Korean Women, Part 1: Dating and Body Image

(Photo by 台北BoA)

Introduction

Today’s post is inspired by the journal article ”Content Analysis of Diet Advertisements: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” by Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon (Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, October 2006), which interested readers can download for themselves here if they want.

I found it myself while I was doing research for my recent posts on Korean women’s body images and consumerism, and unlike the article(s) I discuss there, that free access means that here I can concentrate on giving my opinions of the article and adding related things not covered in it, rather than simply rehashing much of its content like I normally have to. Hence I say “inspired by” and not “about,” and although the article is an easy, 20-minute read tops, you don’t have to read it to enjoy this post or the other two or three in the series.

Still, I think I can at least impose on you to read the abstract, so you know what to expect:

Content analysis of diet advertisements was performed to examine how diet advertisements portray the Western ideal of feminine beauty and promote dieting in Korean women’s magazines in comparison with U.S. women’s magazines. Results showed that the Western cultural ideal of feminine beauty and dieting were prevalent in Korean women’s magazines. Diet advertisements in Korean magazines appear to promote more passive dieting methods (e.g., diet pills, aroma therapy, diet crème, or diet drinks) than active dieting methods (e.g., exercise). Results further indicated that women may be misled to believe that dieting is simple, easy, quick, and effective without pain, if they consume the advertised product. This study suggests that there is an urgent need to establish government regulations or policies about diet products and their claims in Korea. Magazine publishers also need to recognize their role in societal well-being and accept some responsibility for advertisements in their magazines.

Yep, it’s another “girly” subject, which got me thinking: online, I often get accused of being a woman, and while I couldn’t care less really, a new reader to the blog could be forgiven for thinking that I am a woman given this and recent subjects. What can I say? I like women, and unfortunately I can’t say much more than that without giving the impression that I do actually care (damn). But by coincidence, the first thing I thought of when I read that journal article is something probably every expat guy in Korea can relate to, and it just goes to show how the ostensibly girly subjects on my blog have much more of a universal appeal than they may at first appear.

You’re Not Fat, Dammit!

(Photo by KimchiSugar)

Teaching children rather than adults, and being married and a father now, then I don’t have time to often meet new Korean women these days. But when I did, I was always amazed at how readily many would mention to me that they thought were fat and needed to lose weight. Sure, not immediately, but soon enough into our relationship (professional, platonic or otherwise) to be noticeable. Especially if they were in their early-20s too, and always virtually regardless of their actual weight and body shape or size.

Back when I was single, I would find that dates and/or semi-girlfriends often would too. Naturally, if that happened today I’d probably call it a night right there and then, but the first few times it happened, I’d feel like offering a quiet prayer of thanks for the opportunity offered: surely the very first guy to compliment her about her body, after a lifetime of criticism about her weight from relatives, friends and Korean men, would reap the rewards of making her feel good about herself? It sounds very calculating on my part, and was, but that is the nature of dating. And for obvious reasons, I wasn’t actually lying when I did it.

But…sigh…how young and naive I was. Thirty minutes and numerous repeated compliments later I’d still be nowhere, and, exasperated, would be well into covering the facts that:

1. Regardless of what she was aiming for, all men’s instinctive preference is for women with a 0.7 waist to hip ratio. Although, hell, a good 99.99% or so of sexual encounters are done for pleasure rather than reproduction, males and females still find the most fertile mates the most attractive. And women with hourglass figures just so happen to be 30% more fertile than the androgynous figures favored by many Koreans.

2. Women’s ovaries don’t work below 18% body fat: see page 347 of the article for more, and come to think of it it’s even mentioned in G.I. Jane too. Sure, not all women are blessed with the most fertile body form, actually the vast majority aren’t, but that doesn’t mean that our base, uncouth male reproductive instincts don’t only respond to a woman of any form that can actually get pregnant.

(Image detail from Bouguereau’s The Birth of Venus.)

It’s no exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t have to walk very far from my apartment to see many extremely thin, immaculately dressed and make-uped(?) women at the height of Korean ideals of beauty, but which for the life of me I could never imagine having a sexual relationship with. To be precise, they remind me of a Garfield cartoon where he pours water on a poodle to reveal that it’s really just eyeballs and hair, and I too simply can’t image that under the make-up and clothes of the women I describe, that there’s someone with even the physical constitution to have and enjoy sex, let alone of having a child. And so I strongly suspect that, if they’re in a relationship, that they don’t have sex, and in some cases are surely no more than trophy girlfriends for their male partners to show off.

Certainly, much the same can be said of many women and relationships in Western countries too, but there it’s increasingly difficult not to hear about the distinction between real life and the ideals of beauty represented by the fashion industry. Even the fashion industry itself has begun to respond to that in recent years, and women’s magazines have paid more than lip-service to it for decades too, although articles about healthy body images will often still literally be alongside advertisements with ultra-thin models. But in Korea, there is no distinction, and in hindsight that follows on from fashion for conformity’s sake that I discussed in earlier posts. It’s also something that I think someone has to have Korean ability and/or be in Korea to appreciate, because image searches of Korean women on English-language sites like Google or Flickr and so on, for instance, tend to reveal healthy-looking women in line with English-speaking users’ tastes and photographic interests. They don’t capture just how skinny and how so many ordinary, apparently non-photogenic Korean women have become in pursuit of the thin ideal.

And hence all the above both contributes to and is despite the fact that:

3. Korean women are the amongst the least obese in the world. Now, I’m from a Western country (three in fact – it’s a long story), so with that background and her own, not unreasonable, stereotypes of Western women, did she really think that I’d find her obese? I did have hair then, and wasn’t that ugly…did she think I’d scraped the bottom of the barrel with her or something…?

All very romantic I know, but then I’ve long since moved on from what I actually said on those dates (sorry). But I’m not exaggerating when I say that I married the first Korean woman with healthy curves that not once mentioned that she thought she was too fat to me. And I’m speaking literally: when I say “healthy curves”, I don’t mean them in the euphemistic sense that Westerners are used to, and when I say that she never said that she was too fat to me, I mean that she…well, never said that she was too fat. I don’t mean that she was “confident” with her body, and there is a difference: because of the contexts in which it’s used, I think to most Westerners that that phrase conjures up an image of a sexually-aggressive women flaunting herself in a crop-top for instance, and, not that I’m against that, but that was out of question in rural Korea in 2000. But she did never wear a t-shirt over her swimsuit at the beach, and although it may be difficult to believe now, that was quite daring back then.

Bikini Feminism

To illustrate what I mean, consider the following photos. The first two are now normal sights on Korean beaches, and I’m perfectly serious when I say that this fact is to be applauded. I won’t pretend that I don’t mean that in my male, voyeuristic sense, but I also mean it in a feminist sense too:

(Photo by Jeremy Chae)

(Photo by Jeremy Chae)

Claiming that bikinis are good for feminism possibly – hell, probably – sounds patronising and facetious to many female readers. But then consider this picture, which from experience was the norm on Korean beaches in 2000:

(Photo by model337)

Yes, the woman on the left is indeed wearing a bikini, but is that make-up on her face too? And I can’t imagine that the women on the right wouldn’t prefer not be dragged down by the weight of their heavy t-shirts, but are only wearing them because of embarrassment. So when I say that my wife was the first attractive Korean woman I’d met who was simply comfortable with her body, and that that was very refreshing after my previous dating experiences here, then hopefully you can appreciate how much more meaningful that statement is then maybe it first appears.

And in hindsight, it was so telling of Korea too. Because that was despite her being “fatter” than most of her then friends, and that those friends reminded her of that seemingly every time they met. That she still hung out with them despite that – at least until I convinced her otherwise – now makes me realise how routine this perception of themselves must be for many Korean women, although I already suspected because of how little I’d been able to change the minds of those women I dated before I met her. They would nod dutifully at my verbal barrage, and some would even be surprised and interested, but I still had a gut feeling that I what I’d said hadn’t and would never ultimately make any difference to their body images.

I suspect that while my arguments may have been better received if they’d been made by a woman, it would have taken a Korean woman to ultimately convince them. In a sense, what I was saying was a criticism of Korea in that I was criticizing a concept of women’s beauty that many if not most Korean women and men subscribe to, even if it isn’t actually Korean per se. And unfortunately, it’s a fact of life here that all too many Koreans will give little credence to something only said by foreigners, regardless of its objective reliability.

(Image right by publish9)

Or is it? Does all the above still apply? Those dates were back in rural, conservative Jinju in 2000, not quite the same place as Seoul in 2008. Does this still happen on dates with Korean women? Do Korean women still constantly moan about being fat with their friends, Western and/or Korean? Could a picture like the above be taken in a nightclub outside of Seoul? These are all questions I’d like to pose to readers.

Nobody will believe me because I’m still not up to the “diet” in my post’s title, but nevertheless I really didn’t start this post planning to make it a series! But I’ve decided to break it up because of the length and especially those questions above. As you can guess, I haven’t been on a date in 8 years, and so while I’m loath to admit it – I am a longtimer and Korea-Studies geek after all – someone who’s been here a grand total of say, 8 weeks may well know more about the Korean dating scene than I do. So I really would appreciate feedback before moving on to Part 2.

Update: If you’ve read this far, then you’ll probably like this related recent post at Korea Beat too.

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