(WARNING: The THIRD image in this post features partial nudity)

( Image by DunkelFeld. Full video of 2007 advertisement available here )

( Source: Unknown )

An effective way to advertise shampoo to women?

Why not? I'm sure I don't need to tell readers that both sexes are at least subconsciously aroused by semi-exposed cleavage and the oh-so-subtle symbolism of the gushing hose, or that the idea is that some women will come to identify Lee Hyori's hair and physique with the product and thus be more likely to buy it. At least, I assume that that's the idea: any reference to an actual shampoo seems almost like an afterthought in that particular advertisement.

But on the other hand, why would something so blatantly sexually appealing to men be considered equally appealing to women? Is it a reflection of the fact that the Korean advertising industry and the Korean media as a whole is dominated by men, and thus arguably reflects more their own interests and desires than women's?

As you can tell from my recent translations, I'm only just beginning to scratch the surface of that, but I'm getting the distinct impression that there's surprisingly few Korean language sources on sexism in advertising on the internet, and not simply because I'm choosing the wrong search terms. Hell, that this blog is ranking highly in searches in both English and Korean is indicative of that, both gratifying and worrying at the same time.

Part of the reason for that absence is surely the fact that the Korean language didn't even have a word for "sexism" until the early-1990s, although I'm guilty of overstating the lingering effects of that absence 15 years later. Another is perhaps that Korea largely lacked the most objectionable and/or objectifying advertisements until comparatively recently. Consider when this (NSFW) Western one was made, let alone in what magazine it was published:

( Cosmopolitan Magazine, November 1976. Source )

That absence of Korean sources has driven me to delve into the considerable English literature on sexism and advertising, and a message from those that I've repeatedly come across in recent weeks is that decades of nude and/or sexual images of (mostly) women in Western advertisements have somewhat deadened consumers to them, requiring advertisers to provide ever more blatant, racier, and more provocative and violent images to get their attention (see here for a good visual summary of that, and Part One for more recent examples). Ironically, this development was partially in reaction to Second Wave Feminism, because as more feminists joined in the objections to sexual objectification, the beauty industry was concerned that the "new woman" would increasingly reject their products, and indeed the 1970s did see cosmetics, fragrance and hair-care products all suffering flat or declining sales.

But regardless of their origins, the result today is that consumers of both sexes have largely internalized those male-centered standards for advertisements and made them the norm. So, while I can't pretend to speak for Western women in Korea, I'd imagine that considering what advertisements in Western countries are like today (or indeed, 1976), then most Korean advertisements would barely merit even a second glance from them.

I mention this not because I'm advocating cultural relativism, or that I believe that the fact that more sexist advertisements exist in Western countries somehow render sexist Korean ones "okay". Instead, my intention is to convince readers that in the following discussion of the changes to the ways sexuality, women's bodies and especially men's bodies were portrayed in Korean advertising wrought by the 2002 World Cup, it is important to lose Western cultural baggage of what one considers "shocking" and/or "revolutionary". Although it may be difficult to believe considering what Korean women are wearing and what's on TV today, that Vidal Sassoon advertisement of last year may well have been considered too raunchy for Korean audiences when I first came in 2000. Moreover, while readers are undoubtedly aware that Korea lacked the 1960s so to speak, which were still the main base for the new wave of advertisements in the 1970s like that above, it also lacked the less well-known mainstreaming of pornography into Western popular culture, largely complete even before the invention of the VCR. For more on that, I recommend the Time articles "Porn Goes Mainstream" by Joel Stein, September 1998 and especially "That Old Feeling: When Porno Was Chic" by Richard Corliss, March 2005.

Korean Women, c. 2002

( Source: Unknown )

I should always resist the temptation to generalize my own experiences to the rest of the Korea, but then even just on its own merits it's remarkable that in one of my first ever classes here, some of my female (university) students would mention that they'd just been chastised by middle-aged women on the street for wearing short sleeves, and yet only two years later it would be a point of patriotic pride for them to wear a crop-top made out of the (virtually sacred) national flag. 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)

What had changed, and so quickly? Well, the World Cup of course, But what on Earth did soccer - of all things - have to do with the way women dressed?

( "Miss World Cup" Shim Min-ah [심민아]. Source )

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 (literally) been used in service of the South Korean state (more on that on upcoming posts in my series on Gender and Militarism). That is not untrue per se, but according to Hyun-mee Kim, that summer Korean women were already on the streets wearing sexier and/or more comfortable clothing well before well before public perceptions caught up with and condoned the new standards of dress that they had created. Moreover, they were also publicly discussing, idolizing and objectifying the Korean players and their bodies in ways that would have been previously thought of as shocking, and - women, correct me if I'm wrong - one does not salivate over a guy's pecs by government decree. Make no mistake about it: while I've argued in a previous series that Korean women are notoriously conformist consumers, that a great deal of the momentum for these changes undoubtedly came from many women simply going with the flow doesn't deny the fact that they were definitely initiated by and for women.

If not support for the players, then again: "Why?". Well, briefly consider what life was like for Korean women on the eve of the World Cup, first economically, and then how their sexuality was portrayed in popular culture.

Despite my emphasis in previous posts on the large numbers of salarymen in Korea (much more than in Japan), and the male-breadwinner model of employment that that entails, in the 1990s Korean women had slowly but surely begun to make inroads into business in the 1990s. But not only did the "IMF Crisis" of 1997-98 mean that the "expensive" implementation, enforcement, and further drafting of sexual equality legislation begun in the late-1980s was indefinitely postponed, a re-emphasis of the male-breadwinner model provided a handy justification for disproportionately laying off women, the logic being that young single women, largely living with their parents, would be provided for by their fathers, and that married women (and their children) would be provided for by their husbands. But older, 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 which I've seen explored in many (now old) dramas here.

Coming so soon after supposedly liberating and empowering democratization, which only qualitatively began upon the administration of the first civilian president Kim Young-sam (김영삼) from 1993, then they were, in short, pretty pissed off, and it was in that context that the following music video by the Korean Girl Group SES was made in 2002:

To which Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling gives the following brilliant 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 the Korean media, I will provide more evidence in Part Three. Meanwhile, and on a positive note, although one might have expected that this re-emphasis of traditional gender roles led to a renewed sexual conservatism, generational change had ensured that it was much too late for that.

( Source: Unknown )

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, but 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 timely comparison (for this post) with 1970s America:

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 coming in up in three 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, forever altering -  at the very least - Korean advertising in the process.

The Rise of "Flower Men": A Backlash Against Salarymen?

( Source: Unknown )

The first change they made was in confirming the dominance of feminized male ideals of 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 (소망화장품) website, but I can't imagine that those of other cosmetics companies would have been significantly different.

1997, with Kim Sung-woo (김승우):

1998:

1999, when soccer player Ahn Jung-hwan (안정한) must have signed a modeling contract with them:

2000, with actress Kim Hye-su [김혜수] on the left in both:

2001:

And then of course the notorious television advertisement for "Color Lotion" from 2002, featuring Kim Jae-won (김재원) on the left. I haven't been able to find a postable video, but it can be viewed here.

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, and Korean men that came up with the aforementioned slogans were surely naive to think that things could have gone on simply as before.

( Source: Unknown )

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.

And on that note, sorry (again) for the long delay since this last post. By definition I don't often have revelations, so I can forgive myself for my zeal for wanting to get it out there, but I really shouldn't have let it take over my life like it has for the last two weeks. So, offline I will force myself to take a break before even thinking about Part Three, and blogging wise I'm going to discipline myself and return to shorter and more regular posts on other topics. Sorry it's been so crazy recently.

_______________________________________________

Cho Haejoang, "Living with Conflicting Subjectivities: Mother, Motherly Wife, and Sexy Woman in the Transition From Colonial-Modern to Postmodern Korea", in Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall, pp. 165-195.

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.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Anybody remember this ad with Go Hyeon-jeong (고현정) from last year? Apparently it caused quite a storm in a teacup at the time:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.627568&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Blink and you'll miss it (update: and it doesn't seem to be even loading in Internet Explorer too!), so these screen captures below should help you get the gist of it. In order, the text in them reads:

• "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).
• And finally "Women buying tomorrow. Dios".

( Source )

To just about everybody reading this, I'd imagine that the ad appears completely innocuous, but it still managed to offend many netizens:

디오스 냉장고 광고, 역차별·된장녀 조장 2007/03/13

Dios Fridge Advertisement Encourages Women to Become Bean-paste Girls and to Discriminate Against Men

(For a definition of "Bean-paste Girl", see here)

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." (Source)

( Image Credit: !ºjeon ji-hyun )

But considering that I found only two other news reports on the petition (here and here) from last year and which say virtually the same thing as this one, then I guess that the petition was unsuccessful. No great surprise after Korean women have been eagerly watching 6 years of Sex and the City, and so a rare positive news item I guess.

On "Sex" in Korea

I said that translations on the blog weren't about learning Korean, but then the term "역차별" in the title (or "남녀 역차별" used in the text) proved very problematic, and figuring it out ultimately gave me some insights into the ways many Koreans may actually think about sexism and so forth, literally a foreign concept until relatively recently.

Now, "차별" without the "여" is of course "discrimination" and "남녀" is "men and women", so the "차별" referred to must be "sexual discrimination", but "역차별"? It wasn't in any of my dictionaries, and my wife, whose English is pretty much as good as is possible for a Korean who hasn't lived overseas, really struggled to understand it herself, let alone explain it to me.

It turns out that the word "discrimination" itself only really conjurs up images of sexual discrimination against women in Korean. Certainly much the same can be said of English speakers' initial images too, but then we are definitely aware of the concepts of and regularly use terms like "racial discrimination", "age discrimination", "religious discrimination", "positive discrimination" and so forth too.

"역차별" then, is literally "anti-discrimination", but more accurately "opposite-sexual discrimination against women". But what does that mean exactly? Anti-sexual discrimination? Equality? No. In this case as least, ultimately the opposite of sexual discrimination against women proved to be sexual discrimination against men.

( Image Credit: lavendamemory )

I may well be making too much of this, especially as I've only heard it from precisely one fluent Korean person so far (alebit an extremely intelligent one), but then recall, say, how problematic most readers found the ways in which Koreans used the word "foreigner" or "way-gook-in" (외국인) for all non-ethnic Koreans, even if they were living in and were citizens of foreign countires themselves. Or how "our country" or "oo-ri-nara" (우리나라) means "Korea"? On that latter, I fear that many discussions with Koreans about Korean history (despite my image, not what I usually talk about with friends, Korean or Western) may founder on us lacking a common understanding of really quite basic terms and concepts, much like what happened to discussions of socialism I had at university as a political studies student. It sounds a little elitist of me, but I soon learned to not to discuss it with people not doing the same major (let alone non-students), as "my" socialism being different to "their" socialism meant we'd end up talking past each other. Which is not to say that my version was right (although it was), but I'm sure you get the point.

(By the way, for any fellow political-studies geeks out there interested in the problems of defining socialism, I recommend the first chapter of this classic)

Ergo, even simple words often belie fundamental differences in worldviews between Koreans and Westerners, especially if they are only recently adopted concepts incorporated into the language and Korean life. I'm finding this issue cropping up again and again as I study advertising, images of women, and popular culture as they all reacted to and reflected the Korean concept of "modernization" from the mid-1970s, one proving to be very different to that I've gained from my books on Korean development.

To illustrate this incompleteness, let me leave you with So-hee Lee's experiences with these linguistic issues in the 1980s and 90s, from her opening to her chapter "The Concept of Female Sexuality in Korean Popular Culture" in Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall (2002):

First, let me begin with my own experience of the term "sexuality." I went to Britain for the first time in August 1986, as a British Council Study Fellow in the Faculty of English, Cambridge University. My topic was "Women Characters in Victorian Novels". During the lectures and seminars, I was acutely embarassed by what I heard. Why was everyone talking about sexuality, masculinity, and femininity?...

In those days, Koreans did not have exact counterpart terms for "sex", "sexuality", "sexual intercourse", and "gender". I was very confused as I struggled to determine the appropriate meanings. In Korean, one very general term "seong" (성) could be used for these four concepts, its particular meaning dependent on the speaking and listening context....

It's actually a little more complicated than that, "성" really being the chinese character that means "nature" and "life" as well as "sex", but that probably adds to rather than detracts from her point.

....Korean society in the mid-1980s did not find it necessary to make sharp distinctions between these concepts. At the annual Korean Women's Studies Association Conference in 1989, the issue of sex language was raised and discussed. More recently, the Korean countepart of the term "sexual intercourse" (성교) has gained wide usage, accompanied by the frquent use of the a Korean counterpart for the term "sexual violence" (성폭행)....Sexual violence has now become a recognized issue in need of a discourse.

Korean concepts of sexuality have changed profoundly since the Democratic Revolution of 1987....In 1995, the most popular topics among university students were sexuality, sexual identity, and other sexual subjects. There are many reasons for this....In Korea, there is still no broad popular social discourse on female sexuality outside of marriage.

On the basis of that last paragraph, would it be too much of a generalization to say that in Korea the understanding of the concept of sexual discrimination, despite a relative lack of practical successes in combating it, has advanced in leaps and bounds compared to that of racial discrimination?

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  (Photo by publish9)

Anti-Communist Fashion

Unlike Part 1 and Part 2, this won't be a stand-alone post; in just a moment, I'll jump straight into outlining and discussing the the second part of Taeyeon Kim's 2003 journal article "Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society" as promised.

But before I do, I should mention that since writing those, I've started reading SeungSook Moon's book Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (2005) too, and it's made me realise just how narrow a focus Kim's article has. That's not necessarily a criticism: in the 16 pages available to her, Kim does a good job of explaining how the 19th Century Joseon Dynasty's Neo-Confucianist views of the female body were warped by, adapted to, and ultimately survived and prospered in the 20th Century. And that endurance does go a long way towards explaining the question I first posted in part one, namely why are Koreans so conformist in their fashion choices.

But what Moon's book has made me also realise 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. No, really.

(Photo by theturninggate)

Let me run with this for a moment. In a nutshell, Moon's book showed this to me by giving 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). The more I read about it, the more I learn 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 (an onerous job I'm sure, and strangely not as well-enforced as the former), but you get the drift. 

These attitudes didn't suddenly dissappear upon democratization in 1987 either. In hindsight, it's incredibly naive for me (or anyone else) to account for conformity in modern Korean life without reference to it. Even something as innocuous-sounding as fashion.

(Photo by superlocal)

(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 demonstre 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. After reading it, I recommend reading this recent post of the Metropolitician's on Korean fashion too, as he discusses much the same things but from a different angle, and, lest you feel that I give too pessimistic and conformist an image of Koreans, he argues that Korean fashion and creativity have witnessed something of a watershed in recent years. Considering he photographs them 24/7, then he would know. My comment to that post is a pretty blatant plug for my blog for sure, but in my defence when I wrote it I was quite stoked to find that he was writing a similarly in-depth post about the same subject at the same time I was (the life of Korea-studies geek-blogger is a lonely one). Having said that, I don't agree with everything he says, and I think I'll devote a post to discussing what he wrote next week.

Honourable mention should be made of this post of Roboseyo's post too, if you can get past the picture (it's tough, I know).

The second part of Kim's article 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

(Photo by donut2d)

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 particular case, Japanese colonisation and then civil war and division meant that its postwar search for national identity: 

...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, 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, for two reasons.

First, one, I think, 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 realise that that could have affected Korean's women's postwar lives much more than men; remember that 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. 

(Photo by mookiechan) 

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:

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 labour production to national consumption, becoming, in effect, what Byran S. Turner (1996) calls the capitalist body. (p. 102)

Korea, uniquely, is much less "post-industrial" then Kim thinks (see here), 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.

(Photo by BoazImages)

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?

(Photo by Lola Blue)

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
• And in Korea, it is statistically more likely for a women to become a prostitute than a doctor, a lawyer, or even a schoolteacher. The prostitution industry here is that big.

Hence taegyo is 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.

Finally, now for the how.

Correcting the Flawed Eastern Female

(Photo by danostamper714)

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, italics 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, italics in original)

(Photo by Scoubi)

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 the impacts of these 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?

(Photo by wongtai213)

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