I agree with you about the book. I mistakenly bought a copy for my wife then girlfriend as a birthday gift a few years ago (how romantic), and I don’t think she managed more than a few pages because of the dense writing style. I couldn’t manage to many more myself. I think it’ll quite happily be sitting in my bookcase for years to come, although maybe I should scuff it up a bit to make sure guests at my cocktail parties do think I’ve read it.

But actually, I think I’ve been confusing it with Betty Frieden’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) all along. I belatedly recognise the mistake in Part 3. Have you (or anyone else) read it? I suspect that it’ll be much more readable (and relavant) to Koreans today than The Female Eunuch ever will be.

As for the other comments, I think there’s good sense in considering that superficially, a lot of Korean modernity has been modeled on Western (and somehow, Korea’s entered the 1950s/1960s era in fashion, as well — lots of 50s conservative clothing as well as lots of miniskirts and showing-off all at once. But there’s also that other undercurrent, the indigenous culture that persists and fuses with and ultimately takes over the foreign-culture grafts.

Korean culture really is truly more alien in some ways than suggests itself to us, because all around is clothing, music, iconography, and self-presentation that seems so familiar. Yet as James notes, the undercurrents are also quite unlike the undercurrents of our own Western culture.

But then there’s the good old fact that, at base, we’re all the same species; this makes certain patterns generally unsurprising, and makes others somewhat more easily explicable too.

I would like to reply with something interesting and useful, but I think that you’ve answered your own question!

But I do recommend that you read Part three, because there I discuss a post by another blogger who is very optomistic about and increasingly seeing evidence of Koreans finally putting aside their Neo-Confucian urges to be one with the crowd and embracing creativity and difference in their fashions instead. He’s a photographer too, so I suspect that he would know better than most.

Yet both stances are likely true. No fallacy of the excluded middle here. Both things are in play.

One MAJOR difference for me is that Aaron’s “western” women were not, by and in large, reacting to external notions of the body. That is to say that, as odd as their notions of the body might have been they were developed largely from inside the culture. It seems quite clear to me that Korean women are being pulled by extra-(original) cultural influences (vide the picture of a butt competition) and this external comparison alone (and I am not suggesting it is alone) would mean that James’ analysis is useful as you have what might be termed “community standards” (and that even more important in a Confucian-esque country) being affected by social and economic influences from the “way-outside-machine.”

Then again, I’m quite drunk. ;-)

But you’re right that Part 3 will discuss what you bring up, so on this occasion I will leave things there for now. But I’ve only half-finished it, so I’ll make sure to keep what you said in mind as I complete it, hopefully early next week.

I confess, when I first saw your comment last night I was a bit peeved. My gut reaction was that 2000 words in the first post and 1600 in this one surely couldn’t be dismissed so readily? But I have to admit, I didn’t instantly have the definititive reply that I expected I would, and I’ve definitely had to get through a cup of coffee to come up with this one!

I think the first part of what you say is still only true on the surface. You can’t describe Neo-Confucian Korean women and, say, Christian American women in the 1950s and 1960s the same way. I’m sure I don’t do justice to the concept of ki here, and maybe I should have emphasized just how utterly and irrevocably it excluded women. Not just confined them to having and raising children at home while the men did the “real” work, in a parallel of Western 1950s nuclear family and suburbian domesticity, but considered them physically incapable of the intellectual and spiritual thought that men were.

Thoughts like that sound more appropriate to the era of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) than Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). One reason the latter was so popular was that it addressed the issue of how Western women were treated as equals in education, and legally too, but were then expected to use their degrees to sit at home for the rest of their lives.

I’m not enitrely sure what you mean by the second part of your comment sorry, from “I think it has more….” onwards. If I can take a stab at it, then sure, the progression and place of the now Korean consumer economy has a big part to play in things, but Neo-Confucianism has endured in all other aspects of Korean life, so the point of these posts is to show how it has endured with ideal images and roles of women in modern Korea too, despite them appearing to be the completely opposite.

I’ll discuss that more in Part 3. Of course, if I’ve misinterpreted anything of what you’ve said, please let me know!