Update, November 2013: My views on skin-whitening have changed considerably since this post was written five years ago, so I’ve removed my original commentary to this commercial, and consequently the comments also. But I’ll keep my translation up, just in case any readers still find this post useful (original article: page 52, July 2008 edition of the now-defunct Korea Ad Times / 코리아애드타임스):
더페이스샵 ‘내추럴 선블럭’ 편 / The Face Shop’s ‘Natural Sunblock’ Commercial
“해빛을 맘껏 즐겨봐” / “Enjoy the Sunshine to Your Heart’s Content”
더페이스샵의 광고가 전파를 타고 있다. 이번 광고는 햇빛을 차단해주는 기존 자외선 차단제의 수동적인 발상에서 벗어나 오히려 햇빛을 즐길 수 있게 만들어준다는 능동적인 역할로 선블록의 개념을 변화시키고 있다.
Currently on air, this commercial marks a move away from the traditional notion that one has to protect one’s skin from the sun passively by wearing sunblock and avoiding the sun, and encourages consumers to enjoy the sunshine.
자외선은 피부 노화를 앞당기는 주범으로 많은 여성들은 최대한 자외선으로부터 멀어지려 갖은 노력을 하고 있다. 특히 자외선 양이 급격히 증가하는 여름철에는 손으로 얼굴을 가리고 빠른 걸음으로 햇빛을 피해가는 여성들을 도시의 길거리에서 흔히 볼 수 있다. 심지어 휴양지에서도 긴팔옷과 모자 등으로 최대한 자외선에 노출을 막고 햇빛 아래로 나오지 않으려고 한다. 왜냐면 자외선은 피부를 위해 경계해야 할 대상 ‘제1호’ 이기 때문이다.
Because ultraviolet rays are the number one cause of aging skin, women in particular try very hard to stay out of the sun. As the amount of potential UV exposure rises dramatically in the summer, these days in cities you can see many women both shielding their faces with books or handbags and walking very quickly across the street to avoid having their skin damaged by it. Even at beach resorts women will often wear long sleeves and hats to avoid exposure, or even stay entirely indoors.
그렇기 때문에 지금껏 자외선 이번 자외선차단제 광고는 흔히 자외선을 가장 효과적으로 ‘방어(Block Sun)’ 해준다는 개념으로 접근해왔다. 하지만 이번 더페이스샵의 내추럴 선블록 광고는 이러한 자외선 차단체의 개념을 새롭게 정의해 주목받고 있다. 이유는 소비자들이 선블록을 바르는 이유는 햇빛을 피하고 싶어서가 아니라 햇빛 속에서도 오랫동안 즐기고 싶어서라는 인사이트(Insight)에 초점을 맞췄기 때문이다.
Because of this, up until now the makers of sunblocks have tended to emphasize how effective their products are at stopping UV rays in commercials. By introducing the new notion that consumers can use sunblock to enjoy the sun rather than avoid it instead, this commercial has gathered a lot of attention.
해빛을 즐기는 미남과 미녀
An Attractive Couple Enjoying the Sun
이번 광고는 태국 파타야 근방의 아름다운 무인도를 배경으로 제작됐다. 자연의 수수함이 살아있는 해변에서 눈부시게 쏟아지는 햇빛을 즐기는 두 남녀의 모습이 비쳐진다. 남자모델은 4년간 더페에스샵의 전속모델로 활동하고 있는권상우이고 여자모델은 이번 광고부터 더페이스샵의 얼굴로 새롭게 합류하게 된 배우 이보영이다. 권상우는 데뷔 이래 광고에서 최초로 상반신을 노출하는 파격읗 보여줬다. 그는 햇빛을 즐기는 모습을 담기에 꼭 필요한 노출이라 생각해 기꺼이 응해줬다는 후문이다. 권상우는 익히 알려진 ‘몸짱’ 스타답게 건강하고 멋진 몸매를 과시해 시청자들의 눈길을 단번에 사로잡고 있다. 광고가 전파를 타기 전부터 관광객이 찍은 것으로 보이는 촬영 한장 사진들이 인터넷상을 뜨겁게 달구기도 했다.
This commercial was shot on a beautiful deserted island in Pattaya, Thailand, a natural and pure setting in which to show an attractive couple enjoying the glistening sea. Kwon Sang Woo, the male model, has been modeling for The Face Shop for four years, but although this is the first time that he’s ever appeared half-naked in a commercial, it’s rumored that that he was happy to do it because he felt it was necessary to show how he was enjoying the sun while using the product. Of course, he is well known for his good body, and not only has this helped to attract viewers’ attentions, even before the commercial was aired it received a lot of publicity through Korean tourists taking pictures of it being produced and then uploading them onto the internet.
이보영은 그동안 여러 영화와 광고를 통해 깨끗하고 청순한 모습을 보여왔는데 이런 순수한 이미지가 더페이스샵과 잘 맞아떨어져 새롭게 광고모델로 발탁됐다. 이번 광고에서는 물에 젖은 머리칼을 휘날리며 기존의 순수한 모습 속에 섹시함이 묻어나는 모습으로 그녀의 색다른 모습을 만나볼 수 있다.
As for the actor Lee Bo Young, this is the first time that she has modeled for The Face Shop. As she already has a pure and innocent image from her previous movies and commercials, it was felt that she would be a perfect new face for the company. But with her wet hair fluttering in the breeze in this commercial, viewers get to see a sexy new side to her too.
Update, December 2013: My translation of an article from pages 108-9 of the July 2008 edition of IMAD (아이엠애드) magazine, which has since been discontinued. I’ve removed my original commentary (and readers’ comments), but am keeping the translation up in case someone finds it useful one day:
소비자의 추억을 자극하라 Stimulating Consumer’s Memories
롯데리아 아바카도 통새우버거 TV CF 제작 현장 The Making of the Lotteria Avocado Whole Shrimp Burger Television Commercial
어린 시절 누구나 가지고 있는 추억이 있다. 신나는 동요 소리에 달려나가면 골목 어귀에 서 있던 늠름한 만들. 100원 동전 하나로 리어카에 스프링으로 매달려 있는 말을 타고 멋지게 달렸던 기억.
Everybody has many memories from their childhood, and one many Koreans cherish is suddenly hearing a nursery rhyme playing in the alleyway outside, which meant they could run out excitedly and pay 100won to ride on a magnificent mechanical horse driven around the neighborhood.
웰빙 트렌드를 반영하면서 먹거리에서도 많은 변화가 일어나고 있다. 햄버거도 가공식품의 느낌이 아닌 원재료의 느낌을 그대로 살린 제품이 출시된다. 이번 TV CF도 그런 제품의 특징을 살리고 빠른 시간 내애 소비자의 인식 속에 롯데리아 아보카도 통새우버거를 자리잡도록 하는 것이 목표였다.
Reflecting the “Well-Being” trend, the food consumers eat is undergoing many changes. Hamburger makers too are trying to remove their product’s image of being unhealthy processed food, and to emphasize the taste of their original, healthy ingredients to consumers instead. Thus, the aim of this particular television commercial is both to grab viewers’ attentions within a short time and to convince them that this new burger is also a well-being food.
‘나는 새우’ 라는 동요를 듣고 카피라터가 찾아왔다. 몇 번을 반복해 듣던 중 머리에 스치는 건 어린 시절 동요를 들으며 타고 놀았던 리어카의 장난감 말이었다. “새우를 타보는 건 어떨까?” 이 한마디로 이지아가 새우를 타게 됐다. 제작에 들어가니 한두 군데 손이 가는 것이 아니었다. 우선 가장 큰일은 새우를 만드는 것이었다. 기본 디자인은 회전목마의 모습에서 따오기로 했다. 여신의 모습으로 커다란 통새우를 타고 치마를 휘날리는 이지아의 모습에 팝송이나 클래식이 어울리지 않을까라고 생각하지만, 기획의도부터 언밸런스를 유도하여 처음 보는 소비자도 금방 기억할 수 있는 CF를 만드는 것이 목표였다.
The “Flying Shrimp” song was copyrighted for this commercial. While listening to it many times, the producer realized that it reminded him of the nursery rhymes played by the owners of mechanical horses that visited his neighborhood when he was a child, and so somebody suggested that in the commercial the model Lee Ji-ah should ride a shrimp similar to those. However, there were many to things to do to bring that concept from the drawing board to actual production, and ultimately the basic design of the shrimp used was more similar to a horse from a merry-go-round. In the commercial Lee Ji-ah represents a female goddess, her skirt fluttering in the breeze as she rides a shrimp of equally god-like proportions. The producer originally felt that classical music or a pop song would have been most appropriate for that image, but to capture consumers’ attention quickly he felt that an “unbalancing” nursery rhyme would be more effective.
촬영장소로 선택한 곳은 제주 함덕 해수욕장. 얕은 수심과 에메랄드 빛 바다로 유명한 이것은 CF촬용장소로 많이 찾는 곳이기도 하다. 전날 육지에서 배로 옮긴 통새우를 바닷가에 설치하고 촬영이 시작되었다. 밀물과 썰물의 차 때문에 바다에서의 촬영은 초를 다툴 만큼 어려웠다. 2D에서 나무를 합성해도 되지만 느낌을 최대한 살리기 위해 바다 중간에 모래로 섬을 만들고 나무도 심었다.
Hamdok Beach in Jeju was chosen as the shooting area, well-known amongst producers of commercial because of its shallow water and emerald-like glittering sea. Time was saved by taking the model of the shrimp was taken by boat from the shore and setting it up the day before shooting, but still, because of the difference between high tide and low tide the production crew was literally fighting against the clock on the day itself. This was not helped by having to make a small island out of sand in the background and planting two trees on it, because it was thought that real trees would give of a more lifelike and vivid atmosphere than the 2D ones called for in the original plan.
통새우의 이미지는 물론, 소비자가 CF를 봤을 때 먹고 싶게 만드는 것도 중요하다. 보통 시즐 촐용은 모델 촬영이 끝난 후 남는 시간에 졸린 눈을 비벼가며 야간에 찍는 것이 보통이다. 하지만 이번 CF에서 중요한 건 통새우와 아보카도를 알리는 것이기 때문에 우리는 시즐 촬영에 이틀의 시가늘 쏟아부었다. 최상의 컨디션과 신선한 재료로 최고로 먹음직스러워 보이는 화면을 찍기에는 이 시간도 짧게만 느껴졌다.
While the image of the shrimp was important, of course the main purpose of the commercial is simply to make people want to eat. Usually, in commercials of this nature the “sizzle” shot is quickly done at night after the main shooting with a model during the day, often when the commercial crew is very tired, but in this case it was felt that convincing consumers of the healthiness of the new avocado and shrimp burger was so important that 2 entire days were spent on it. Because all ingredients had to be shot fresh and in the best condition, those two days also felt too short!
You can’t blame overseas reporters for just calling them metrosexuals: kkotminam (꽃미남), literally “flower beauty man,” sounds a little strange even in Korean, let alone English.
Done too often though, it’s easy to lose sight of the differences. Combined with scholarship that (over)emphasizes the trend’s roots in popular yaoi manga from Japan, one can easily be forgiven for thinking that Korean men are doing no more than imitating what they see overseas.
This needs rectifying. Not least, because when men suddenly adopt some new fashion en masse, it’s invariably with the specific purpose of getting laid. But what was so special about the 2002 World Cup that made Korean women demand hitherto “effeminate” clothing, personal-grooming, and behaviors from them, if they wanted any hope of doing so?
To answer, you need to consider what happened in the 5 years preceding it, which was a tumultuous period for Korean society. Especially for Korean women, something which tends to get ignored in most accounts of events.
In brief, once democratization began in the late-1980s, women were finally rewarded with the drafting, implementation, and — yes — even enforcement of a wealth of sexual equality legislation, after years of having such concerns ignored or deferred by the military authorities and democracy movement respectively. Also, the female workforce participation rate slowly but surely increased, despite the predominance of the salaryman system and the attendant male-breadwinner ideology. In more ways than one, women could feel justified that their patience was being rewarded.
Then the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-8 struck. Not only was “expensive” sexual equality legislation indefinitely postponed, but the government-business “solution” was to disproportionately lay off women, the logic being that young single ones, largely living with their parents, would be provided for by their fathers, whereas married women (and their children) would be provided for by their husbands. More advanced in their careers, and thus more expensive, the latter would be particularly targeted, to the extent that many would do their utmost to keep their marriages a secret from their employers, a theme subsequently explored in many dramas.
Lest anyone feel that this overview is a wild generalization, note that, tellingly, president Lee Myung-bak would repeat the same solution in the next financial crisis in 2008, although by that stage there was more of a pure financial logic: by having the most irregular workers in the OECD, which women would form the vast majority of. Back in 1998 though, and coming so soon after supposedly liberating and empowering democratization, which actually only really, qualitatively, began upon the administration of the first civilian president Kim Young-sam (김영삼) from 1993, then I’m going to take a wild guess that women were, in short, pissed off.
And with that prickly conclusion in mind is precisely how one should view the following music video by the Korean girl-group SES, made in 2002:
About which Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling gives the following insightful commentary, starting with:
Taken at face value, the SES video seems to be about getting revenge on some boorish (white) men and humiliating them, but I think there are other ways to look at this video than just as a representation of Korean anti-Americanism. A very simple question would be: How many working women in Korea interact with foreign bosses, foreign colleagues, or foreign customers? I would imagine that the vast majority of working women never have to deal with foreigners in the workplace. So, for working Korean women…who would the sexist or rude bosses, colleagues, or customers really be?
And a little later:
…could this be seen as a “liberating” narrative of women standing up to boorish, disrespectful men in positions of power over them and humiliating them or otherwise getting revenge on them and asserting their power. In this case, the use of foreign actors to portray these men acts as the spoonful of sugar which makes the medicine go down because images of Korean men being humiliated would never be approved.
Whatever the answer, what’s clear is that, especially in 2002, on TV, Korean men could never have been treated like this, unless it was done with a lot of humor (and probably not even then). It needs to be asked, of course, why it would be acceptable to portray foreign men the way they are in this video, but not Korean men.
Lest you feel that Matt exaggerates the restrictions on how Korean men could be — and still can be — portrayed in popular culture, see here for a wealth of further examples. Yet, despite those, there were other ways women could express their anger. And a lot more besides.
While I should always resist the temptation to generalize my own experiences to the rest of Korea, it is still remarkable just in its own right that, in one of my first ever classes here in 2000, some of my female students mentioned that they were regularly chastised by middle-aged women on the street for — wait for it — wearing short sleeves. For just 2 years later, it would be a point of patriotic pride for them to wear a crop-top made out of the previously sacred national flag during the 2002 World Cup, and very much encouraged by their elders. As Hyun-Mee Kim (see the footnotes) puts it:
Stripping the Korean national flag of its heavy solemnity and nationalism, [women] brought change with their white, red, blue, and black sports bras, scarves, tank tops, and skirts. And the young Korean women who had been the target of criticism by the media every summer for their “excessive spending” and “oversexed outfits” were praised as original and attractive fashion leaders at the soccer scenes (Hyun-mee Kim: 228-229)
To clarify, I am not (yet) making a connection between this and previous events: merely pointing out the speed of the change. But, how to explain that pace? What on earth did soccer — of all things — have to do with the way women chose to dress?
Perceptive readers may already be thinking that all the skin was publicly encouraged to show support of the Korean soccer players, not the first time women’s bodies and sexuality have quite literally been used in service of the South Korean state (see Sex Among Allies by Katharine Moon, or my own series on gender and militarism). And, indeed, the media did soon describe it as such.
But Hyun-mee Kim notes that Korean women were already on the streets wearing sexier and/or more comfortable clothing that summer, well before public perceptions caught up with and condoned the new standards of dress that they had created. Moreover, and crucially, they were also simultaneously publicly discussing, idolizing and objectifying the Korean players and their bodies in ways that would have been previously thought of as shocking. And, as one does not salivate over a guy’s pecs simply by government decree (please correct me if I’m wrong), then it’s difficult to deny that both were definitely initiated by and for women.
Also, that much more was going on than simply women showing more skin, questioning public standards of decency, or talking more about men that they found attractive. Indeed, the process had already begun in popular culture in the mid-1990s.
Writing in 2002, So-hee Lee mentions that in 1995, “the most popular topics among university students were sexuality, sexual identity, and other sexual subjects” but that in 2002 “there is still no broad popular social discourse on female sexuality outside of marriage”. Partially that was because the term barely existed in Korea then as explained, but primarily it was because – for all the stereotypes of married Korean women or ajumma (아주마) having gender but not sex – precisely they that were at the forefront of a veritable sexual revolution in Korea beginning in the mid-1990s. As she explains, many Korean women novelists confessed that it was in marriage that they had begun to recognize their repression as women for the very first time”, and this was because:
Looking at their mother’s lives, Korean women in their early thirties believed that their marriages would be different. Because the Korean standard of living and patterns of Korean life changed very quickly, they believed that Korean ways of thinking had been transformed with the same speed. This is where their tragedy begins. As [a character in a mid-1990s novel discussed] says, “mothers teach daughters to live differently from themselves but teach sons to live like their fathers”….During sixteen years of schooling, they had learned that equality is an important democratic value, but nowhere had they been taught that women experience the institution of marriage as a condition of inequality. Many married women of this generation have [thus] experienced a process of self-awakening…(Lee: 144)
Lee’s chapter is about a succession of novels, movies and TV dramas that suddenly appeared between 1993-1996 which, with their blunt depictions of Korean women’s sexual desires, sexual repression, sexual frustrations within marriage, direct challenges to sexual double standards and so forth, were direct challenges to those stereotypes and provoked intense discussions throughout Korea. Unfortunately, a detailed discussion of them will have to wait for another post (update: and here that is!), but it can be said here that Lee concludes from her study of them that:
Looking back at Korean culture with a certain detachment [in 2002], I can imagine that the years 1995 and 1996 will be remembered as a critical period for the emergence of social discourse on sexuality, especially female sexuality. The year 1995 was particularly remarkable in that housewives began, on their own initiative, to speak in public about wives’ subjective sexuality (Lee: 160).
And that, in a comparison with the US in the 1970s:
My reading of the concept of female sexuality in Korean popular culture might suggest that Korean society is now at a stage of development comparable to America in the 1970s, when every kind of women’s issue appeared in realistic novel form….If this parallel holds, then what kind of story is unfolding in twenty-first-century Korea? Is it not difficult to image that a viable revolution against sexual repression might take place? (158)
With even greater benefit of hindsight, I’m not all that sure that the mid-1990s are remembered quite like that in 2008, and Lee did acknowledge that her discussion possibly:
…gives the impression that Korean women now are marching to demand their sexual subjectivity, in reality, most Korean women are marching only as the passive consumers of the sorts of cultural products described previously, not as their active cultural producers (159).
But quite presciently, she continues:
When women are able to intervene in the process of cultural production as subjective consumers with a feminist point of view, the Korean concept of female sexuality can be transformed more rapidly than before (159, my emphasis).
And of course, just like the 2008 Olympics that are coming in up in 3 weeks time, the World Cup is no longer merely or even primarily a competition for victory between nations, but is a prominent global cultural product. Part of that cultural product is the bodies of the the players themselves, and Korean women in 2002 definitely fundamentally changed the ways in which they “consumed” those.
The Rise of Kkotminam: A backlash against salarymen?
The first change they made was in confirming the dominance of feminized ideals of male beauty that had first begun evolving in the mid-1990s. Consider this description of the previous ideals:
The streets of Seoul are now filled with girlish women. Some look fragile, as if calling for protection. Women of this generation say that want to be protected rather than to protect. Young girls who used to favor gentle “mama’s boys” now turn their backs on them. They are anxious to fall in love with “tough guys” who look strong and even violent, like Choi Min-su and Lee Cheong-jae, who played tough gangsters in the explosively popular 1995 television drama Sand Clock (모레시계). Besides having a “tough guy” as a boyfriend, the women of this emerging generation want a pet. A pretty and coquettish girl, with a tiny, cute dog, beside a tough guy is part of this emergent new image. (Cho Haejoang: 182)
Although the book that was from was published in 2002, by the reference to the television drama and by the focus of other chapters I get the impression she is really writing about the mid to late-1990s. Later in the chapter, she mentions how the country as a whole reverted to a justifying male breadwinner mentality under the banner of “Let’s protect the our fathers who have lost their vitality” or “Let’s restore the authority of the family head” as a result of the IMF Crisis as I’ve discussed, and presumably the natural result would have been that those “tough guy” preferences of Korean women would have been reinforced, or at least the protective elements of them. But in fact, quite the opposite occurred. For instance, by 2000 there was:
…a new type of male emerging albeit in a small number of music videos. It is a de-gendered image of men which is a contrast to the macho image. Male groups such as Y2K, H.O.T., ITYM, and Shinhwa, whose fans are mostly teenage girls, portray this image. They wear make-up and a lot of jewelry and ornaments – which are all considered feminine – and take of their shirts to show off their bodies. This indicates that the male body is also sexually objectified as the female body….The style of the video is similar to that used to show female [bodies] with extreme close-ups to fill the screen with a face, and medium range or full body shots for dances. Although there is a risk of overstating the phenomenon, this image could be interpreted as a signal indicating the possibility of breaking the binary boundaries of men and women that have been formed in a patriarchal culture (Hoon-soon Kim: 207)
And this is corroborated by the fact, as early as the mid-1990s, there were already distinctly feminine advertisements for cosmetics aimed at men. These following ones are all from the Somang Cosmetics website (update: they’ve since been taken down), but I can’t imagine that those of other cosmetics companies would have been significantly different.
1998, with Kim Sung-woo (김승우):
1999, when soccer player Ahn Jung-hwan (안정한) must have signed a modeling contract with them:
And then of course the notorious television advertisement for “Color Lotion” from 2002, featuring Kim Jae-won (김재원) on the left:
Regardless of what women made of that particular homoerotic advertisement, the establishment of distinctly feminine ideals of male attractiveness were at least partially sealed by Ahn Jung-Hwan’s success in the World Cup, when Somang Cosmetics must have thought that all its Christmases had come at once:
Although the Earth must surely have shifted as Korean women collectively put their hands to their chests and sighed as Ahn Jung-hwan kissed his wedding ring every time he scored a goal, I’m not for an instant placing the blame(!) for what came to be known as the “Flower Men” (꽃미남) phenomenon solely on his shoulders. Where does it come from then?
Of course there is some international basis for it. While Taiwan, for instance, both survived the IMF Crisis relatively unscathed and didn’t host the World Cup, much the same phenomenon still happened there:
Josephine Ho (2001: 63-86), a feminist from Taiwan, points out that most of the recent idols of teenage girls are no longer buff and tough men but rather “feminine men” who evoke a sense of sympathy, saying that there is a “clear contrast between teenage girls of enormous strength and their idols of somewhat weak image.” This illustrates that women in their teens are breaking away from the typical framework of heterosexual romance in which women long for me who will devote themselves to, and take care of them, and have started to express their sexuality in an active manner. The preference for men with the capability and personality of the breadwinner as the “most attractive” is being undermined. (Hyun-Mee Kim: 235)
I don’t know enough about modern Taiwanese society to judge the accuracy of that, but I have no reason to doubt that it’s true. But I have many problems with international comparisons.
Firstly, because they mean that the Western notion of “metrosexuality” invariably comes to dominate discussions, years of repetitive comparisons between An Jung-hwan and David Beckham in the Korean English-language media (and, by extension, by foreign observers too) ultimately seeming to absolve Korean women of any ability to determine their own tastes in men. And just like it does to be told personally that my liking any Korean women at all is mere “yellow fever”, it must surely rankle Korean women to be told that them liking say any Korean idol is no different to, say, a British teenage girl liking a member of Westlife.
On top of that, for all their new assertiveness, there were still definite limits on how far women’s new freedoms could go, and they did not extend to publicly praising and/or objectifying non-Korean men. Obviously that’s a crucial point, but as this post approaches (ahem) 4500 words I realize that a discussion of that would be better placed in Part Three; meanwhile, accounting for changes by a simple importation of foreign ideals of male attractiveness portrays Korean women as, well, mindless, uncritical, and passive consumers and again as Part Three will more fully reveal, this was anything but the case.
As the title suggests, I pose a more proactive explanation, and herein (finally) lies the revelation that has so preoccupied me for the past two weeks. First, consider this statement:
When gender discrimination in public areas such as the labor market and politics is still powerfully all pervasive, Korean women often feel helpless in thinking that change won’t come easily. Their sense of devastation leads to displays of resistance and subversiveness in “private areas such as sexuality. Sexuality and intimacy lend themselves to being viewed as the only arena where the women can affect a measure of change through their will or emotions. In this respect, Korean women’s rapid sexual subjectification demonstrates, on the one hand, the power to transform and, on the other, a collective sense of powerlessness (Hyun-Mee Kim: 240).
The first things that came to mind when I read that were the scene in either La Femme Nikita or Point of No Return (I can’t remember which) when, after receiving her training to become an assassin, the main character is placed in a sort of finishing school where her female tutor reveals the existence of “this power” that women have over men. After that was a line from some sex and/or relationship advice book that I read once, which said that women should not consider sex as something to be given to or withheld from partners as a form of reward and punishment.
Yes, considering the virtual gender apartheid that exists in Korea, then an alleged asexuality of ajummas as a form of resistance to patriarchy was one of the first things that came to mind too. But then the next thing was that, maybe, just maybe, flower men became their new ideal of male attractiveness as a act of at least subconscious resistance to the men that had denied them of the opportunity for children and careers that they’d (finally) come to expect? That still maintained that women didn’t even have sexual feelings, but at the same time taking advantage of one of the biggest prostitution industries in Asia? That had the gall, after doing all that, to expect Korean women to continue to hold breadwinners like them on a pedestal? Like I said, they were pissed off, andKorean men that came up with the aforementioned slogans were surely naive to think that things could have gone on simply as before.
Of course, I acknowledge that it will be much more complicated than that in reality. Like I said, I haven’t looked at the 1990s in any great detail here, but in addition to the sexually radical new books, movies and dramas that came out in 1993-96 that Cho Haejeong discusses, there’s a whole host of developments like the “Missy” phenomenon beginning in 1994 and the “Samonim” (사모님) one before that: in other words, things weren’t quite as simplistic as how I’ve depicted them. I haven’t paid enough attention to generational differences either, even though Hyun-mee Kim quite correctly claims that they are as strong markers of identity in Korea as race is in the US, so much so that most chapters in the books used here us them as their base units of analysis, and increasingly books on Korean politics are too.
As I type this, I realize that no description is complete without those, and so they’ll require an unplanned additional post before I talk about the 2002 World Cup proper in now Part Four (or Five)…which is not to imply that this post hasn’t considerably evolved and mutated itself since I first began writing on this, now somewhat amorphous subject.
Another thing I realize is that until recently I’ve been so enamored of my associations of Korea with futurism (see here and especially here for instance) that I’ve mistakenly disdained studying the 1990s previously, feeling that as I looked further and further back in time in Korea then the people become more conservative and unlikeable, the clothes and hairstyles more bizarre, the women less attractive, and the country as a whole much less modern…and so on. That’s not unreasonable given Korea’s breakneck speed of development, but considering that I arrived in Korea as long ago as 2000, and that I first went to university in 1994, then in hindsight my disinterest has been very strange. After all, to understand me, you’d have to understand New Zealand in my formative years as an adult, and indeed just on the bus home yesterday I listened to a Korea Society Podcast on president Lee Myung-bak’s first 100 days in office, in which one panelist argued that the experience of the IMF crisis defines Koreans of my generation. All obvious certainly, but I’ve got some catching up to do.
Regardless of all that though, I think my notion of flower men becoming popular because of a backlash is a definitely a valid one, and I think original too; certainly no-one that I’ve read recently makes a link like that. At the very least, it needs further exploring.
Only having just begun examining the 1990s myself then, I can’t confirm or disprove Gord Sellar’s suggestion that cross-fertilization from some elements of Japanese popular culture may also have played a role in the rising appeal of flower men, and while my gut instinct tells me that it was mostly home grown and that that would only have had a marginal role at best, I still highly recommend his post just for its discussion of the ways in which the phenomenon has evolved and be sustained since 2002 alone. Given that I end my discussion on them in 2002 (for now), then our two posts nicely compliment each other on that score.
Ho, Josephine, “From ‘Spice Girls’ to ‘compensated dating’: sexualization of Taiwanese teenage girls,” Yonsei Women’s Journal, 7, (2001), pp. 63-86.
Hoon-Soon Kim, “Korean Music Videos, Postmodernism, and Gender Politics” in Feminist Cultural Politics in Korea, ed. by Jung-Hwa Oh, 2005, p. 207 pp. 195-227.
Hyun-Mee Kim, “Feminization of the 2002 World Cup and Women’s Fandom” in Feminist Cultural Politics in Korea, ed. by Jung-Hwa Oh, 2005, pp. 228-243.
So-hee Lee, “Female Sexuality in Popular Culture” in Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, pp. 141-164.
Update, December 2013: A translation of this article, with my original commentary (and consequently readers’ comments) removed. Here are some quick translations for the captions below too:
“Be picky”
“Embrace your desires”
“Be lazy”
“Think differently”
“Look at them [men] humorously”
“Don’t wait”
“Don’t even look up [at him]”
“Shout”
“Dios Women Cheer Project” (the name of the ad campaign).
최근 TV를 통해 방영중인 LG 냉장고 ‘디오스 여자만세 프로젝트’ 광고가 네티즌들로부터 거센 비판을 받고 있다. 무엇보다 표현이 상식수준을 넘어 보기 민망할 정도로 지나치고 심지어 남녀 역차별을 조장하고 있다는 점을 들어 포털사이트 다음 아고라에서는 ‘디오스 여자만세 프로젝트’ 광고 중지를 요구하는 청원 서명까지 벌이고 있다.
Netizens have strongly criticized the “Dios Woman Cheer Project” advertisement that has recently been playing on Korean TV. On the Daum Agora discussion forum, they have complained that the things said in it defy common-sense standards of decency, even going so far as to promote discrimination against men, and so have set up an online petition calling for it to be taken off the air.
광고에는 ‘여자들이여 까다롭게 굴어라, 더 욕심 부려라, 게을러져라, 딴 생각해라, 우습게 보라, 기다리지 마라, 거들떠보지 마라, 큰소리 쳐라’ 등의 문구가 여성이 남성을 인형처럼 조정하는 자극적인 장면과 함께 등장한다.
In the advertisement, the voiceover and the text say: “Hey, women! Be picky! Embrace your desires! Be lazy! Think differently! Look at them (men) humorously! Don’t wait! Don’t even look up (at him)! Shout!”, and so forth. In one scene women are even encouraged to treat men like puppets.
서명을 주도하고 있는 네티즌 ‘꽃순이’는 “‘여성만세 프로젝트’라는 거창한 이름으로 좋지 않은 말들만 열거하고, 그 대상을 남자로 유도하고 있다”며 “방송에서 안볼 수 있게 해 달라”고 요청하고 나섰다. 또 다른 네티즌은 “만약 남녀 반대로 광고가 만들어졌다면, 사회적으로 큰 파장이 왔을 것”이라며 “남녀 역차별을 조장하고 있다”고 주장했다.
According to the netizen “Flower-Suni” that initiated the petition, “The grand-sounding ‘Woman Cheer Project’ advertisement merely lists and induces negative behavior towards men”, that “people don’t really want to see on their screens”, and demanded that it be taken off the air. Another netizen added that “if an advertisement portraying the same sentiments towards women had been made, then all sectors of society would have been quickly up in arms and insisted that “it promotes inequality”.
광고 내용이 눈에 거슬리기는 여성들도 마찬가지다. 여성이라고 밝힌 네티즌들 대부분 “저런 광고는 여성들에게도 달갑지 않다”, “괜히 여자 안티를 만드는 광고”, “광고가 무척 거슬렸다. 된장녀를 만드는 것인가”라고 비난했으며 “남녀평등이란 서로 만드는 것이다, 한쪽만 강조하는 평등은 또 다른 불평등을 가져온다” 고 지적했다.
By no means is it only men that feel that the contents of the ad were inappropriate. Of those female netizens who have made their gender public on discussion boards, most criticized it, saying things like “it is unacceptable to women just as much as men”; that “the advertisement will make people anti-women”; and that “the advertisement is very offensive, and encourages women to be Bean-paste Girls”. Finally one netizen pointed out that “men and women have to become equal together, and if you overemphasize only one aspect of that then it will actually only lead to further inequality.”
Update, December 2013: A very old post, which I’ve long since removed the original commentary to (and consequently the comments also). But hopefully someone may still find the translation useful!
해외동포 연예인 붐을 일으킨 재키림의 10년 전 사진 / Jackie Lim, The Creator of an Overseas Korean Entertainer Boom
삼성은 하이버네이션 기능 때문에 안정성에 문제가 많은 그린컴퓨터를 얼른 단종시키고 매직스테이션이라는 새로운 브랜드를 선보였는데, 매직스테이션은 꽤 오래 출시되면서 장수 브랜드로 자리 잡았다.
Because the “hibernation” function was causing many problems with stability, Samsung quickly stopped producing “Green computers” in 1995 and launched a new brand called “Magic Station” instead, which became a very successful brand over the next ten years.
매직스테이션III의 광고모델은 당시 새롭게 떠오르던 해외동포 연예인인 재키림이다. 몇 개 국어를 자유자재로 구사할 수 있었던 재키림은 재원이라고 칭찬받으며 화려하게 연예계에 데뷔했다. 재키림은 SBS ‘생방송 TV 가요 20’, KMTV ‘동방특급 비디오자키’ 등을 뛰면서 가수와 비디오자키로 활동했다. 재키림은 비디오자키의 열풍을 일으켰을 뿐만 아니라 오늘날의 해외동포 연예인 붐을 일으킨 불씨가 되었지만, 정작 본인은 한국 연예계에 적응하지 못하고 방황으로 얼룩진 비운의 운명을 걷게 된다.
Jackie Lim was a new and upcoming star when she appeared in the “Magic Station 3” advertisement in 1995. As she was fluent in many languages she received a lot of attention and praise when she made her original debut, both starring as a singer and working as “video jockey” on the SBS program “20 Songs On Air” and KMTV’s “High-Class Eastern Video Jockey”. Ultimately she proved so popular she provided the spark for a boom in interest in overseas Korean entertainers. But she soon found it difficult to adapt to the Korean entertainment industry, and became a bit lost for which direction to take herself and her career.
재키림은 마약을 비롯한 좋지 않은 사건에 휘말리는데, 그녀가 이런 사건에 빠진 이유는 ‘한국에서 실력으로 활동하려 했지만 자신을 성적대상으로만 보면서 높은 사람 자리에 불려나가야 하고, 동료연예인들로부터 왕따당하면서 외로워서 약을 하게 되었다.’고 밝혔다. 재원이라고 떠들었던 뒷편에는 여성 연예인에 대한 여전한 성차별과 고위권의 압력, 동료 연예인의 텃세가 있었던 것이다.
Later, she became disgusted and further disheartened by trying to succeed as a singer in Korea through her own abilities but while facing the virtual prostitution of female entertainers that goes on behind the scenes. Not only was she regularly pressured to entertain and provide sexual services for politicians and business leaders, who saw her merely as yet another trophy girlfriend to be used, but on top of that she was also ostracized by other entertainers too, angered by whom they saw as an uppity overseas Korean whom they intended to put in her place. In the end she became very lonely and depressed and got involved with drugs.
이미지: 1995년 삼성 매직스테이션3 광고에서 밝게 웃는 재키림. 하지만 이 웃음 뒤에는 잘못된 연예게 관행으로 인한 외로움과 고통이 숨어있다.
Photo caption: Jackie Lim smiling brightly in Samsung’s advertisement for the Magic Station 3. But hidden behind the smile there was a great deal of loneliness and pain caused by the Korean entertainment industry’s bad practices (source).
Update, February 2014:In case of any confusion, Part 1 on Korean workplace culture has since been deleted sorry!
Switching from the office politics of Korean workplaces to the Japanese colonization of East Asia may seem like quite a jump at first, especially to those whose primary interest is gender issues, but then to fully understand the present-day impact of conscription on Korean society it is obviously necessary to study the military as a whole first. Doing so invariably leads to colonial Korea, for the Korean military regimes of 1961 to 1987 had uniquely pervasive roles in and control of Korean society, and any accounting for those cannot avoid the fact that the bulk of their military officers and bureaucrats in the 1960s had served in the Japanese colonial state in some capacity. Once in power they had no hesitation in recreating a state model that had, in their experience, demonstrably delivered high growth under an authoritarian, top-down control of society, and both features tied in well with and were ultimately considered essential to the new state ideology of anti-communism. Indeed president Park Chung-hee had spent most of his impressionable twenties as an officer in the army of colonial Manchukuo, a vast social laboratory of state control that 1960s Korea increasingly began to resemble.
I’ve frequently mentioned the profound similarities between Japan and Korea in this blog, but in many senses the colonial origins of these are still like the elephant in the room here, their presence still keenly felt in economics, state-society relations and domestic politics, but something that Korean social-science scholars have only just begun acknowledging – let alone the Korean public – lest Korea’s post-colonial achievements be viewed as nothing more than the product of a much disliked and particularly brutal colonial rule. Hence while nobody in any country likes having foreigners explain their history to them, in this particular case Korea specialists outside of the country, with more job security, really do seem to have a much more balanced and objective view of the period than Koreans themselves.
With that note on being objective in mind, it is important to begin by putting all stereotypes and preconceptions of other military regimes out of one’s mind, especially for North Americans (the bulk of my readers) who may be very familiar with Latin American cases and tempted to equate those of South Korea with them. In those cases (with the important exception of the huge social and economic transformations begun under Pinochet in Chile), militaries generally merely took over state organs, either for the sake of preventing leftists coming to power, preventing the socialization of the economy, and/ or for the sake of their own enrichment, but overall they left state and elite structures largely intact. In contrast, a more accurate picture of the level of control and transformation wrought by South Korean military regimes would be of China under the Chinese Communist Party, and this is by no means a coincidence as I’ll explain later.
Ultimately, by outlining this historical context in this post and the next, I hope to demonstrate both why it’s so important to treat the Korean military as a special entity and why it’s reasonable to describe Korea as a “militarized” (if not technically military) regime even now, and having done so then hopefully readers will be more convinced of the truth of the seemingly outlandish assertions about the effects of conscription on Korean men that I’ll make in Parts Five and Six.
For the sake of space then I’m going to assume that readers know a little about the history of Japanese colonialism and how Japan had been trying to catch up economically and militarily with the West since at least 1868. If not then no problem, the Wikipedia articles linked to above are perfectly adequate, if basic introductions; this provides some additional information and links too. Instead, I’m going to start off here with some facts about the former that I’ll hazard that most readers probably don’t know, but which proved very influential on the ultimate development of its colonies and of Korea in particular. Ironically, considering the government’s largely empty rhetoric on the subject today, back then Korea was a very real hub for the movement of soldiers, immigrants and materials between Japan, its other colonies and then front-lines in China, and as such it was also a natural supplier of mineral resources, hydroelectricity and forced labour.
But first, a note on sources before I begin properly. I actually studied all this as an undergraduate, but as most of my notes are back in New Zealand then for now I relied on the book The Developmental State, edited by Meredith Woo-Cumings (1999) for the first half or so of this post, and used the chapters “Introduction: Chalmers Johnson and the Politics of Nationalism and Development” by Meredith Woo-Cumings and “Where do High-Growth Political Economies Come From? The Japanese Lineage of Korea’s Developmental State” by Atul Kohli in particular, and for the second last section I used the chapter “Colonizing Manchuria: The Making of an Imperial Myth” by Louise Young in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, edited by Stephen Vlastos (1998) and especially the journal article “Imitating the Colonizers: The Legacy of the Disciplining State from Manchukuo to South Korea” by Suk-Jung Han in the July 2005 volume of Japan Focus (available online here).
Finally, for any readers also interested in Latin American studies and in particular what made the Pinochet regime so unique in the region, I strongly recommend reading the journal article “Reconceptualizing Latin American Authoritarianism in the 1970s: From Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism to Neoconservatism” by Hector E. Schamis in Comparative Politics, January 1991, pp. 201-220. I usually wouldn’t bother mentioning something so off-topic, but then it’s one of those articles that made three years of Latin American Studies suddenly all make sense in fifteen minutes of reading, and so it should be much more widely known (Part Three will be based on a similarly revelatory journal article for East Asian Studies). Speaking of which, the best comparative study remains Chapters Five and Six of Capitalist Development and Democracy by Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Elelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stevens (1992), one of the first books I made sure to buy as soon as I received my first ever paycheck.
Again, please put aside all preconceptions. First, those of Japanese strength back then based on its position as an economic superpower today. While European powers were at the height of their technological, military and economic superiority to the rest of the world by the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, it’s important to remember that Japan, in contrast, barely avoided being colonized itself. The developmental passion that this provoked in the Japanese was very important, and combined with its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 and the benefit of hindsight then its ultimate rise appears somewhat inevitable. But in reality that victory was a very close-run thing, against the most backward of European powers, and in contrast to their then global empires this only granted Japan a very limited corner of the world to just begin to colonize. Even four decades later Japan was by no means fully developed, and the consensus of historians is that even if Japan had, say, won the Battle of Midway or even occupied Hawaii, an ultimate US victory in the Pacific (and Europe) was still somewhat inevitable, albeit one heavily army-based involving hopping from the Aleutian Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and finally the Kuril Islands, involving a transfer of resources that may have stalled the development of atomic weapons and their attendant technologies.
Yes, I am a big fan of alternate history fiction and counterfactual history. Meanwhile, Japan’s quite weak position at the turn of the Nineteenth Century forced a uniquely intensified form of colonialism, which again any preconceptions based on European colonialism would give quite a false impression of. Japanese colonialism was different in several crucial ways:
1. It began much later, and was initiated, led and controlled by the Japanese state for the sake of Japanese development rather than by private companies and business interests in pursuit of profit.
While it’s true that all European powers were in a mad scramble for colonial possessions in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, this belies the fact that for centuries they generally only gained territories with the greatest reluctance, usually after becoming entangled in disputes between natives and trading companies and having to stay for the latter’s protection and continued free pursuit of trade. In contrast, in Kohli’s words, Japan stands out amongst colonizing nations “as nearly the only one with a successful record of deliberate, state-led political and economic transformation” (the other would be Germany, as it was also a late developer), and given their circumstances as described then the Japanese were forced to make “ruthless use of [this] state power to pry open and transform Korea in a relatively short period.”
2. It only occurred in those areas geographically closest to Japan, and, not unimportant, culturally and racially closest to Japan too.
This proximity both facilitated and encouraged many more Japanese to play a direct role in colonial rule than was ever the case in European colonies. To give some comparisons, there were 87,552 government officials in Korea in 1937, 52,270 of whom were Japanese, whereas the French state in Vietnam (relatively large itself compared to British colonies in Africa) only had 3000 French officials. In other words, for geographically-similar sized colonies the Japanese had fifteen officials for every French one. Also, there was a police force of 60,000 in 1941, just under half of whom were Japanese. Kohli gives no figures for Vietnam, largely as having a large colonial police force isn’t all that unique, but again this belies the unusually close personal supervision of it by the Japanese: in 1915-20, about one in ten police officers were sternly disciplined for transgression of police rules. In contrast, you virtually need the direct intervention of the president for that in Korea today.
This proximity also led to a great deal of movement of ordinary civilians from Japan. Grand state narratives of colonial settlement before the 1930s were more propaganda then reality, genuine examples only being confined to places like Okinawa and Hokkaido (much less historically “Japanese” than people think) in the 1870s and 1880s, and after that emigration was primarily to other places like Hawaii, California and Latin America (by coincidence, Brazil recently celebrated 100 years of Japanese immigration) until the racist natives increasingly restricted their numbers. After that the state certainly encouraged farmers to colonize the new overseas territories, but few actually did until the agrarian pressures and poverty engendered by the depression, combined with the newly acquired territory of Manchukuo, persuaded no less than 321,882 to settle there in a decade or so. Even more extraordinarily, roughly 720,000 Koreans settled there between 1932 and 1940 too.
My budget for books is large but not unlimited, so I don’t have any figures for the numbers of settlers from European nations to their colonies sorry, but I’d be surprised if those figures didn’t compare well to those for, say, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, which took much longer and lacked such large and/or vulnerable indigenous populations. Moreover, there is a clear agricultural and psychological ease in colonizing areas similar climatically to the mother country (obvious, but strangely rarely pointed out), and given their geographical proximity and racial and cultural affinities with the natives then the Japanese could realistically consider their rule to be permanent, leading eventually to a full integration of colonies into an expanded Japan. This, indeed, was the idea of the official ideology of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere“, even if the racism of the officials charged with implementing it did seriously undermine this vision in practice.
3. Given the above, then Japanese colonization ultimately involved the complete transformation and development of colonies’ economies and the establishment of modern bureaucratic states where none had existed before, and while all this was purely for the sake of Japan, this involved much more investment and establishment of infrastructure and industry than the extractive industries of European colonies ever did.
In Kohl’s words, its impact was “more intense, more brutal, and deeply architectonic: it also left Korea with three and a half decades of economic growth [at an average of 3%] and a relatively advanced level of industrialization (nearly 35% of Korea’s national production in 1940 originated in mining and manufacturing).” No, the word “architectonic” isn’t in my dictionary either, but you get the idea. One of the first and most important things I learned in my Southeast Asian history classes at university was that coloring, say, England, Malaysia and Burma red in an atlas didn’t imply that the latter in anyway resembled the former, but in very real senses Korea at least was indeed a mini-Japan by the 1940s.
It is natural and correct to point out that a great deal of this development was destroyed in the Korean War, but although the developmental mindset passed on was ultimately a much more influential colonial endowment as I’ll explain in Part Three, the remaining industry and infrastructure was by no means insignificant. In brief, this included:
– As the hub of the colonial empire, Korea’s roads and railways were among the finest that a developing country could inherit from its colonial past.
– Although technically “human capital”, the Japanese made significant investments in primary education, and the benefits of these would have largely been felt by North and South Korea rather than the colonial state itself.
– The exhaustive land survey of 1910-1918, which “mapped all plots of land, classified it according to type, graded its productivity and established ownership” both provided a reliable source of taxation and the information upon which Korea’s agricultural revolution was based, Korea going from a land of regular famines to the granary of the empire in two decades. Certainly this never meant that Koreans actually ate more themselves, and however important clearly delineated land ownership is to developing economies today it was obviously of little use in Korea after the Korea War. But still, the postcolonial state knew its subjects and resources intimately, whereas most governments of former colonies today still haven’t mapped their territories adequately.
– The geographical distribution of industries established did have impacts later. Most chemical, metal, and electricity-generating industries were in the North, and the remainder of those, combined with communist regimes’ strengths in producing industries but not consumer goods, in large measure accounts for the economic superiority of the North over the South until the late-1960s. But these were largely highly capital-intensive industries “that were not well integrated into the local economy…much more likely to evolve into white elephants, requiring continuous protection, rather than into nimble, labor-intensive exporters of consumer products”. In contrast, the South actually had 60% of total industrial production in 1938, and what’s more this was concentrated in such fields as food production, textiles, machines and tools, and tobacco-related industries, not coincidentally much better suited to export than anything produced in the North.
– And export they did. In 1938 Korea was exporting twice as much as other similar-sized economies, and what’s more almost half of its exports were in manufactured goods. And as anybody who studied history in school should know, the whole idea of most colonies was to extract raw materials from them, send them back to the mother country, make things from them, then sell them back to the colonies, a captive market. No wonder then, that South Korean military and bureaucratic elites in 1961, largely the same people that had previously occupied the lower rungs of the colonial state, relished the chance to restart a high-growth economic system for the sake of Korean rather than Japanese development and capital accumulation.
I’ll cover the colonial period in a little more detail in Part Three, but only on a macro-level so to speak, so anyone further interested in the Japanese colonial period and grassroots Korean history in general, I recommend the Korean section of Frog in a Well for many interesting posts, and Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling has written a great deal on that period too (although without a category section his posts can take some time to find sorry). Meanwhile, as so many of those elites mentioned and especially Park Chung-hee had served in Manchukuo in some capacity, then an examination of that colony really does become almost as important as colonial Korea itself to understand Korean military regimes.
Readers, I’m sure, are familiar with many of the biological and cultural explanations proffered for differences in mental abilities between the sexes. Here’s an an article in the Economist magazine with some strong evidence for, well…both sides to the debate, and with some surprising conclusions about Korea too:
Girls are becoming as good as boys at mathematics, and are still better at reading
TRADITION has it that boys are good at counting and girls are good at reading. So much so that Mattel once produced a talking Barbie doll whose stock of phrases included “Math class is tough!”
Although much is made of differences between the brains of adult males and females, the sources of these differences are a matter of controversy. Some people put forward cultural explanations and note, for example, that when girls are taught separately from boys they often do better in subjects such as maths than if classes are mixed. Others claim that the differences are rooted in biology, are there from birth, and exist because girls’ and boys’ brains have evolved to handle information in different ways.
Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute in Florence and his colleagues have just published the results of a study which suggests that culture explains most of the difference in maths, at least. In this week’s Science, they show that the gap in mathematics scores between boys and girls virtually disappears in countries with high levels of sexual equality, though the reading gap remains.
Dr Guiso took data from the 2003 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. Some 276,000 15-year-olds from 40 countries sat the same maths and reading tests. The researchers compared the results, by country, with each other and with a number of different measures of social sexual equality. One measure was the World Economic Forum’s gender-gap index, which reflects economic and political opportunities, education and well-being for women. Another was based on an index of cultural attitudes towards women. A third was the rate of female economic activity in a country, and the fourth measure looked at women’s political participation.
As long-term readers will know, I usually have problems with virtually anything the Economist says about international comparisons of education standards, its consistent praise of the high scores of South Korean students, for instance, undermined by South Koreans themselves finding their education system appalling (a fact which a whole five minutes of checking on the internet would reveal). There’s little scope for misinterpretations of correlations between reading and writing scores and measures of sexual equality though, but still, as you can see, the researchers were at pains to keep the variables down to a minimum (source, right: Tattoo Lover; CC BY-SA 2.0).
On average, girls’ maths scores were, as expected, lower than those of boys. However, the gap was largest in countries with the least equality between the sexes (by any score), such as Turkey. It vanished in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the sexes are more or less on a par with one another. The researchers also did some additional statistical checks to ensure the correlation was material, and not generated by another, third variable that is correlated with sexual equality, such as GDP per person. They say their data therefore show that improvements in maths scores are related not to economic development, but directly to improvements in the social position of women.
That was quite surprising, and confusing. For sure, in terms of its gender empowerment measure, Korea is one of the most sexist countries in the world, and although it was less than a generation ago that girls’ university and even high-school educations were often sacrificed for the sake of their brothers’, I’ve heard from many different sources that the Korean education system today is relatively meritocratic. Indeed, Michael Seth in this must-read book on the subject, argues that it is one of its greatest strengths, albeit one unfortunately (and ironically) at odds with the great respect, status and deference given to high achievers also.
I’d imagined, then, that young Korean women confront sexism more once they enter the workforce, as despite their educations there remain strong societal expectations that they will be happy to work at non-advancing jobs in their twenties and then effectively retire upon marriage, not unlike the situation in Western countries in the 1950s and ’60s.
But then these tests were for 15 year-olds, so clearly there is some sex-based factor at work in the Korean education system that I wasn’t aware of. Why do Korean girls do so badly at math then? I’m open to suggestions.
The only clue I have is that Maths (and English) is considered a hard and difficult subject for students, which is why in its 19-year history the chain of institutes I work for didn’t hire any female teachers to teach it until literally last week, only men being considered authoritative enough to get students to study in class. Certainly, the institutes I work for are quite unique in that regard, and much more demanding of students than most, but still: I think it’s quite telling that the policy was in place. And if students of either sex disliked it so much, then I can’t imagine that girls with interest and/or ability in it would have been particularly encouraged to pursue it, given their relative absence in engineering and scientific fields in Korea. Perhaps Korean education isn’t quite as meritocratic as I thought?
(On a side note, it says a great deal about the sort of English taught at my institute that only men were considered capable of teaching that also, despite — I assume — a majority of English {and languge} teachers in Korea {and probably the world} being women)
The one mathematical gap that did not disappear was the differences between girls and boys in geometry. This seems to have no relation to sexual equality, and may allow men to cling on to their famed claim to be better at navigating than women are….
Again, surprising in a Korean context. I’ve been teaching 13 and 14 year-olds, on-and-off, for a good eight years now, and I’ve noticed that their math textbooks are always just full of geometry, far more than I ever had to do at their age. For sure, frantically copying each other’s answers in breaks between classes doesn’t equate to real learning, something they’re forced to do because they wouldn’t possibly have enough time to do all the homework required of them (let alone — heaven forbid — eat and sleep too). But still, if there’s one country where I’d thought girls would have been good at geometry, it would have been Korea. Something is clearly up (source, right: unknown).
The article gets more interesting (and controversial) after that:
….However, the gap in reading scores not only remained, but got bigger as the sexes became more equal. Average reading scores were higher for girls than for boys in all countries. But in more equal societies, not only were the girls as good at maths as the boys, their advantage in reading had increased.
This suggests an interesting paradox. At first sight, girls’ rise to mathematical equality suggests they should be invading maths-heavy professions such as engineering-and that if they are not, the implication might be that prejudice is keeping them out. However, as David Ricardo observed almost 200 years ago, economic optimisation is about comparative advantage. The rise in female reading scores alongside their maths scores suggests that female comparative advantage in this area has not changed. According to Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management in Illinois who is one of the paper’s authors, that is just what has happened. Other studies of gifted girls, she says, show that even though the girls had the ability, fewer than expected ended up reading maths and sciences at university. Instead, they went on to be become successful in areas such as law.
In other words, girls may acquire an absolute advantage over boys as a result of equal treatment. This is something that society, more broadly, has not yet taken on board. Mattel may wish to take note that among Teen Talk Barbie’s 270 phrases concerning shopping, parties and clothes, at least one might usefully have been, “Dostoevsky rocks!”
I’m very much a proponent of the existence of some fundamental biological differences in aptitudes between the sexes myself, and do believe that even in a perfect world that there will always be, say more female nurses than male ones, and more male engineers then female ones and so forth. Not for a moment does that mean that I will ever stop or even not positively encourage my daughter to, say, be an engineer, or not take seriously a male nurse, but the above is yet another inconvenient truth against the argument that all difference is due to prejudice.
For more on that I recommend the book The New Sexual Revolution, by Robert Pool (1994), and especially “The Real Truth About The Female Body” in Time Magazine, March 8 1999. I especially recommend checking out the (naturally) numerous comments to the Economist article; as you have to be a subscriber to make a comment, then the dialogue is a lot more intelligent and civilized than you’ll find on most blogs and forums! I especially like this one of Tom West’s, a healthy cautionary message against what I’ve written above:
“Do all feminists rail against the idea that men and women might actually be inherently different?”
The trouble with acknowledging differences is that human beings tend to turn a generality into a specific rule. As soon as you say that it’s natural that men are over-represented in higher math, it becomes instantly harder for any woman to be even average at math. The meme is simplified into “women can’t do math”, and you soon end up with teacher’s wjho won’t work hard to teach girls math, boys and girls that reject those who are good at math as weird and different, and of course, dissuade many from putting in the effort to become good at math because they themselves believe they can’t do math.
As an aside, in my opinion, that was why Larry Summers deserved to lose his job for his remarks. Not that he was necessarily wrong. It was that by virtue of his widely circulated speech, he had legitimized “women can’t do math” in the minds of many, regardless of what he actually meant or believed. (And that people in authority have to be aware of not what their words say, but of what their words will do.)
(Note: Having my blog posts regularly copied and pasted by others myself, normally I’d be loathe to paste an entire article here. But it was of an annoying length that made simply giving excerpts difficult, yet pasting all of it too much. After much time and repeated links wasted on trying the former, I gave up and chose the latter!)
Steve, who is unfortunately leaving Korea soon, has written a short but interesting post about the meanings and ramifications of the terms waekookin (외국인) in Korea and gajin (外国人) in Japan over at his blog Where is Cheongju Again?, and long-timers here especially could do much worse than take the five minutes to read it over their coffee this morning. Overall, he makes a pretty convincing case for Westerners in both countries referring to and thinking of themselves as such rather than simply as “foreigners” (the basic translation of both words), and I’ll be doing so myself from now on.
It may not sound like much, but like I said in this forum, Korea’s (and Japan’s) “bloodline”-based notions of nationalism and citizenship emphasize and exaggerate the differences between natives and non-natives to an extent rarely found elsewhere in the world, and the constant reminders of these quickly become wearisome to anyone who’s spent even just a few months living here, let alone eight years. Also, ironically, constantly hearing the term waekookin in our daily lives probably means that we come to adopt some of the same notions of division and distance ourselves too, and the effect snowballs.
A little cliched? Perhaps. But still, the term is such an immutable fact of expat life here that probably few of us have ever given some thought to it, and it surely can’t harm to do so. Not least, by a grizzled and cynical old timer like myself.
Update: If you found this post interesting, then you might want to check out this thread on Dave’s ESL Cafe too. To those of you not in Korea especially, it gives a good idea of how (over)used the word “foreigner” is here, and just how quickly it can become annoying.
Hat tip to the (sadly now defunct) Startdrawing.org. But you can still go directly to Kim Joon’s own website for hundreds more examples of his work. Here’s a small selection:
With apologies, I rejected posting examples with male subjects back in 2008, primarily because I didn’t particularly like Kim Joon’s choice of only stocky men or those lacking any muscle definition (as opposed to his choice of universally tall and skinny or athletic* women, a body type I admit I find both aesthetically pleasing and sexually attractive). I’ve since come to appreciate them though, and fortunately there’s still many 2005 examples available here. Also, he did start using more muscular male subjects a few years later.
Unfortunately, despite the plethora of websites that feature his work, very few give any specific details about how he actually makes his images, and him being described a “tattooist” left me rather confused: are they primarily tattoos, computer graphics, or both? From what I can make out from the “text” section of his site, different images required different techniques, but most of them were substantially changed on a computer after the original photos were taken.
Looking at his profile, he does live in Korea and has exhibited here often, and so I’ll try to keep tabs on when his next exhibition is coming up, although if any readers hear before me I’d be very grateful if they could pass it on. Also, have any readers already seen his work in person? What did you think? Did seeing the photos at a large scale make you like the art any more or less?
That’s not really a criticism: in the 16 pages available to her, Kim does an excellent job of explaining how the 19th Century Joseon Dynasty’s Neo-Confucianist views of the female body were warped by, adapted to, and ultimately cam to survive and proper in the 20th Century. And that endurance does go a long way towards explaining the question I first posted in Part 1 — namely, why are Koreans so conformist in their fashion choices?
But what Moon’s book has also made me realize is that, however outlandish the connection sounds at first, today’s Korean fashion can’t be explained fully without mention of the postwar Korean state’s anti-communist ideology too.
Let me run with this for a moment. In a nutshell, Moon’s book gave me a more bottom-up perspective on life in postwar Korea than what I’m used to (decidedly top-down Troubled Tiger is one of my favorite books), and the more I read about it, the more I learned just how pervasive that ideology was in people’s everyday lives, and how almost any form of legitimate dissent or creative difference was often regarded by the state as nothing short of “leftist” subversion. I could give you examples, like Korean men with long hair being publicly shaved in the 1970s, or the police checking that women’s skirts were long enough (albeit more as an excuse to simply harass women), but you get the drift (source, right: theturninggate).
These attitudes didn’t suddenly disappear upon democratization in 1987. In hindsight, it’s incredibly naive for me (or anyone else) to account for conformity in modern Korean life without reference to it. Yes, even in something as innocuous-sounding as fashion.
(Update: I suddenly remembered this ad. But while it’s a good play on how the “rule” for miniskirts has completely reversed since the 1970s, the conformity remains the same. How else to explain wearing miniskirts in winter? An otherwise extremely wasteful use of the body’s resources to demonstrate one’s physical prowess to mates, just like a peacock’s tail?)
But that will be the subject of later posts. First, let’s finish Kim’s article, sans political ideologies (Update: after reading it, I recommend this recent post of the Metropolitician’s on Korean fashion, lest you feel that I give too pessimistic and conformist an image of Koreans; honorable mention should be made of this post of Roboseyo’s post too). The second part starts by placing the endurance of Neo-Confucian images of women’s bodies in modern times in the context of the endurance of Neo-Confucianism in Korean society as a whole:
Confucian Fundamentalism and Korean Identity
The first thing of note is that, despite how it may at first appear, the endurance of Neo-Confucianism in modern Korea is probably more because of Korea’s turbulent 20th Century rather than despite it, as fundamentalism of any stripe is usually a reaction against painful, forced transitions to modernity. As Kim says, in Korea’s case Japanese colonization and then civil war and division meant that its postwar search for national identity (source, right):
“…became essential to Korea’s postcolonial and post-war project for national reconstruction. Neo-Confucianism came to stand for essential ‘Koreanness’ and was quickly embraced as the authentic culture of Korea – so much so that challenges to Neo-Confucian principles were branded as threats to national integrity. Neo-Confucianism also maintained its gloss as part of the elite culture, and as more and more Koreans were becoming upwardly mobile, many strove to identify themselves with the former [elites], making what was originally an ideology and culture of the elite minority into the culture of all Koreans” (pp.102-103).
Some other consequences of that quest for self-identity include Korea’s bloodline-based nationalism (although the origins of that were closer to 1900 than 1953), and military regimes deliberately nurturing the idea that Korea has suffered invasions more than most, both now counter-productive (to put it mildly). Ironically though, for women it also ultimately meant a reaffirmation of the ideals of taegyo (태교), despite women’s entrance into the workforce for the first time and the nuclearization of the Korean family. There are two reasons for this, one speculative and one more concrete.
First, one increasingly under-appreciated aspect of postwar Korea was overcoming the psychological trauma of the physical dislocation and separation of Korean families due to the war, and until I started today’s post I didn’t realize that that may have affected Korean’s women’s postwar lives much more than men — remember that, under Neo-Confucianism, they weren’t really thought of as of as individuals in the Joseon Dynasty, and thus their families had been the primary source of their identity. But then, not only were they suddenly and violently brought out of the inner, private sanctum of those families and homes by the war, and then into the public sphere of schools and factories for the first time, those families also moved from the farm to the cities, and nuclearized in the process. Given those circumstances, it is natural to suppose that women might yearn for the good old days of certainty, especially former upper-class women to whom Neo-Confucian tenets had been most vigorously applied.
Second, while for a time women’s physical labour in factories came to be regarded (rhetorically at least) as just as important and useful as their traditional domestic work in the home (as was, I might also add, their equally “needed”, expanded roles as sex workers too; I’ll save that for a later post), ultimately (source, right: Mike Beauregard; CC BY 2.0):
with the advent of a post-industrial, consumer capitalist society in the 1980s, women became more important as consumers than as factory workers, shifting the utility of their bodies from national labor production to national consumption, becoming, in effect, what Byran S. Turner (1996) calls the capitalist body. (p. 102)
Later, I feel that Kim exaggerates how “post-industrial” Korea is, but that doesn’t detract from the basic point that women, once exhorted and educated to work in the factories, were once again extorted to stay at home upon marriage, and to then focus on producing and raising children. Seeing as a good third or so of the blog is about how the Korean economy and minimalist welfare system is predicated on that fact, then I don’t feel the need to elaborate on and justify that here. Instead, of note is how they are also urged to consume as housewives and mothers, both for the sake of national development, and for the sake of obtaining the items necessary to secure and advance their family’s social status, as explained in Part 2. Ergo, it’s taegyo all over again, although I’ll admit that it sounds neither particularly Korean or even Neo-Confucian at the moment.
The Ensuing Social Malaise
But just like in Western countries after World War Two, you can’t expose most women to working life and equal education and then expect them to meekly return to the home once the economy and/or national emergency no longer requires their economic services; the contradiction leads to the appearance of various social malaises, such as the “housewives’ syndrome” that Betty Friedan so adroitly recognised in 1963. In Western countries, that recognition and the civil-rights movement led to Second-wave Feminism. But Korea has so far lacked the former, and is only just beginning to experience a form of latter, often more because of the signing and implementing of UN conventions on gender issues and so forth rather than domestic pressures. What unresolved social malaises then, have arisen in Korea?
Kim argues that uprooted Korean women naturally found solace in new, postwar media images of women, and following the new rules of fashion was certainly easier and more personally satisfying to most women then embracing new, entirely alien concepts of liberalism, individualism and feminism to which Korea’s new relationship with America exposed them to. Hence:
The Neo-Confucian values of harmonizing as one, proper behaviour and self-cultivation, [re-emerged] in the guise of conformity, propriety and self-improvement. (p. 107)
But as we’ve seen, while self-improvement for men involved training of the mind, resulting in transcendence of the individual self, women were considered incapable of this. Hence women’s primary means of self-improvement came to center on the physical body instead, and this ultimately explains the why of today’s social malaises in Korea today, notably that:
Many young Korean women feel compelled to wear mini-skirts in winter. Think with your head for a moment, and realise its not a good thing.
Many Korean women have to wear make-up to work, upon fear of being fired.
Korea has one of the biggest plastic-surgery industries in the world
Hence taegyois Korean and/or Neo-Confucian, because while plenty, if not most, Western women consider getting plastic surgery for the sake of bettering their chances in job interviews and marriage prospects so forth, very few do explicitly for the sake of their father’s and or husband’s families.
I’ve already explained that Korean women tend to embrace conformity rather than individuality in their fashion choices, and articles about fashion in women’s magazines too are less “Western” than they may first appear. While opening paragraphs seem to promise articles “promoting liberation from the edicts of fashion, and self-expression over blind conformity,” for instance, what they actually do is set up strict guidelines for Korean women to follow, the authors often failing to recognise that their exhortations not to follow fashion magazines’ fashions, but their tastes and styles instead, actually amount to the same thing. Indeed:
What is right for [the authors] must be right for everyone else, for there is a blurry distinction between [the authors] and others, a legacy of the subjectlessness of the Korean woman. (p. 104, emphasis in original)
Sure, much the same can be said of Western women’s magazines, which Kim should have acknowledged. But remember the importance of the notion of “subjectless bodies” in Kim’s article (see Part 1), and that for Korean women the philosophical concept of the individual self, defined not by ki and the family but by the physical limitations of the corporeal body, is very new. Hence Korean authors and readers may not see the contradiction that their Western counterparts may. Moreover, articles often present:
…what [they] consider to be particular features of the Korean women – short legs, big face, yellow skin – as problem features that can be corrected by certain types of clothing and colours….[they] imply that the imperfect Korean body is disordered but can be put back in order through the tricks of fashion. The body is something to be rearranged so its apparent flaws are concealed or eliminated. These flaws themselves stand out as imperfections because they are features unique to Koreans and absent in white models (p. 104, emphasis in original)
I could go on to discuss the details of huge plastic surgery industry in Korea, but it’s been done to death elsewhere, and I think the above photo and this article sum it up better than any virtual ink spilt on the subject. Having said that, numerous sources have claimed that Korean women’s desires to look Caucasian are the result of an inferiority complex towards and cultural colonization by the West, but I think that both that desire and those influences have been grossly exaggerated. Consider this:
All three elements, the Neo-Confucian woman’s subjectlessness, the perception of Korean bodies as imperfect, and fashion’s function to re-order the disordered Korean bodies, make Korean women’s bodies particularly prone to alterations, rearrangements and re-creations of the body. (p. 104)
The biggest thing I’ve gained from these writing this series of posts (and I just so happen to think that it’s quite an original point too), is that in that statement above you can replace “Korea” with China, Japan, and/or Taiwan, and that argument would still be just as valid. Arguing that their shared plastic surgery mania is because all four countries share a history of cultural colonization and have inferiority complexes towards the West is tenuous at best, and if even if true, surely it would mean that Korean men too, say, would aim to look more Western? But no, they don’t, and not even with the huge size of the Korean male beauty industry today. But all four countries do share a history of Neo-Confucianism. On that basis, is it too much of a jump to argue that the Neo-Confucianist combination above is precisely why plastic surgery is so popular amongst women in this part of the world?
For new readers, Part 1 was an outline and discussion of the first part of the 2003 journal article “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society“ by Taeyon Kim. To quickly recap it, she argues that women weren’t really thought of as individuals in Joseon Dynasty Korea, as the state ideology of Neo-Confucianism considered them incapable of the spiritual transcendence that men were. Instead, the best they could aim for in life was continuing a husband’s “ki”, or spirit, through the production and upbringing of sons and the efficient management of his household. Hence Kim describes them as “subjectless bodies,” as not only were they not really individuals but their physical bodies were not really their own either, merely being vessels for and tenders of the more precious ki instead (source, right: jingdianmeinv)
In terms of the ideals for women’s appearance, this meant that the physical attributes required for those were prized more than beauty. On top of that, adornment and/or alteration of the body was not condoned for either sex, as the physical body was one’s inheritance of ancestors’ sacred ki. And herein lies the paradox, as on the one hand Neo-Confucianism still pervades all aspects of Korean life today (I’ll take readers knowing and agreeing with this as a given), but on the other hand, modern Korea appears to be in the midst of a decidedly non-traditional celebration of youth and the female form. What gives?
Neo-Confucian Consumption Motives
The short answer is that appearances can be deceptive. It is certainly true that modern media images of Korean women are not Neo-Confucian in the 19th Century sense described above, and it’s difficult to argue just by looking at them that advertisements, for instance, are any different to their counterparts in Western countries. Of course, systematic cross-country analyses of numbers and types do reveal significant and telling differences, and if readers are interested in those then I highly recommend reading the 2006 journal article entitled “Content Analysis of Diet Advertisments: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” by Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon, downloadable here. But surveys like those do not chronicle average Korean and Western women’s reactions to them, and herein lies the essential differences between them.
As a rule, in Western countries most (although not all) advertisements for a product have to actively suppress and disguise the notion that people may feel compelled, influenced or forced into purchasing that product, whether by the ad, by peer pressure, or some other unwritten social rule. Instead, people are encouraged to conceive their purchase in terms of personal choice, individuality, empowerment, and — especially if the target consumer is young — maybe liberation and rebellion too. And of course, these advertising norms undoubtedly operate for a good proportion of advertisements in Korea too. But in the case of advertisements for products related to one’s appearance, be they cosmetics, clothes, or plastic surgery, it turns out that a great number of Korean women make purchases for precisely the opposite reasons. Indeed, not only is there no stigma in doing so, but they positively embrace the opportunity to conform to and harmonize with social norms through their consumption choices (source, right: Kiran Foster).
Lest that assertion sound like a typical exaggeration of a Caucasian male, surveys that Kim cites indicate that most Korean women explicitly justify their choices in those Neo-Confucian terms, and definitely not the individual empowerment, entitlement, and personal assertion of one’s individual choice that Western women tend to do in similar surveys. That is not to say that Western women (or men) can’t and don’t also passively follow fashions, and it’s not necessarily a negative or dehumanizing thing either. But very few Westerners would admit to it.
I see no reason to doubt the results of those surveys (which I can provide the details of if readers wish), and while my own female Korean friends for instance, are certainly as liberal and free-willed as any Westerner in their clothing and cosmetic choices — and lifestyles; indeed, that’s why we’re friends — they can’t counter the mass of empirical evidence Kim provides, and even the anecdotal evidence from the media and on the streets of Korea. If Neo-Confucianism is pervasive in modern Korean life then, and Korean women consume cosmetics, clothes, and undergo plastic surgery operations largely for the sake of Neo-Confucianist motives, then it’s time to call a spade a spade and argue that Korean society’s new emphasis on women’s appearances is (somehow) Neo-Confucianist too. Indeed, it would be strange if only this particular aspect of Korean life was so different.
Hence the second part of Kim’s article is about how this modern phenomenon is a warping of and adaptation of Neo-Confucian ideals of women’s roles to new capitalist and consumerist circumstances. But while I originally wanted to outline and discuss that in this post, I’ve moved that to Part 3, because first I wanted to place those circumstances in their historical context, which I think considerably adds to and strengthens Kim’s argument (source, right: Jacob Bøtter).
The Developmental Context of East Asian Consumption
I’ve already demonstrated that although Korean women and, say, American women, can both be labelled as “consumers,” they can and do both make radically different consumption choices; or, make the same choices, but for radically different reasons. Sure, this is obvious, but I’m as guilty as anyone in generalizing and using labels here, so it’s good to remind ourselves of it. But if we shift our attention to the differences between most Westerners and most Koreans (and East Asians) as a whole, the first fact of note is the fact that most Korean university students’ parents easily recall the days when possession of some must-have items like a fridge, radio, color TV and car were essential signifier that one’s family had made it into the then swelling ranks of the middle-class. On that basis, it may be fair to say that they still imbue their consumer goods with much more status and importance than most Westerners do. (Hell, many of the university students themselves too.) This explains Koreans’ love affair with big cars and SUVs for instance, and in one of the most oil-lacking, mountainous and densely-populated countries in the world.
(Update, April 2013: Actually, the Korean preference for big cars is more due to the [inordinate] socialstatus they provide.)
On top of that, Korean governments since 1961 have explicitly and fervently extorted Koreans to consume these items, provided that they were made in Korea. It’s easy to simply attribute this to and write off as mere nationalism, only different in degree to, say, the “Buying Kiwi-Made” campaign in New Zealand, or Democratic presidential candidates in the US criticising NAFTA in election year. But this is quite wrong. If you’ll bear with me for a moment, to properly understand women’s fashions in Korea you need to understand a little of it’s well, political history first. No, really.
When Park Chung-hee/박정희 took power through a coup in 1961, while his military regime of course relied on the use of force, it would be naive to assume that it didn’t have a great deal of popular support. And so, originally at least, his military regime’s sole claim to legitimacy was its perceived ability and capacity to produce the economic development seen as necessary for national security after the chaotic years of the Syngman Rhee/이승만 presidency. While linking the economy and security this way may sound absurd in 2008, it’s important to be aware that North Korea was actually ahead of South Korea economically until the late-1960s, and in addition to this Park was (justifiably) deeply concerned about the US possibly withdrawing its security guarantees to South Korea in the wake of its foreseeable withdrawal from Vietnam. Hence the development of POSCO and the Korean steel industry for instance, which, far from being the carefully planned and coordinated developmental success story it is often touted as today (it is the third largest steel producer in the world), was pursued despite the advice of Korean economists at the time, let alone American ones. Instead, as Mark Clifford explains in chapter five of this must-have book, Park didn’t care about the economics of it; he simply wanted the ability to produce tanks and ships should the US no longer provide them.
This is why Korea is often known as a “Developmental State,” as too are Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, which faced similarly dire circumstances in the Cold War and reacted in similar ways. Neo-liberal economists in particular are loath to admit that state-led development can be successful, and so they continue to critique the economic policies of these Developmental States decades later, but this excessive focus on economic minutiae has overshadowed the fact that they were and are primarily socio-political, not economic, phenomenons (right: Posco Center, Seoul, by Ian Muttoo).
Hence consumerism has links to national security in Developmental States, and all the choice government slogans like “Consumption is Virtuous” that I saw in old photographs of Korea from the ’70s in economic journals in the archives room of my university library. And while the corollary of Park’s developmentalism was authoritarianism, and average Koreans were expected to be content with and prolific buyers of Korean goods, imports being shut out by high tariffs in order to develop Korea’s own industries (which is why such a stigma remains on imports today), what I want you to take away from all the above is that:
Koreans are used to being told what to buy.
These choices have often been couched in terms of contributing to a higher purpose.
Those that didn’t subscribe to these higher purposes were given few alternatives, and the state was encouraged in stigmatizing them.
It is no great conceptual leap for Neo-Confucian women to go from being subservient to the higher purpose of ki, and their bodies to be imperfect versions of men’s, to furthering the higher purpose of improving the economy and maintaining national security by consuming Korean goods, and finding common identity in a turbulent century by following the new fashion industry’s edicts to improve their imperfect bodies by following their rules for fashion, cosmetics, and body shapes. Those will be the subject of Part 3.
…essential reading for anyone wanting to know more about the 1990s in Korea, and in particular the frequent government and media campaigns against over-consumption (in practice aimed almost exclusively at women, these were important precursors to the “beanpaste girl” stereotypes of the 2000s)
See my “Revealing the Korean Body Politic” series for more on those campaigns and stereotypes in the 2000s, especially Parts 3 and 4.
“Koreans are conformist because of their Confucian heritage…yada yada yada”
Even though I’ve chosen to live in Korea a long time, like most expats I often find it to be a frustrating and exasperating place sometimes. That’s not necessarily a criticism, and indeed this love-hate relationship may even be part of its charm—certainly my adopted hometown of Auckland, New Zealand, never aroused such strong emotions in me. On the other hand, it does lead to so many one-liners about the place, endlessly repeated by fresh rotations of expats.
But are they always wrong? Don’t some have a grain of truth? To answer, let me examine one that I and probably most readers have made at some point in our stay here, but which I personally wouldn’t have been able to justify before I did my research for this post. And certainly won’t ever be making again.
What I have in mind is your gut reaction to watching the following commercial, about three years old:
(Update, July 2012: Unfortunately, the video has been taken down, and I didn’t save a spare copy back in 2008. Hopefully, the screenshots will still give you the gist of it!)
According to Marmot’s Hole commentator mins0306, to whom I’m very grateful for finding the video, the message the commercial wanted to convey was “What she selects will become a trend. And since she selected a Prugio apartment, Prugio apartments will also become a trend.” Instead, it has inadvertently become of a symbol of Korean people’s conformism, particularly of women’s attitudes to fashion.
But before writing this post, had I been pressed for why so many Korean women seem to so blindly follow the latest trends, be they mini-skirts in winter or getting double-eyelid surgery, I would have mumbled something about Confucianism and the education system discouraging individuality. That is still technically correct, but—let’s face it—most of us blame so much here on Confucianism, but actually know little more about it than what we read in Lonely Planet Korea in the week before we came. But how,exactly, is it to blame? Why?
On the surface, it may not even have anything to do with Confucianism at all. Consider this statement from the 2003 journal article “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society” by Taeyon Kim (details and abstract here):
“For 500 years, Korea adopted Neo-Confucianism as its official ideology and strove to create a Neo-Confucian state by following its precepts as closely as possible. Neo-Confucians believed the body was sacred. Since it was bequeathed by one’s parents, in accordance with filial piety, the body had to be respected and remain unaltered…The Korean aversion to manipulation of the body seems to have been a long-standing cultural principle – only whole-heartedly abandoned in the last few years of proliferating plastic surgeries and various other manipulations of the body. Why has what appears to have been such a strong cultural value been so suddenly and completely abandoned?” (p. 98)
Like I said, I didn’t know that Joseon Dynasty Korea adopted “Neo-Confucianism” rather than merely “Confucianism” its state ideology either; from now on, I’ll make sure to blame all Korean ills on that instead. But now that she mentions it, yes, I do recall that Confucianism…oops, Neo-Confucianism I mean…did not condone alteration and adornment of the body, which is why it was so dishonourable for men to have their ponytails cut off.
How then, can Korea still be described as “more Confucian than China” when: Korean women adorn fashion and accessories to the point of what Michael Hurt describes as “fetishization;” female friends of mine wear excessive make-up to work upon fear of being fired if they don’t; others think nothing of wearing it to the gym; and Korea leads the world in the number of plastic surgeries made per capita? The notion now sounds absurd.
But Kim goes on to argue that the prescribed Neo-Confucian role of women’s bodies is essentially the same today as it was in the Joseon Dynasty, albeit adapted to and/or warped by democratization and capitalism. I don’t entirely agree with everything she says, but more in degree than in substance, and she certainly does make a decent stab at solving that paradox above.
Because her two-part argument is very long, and I actually have a lot of my own thoughts and ideas to add to her arguments about postwar Korea, I’ve taken the wise (but unusual for me!) decision to split my original 3500 word post on her journal article into two. In the remainder of this first one then, I’ll outline what Kim says about how Neo-Confucianism viewed women’s bodies and their roles, and in the next one I’ll discuss how these adapted and changed to, but ultimately survived, the 20th Century (source, right: natebeaty).
Neo-Confucian Women’s Bodies as Mere Vessels
Before reading the following, bear in mind that only Joseon Dynasty elites—possibly as little as 1% of the population—would have subscribed to the Neo-Confucianism edicts described (Kim does acknowledge this). But the vast majority of Korean women worked on their farms, and were integral economic parts of the household; indeed, I’ve won arguments with older male students of mine on this point, who thought that “Korean tradition” justified them in literally forbidding their daughters-in-law from working after marriage. I concede though, that they would have remained an ideal.
“To understand the Neo-Confucian body, it is essential to understand the concept of ki. A material force which links the body and mind into one system, ki flows through all things, giving them form and vitality….There is no distinction between the self and the universe. Neo-Confucian men were encouraged to let go of ego and become selfless, that is to have no consciousness of an individual and separate self apart from others….Ki was passed from parent to child throughout the generations, acting as a material link between ancestors and descendants….The family composed a unified body through ki, and the identity of the family and self and family was continuous and undifferentiated.” (p.99, italics in original)
For learners of Korean, this “ki” appears to be “기,” which has a hanja character on p.38 of my Korean vocabularly ‘bible’ that, in addition to “spirit,” also means “air,” “atmosphere,” and “energy.” And for everyone, I admit, at the moment it sounds very similar to a mere family name or bloodline, but those are quite vague concepts at best, whereas ki does sound like a well-thought out—albeit sexist and fundamentally flawed—philosophical concept. Elaborating on it further:
“The force of ki constituted one’s sense of the body and self more than the corporeal body. It followed that the family body, within which flows the same ki,was considered the essential self more than one’s own physical body. The emphasis on non-distinction between self and others produced a sense of self that was non-individuated and fluid, with no boundaries to determine a distinction between one’s family and one’s self.” (p.99)
Hence the Hoju System/호주제, a family registry system, rather than one of individual birth certificates like in Western countries, that was not abolished until as late as this year. Under it, upon marriage, women would be transferred from one family’s certificate to her husband’s family, almost like property. In practice, female divorcees suffered greatly from it because:
Given that it was often required for job applications, it meant that applicants’ marital status was readily apparent to employers. I’ve read, but am not sure how applicable it is now given the high divorce rate, that female divorcees were often discriminated against by employers as a result, ironically at a time when most would have needed employment more than ever.
Custody of children was overwhelmingly awarded to fathers; after all, the women were no longer part of the ki/family.
For those women married to fathers that abandoned their families, divorcing them would mean years of adminstrative problems with children in schools and so forth, as it meant that they were no longer their legal guardians. In Japan, with a similar system, these issues came up with ex-prime minister Koizumi after he divorced in 1982.
Promising to abolish this system was one reason I supported the election of Roh Mu-hyon back in 2002, and while he did prove to be quite a lame duck president, and least this promise was fulfilled. To continue (source, right: theturninggate):
“Neo-Confucian techniques of self-cultivation of the mind and body only applied to men. Women in the Neo-Confucian view were incapable of achieving sagehood and therefore had neither the need nor the ability to strive for transcendence of the self and body. While men produced their selves through the mind (study of the classics) and body (maintenance of the family body through ancestor worship), women were occupied with maintaining and reproducing the family body through the corporeal bodies of the family.” (p. 100)
Koreans are by no means alone in having philosophical or religious beliefs justifying an inferior status of women, but this particular one could lead to some very strange-sounding results. For instance, Kim explains that one study of a villagers in 1990 found that they thought women were inferior to men because they did not carry the ki that men did, meaning that “women were believed to be passive receptacles of the life which men implanted in them; they played no active part in creating life.”
It also meant that beauty and wealth were secondary to possession of the physical traits required to bear sons, and gave rise to an elaborate system of prenatal education known as taegyo/태교 which, rather than the notion of women and child’s health that the word brings to mind today, back then was more the idea of women as bodies rather than subjects or individuals, because “their conduct and thoughts were for the sake of the other abiding in their bodies, and they were valued mostly for the children and labour that their bodies could produce.” Hence, women “were regarded as subjectless bodies.” (pp. 100-101), the consequences, in sum, being that (source, right: InSapphoWeTrust):
“While [men] aimed to transcend the body, women could never do so – their bodies were too valuable. A man’s mind and ki were considered more valuable than his corporeal limbs while a woman was most valued for her body and its reproductive labour. As a result, efforts were made to maintain sole control over women’s bodies, subjecting them to a protection and concealment that practically rendered their bodies invisible.” (p.101)
Indeed, while the hanbok is much more comfortable to wear and walk around in than a kimono (or so I’ve heard), it’s not exactly a celebration of the female form. Also, this protection and concealment literally meant that elite women’s homes became prisons, as they weren’t allowed to leave: those “traditional see-saws,” for instance, were actually so popular because they allowed elite women rare glimpses of life outside of the walls of their courtyards, and I remember reading somewhere of a woman escaping from her village to Busan during the Korean War, despite all the death and destruction around her actually having an exciting time, as it was the first time she’d left her house in decades!
Next week: Part 2, which will continue the discussion into the postwar period.
Update, August 2010: An excellent article by Andrei Lankov, which deserves to be much more widely read. Unfortunately though, Tom Coyner’s site is the only site I’ve been able to find it on. So, here’s one more copy, to ensure that it remains available:
War of Details
Andrei Lankov, Korea Times, August 31 2006.
Every foreign resident of Korea is exposed to a number of habitual Korean statements, which reflect Korean ideas about themselves and their nation. Many of these beliefs are true, some are not so well founded, while others are strange — like, say, the well-known tendency of Koreans to boast that their country “has four distinct seasons” as if this is something unusual and unknown to most other countries of the globe.
One such oft-repeated statement is that Korea has always suffered invasions and wars. Koreans often say, “Our history has been tragic, for centuries we have been invaded by powerful enemies and suffered in their hands greatly.” Every visitor to Korea is bound to hear such a remark sooner or later, and most people tend to take it at face value. This statement might correctly describe Korean history of the last one hundred years, but it is hardly applicable to earlier eras.
Well, let’s have a look at the Choson Dynasty period, from 1392 to 1910. The last four decades of these five centuries were turbulent indeed, but what about earlier times? Even a cursory look demonstrates that it was hardly a “time of troubles.” Throughout 1392-1865, Korea fought three wars against foreign invaders, not including some minor border skirmishes with nomads in the north, and Japanese pirates on the coasts. In one case, the war with Japan from 1592-1598, known as “Hideyoshi’s invasion” in the West, and as the “Imjin War” in Korea, was disastrous and the entire country was devastated. As you know, the medieval armies, all those “knights in shining armor,” were not too nice when they encountered the civilian population. The two other conflicts, of 1627 and of 1636, were of much smaller scale — essentially, two blitzkriegs brilliantly executed by Manchu generals whose cavalry units broke through Korean defenses, approached Seoul, and forced the Korean government to agree to an unfavorable peace.
Let’s compare this with the fate of more or less every European country. Throughout the same period of 1392-1865, almost every country in Europe fought a much greater number of conflicts, and suffered much greater casualties. Let’s have a look at German history. The period under consideration is marked by at least four major military conflicts, each lasting for one or several decades, and resulting in mass death and destruction: the Reformation Wars, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the Prussian campaigns of the mid-18th century and the Napoleonic wars. And these are only large-scale wars, each being as significant and bloody as Korea’s war with Japan in 1592-1598 (in all probability, all these conflicts were more destructive than the “Hideyoshi invasion”). Apart from these, there were a number of smaller conflicts, many of which were not small at all– like the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), or the chain of conflicts that accompanied German unification in the 1850s and 1860s. And, of course, there were countless quarrels between the mini-states which formed the Germany of the era, each such quarrel being a military conflict on its own right, far exceeding Korea’s occasional skirmishes with Japanese raiders.
Is Germany an exception? By no means. This is the fairly typical history of any European country, and against such a background Korean history appears rather quiet. Rather than being a country with a uniquely turbulent history, Korea actually was a country, which enjoyed stability undreamed of in most other parts of the world!
The same is true in regard to domestic policy. Of course, old Korea had its own share of court conspiracies, poisoned dignitaries, and scheming royal concubines. But throughout the same period of 470 years, only two Korean kings were actually overthrown (and in one case the life of the ex-sovereign was spared — an almost unthinkable leniency by the standard of medieval Europe or the Middle East!). There were two unsuccessful gentry revolts, each lasting for but a few weeks, one peasant uprising on moderate scale, some local disturbances, a bit of banditry — and that’s all! Once again, in comparison with France (at least a dozen major revolts, revolutions, and civil wars), Germany, or even relatively peaceful England demonstrates that Korea was indeed a very secure and stable place.
Suffice to say that the Korean army for most of the period had about ten thousand soldiers on active duty — a very small army for a country with population of some ten million. The armed forces were increased when the government faced a perceived security threat, but for most of this long period the Korean army was essentially a police force, sufficient to fight bandits, patrol borders, restore order in some villages, and ensure the personal security of the king. So much for the talk of the permanent invasions Korea allegedly faced: a country, which lives under threat, does not have such a small army.
But why did such a view develop? There might be few reasons, but I suspect that Korean intellectuals of the 1950s or 1960s were shocked by the turbulent nature of the last hundred years of Korea history (to be more precise, the period between 1865 and 1960). This came as a sharp contrast to the tranquility and predictability of earlier times. This shock made Koreans believe that their history has always been that difficult and hard. And, of course, Korean nationalists used these feelings for their own gains. But this is another story…
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
From page 3 of the September 12, 2007 Busan Focus:
출산휴가가는男: 내년7월 배우자 3일 부여 ‘남녀고용평등법’등 의결
내년 7월부터 남성근로자도 배우자 출산휴가를 사용할 수 있으며, 육아휴직을 나눠 쓰거나 육아휴직대신 근로시간 단축방법도 사용할 수 있게 된다.
정부는 11일 오전 중앙청사에서 한덕수 총리 주재로 국무회의를 열어 일과 육아의 병행을 위해 이 같은 내용을 핵심으로 하는‘남녀고 용평등법’개정안 등 20여개 안건을 심의, 의결했다. 이 개정안은 그간 사업장별로 임의로 시행해 오던 남성근로자의 출산휴가를 3일간 부여하는 것으로 의무화했으며, 현행 전일제 육아휴직 대신 주 15~30시간 이내의 범위에서 근무하는 육아기 근로시간 단축을 신청할 수있도록 하고, 육아휴직이나 육아기근로시간 단축제를 1회에 한해 분할 사용할 수 있도록 하고 있다.
또 육아기 근로시간 단축을 이유로 해고나 불리한 처우를 하는 사업자의 경우 3년 이하의 징역이나 2천만원 이하의 벌금, 육아기 근로 시간 단축 종료 후 같은 업무에 복귀시키지 아니할 경우 500만원 이하의 벌금, 그리고 배우자 출산휴가를 주지 않을 경우 500만원 이하의 과태료를 부과하도록했다 (image source: On Being; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
또 국제화 시대를 맞아 ▲ 회사의 설립·운영 등에 사적 자치를 폭넓게인정하는 유한책임회사 등 새로운기업형태를 도입하고 ▲무액면주식 제도의 도입과 최저자본금제도의폐지 등 상법 개정안도 심의했다.
Men on Paternity Leave: To fulfill the requirements of the law on gender equality in the workplace, a 3 day paternity leave is to be available from next July
From next July, the spouses of women taking time off work to give birth can also take time off from work, either for the birth itself or by shortening their work hours by an equivalent amount.
On the Morning 11th of September, the prime minister Han Deok-Su, opened a session of Congress focusing on work and childcare. Congress members deliberated on a bills regarding the law on gender equality in the workplace and on 20 other matters, and passed a law that will require all workplaces to provide paternity leave to male employees. They will be given the option of either taking 3 days at the time of the birth of the child, or have their working hours reduced by 15-30 hours at alternate times when it is convenient to them. These 15-30 hours will not have to be taken all at once.
If employers use this reduction of work hours as a pretext to fire an employee or treat him unfairly, then the employer will be liable for a jail sentence of up to 3 years or a fine of 20 million won. Also, if an employee is not allowed to continue in the same position after returning from paternity leave, or if paternity leave isn’t granted at all, then the employer will be liable for a fine of up to 5 million won.
Since we are in a globalized age, Korean companies need to introduce more scope for employee’s personal autonomy in their establishment and operations. Also discussed at the congress was the introduction into commercial law of a no-par stock system and the discarding of a minimum capital stock system.
For the sake of comparison, see here for a table showing different countries’ parental leave provisions.
Movie poster for Samaritan Girl/Samaria (2004), a Korean movie about teenage prostitution; see here for my review. Source: Naver영화.
애인대행사이트 10개중 3개 ‘청소년도받아요‘ (3 out of every 10 dating sites are being used by teenage prostitutes to find clients)
“전 17세 여. 경제적으로 큰 도움 주실 분 연락주세요”
애인 대행 사이트 10개 중 3개 이상은 청소년 가입이 가능하고 이중 아르바이트생을 구하는 의뢰인 50% 이상이 성매매(불건전 만남)를 요구하고 있는 것으로 나타났다.
“I am a 17 year old girl. If you can help me financially, please contact me.”
More than 3 out of 10 dating sites allow teenagers to register, and more than 50 percent of these registered teenagers are using the site immorally to solicit sexual services.
국가청소년위원회는 최근 대구YWCA에 의뢰, 인터넷 포털을 통해 접근 가능한 69개 애인 대행 사이트를 모니터링 한 결과 이같이 나타났다고 22일 밝혔다. 청소위는 “애인대행 사이트에서 성매매 유인행위가 많이 일어나고 있어 청소년의 접근을 차단할 필요성이 있다”며 “성매매 등 불법ㆍ불건전 만남을 조장하는 애인대행 사이트에 청소년이 접속할 수 없도록 청소년 유해 매체물 지정을 추진하겠다”고 밝혔다.
청소년위의 조사 결과에 따르면 애인대행 사이트의 청소년의 가입이 가능한 경우는 23개로 33.3%를 차지했다. 이어 청소년의 가입은 불가지만 청소년 유해매체물 표시가 없는 경우가 42개(60.9%)였다. 청소년 연령 확인 및 접근 제한 장치가 있는 경우는 4개(5.8%)에 불과했다.
Recently, the Government Youth Comission asked Daegu YWCA to investigate to what extent teenagers were using 69 adult dating sites that can be found through major internet portals, and today they reported their findings. According to the Commission, “Making money through prostitution via these sites is a very alluring and attractive proposition for teenagers,” and that “the government needs to make greater effort to ensure that teenagers are prevented from gaining access to these sites which promote illegal prostitution and ‘unconditional meetings’.”
According to the Commission, 23 sites of the 69 sites (33.3%) allowed teenagers to register. 42 (60.9%) did not allow teenagers to join, but lacked a special warning indicating this; in the end, only 4 (5.8%) both didn’t allow teenagers to join and had the required software to prevent them from doing so (James – does this mean that teenagers could still join those 42 or not?)
애인대행사이트에 게시된 내용은 ‘강남 지금 만나요’ ‘2:1 대행이요’ ‘경제적으로 큰 도움 주실 분’ ‘술 한잔 하실 분’ ‘밤새 놀려고 하는데 50만원 가지고 뭐하나’ 등 성매매 및 불건전 만남을 조장하는 내용이 대부분이었다.
또 대구YWCA가 2시간 동안 대화방을 개설한 결과 48명의 남성 이용자가 접근, 역할 대행을 의뢰했다. 이 중 성매매 요구가 25건(52%)으로 가장 많았고 홍보 및 대화가 19건(40%), 건전 대행 요구가 4건(8%) 등이었다.
Amongst the chat rooms and message boards of the 23 sites that did allow teenagers to register, you come across personal ads of teenagers, and men seeking them, with titles such as “Let’s meet in Gangnam now,” “2 for 1,” (James – your guess is as good as mine) “Seeking a sugar-daddy,” “Someone to have one drink with,” “I have 500,000 won, what am I going to do all night?,” and so forth, of which the vast majority are obviously for prostitution.
In addition, Daegu YWCA opened a chatroom on one site for 2 hours, and of 48 male users that entered, 25 were blatantly looked for teenage prostitutes, 19 chatted about sexual acts, and only 4 chatted about non-sexual subjects.
주요 포털사이트는 ‘애인대행’ 단어를 금칙어로 적용, 성인인증 및 연령확인을 요구하고 있으나 ‘대행 알바’ ‘애인 알바’ 등 변칙적인 방법으로 올라오는 애인 대행 사이트에 대해서는 개별적인 조치를 취하고 있다.
청소년위는 “69개 애인대행사이트에 대해 청소년 유해성 여부를 심의하도록 정보통신윤리위원회에 요청할 것”이라며 “포털사이트에 대해서도 애인대행 등 금칙어 적용 및 성인인증을 요구할 계획”이라고 밝혔다.
Major portal sites do not allow you to type in obvious search terms for teenage prostitutes, and require proof of your age. But both prostitutes and clients are adapting and choosing new terms to direct each other to their various chatrooms and sites instead.
The Commission concluded that they are going to request that the Korea Internet Safety Commission look more closely at these 69 sites for the sake of teenager’s welfare, and they will also ask the owners of the 69 sites studied to not allow the search terms used for prostitution that are already banned on internet portals to be used on their sites also (end).
(See Joins News for the original article, or here for the same at the author’s own site)
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Movie poster for Samaritan Girl/Samaria (2004), a Korean movie about teenage prostitution; see 
The Grand Narrative 
