

비상업 적인 목적으로 이와 비슷한 사진을 전문가 집단의 도움 없이 촬영한다는 것은 상당히 힘든 작업입니다. 그럼에도 불구하고 이 작품은 좋은 모델과 의상, 포즈, 장소, 광원이 잘 맞아 떨어져서 사진을 감상하는 많은 사람들의 눈을 즐겁게 해 주고 있습니다.

“It is considerably harder for non-commercial photographers to take pictures with a similar pose and setting without the help of a production team. Despite that, the lighting and the model’s beauty, clothes, and pose came out very well in this photo, and many people have been enjoying it.” (End)

Sorry, but although Naver does give the photographer’s Naver ID and links to more examples of her work, it seems to neglect to mention the minor, trifling detail of what her name is. If anyone knows it or can see it on the site where I didn’t, please pass it on!

Let me leave you with another great shot of hers instead, which I really liked partially because I’m a real sucker for juxtapositions of Korean houses and futuristic-looking apartments (I recommend those by bophoto especially), but mostly because this shot also manages to capture the crisp atmosphere and the brown-red hues of Korean cities in the winter very well; my favorite time of year and place(s) in Korea, but difficult to convey in words. Still, I’d have to admit that the shot would probably have looked much better with more of the roof in the foreground cut off, and especially with a much wider view.

(“고것에서” / “From That”. Source: Naver)

By the way, does anybody recognize where the picture was taken from?

Resources on Evolving Korean Ideals of Male Beauty

(Source: Laneíge)

As long-term readers will (hopefully) recall, in my last major post in this series I put forward the hypothesis that an increasingly feminized ideal of Korean male beauty was not a mere import of foreign notions of metrosexuality, as is often claimed, but more the result of a subconscious or deliberate act of defiance by Korean women, angered at being the first to lose their jobs during the economic crisis of the late-1990s. Given that these small inroads into Korean business had been only recently made too, Korean feminism very much taking a back-seat to the wider goals of the democratization movement previously, then it’s not unreasonable to suppose that Korean women would have angrily rejected their previous ideals of men as strong, masculine providers in response, particularly as the male-dominated government and media chose to urge them to support their hardworking fathers and husbands rather than air their complaints.

Unfortunately, there is not quite the same level of academic interest in evolving Korean ideals of men’s beauty as there is in women’s…*cough*…and in the case of English-language studies of Korean men especially I suspect that I’m entering into almost completely uncharted territory.

But in addition to some that I linked to that earlier post, one more English resource that I did find recently was a paper titled “Dual Dominating Strategies of the Korean Hegemonic Masculinity: Advertisements for Men’s Cosmetics” by Park Seung-min, downloadable here. If the title gives you misgivings however, then so it should, for unfortunately it badly needs a major rewrite by a native speaker, preferably one with some background in social sciences too; at the very least, simple terms should have been chosen over rather abstract academic ones which even specialists disagree on the precise meanings of. Otherwise you end up with ditties like this:

According to R. Barthes, creating any meaning of the advertising goes through two stages in the process of action in its meaning. The first stage is a process representing things with symbols, having the denotative meanings. Since the expression of one symbol only has the content of one symbol, the symbol merely has ‘monosemic meaning’ in the action of meaning at the first stage…

But the paper’s images of advertisements from 1970-2006 alone make it worth viewing, and despite everything it is still possible to follow, something which can’t be said of a great deal I’ve read on postmodernism that that passage is reminiscent of. Meanwhile, to add my own contribution, here is my translation of an article from the July edition of Korea Ad Times (코리아애드타임즈) about a recent commercial for men’s sunblock:

라네즈 옴므 ‘선블록 로션’ 편: 그루밍족을 위한 스타일리쉬 선블록

Laneíge Homme ‘Sunblock Lotion’: Stylish Sunblock for Men Concerned about Personal Grooming

‘자외선은 피부의 적’ 이라는 사실은 누구나 알고 있을 것이다. 자외선의 UVB파장은 진피층의 콜라겐과 엘라스틴 파괴시키고 색소 침착을 증가 시키기 때문.

Everybody knows that UV rays are the enemy of youthful-looking skin. This is because the UVB ray components of it destroy the collagen and the elastin in the dermis layer and increase the amount of pigment.

피부 노화의 주범이 자외선이라는 사실이 밝혀지면서 여름은 물론 사시사철 자외선 차단제의 중요성이 강조되고 있다. 하지만 남성들은 끈적이고 바르면 하얗게 뭉쳐 귀찮아서라는 이유는 선블록을 평소에는 바르지 않는다.

Ultraviolet rays are the main cause of aging of the skin, and people are beginning to realize the importance of using sunblock all year round. But men ordinarily don’t wear it, as they don’t like its sticky, greasy feeling or the fact that it tends to clump together in white lumps.

선블록은 단지 야외에서 운동할 때 여름 휴가 때 겨울의 스키장에서만 바르는 특수한 용도의 화장품이라고 여기고 있기 때문이다. 남성들의 이런 생각 때문에 남성 피부는 항상 자외선에 무비방 상태로 놓여있다.

Men tend to think of sunblock as something only to be used when exercising or traveling in the summer or skiing in winter, and so normally their skin has no protection at all against the sun.

하지만 이런 남성들 사이에도 변화의 바람이 불기 시작했다. 바로 ‘그루밍족’의 탄생이다. 이는 몸을 칭찬한다는 뜻의 ‘Groom’에서 나온 말로 패션과 미용에 아낌없이 투자하는 남성을 지칭한다. 이러한 그루밍족을 위해 탄생한 라네즈 옴므, 라네즈 옴므에서 제안하는 피부관리의 첫단계는 바로 ‘선블록’ 이다.

But men are changing their attitudes, and some are prepared to invest a lot of time and money in their appearance, becoming known as “Groomers” by advertisers. Laneíge Homme’s “Sunblock Lotion” is specifically designed for this new group, and advises men that sunblock is the essential first step in adequate skincare.

갈색으로 그을린 구릿빛 피부는 보기에는 멋지고 건강해 보이지만 실제로는 자외선에 의해 피부가 손상됐을 가능성이 높다. 이 CF는 이점에 착안, 스타일을 생각한다면 스킨과 로션 후, 손질를 마무리하는 단계에서 자외선을 차단하면서 피부톤까지 살려주는 라네즈 옴므 선블록 로션을 잊지 말아야 한다는 것을 강조한다.

Brown skin may look attractive and healthy, but it actually means that the possibility of it being damaged by the sun is very high. This commercial draws attention to this, and also emphasizes that you should not forget to apply the product after applying skin lotion and toner.

라네즈 옴므 선블록 로션TVCF는 ‘스타일리쉬’ 그 자체라고 할 수 있다. 심플하고 모던한 실내 세트장은 그 압도적인 규모뿐 아니라 브라운관들로 이루어진 천정이 눈길을 끈다. 모던한 세트장과 조화를 이루는 절제된 소품들은 고급스러움을 한층 더하고 있다.

Laneíge Homme’s new commercial is very stylish. The simple and modern room interior it was shot in is not just big, but viewers’ eyes are drawn to the ceiling, which has many TV monitors. The commercial has much finesse and many subtle points which combine to produce a high quality piece of work.

그루밍족을 위한 카리스마 강조, Emphasizing the Charisma of Groomers

무엇보다 ‘그루밍’ 의 워너비로 등장하는 배우 김지훈은 그만이 가진 세련된 실루엣과 카리스마로 남성뿐 아니라 여성들의 시선을 사조잡고 있다. 어두운 공간에 홀로 앉아 있는 멋진 남자와 천정에 설치된 작은 브라운관들에 남자의 다양한 표정들이 보여진다. 이 때 부라운관에서 자외선이 강렬하게 내리쬐며 남자를 비추고 강렬한 빛에도 당당한 모습을 잃지 않은 남자, 그의 손에는 라네즈 옴므 선블록 로션이 들려있다.

More than anything else, actor Kim Ji-hoon (김지훈) – Groomers’ ideal type – attracts the interest of both men and women with his charisma and stylishly-cut body shape. In the commercial, a man is sitting alone in a dark space and his various expressions are shown on the TV monitors. Then, on the TV monitors there’s a sudden strong flash of sunshine against him, but he still holds himself confident and strong against it, all the while holding a bottle of Laneíge Homme Sunblock Lotion.

내리쬐는 빛으로 점점 환해지는 실내, 자외선마저도 자유롭게 연출 할 수 있는 당당하고 스타일리쉬한 남자, 바로 모두가 꿈꾸는 진정한 ‘그루밍족’ 이 아닐까?

The sunshine gradually makes the room bright, but the stylish and confident man is unaffected by it and free to do as he wishes. He is the quintessential grooming man, the envy of consumers.

선블록 로션TVCF의 또 다른 매력은 바로BGM과 영상의 조화가 돋보인다는 점이다. 이번 광고를 위해 BGM이 특별히 제작했다. 젊은 남성 타겟의 취향을 고려하여 파워플하면서도 세련된 사운드가 돋보이는 Rock 스타일로 만들어진 것.

Another charm of this sunblock lotion commercial is that is in exceptional harmony with BGM’s background music. BGM produced the music especially for this commercial, and it has a powerful and sophisticated rock-style sound, in consideration of young men’s tastes.

이로써 TV CF의 하이라이트 부분과 BGM의 클라이막스가 완벽하게 맞아 떨어지면서 한층 임팩트 있는 광고가 됐다.

The climax of the music is in perfect synchronization with the climax of the commercial and combines to give a very powerful impact on viewers.

(A 2007 Laneíge Homme advertisement featuring Jo In-sung {조인성}, the first aimed at men. Source: Laniege)

Perhaps not a great contribution sorry, and I really expected rather better from a 15,000 won specialist magazine; given how much my wife was laughing out loud at the original Korean version, then I’m not sure how I could have made it more natural-sounding in English either. On the other hand, at least I do now know about “Groomers”, whom I expect to hear much more about in Korean advertising literature in the future.

Koreans, Criticism, and the Korean Language

(Taking too close a look at the frogs in the well? Source: FARK)

For those of you that don’t already know, yours truly was briefly mentioned in an article on how Koreans handle criticism by foreigners by Bart Schaneman in The Korea Herald on Monday. It resulted in a lot of hits on the day, and even some offers of being paid to write from some other sources, so all in all pretty good for something that I originally declined to respond to. Citing his space restrictions, I thought that replies of mine to Bart’s email questions would be reduced to mere one-liners, but obviously I relented, and to his credit he did manage to get a lot of information into the article. You can see a full PDF of that here; in this post I’ll just clarify and expand upon some of the points in my own short contribution to it:

…We’re not that different

New Zealander James Turnbull runs The Grand Narrative. He calls it “An irreverent look at social issues.” Much of his work deals with Korean advertising and media as well as social commentary. In his eighth year in Korea, Turnbull teaches English in Busan.

“I find the notion that only Koreans are ‘permitted’ to speak about Korean problems simply absurd,” he said. “That isn’t to say that all foreigners’ opinions on them are equally valid, but if the roles were reversed then I’d be quite happy to hear the opinions of, say, a Korean person who had spent some time in New Zealand and who made an active effort to study and know New Zealand society and learn the language. In fact, probably more so than someone who was merely born there.

(I should really give credit to Gomushin Girl for at least the inspiration for that last point).

One thing I would add to that, albeit too egotistical sounding for me to have offered to Bart, is that I think that I’d probably be more likely to feel that way more than most New Zealanders themselves, or indeed the natives of any country. As a teenager I moved around a lot, at one point going to six different high schools in three countries in three years(!), and while it was a difficult and much resented experience at the time, it did at least mean that as an adult I’ve tended to be a bit more objective about a country’s good points and bad points than the natives. The flip side of that, though, is that to a greater or lesser extent I’ve always felt like an outsider in all of the four countries I’ve lived in, which goes some way towards explaining my newfound sympathies for the experiences and opinions of Koreans living there.

But neither that ability, nor the fact that I’ve been here for eight years automatically makes my opinions on things Korean more accurate or helpful than a newbie’s; actually, they’re just as likely to be simply more cynical and jaded instead. My point in the article then, admittedly not very subtle, is that the right to have one’s opinions about Korea to be taken seriously has to be earned, regardless of whether you’re a newbie, old-timer, or even Korean yourself. It’s true that that process takes a little more work in Korea than in many countries, but still, I wasn’t lying when I said the next:

“The majority of netizens aside, I’ve actually found a significant number of Koreans to feel much the same way about the opinions of non-Koreans.

The following though, really does suffer from lack of the example I gave to justify it, but once you read my expanded version of that below then you’ll understand why Bart left it out.

“Another advantage to using and considering Korean-language sources as much as possible is that it makes you realize how much you may stereotype and generalize Koreans yourself without being aware of it.

I wrote that because a few years ago, I realized that I was very guilty of both myself. Not despite me being a Korea studies geek; actually, probably precisely because of it.

The occasion was listening to the radio on the bus home one night in 2005. Frustrated with never getting any Korean listening or conversation practice, and being unable to find a Korean drama to watch that I didn’t find nauseating and/or wholly unrealistic, I spent my commuting time those days listening to the traffic channel on my small hand-held radio (94.9FM in Busan). Not an obvious first choice, no, but there was minimal music, and it did have a lot of interviews and talkback callers whose conservations I could usually at least get the gist of. That day, a woman from the Ministry of Health and Welfare was on, and she was explaining the numbers of HIV positive and AIDS cases in Korea and how they contracted the disease.

Naturally my ears pricked up at that, because, as we all know, not only do all Koreans think that both are “foreign diseases”, but they also believe that there are absolutely no Korean homosexuals. So how on Earth were she and the interviewer going to work around those?

(Source: InSapphoWeTrust; CC BY-SA 2.0)

In short, they didn’t. She calmly and patiently explained the number of cases contracted from drug users, mother to foetus transmission, homosexual partners, heterosexual partners, homosexual prostitutes….and so on, in a matter-of-fact manner that indicated that there was nothing exceptional or noteworthy about the subject. Neither did the interviewer nor later callers question the figures nor get into any racist hysterics about “foreign gay contamination of Korean blood” either. What the hell was going on? It was just as sedate as any similar discussion in any Western country.

And then I realized that in fact I’d only ever read that Koreans thought like that, and I’d never actually asked a single Korean about homosexual Koreans and/or AIDs myself. That may sound strange, but then I saw no reason not to believe the books, and I can think of more appropriate free-talking topics for conversation classes.

Why did the books say that then? Well, because undoubtedly a majority of Koreans once did once think like that once, and, as this recent case of teenage prostitution illustrates, some still do, but despite that clearly most Koreans had long since moved on from whatever book on that particular aspect of Korean society I’d read was published. Hence my next and final point, and kudos to Bart for also retaining my (indirect) criticism of the very paper the article was printed in:

“Without any Korean ability, foreigners are usually forced to rely on either the limited English language media or books for the bulk of their information, and both have problems: the former for often presenting a rose-tinted version of Korea to the world, and the latter for being quickly out of date in a country as rapidly changing as Korea.”

It sounds obvious, but it took me five years to realize that, like I said probably because I’m more of a Korea studies geek/bookworm than most. But I’m glad I did, and on the plus side – although my Western and Korean friends will scoff at this – it has made me a bit more humble and circumspect in my comments and criticisms about Koreans and Koreans ever since.

Update: Anyone further interested in the numbers of HIV and AIDS cases in South Korea, please see here and here

How Korean Girls Learn to be Insecure About Their Bodies

Seriously, it’s great that the makers of this video are trying to encourage children to eat healthy foods with fermented bean paste (된장) rather than candy. But do they really need to be told that it’s good for their “S-lines” and “V-lines” too? For those few of you that don’t know what either are, this next commercial in particular makes the former pretty clear:

(Source: ¡Hoy mejor que ayer, mañana mejor que hoy!. The text reads “The S-line you want to have.”)

Note that Go Ara, the actress in the commercial, is actually much younger (16) than she may appear above. Meanwhile, here are some commercials for a tea-drink which supposedly gives you a V-line chin, which at least have actual grown women (BoA, 22; Kim Tae-Hee, 28) endorsing the product:

Not by coincidence, here are some “face rollers” which started to appear all over Korea not long after I first heard of V-lines. I’ve read that they’ve been used for many years in Japan and Taiwan too, so Korean women too may well have been using for a long time before they started worrying about their V-lines specifically. But then they weren’t popular enough for me to have noticed them at all until last year, and certainly sellers of them have been making explicit references to V-lines ever since the concept first appeared:

(Source: GMarket)

Alas, I’m not entirely certain why an ad explicitly for women opens with some not particularly flattering shots of men either (Lee Seung-gi and comedian Kang Ho-dong), but I guess I’m not the target market. That they do so humorously though, does help reinforce the notion that dieting (etc.) is only something for women to be serious about.

Or perhaps just girls, as I’ve never actually seen a woman using one. My 13 year-old students, however, use them every other break…(sigh).

Update: See here, here, here, and here for much more on the constant invention of new, often impossible body shapes and “lines” for Korean women to strive for, and for North American and European parallels.

(Source: danle; CC BY 2.0)

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(Source: ppassu; left, right)

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(Source: Carolyn Speranza; CC BY 2.0)

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(Source: LG전자; CC BY 2.0)

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(Source: Surija / “Sray”; CC BY 2.0)

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(Source: I am Goding)

(Source: OHLALAMag)

(Source: Somang Cosmetics)

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(Source: LG 전자; CC BY 2.0)

(Source: thomas park; CC BY 2.0)

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(Source: Unknown)

(Source: Somang)

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Source, all screenshots: 여자도 모르는 여자이야기

Source: Textcube

Korean women taking responsibility for contraception…only in the movies?

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(Source, all images: conan)

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(Source: Naver)

(Source: Naver Blog)

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(Sources: Naver, Yonhap)

Underwear emerges from the shadows

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(Source: LG 전자; CC BY 2.0)

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(“하늘위로훨훨 ~ 날아올라” / “Flying to the Sky”. Source: Naver)

(“고것에서” / “From That”. Source: Naver)

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(Source: Laneíge)

(A 2007 Laneíge Homme advertisement featuring Jo In-sung {조인성}, the first aimed at men. Source: Laniege)

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(Taking too close a look at the frogs in the well? Source: FARK)

(Source: InSapphoWeTrust; CC BY-SA 2.0)

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(Source: ¡Hoy mejor que ayer, mañana mejor que hoy!. The text reads “The S-line you want to have.”)

(Source: GMarket)

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