The Grand Narrative

( “gender specific colours” by superlocal) 

Since my last post, I’ve been pretty good at sticking to my resolution of going to bed earlier and living more healthily. True, it has technically only been two whole days so far, and despite what I said then I did go to bed after 12 last night. But, lest I be accused of backtracking already, I was only a mere 10 minutes into an episode of Season 3 of tvNgels before I managed to turn it off and go to sleep, and that makes me a saint as far as I’m concerned.

So, some of you may be expecting a more academic post than what I’ve been providing recently. At first glance, you will be disappointed: there is still a picture of a gorgeous woman in a bikini below. Sorry. But then God moves in mysterious ways, and it is merely the starting point for today’s post really. And actually I didn’t come across the picture by myself…no, really…but instead did so in a thread at daveseslcafe, the biggest website for ESL teachers in Korea. Being enterprising, once I saw it I quickly found where the picture came from, glanced over the Korean article it was in, and then put up a post giving the link and a brief summation of what it said, which was that 아주마/ajummas like 김준희/Kim Jun-hee in the picture were still sexy and attractive even though they were ajummas. I finished with the observation that given that the stereotype of any women in Korea that is married and/or in her 30s and/or has had a child (ie. ajummas) is of a sexless, fashion sense-less, impolite, que-barging, gossiping, skinflint, frigid husk of a women, then this was of course a good thing. Again, if you think I’m exaggerating, then you’re sooo not in Korea.

The response of davesesl? To delete the whole thread. Not just locked, but completely erased, with no explanation. Sure, most of the other posts in the thread were along the lines of “Wooah. I’d do her! Hell Yeah!”, and the thread’s title was indeed “Wow. Just. WOW,” but then not only is an equally low-brow thread about “Going Lesbian” still up, but one about the porn star Almond Tease is still going strong, and it even has barely SFW pictures too (not that I’m against that!). Yes, she’s the same one who came to teach English in Korea but who was exposed recently if you’re interested (no pun intended).

In a nutshell, that site is good to keep up with events in Korea, and is an especially great introduction to teaching in Korea to be recommended to newbies, but its atrocious search function means that the same topics are repeated again and again every few months ad naueseum, and my now personal experience of the completely arbitrary deleting of entire threads…? I’ll complain there later today (8:45pm: and here it is), and if no explanation is offered and/or that thread is deleted too, then I think I’ll just give up on that site from now on; the whole thing reminds me why blogs were invented in the first place!

Here’s the oh-so-offending picture and article, with my translation underneath. Fans will notice that I’m moving onto lengthier articles, yes? Not only that, but other than the 4-line ‘article’ on Lee Hyori as promised last time, this week I’ll be moving onto ones with no women in bikinis at all, starting with one on what Koreans think of this crappy summer and then Barack Obama. And I have part 4 on the Korean education system still to come after many delays too. Maybe this blog is finally over it’s adolescence?

유뷰녀 스타들, 벗고 있다

[일간스포츠 2007-08-11 09:13], [JES 이현 기자]

Married Female Stars are Undressing

[Daily Sports 11th August 2007 09:13], [JES Reporter: Lee Hyeon]

20대 미혼 여배우들의 전유물이었던 노출 행보에 유부녀 스타들이 과감히 동참하고 있다.

In the past, only unmarried women in their twenties would expose bare skin, but now married women are determined to do so too.
　
장신영·김준희·이혜원 등이 환상적인 S라인 몸매와 함께 비키니 화보를 공개했는가하면, 김지혜·이송정·조은숙·변정수·김민 등은 심지어 임신 중인 만삭 몸매를 드러내며 변함없는 ‘관리 상태’를 과시했다.

Women like Jang Sin-Yeong, Kim Jun-Hee, Lee Hyae-Won have produced photobooks of their fantasy-like S-line bodies in bikinis, while women such as Kim Ji-Hyae, Lee Song-Jeong, Jo Un-Suk, Byeon Jeong-Su and Kim Min have gone so far as to even show off their still beautiful bodies in their last month of pregnancy.

(By the way, I translated an article on Jang Sin-Yeong’s photoshoot a couple of weeks ago: you can see it here)
　
‘결혼한 여자는 조신해야 한다’는 사회 통념에 유부녀 스타들이 반발하기 시작한 것. 스타들의 화보를 진행하는 업계 한 관계자는 “유부녀 스타들은 결혼 후 정체돼버리는 것에 대한 두려움과 위기감을 갖고 있다. 그로인해 여느 미혼 스타들 못지 않은, 또는 그보다 월등한 몸매와 미모를 공개함으로써 연기자로서 또는 스타로서 자신의 건재함을 홍보한다. 노출 화보는 청순했던 그들이 성숙한 여성미를 선보이기 위한 전략으로도 사용된다”고 분석했다.

These women are against the conventional wisdom that married women should be modest and reserved. According to people in the photobook industry, this is because “female Stars have a lot of fear and anxiety about their careers after they get married. They are disadvantaged compared to ordinary single stars, but through following a strategy of revealing themselves in bikinis for the first time they can generate a great deal of publicity about their outstanding bodies and attractive faces, and thus can remain in the public eye. In so doing, they display their more developed female beauty rather than the innocent looks of their single counterparts.”

저들이 유부녀라고? S라인 비키니 몸매

These people are married women? They have S-line Bikini Bodies!
　
비키니는 일종의 자기 과시욕이다. 굴곡없이 늘씬한 S라인을 만천하게 공개하는 기회가 되기 때문이다. 그래서일까. 노출을 거부하지 않은채 카메라 렌즈 앞에 서는 용기있는 유부녀 스타들이 줄을 잇고 있다. 그들은 모바일이나 잡지 화보 또는 자신들이 운영하는 쇼핑몰 홍보를 위해 옷을 벗어던진채 비키니로 갈아입고 있다.

Because the opportunities to present their curved, slender bodies to the whole world have presented themselves, then it is has been very tempting to take them. So these women, very confident in front of the camera, have been lining up to reveal as much of themselves as possible these days. Afterwards, they have promoted themselves via selling the photoshoots to mobile phones companies, magazines, and on their own personally-managed websites.

비키니를 입은 유부녀 스타들 중 가장 파격적인 변신을 한 인물은 바로 장신영이다. 지난 4월 출산 이후 16kg을 감량한 장신영은 비키니 화보를 통해 소위 ‘무결점 S라인’을 드러냈다. 결혼 전 노출 연기조차 제대로 볼 수 없었던 청순한 이미지의 그가 보여준 파격적인 섹시함에 관심이 집중된 것은 당연한 일이다.

Out of the women who have done this, Jang Sin-Yeong stands out the most. This past April, after losing 16kg after giving birth she presented her ‘Flawless S-line’ body through a photobook. Before she got married, she had revealed very little of her body in her acting and so had a very innocent image, and so revealing by her photobook that she was in fact exceptionally sexy has generated a lot of renewed interest in her.
　
장신영은 비키니 화보를 찍은 이유에 대해 “빨리 일을 하고 싶었다. 결혼 후 기존과 다른 이미지를 보여주고 싶었다. 그래서 화보 촬영에도 적극적으로 참여했다”고 변신에 대한 변을 내놓았다.

Jang Sin-Yeong says that the reason she produced a bikini photobook was that “I want to start working again soon, but I want work of a different standard and want to project a different image. This is why I was so positive about producing a photobook”
　
김준희·이혜원 등 유부녀 스타들의 몸매 과시에는 또다른 포석도 깔려있다. 미혼일 때부터 ‘몸짱’임을 과시했던 김준희는 자신이 운영하는 인터넷 쇼핑몰 홍보를 위해 호피무늬를 비롯해 다양한 스타일의 비키니를 입고 글래머 몸매 자랑을 했다. 안정환의 부인 이혜원은 그와는 달리 발랄한 느낌의 비키니 룩을 보여줬다.

This strategy of married female stars like Kim Jun-Hee, Lee Hyae-Won and so forth of showing off their bodies is spreading and developing. Actually, from when she was single Kim Jun-Hee has been known for her good body, but now to show off and generate publicity for her home shopping mall she is beginning to embrace different styles like tiger-skin patterns, bikinis, and also more glamorous clothes. Also, footballer Ahn Jeong-Hwan’s wife Lee Hyae-Won has been presenting a distinctive lively bikini look.

이현 기자 [tanaka@jesnews.co.kr]

Lee Hyeon - Reporter

(By the way, Kim Jun-Hee in the picture was born on 1st March 1976; like I said on daveeslcafe, I’m only a week younger and I’m not a sexual has-been, and you’d have to be  blind and/or a eunuch to claim think that she is merely because she’s technically an ajumma!)

With the caveat that my Korean is still inadequate, and that the text is so typically Korean in that it can be translated into English in so many @%$#ing ways, then clearly 30-somethings parading around in their bikinis isn’t going to usher in a new feminist revolution in Korea. Indeed, a harsh interpretation of the article would be that these women were forced to do so just to be noticed at all by the media after they got married. But it’s not all bad. The article isn’t exactly perpetuating the stereotype about ajummas: quite the opposite. And that they are strategically using their assets to their best advantage, no matter how base that that putting it like that sounds, or what it says about the state of sexual equality in Korea, is not denigrating the women themselves. Actually, I think it means they’re smart.

The article reminds me of an essay on China I did for my MA, with the title as thus: “Why have women borne the brunt of lay-offs from urban state-owned enterprises since the mid-1990s?”. My memory may be a little hazy, that essay was done 3 years ago and my books are under various teddy-bears and nursery-rhyme books now after all, but in the process of doing the research for it (although I didn’t get to use this in the essay) I learnt that many commentators consider the women working in China today as receptionists, minor-models, and so forth - professions where looks and being female are considered necessary - as a sort of intelligensia for their generation of Chinese women, as the alternatives are not much more diverse than slaving away in the countryside or working 16 hour shifts making Sesame Street toys in factories in special economic zones. While there are dumb women in those sorts of professions of course, the competition to get into them is so fierce that merely being pretty often isn’t enough.

On a much less exalted level, the women that work in the bar I go to to practice Korean, for instance, are indeed very attractive and I’d be completely full of it if I pretended for a minute that that isn’t the primary reason that my friends and I go there. But after talking in Korean to them for hours on end I’ve learned a great deal about them and Korea in general, and while of course some of them are not particularly intelligent, just as many are, and despite the indignity of men (like my hypocritcal self) coming to ogle them, they work at that bar because they still have a great deal more freedom and make a great deal more money than at other part-time jobs. Just last time I was their I met a new girl who is learning Portuguese at University, who spent a year on her own living in Brazil, and who started work at the bar to save enough money to go back. Not only was she smart and determined to get what she wanted, but her assertiveness was refreshing for Korean women and put my lazy, content in my being caucasian and so able to get an ESL job anywhere, no longer risk taking at all self to shame.

This works both ways. When I was at University myself, originally I worked in the service industry in various guises, but once I was older and wiser I decided to work on building sites instead. While this was partially for ideological reasons, after seeing the movie The Trigger Effect not wanting to be a useless ivory tower academic who could wax lyrical on Marxism but not change a simple fuse (we won’t let the fact that I still can’t drive yet ruin this image of me), mostly it was because back then it meant that I not only made NZ$10 an hour cash in hand, as opposed to the taxed $8.50 an hour I would at a coffee shop, but also that I didn’t deal with a-hole customers, didn’t have to wear a uniform, got to work on my (then) adonis-like body in the sun and, once I’d learned, was given a great deal more respect and trust to use the diggers, jackhammers, and chainsaws etc. etc. than I ever got at the #%*^ing Warehouse earlier. I even used that to persuade people to pay me $12 an hour not too much later.

Sure, there were downsides, like the number of times I nearly died and/or lost fingers and limbs -  in hindsight I know early 20-somethings are stupid and need to learn, but I’m still amazed today at what I was prepared to do then for the cost of a couple of Black Russians an hour - and the fact that it wasn’t for 4 goddam years later, on my very last labouring job ever, that I found myself half-naked in the sun, rippling muscles glistening with sweat, suddenly standing in front of some female potentials classmates from University. But I’m going off my point, and that is that being a builder or laborer doesn’t automatically make you stupid: I know because I was one, and although many people I worked with were as dumb as shit for sure, a good few of my workmates were intelligent too, if not in a book sense. Because the money and conditions (except for the lack of females) were better than the alternatives, and my already great body meant I had the assets/muscles to do the work, then I think I was smart to get into it. Not only that, but my girlfriends were partially attracted to me in the first place for me being such an pretentious geek who had even done women’s studies courses on the one hand, but had a great body and was a builder on the other…I think I wasn’t just smart, I was fricking inspired myself.

While I’m not so hypocritical not to admit that I don’t like the idea of my daughter 18 years from now working in a bar and having sleazy guys nearly twice her age (like me now) pretending to want to talk to her but really wanting to stare at her breasts for longer, or that if I have a son next that I want him doing something as dangerous as laboring, let alone learning about life at an impressionable age by hanging around with some of gorilla-like characters (as in size and intellect) that I did, if that were the best work options for them at the time then I’d learn to live with it. So to sum up here, extolling the virtues of 30-something Korean women in bikinis isn’t as base as it sounds: it has it’s positive sides, and is much more nuanced than it may at first appear.

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