Revealing Soju Advertisements?

A soju advertisement I saw in the restaurant after my friend’s wedding recently. Being somewhat of a cynical old timer that has attended very many Korean weddings, I confess that I found it much more interesting than the ceremony itself:

Recognize her? She’s 고아라/Go Ara from this soft drink advertisement below that we all loved to hate, but which we couldn’t help but sing and dance to when none of our students were looking:

When I found the original advertisement of Go Ara’s above on this page of Jinro Soju’s homepage (watch out for the noisy automatic video when you click on the second link), next to it I first noticed this advertisement below with Kim Ah-joong (김아중) too:

That got me thinking: almost every Korean soju manufacturer has an innocent, virginal looking woman in its advertisments these days, and this one with Kim Ah-joong only stood out because I’ve seen the video of her most recent commercial for Jinro at Mongdori here, or here on Jinro’s website again (her behavior in the video is sickeningly childish, but unfortunately all too typical for many young Korean women). Even though by the time I go back to Australia and NZ next month for a month’s vacation it will have been a crazy 5 years and 9 months(!) since I’ve been to a Western country, even I still remember that Western ads for alcohol are just as full of women who wouldn’t last one year as a model if they actually drank the products they’re advertising, but in the case of soju in particular I’ve always found the discrepancy between the sweet, innocent, youthful women and the actual appearance of the odious middle-aged ajosshis who would be 95% of the drinkers of the product just too great to be even remotely swayed by the advertisements.

Sure, everyone’s entitled to drink what they hell they like, and if drinking pure ethanol mixed with water and flavoring is your tipple of choice, then I won’t make out that I’m all superior by mostly drinking Black Russians and Jack and Cokes, and I promise I’ll only look down on you on my way home from my own favorite bar (see here and then here) when I pass you vomiting in the gutter. But I can’t help it, every time I see those advertisements the first thing that comes in to mind are these anti-smoking ones:

I may be overanalysing them, but you would too if you saw a 3 metre version of this one of 이채연/Lee Chae Yeon’s (click here too) at 연산/Yeonsan subway station to and from work everyday. Seriously, it’s difficult to get soju ads off your mind when you pass breasts that are bigger than your head everyday (no pun intended). And this is at the very same station with pictures of rather minimalist female figures on the pillars promoting awareness of breast cancer, that had to be colored pink within 2 weeks or so to make it look more like they were giving themselves breast examinations fully clothed…presumably, someone complained at the moral depravity of it. This advertisement, in contrast, has been up for at least a year, and considering she’s merely wearing a negligee then the advertisement reveals a lot more than those virtual cartoon characters ever did.

In case you’re not entirely convinced that Korean soju advertisements have attractive Korean women in them (hey, it’s possible), here are two with 김태희/Kim Tae-hee, whom you can find more information about at an earlier post of mine on her here. I admit, while she doesn’t look quite so virginal in the first, they overdid the look a bit in the second.

Despite my choice of images, when I wrote “revealing” in this post’s title, I actually meant revealing of certain features of Korean society, which actually these following three advertisements, also from the Jinro homepage, do much better. Exhibit number one:

That Korean families are a lot “closer” (for want of a better term) than their Western counterparts (except perhaps Southern Europeans) isn’t some newbie myth about Korea that I’m going to claim all the books about Korea in my bookshelf, which you don’t have, demonstrate really isn’t the case, but which only Korea Studies geeks like myself know. While I will argue in a post soon that Korean 20-somethings stay at home until they’re married not so much because of some supposedly timeless Korean cultural feature, and more because the structure of the housing market here means that they can’t leave home until they’re about 25, and by then they’re used to it, in the meantime the familial nature of people’s lives is indeed very pervasive here. Just watch a dating program sometime, like weddings again ostensibly Western at first, but then the person selecting who to date brings mom and dad with them, and they form a integral part of the show. So drinking soju with Dad here is no big deal. Hell, it’s not even particularly Korean, as it reminds me of this old New Zealand Speight’s Beer Ad:

Watch it once, then watch the younger man’s expression 12 seconds before the end…has always made me want to kill him. But I digress.

So drinking with Dad, or your sheep-shearing mentor, sells beer even in homophobic New Zealand, but jeez…did the Korean ad have to be so completely and utterly gay? Now, you all know my feelings about Men in pink, and like I said diversity in clothing styles is to be applauded, and pink doesn’t necessarily mean gay. But why, oh why, do the Korean guys in ads invariably have to be so damn effeminate? In this case Dad can be forgiven, at least he’s procreated, but jeez, that kid looks like he’s two shots away from breaking out the baby oil and S&M gear.

Self-explanatory. If not, check out this post and my comments to it at Gusts of Popular Feeling, and if you too feel I’m reading too much into it like some other commenters there thought, I challenge you to find one ad with a Korean woman – non-Korean man couple in it, whereas off the top of my head I can remember 5 with the opposite here, and I don’t even watch Korean TV. (Edit: According to my friend, the guy on the left is clearly Caucasian. Maybe so, in which case surely I’ve lost all credibility with my readers. My friend thought it was significant that he was set aside from the rest of the group though)

A little overkill perhaps, for you probably got my message about effeminate Korean men. If not, also check this image of the “ideal” Korean male (with thanks to Seoul Man). The ad above claims he’s an athlete, but jeez, I looked more butch when I was a teenager playing nothing but chess all day. But yes, he sure is pretty, I’ll give him that.

And on that athletic note, I’d better put this marathon of a post to bed.

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