(Update: I'd like to thank bumfromkorea over at the Marmot's Hole for telling me about Time and Cinderella, two movies that deal with the Korean plastic surgery industry. I would thank (probably) him there, but for some reason every time I write a comment on that post it just disappears)  

("Liberty Leading the People" by Eugène Delacroix)

Introduction

Today's post is a bit of a light-hearted break from all the intense and/or very academic posts I've been writing recently, but I think that the points I'm making are still quite valid. Sure, if I'd wanted to convey that impression more effectively then probably I should have used a different title instead, but then I'd be lying if I said that I didn't usually choose them with SEO in mind (Search Engine Optimization to non-bloggers). Sorry if that sounds a little cynical, but then consider this internet classic on the differences between what people say they read and what they actually do read on the internet. Meanwhile, if pictures of Lee Hyori are what you're really after, then you'll find plently to choose from here.

Korean Celebrity Culture 1: Different Standards

(Photo by lej pics. Yes, I know Lee Eun-ju/이은주 on the right committed suicide in 2005, but rather than making my choice of picture tasteless, actually I think that that illustrates my points all the more)

The original motivation for this post was my volunteering to translate this "news" article about Lee Hyori's recent chest X-rays for readers over at Dave's ESL Cafe (I guess I'm a real glutton for punishment). I did last night, but PopSeoul! has already translated something very similar here, saving me the trouble of putting it up.

The article I translated is stupid, as is the endless speculation about whether or not Lee Hyori has received breast enlargement surgery: for one, you can see the before and after evidence for yourself here, and I discuss that in more detail here. Of course she has. Like I say there, I think she was very attractive without them, but they certainly didn't harm her career, and while I may often sound critical of plastic surgery, I'm not against it per se. But why then, this endless, repetitive speculation? Because she refuses to admit it. Or rather, ironically, being a celebrity means that she's not allowed to admit it, at least in Korea.

(Photo by mona)

I've already written a great deal about the differences between Western and Korean celebrity culture, so let me just give the briefest outlines of them here.

Discounting the big differences between Western countries, to a greater or lesser extent Westerners almost expect their celebrities to live hedonistic lives, and the public and the justice system as a whole gives them a great deal of leniency to do so that is not granted to ordinary mortals like ourselves. But Korea is the exact opposite, and female celebrities in particular are held to impossibly higher standards. Hence when it is revealed that they have taken drugs or had sex before marriage, for instance, then the public reaction is swift and severe, even if they didn't actually do the heinous crimes of which they're accused.

And so while Korea has one of the largest plastic surgery industries in the world, and a majority of women have had some form of operation or another, Koreans seem to want to keep this a secret from non-Koreans, and celebrities in particular definitely can't admit to having received it themselves (with exceptions for aspiring stars).

I think that the movie 200 Pounds Beauty/미녀는 귀로워? is one of the rare popular Korean movies that draws attention to this (I discuss it here); if readers know of any others, please let me know. I also think that the dichotomy between the Korean public's standards for themselves and for celebrities also partially plays a role in the their toleration of sexually-suggestive dancing and provocative clothes from the Wondergirls/원더걸스 too, because many parents, say, that regard both as innocent and cute would never tolerate the same from their own daughters. But after all the virtual ink I've already spilled on that, I'll wisely stop there and let readers make their own judgements.

Korean Celebrity Culture 2: Promotion of the Mundane

(D-War/디워)

Amongst non-Koreans living in Korea at least, the both the Korean and especially English-language Korean media is notorious for portraying any cultural product destined for overseas consumption as world-class, on a par with Hollywood productions (if it is a film), and enthusiastically received by non-Korean audiences, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Gordsellar describes it as a "standard, near-universal conviction among Koreans that a positive image of Korea must be presented to the world", and I myself (somewhere amongst these posts) have interpreted the effects of this on the Korean media to be its portrayal of the Korean Wave/한류 as Koreans would like it be received rather than it actually is, and even if this was the only problem the Korean media had, then it would be in a very sorry state indeed. Unfortunately, it's not, as this and the following case reveals.

By this stage, you may well be asking how on Earth the Korean Wave is related to Lee Hyori's breasts? Are they a cultural product? Well...yes. Consider this article about her trip to Hong Kong in 2003, but before you do, let me provide some background:

• Men like women's breasts
• There are some men in Hong Kong
• Lee Hyori has breasts
• Lee Hyori went to Hong Kong

Therefore, even before the big event I would have bet money on some men in Hong Kong liking her breasts while she was there. An article about the test of that hypothesis is not news, and of course the fact that it was in a Korean tabloid also means that it wasn't news too. But ironically, this celebration of Hong Kong men's interest in Lee Hyori's breasts is news precisely because it was in a Korean tabloid.

The mainstream Korean news media is amongst the most populist, unprofessional, racist and xenophobic in the world, and is more than happy to portray all non-Korean men as perverted, pedophilic sexual predators whenever it suits them, so you can imagine what the tabolid press is like. Not unsurprisingly, this means that many Korean men (but by no means all) are resentful of Korean women in relationships with non-Koreans. Hence KoreaBeat points out that it was simply bizarre that a Korean tabloid newspaper would revel in non-Korean men ogling one of "their" women, and I'm suprised that I didn't notice the incongruity myself when I read it at the time.

Now, I'd be the last person to describe Lee Hyori's breasts as mundane...but sorry, at the end of the day, they're still just breasts. So considering all the above, is there any other explanation for the positive spin of the article other than the desire for self-promotion overriding the xenophobia, which, after all, is usually just a mere convenient device to use when Koreans want to deflect attention away from their own problems?

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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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