Korean Women, Part 3 (final): A Caucasian Ideal?
( “Mask” by sam samant,a)
1. Introduction
Back in the second part of Part Two, I discuss the phenomenon of so many Korean women using whitening make-up, usually to excess and in situations where it is completely inappropriate, like on the treadmill at the gym. It’s easy to sound like I’m exaggerating when I describe how much it is used in Korea, but in fact Korean women’s desire for light skin is so strong that, by the time they reach menopause, they have serious vitamin D deficiencies (actually the worst in the world). Apparently, that’s what three decades of not being able to even cross a sunny street without covering your face does to women.
It sounds inconvenient and unhealthy and, based on what I discuss about the socio-biology of cosmetics in Part Two, anti-instinctive too. Clearly, there must be some strong cultural pressures towards and/or advantages to light skin for Korean women that outweigh these disadvanages. In the comments to that last post GordSellar and SkinnySteve argue that the primary explanation is the historical association of light skins with sedentary, indoor elites, and while I agree that that certainly plays a role, it can’t explain why the practice is so widespread across Northeast Asian countries in particular, nor why the vast majority of the ”ideal”, light-skinned Northeast Asian women in those countries’ medias have undergone such a plethora of cosmetic surgery operations also. I’ll respond to their comments in detail in the third section of this post.
( “Eye of Blue” by ~Dezz~)
Meanwhile, the most notable of those operations is “double-eyelid” surgery, which I variously hear that 60-80% of Korean women have received by their mid-20s, and both argue that the practice either predates contact with Westerners and/or is not reflective of a Korean desire to look Caucasian. Personally, I think it’s too much of a coincidence that the most sought after cosmetic surgery operation by Korean women is for a bodily feature found naturally in much greater numbers amongst Caucasians. By itself it could be coincidence, but combined with: the skin-whitening as explained; the decades of articles in Korean women’s magazines extorting readers to turn their “incorrect” and “flawed” Korean bodies into Caucasian ideal shapes and forms (which I’ll explain momentarily); and finally the numbers of Caucasians in Korean advertisements, (which I’ll cover in section four), then naturally I do think that the primary purpose of whitening make-up and cosmetic surgery by Korean women is indeed for the specific purpose of making them look more Caucasian. As least in 2008.
2. Sources
(Photo by Scoubi)
To be fair to Gord and Steve, so far I’ve never mentioned on the blog the fact that, say, Korean women’s magazines do explicitly say that the Korean body is flawed and Caucasian bodies the ideal. There’s very little on the subject in English, especially on Korea (in fact the 2006 article I discuss in the fourth section is the first of its kind), and unless you’re fluent in Korean and are an avid reader of women’s magazines yourself then the only real way of knowing this would be to read the journal articles that I have. I’m not saying that having read them makes me smarter than readers, or that the journal articles themselves aren’t open to interpretation, but…well, that’s what they say, and they do appear to fatally undermine arguments against the links I make between cosmetic surgery, skin-whitening, and a desire to look Caucasian.
Let me (belatedly) provide an example:
The article presents what it considers to be particular features of Korean women - short legs, big face, yellow skin - as problem features that can be corrected by certain types of clothing and colours: ‘For Korean women the best look is the formal tailored suit with padded shoulders. This square shaped suit helps make big faces look smaller and puts the entire body in order’ (italics added). [The author] implies 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 peculiar to Koreans and absent in white models.
That was from page 104 of the 2003 journal article “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society” by Taeyeon Kim (details and abstract here), which was the basis for these posts that I started last month. Since finishing those, I’ve read very similar descriptions of articles in Japanese, Taiwanese and Singaporean women’s magazines too, and because women in those countries also desire light skins and share “Eurasian” ideals of women’s bodies, then I think that basing, say, modern ideals of Japanese women’s skin colours and body forms the white-face painting of geisha is useful and necessary, in a parallel of what commentators said about Korea, but neither the Japanese or Korean hostorical specifics can explain why those ideals are so common to the region.
(Korean Jeon Ji-hyun (전지현). Photo by wongtai231, from this ad)
What does link the region then? Let me adapt the remainder of Taeyeon Kim’s paragraph above, by replacing “Korean” with “East Asian”:
All three elements, the Neo-Confucian woman’s subjectlessness, the perception of East Asian bodies as imperfect, and fashion’s function to re-order the disordered East Asian bodies, make East Asian women’s bodies particularly prone to alterations, rearrangements, and re-creations of the body.
In simple terms, these elements provided a base upon which individual countries’ own culture and histories of the use of cosmetics and so forth built upon. They were important, but I do seriously doubt that those East Asian populations with the means to afford cosmetic surgery operations would have done so quite so readily and in such large numbers without a shared philosophical framework that gave such leeway and encouragement for women to do so.
( “Asian or Caucasian?” by c0nn0r. Anybody know who she is?)
That’s the gist of what my theory, anyway, which I’m in the process of researching and fleshing-out, like I discuss here. But for the remainder of this post, first I’ll address points Gord and Steve raised in much more detail, and after that I’ll discuss the phenomenon of large numbers of Caucasians in Korean advertisements.
3. Response to Comments
Sorry in advance if my chopping and pasting and combining of comments maybe (inadvertently) misrepresents commentators’ arguments; I encourage readers to click on the links to their names and read their comments in full before moving on. Also, much of what I’m quoting below I’ve already responded to earlier (they’re the detritus of many rewrites of this post, sorry), so here I’ll try to concentrate on things I haven’t mentioned already.
Here goes then:
In Part Two, Steve said:
In regards to Korean women trying to whiten their skin in order to look more Caucasian, I used to agree, but as I’ve learned more about Korean history and culture, as well as seeing traditional dance performances, I’ve come to conclude that Korean women have been painting their faces ghostly white for a long, long, time because it makes them look more upper-class in the sense that they’re not out working the fields in the hot sun.
And Gord said:
I also would take issue with the idea that Korean women are (at least consciously) trying to look white. After all, as far as I can tell the double-eyelid obsession was in place BEFORE they met us folk, since some percentage of Koreans are born with it naturally (like my fiancée, for one). Paleness, again, would be a sign of domesticity, and thereby a sign of higher status. (And anyway, there’s lots of anecdotal evidence that even in very remote, non-Westernized societies, there are preferences for paler members of the group…my mom has observed it in many groups living in the bush in Malawi, for example.)
I readily agree that Koreans have historically associated lighter skin with stuck-indoors-all-day elites, and that it may well be a universal phenomenon; I first read of it myself while studying Medieval history when I was fourteen, and if you’re interested you can read a specific chronology here of how tanning in turn became a signifier of the leisured (Caucasian) classes, starting in the early 20th Century. But while it’s difficult to empirically quantify, things like Korean women’s vitamin D deficiencies do point to specifically Koreans (and East Asians) desiring lighter skins to a surprising degree, and I don’t think these historical associations are a sufficient explanation.
I’m very surprised to hear about Koreans being obsessed with double-eyelids before meeting Westerners, especially before modern cosmetic surgery allowed Koreans to get them for themselves (I’ll return to this point in a moment). I’d be the last person to doubt the veracity of anything Gord said, but I’d be very grateful if he or anyone else could point me in the direction of sources on that; after all, if all goes well, I’ll be presenting a paper on it in Fukuoka in September!
(Photo by bowtie614)
Steve continued:
Nowadays, though, I think that it may be playing a part (like, 30-40%), but I still don’t think attempting to look Caucasian is the motivation. I think a Korean woman might say “I buy face whitening cream to look more beautiful” but highly doubt she’d say, “I buy face whitening cream to look like a white woman.” You still don’t see that many Korean women with dyed blond hair walking around, after all.
Like Gord mentions earlier, I’ve never said that Korean women consciously want to look Caucasian (although I still think that some surely do). Arguing that they do reminds me of the British stand-up comedian Ben Elton making a joke about women thinking about making their faces resemble their aroused vaginas as they put on lipstick in the morning (God, considering he said that in 1985, no wonder he got the reputation that he did!); that they don’t doesn’t mean that it is not ultimately a factor in the origins of the cultural habit, just like I won’t think about the universal desire for humans to distinguish ourselves from other animals when I shave tomorrow morning, or that my tie is actually a phallic symbol when I get dressed after that. Well, actually I will now, in a pink elephants fashion, but you get the idea.
What do they consciously say are their motivations then? Well, Gord says:
I’d say Korean women, at least younger ones, are trying more to look like Hyori or Jeon Ji Hyun or some other icon of Korean femininity than, say, Julia Roberts.
As this old post of Robert Koehler’s demonstrates, that’s certainly true. Steve also says:
As far as the double-eyelid surgery is concerned though, I think if anything that trend has come about from Koreans’ own desire to conform. I read somewhere (actually, I think it was an MTV documentary by Soojin Pak, but I can’t remember the title) that a certain percentage of Asians naturally have the double eyelid, so it’s not as if the feature is alien to Korea/Asia. What they see, though, is all the rich and famous people in the world sporting the double eyelids, combined with the Koreans that already have it, and now the double eyelid is considered trendy and beautiful. Again, it doesn’t strike me as overtly trying to look like a Caucasian person. It seems like Koreans are fascinated with big eyes as well, a feature that tends to creep me out more than anything, and I suspect the double-eyelid surgery may haveus much to do with giving an appearance of having bigger eyes than anything else.
(Photo from PopSeoul!)
But I think the point that average Korean women are whitening their skins and undergoing cosmetic surgery because they want to look like rich and famous Korean women is, to be blunt, irrelevant: it merely changes the focus of our attention, but doesn’t answer the question of why rich and famous Korean women (rather than average Korean women) are doing so. And returning to the point about double-eyelids, I confess that when I first read Gord’s comment that Koreans were obsessed with them before Western contact, personally I doubted it very much. And were it to be true (and for sure, it might be), I still find it too much of a coincidence that that particular body feature, which Caucasians just so happen to naturally have in far greater numbers than East Asians, has become virtually a mandatory requirement for young Korean women.
(Update: Sorry, I just realised that I forgot to respond to Steve’s point about Koreans’ fascination with big eyes. But personally, I don’t think that that fascination is exlusively Korean or even East Asian for that matter. And while I’ll readily admit that big eyes are certainly, say, a prominent feature of manhwa (만화) or manga for instance, that is more to make especially female characters look more youthful rather than a fascination with big eyes per se )
Steve also says:
So, yes, it LOOKS like Korean women are trying to look Caucasian, but that doesn’t mean that’s the real motivation, and I haven’t seen any evidence to really suggest that Korean women are running around trying to meet a beauty standard intended for the whole purpose of appearing like the very Caucasians Korea is continuously trying to keep at arm’s length.
( “Swede Revenge” by cheese bikini)
That last point is very eloquent, and is a good, pithy way to round off a university paper or a newspaper article, let alone a comment in a humble blog. Unfortunately, it’s also completely wrong. It doesn’t take academic study of Korea and/or of Anti-Americanism in Korea and abroad to know that public displays of antipathy towards America and/or Caucasians and/or Foreigners usually go hand in hand with fascination, jealousy, and extensive trade and cultural links, and the stark differences in the way Caucasian and non-Caucasian foreigners in Korea are treated is evidence enough that Koreans don’t want to keep Caucasians “at arm’s length.” When non-Koreans are negatively-portrayed and scapegoated by the Korean media - and I’ll be the first to admit that that happens entirely too often - invariably it’s for domestic political purposes and/or to deflect attention from Korean society’s own flaws.
Finally, Gord says:
There’s no shortage of students who are happy to suggest that contemporary images of Korean femininity are *fueled* by Western icons of “beauty,” but I think it’s worth throwing in a grain of salt, since many of the same students who are talking about this now, were one semester ago regurgitating rather distorted versions of Edward Said’s Orientalism. *shrug*
For sure, and that’s something to bear in mind when reading the next section.
4. Images of Caucasians in Korean Women’s Magazines
(Photo by Mr Rock Man)
Because this post is already rather long, I’ll do little more then outline the conclusions Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon come to in their article ”Content Analysis of Diet Advertisements: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” (Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, October 2006), and readers can form their own opinions from those.
Because of a lack of prior research (pretty typical for Korean Studies) they write that null hypotheses were developed:
Hypothesis 1: There will be no difference in the percentage of diet advertisements in Korean and U.S. Women’s magazines.
Hypothesis 2: There will be no difference in the percentage of female model’s ethnicity in Korean and U.S. Women’s magazines.
The two Korean magazines they used were Women Sense/우먼센스 and Jubu Life/주부생활, and the two U.S. magazines were Red Book and Good Housekeeping. You can read details of the hypotheses and methods of the samples from pp. 351-353, and details of the results from pp. 353-359.
(Source)
Hypothesis 1 isn’t relevant to this post, but it is to Parts One and Two, and is still very interesting.
In a nutshell, Kim and Lennon found that the hypothesis was false, and the percentage of diet ads in Korean women’s magazines was significantly higher than the percentage in U.S. women’s magazines (11.8% to 3.5%), and also that they tended to promote passive dieting methods, reinforcing the idea that buying their advertised product will solve weight problems with no effort required on the part of the user. Unfortunately, most of those claims are completely false, but because diet products are technically considered supplements in Korea, they are not regulated by the strict guidelines used for pharmaceutical products. Even in the rare cases that companies are prosecuted by the Korean Consumer Protection Board, penalties are minimal and companies often merely close down, reopen under a new name, and go on selling the same product with a different name.
Shocked? Unfortunately asbsent or ineffective regulations are a fact of life here, as things like almost all Korean Vitamin C drinks containing carcinogenic benzene and 88% of Korean organic food is completely fake demonstrate. Not only is little done about this, but I recall that in that benzene case above the KFDA wasn’t allowed to mention the names of the three vitamin C drinks that didn’t have benzene…how ironic that Koreans have to turn to a Chinese news source to find out what they’re drinking.
In such circumstances, it’s no wonder that impressionable young girls take the messages of dieting product companies to heart: as Kim and Lennon report (p. 357), in 2002 half of Korean high school girls were anemic because of dieting-induced malnutrition, and were considered unqualified to give blood.
(Source)
Hypothesis 2 was also found to be false: U.S. magazines had larger percentages of White than non-White models (84.9% vs. 15.1%), whereas Korean magazines had much more equal percentages of White and non-White models (52.3% vs. 47.7%).
In Kim and Lennon’s words:
Instead of having predominantly non-White (Korean) female models in Korean magazines, White female models were as common as non-White models. The number of White models was actually greater than the number of non-White models. The presence of White female models in Korean women’s magazines to this extent suggests that the Western cultural ideal for women is ubiquitous and widely accepted among Korean women. Korean magazines seem to portray and promote Western feminine beauty as ideal and subsequently pressure Korean women to achieve the Western ideal. Subsequently, this indicates that the Western cultural beauty is not limited to Western countries anymore but has gone global. (p. 358)
Naturally I agree: it’s certainly telling that Korean women’s magazines have more Caucasians than Koreans in them. But it’s not unreasonable to argue that Kim and Lennon are making too much of a conceptual leap, without also considering the extent to which having Caucasian models in advertisements is a sign of wealth, class, and of a country having “made it.” Not coincidentally, the first time Caucasian models were even allowed in Korean advertisements was shortly before Korea was admitted to the OECD in 1996. As Taeyeon Kim (referenced earlier) explains:
A casual browser of Korean women’s magazines might observe that many of the models or settings in the advertisments are Euro-American or look Euro-American. This image has become ever more pervasive. In June 1994, changes in laws allowed the Korean advertising industry to use foreign models and celebrities, which quickly led to a sharp increase in the use of foreign models to sell domestic wares. No longer were only foreign products sold to Koreans with a foreign face, now even domestic products were marketed to Koreans by the likes of Cindy Crawford, Meg Ryan, and Claudia Schiffer. (p. 103)
(Photo by Mmmonica)
She still comes to much the same conclusions as Kim and Lennon though:
While there does seem to have been a gradual increase in recent years of Korean models in domestic advertisements, these Korean models nearly all have features that have already been reconstructed to meet the prevailing standards of beauty which, if not totally white, are at least a melding of Asian and Western features, the ideal encapsulated by the increasingly popular ‘Eurasian’ look. Many of the articles and beauty tips in these magazines function on the assumption that the Korean body is flawed while the white body is the standard norm.
I don’t read Korean women’s magazines, but I have noticed the virtual absence of Korean women in lingerie advertisements here (it’s difficult not to notice, given the number of ads on subways and cable TV here). Or to be more precise, the fact that Korean models in them will almost invariably be fully clothed (a very rare exception below), but Caucasian (usually Russian) models will more usually be wearing only the lingerie. Sometimes in the same infomercial you’ll have Russian models in their lingerie but the Korean models fully clothed, holding the lingerie in a hanger. Seeing those for the first time years ago, it was difficult not to conclude that they reflected some pretty warped notions of Korean feminine virtue and foreign lasciviousness.
(Photo by menacingPanda)
To be sure, many Koreans do indeed have some warped notions of Korean feminine virtue and foreign lasciviousness. But now I think I was mistaken, and realising that the Russian models are signifiers of “developed country status” makes their numbers and their sharp distinctions with Korean models in ads more explicable. So despite what the two journal articles I’ve quoted at length in this post say, the mere presence of Caucasians in Korean advertisements certainly does not necessarily mean that Koreans have embraced and aspire to Western ideals of feminine beauty. But having said that, I do find the overall weight of evidence compelling.
And on that note, because I sense I’m beginning to lose the thread of things at this late stage of a much too long post, I’ll put this subject to rest for now!
Update 3: Years ago, Robert Koehler mentioned the Korean model Jang Yun-ju (장윤주), one of the few Korean models “that nobody will ever accuse her of cutting up her face to look white”. In a less academic phase of the blog (hey, we’ve all been there), I linked to many pictures of her here.
Update 2: Great, just great. I type all that, and only then do I discover this post of Michael Hurt’s on the same topic.
Update 1: By coincidence, KoreaBeat has just posted a link to photos with the theme “Korean Girl Discovers the Joys of Whiteness”.
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Very interesting stuff. You’ve got me thinking, and I’d like to throw out an idea or two.
What about consumerism? Once you’ve established even the faintest hint that a certain look is more attractive, it becomes a race (no pun intended) not to be the last one to have that look.
I have yet to travel to Korea, and frankly know very little about it (that’s why I’m here), but one thing I keep thinking about is just how fast Koreans have advanced into western modernity and have enthusiastically adopted all the habits of consumerism. In addition to the issues deriving from neo-Confucian selfless womanhood, I’m going to have to add that consumerism itself encourages a diminishing of the value of the self in favor of the value of objects that exist outside the self.
What has happened, therefore, is that according to consumerist ideology, the body now exists outside the self. I notice that there is little discussion here of Korean woman “acting” more “white”. They are not trying to talk the talk or walk the walk, as it were. They’ll probably never even attempt that. Because those kinds of substantive, personal changes actually require a reconnection with the true self. Buying a look however only requires money and a body to carve up or adorn. The consciousness remains entirely absent from the equation. In many ways, isn’t undergoing plastic surgery the truest and most pure (I mean this to sound perverse) form of consumerism a person can undertake? Is it not the apex of the pyramid of self-abandon in favor of external happiness?
Sorry, I guess I should state my hypothesis…
Maybe, for a large number of Korean women undergoing plastic surgery, the choice isn’t so much about looking more white as it is about being a consumer or not being a consumer.
Perhaps that’s the bandwagon their more worried about not being on…
“That last point is very eloquent, and is a good, pithy way to round off a university paper or a newspaper article, let alone a comment in a humble blog. Unfortunately, it’s also completely wrong.”
LOL, awesome. You’re right. I didn’t really think that through enough and used it as much for it’s artistic flair when it came to me. I’m sure there’s a logical fallacy at work somewhere in the way I constructed it as well.
“Arguing that they do reminds me of the British stand-up comedian Ben Elton making a joke about women thinking about making their faces resemble their aroused vaginas as they put on lipstick in the morning.”
Also an excellent point. As was the discussion you led into from there, which I basically agree with now that you’ve put it *that* way. I tend to think Korean culture has simultaneous love/fear relationship with all things foreign and, given their history, I think it’s understandable and I don’t necessarily consider it a fault. More like a defense mechanism. Framing the argument in this way, I would 100% agree that part of Korean culture that has a fascination is probably a major factor, moreso than the degree to which I originally suggested.
I personally think the simultaneous resentment and reverence of all things foreign reflects an endemic self-esteem problem about Korea’s role in the world. I could go ten different directions and probably write a 2,000 word essay myself from there, but it’s already 12:30am and I’ve got to get some sleep. I will add this: I don’t think there is anything uniquely Korean about the propensity to approach all things foreign… [what's the word I'm looking for? dichotomously? The word I'm thinking of means something like holding two opposing viewpoints in mind at the same time, which Richard Nisbett says Asians are much more comfortable with that westerners are to begin with. Hmmm... No, that's not really it. Schizophrenic sounds too negative.... oh well. I hate it when this happens. MOVING ON]
I realize that you never said this WAS uniquely Korean. I just personally find it interesting how so many cultural things can be traced back to basic human psychology that plays itself out in different ways in different settings. I haven’t taken the time to think this out, but it seems like it would be interesting to examine the acceptance/rejection of things foreign by Korean society through the lens of object relations theory. Once I dig out an old psychology textbook and make sure I remember what O-R theory means, I may or may not be able to back up that assertion.
And, finally:
“…almost all Korean Vitamin C drinks containing carcinogenic benzene…”
Holy S#$%@!$#%!$ What? How did that one get by me? Did anything happen with that? Is that situation ongoing?
Though I didn’t really think through my comments as much as I would have had I known they’d be deconstructed so thoroughly, I’m taking it as a major compliment that they were used in this latest post and am supremely satisfied in simply having had a small part in a thoughtful, not-too-contentious, intellectual debate again. It’s a nice break from the pathetically boring curriculum writing that I do all day, every day at my job.
My primary objection was just in the oversimplification about Korean women trying to look white that I’ve heard in various forms for years. Maybe it’s just a personal distaste for oversimplifications. For example, I was against the Iraq War from the very beginning, but I still bristle if I hear someone say something like “The US just wants Iraq’s oil.”
Okay, I’m signing out. Oh wait, did you see this?:
http://seoulsteves.com/2008/04/23/elyse-sewell-joins-the-korea-blogosphere/
Just ever-so-slightly relevant to the topic at hand.
You do make a good argument, James.
As for whether I can demonstrate when the Korean fascination with large eyes came in, I’m not sure I can cite a source, or whether I got it from one or through half-baked logical reasoning (of my own or someone else’s?), based on the fact that some Koreans do have a naturally-occurring so-called “double eyelid.” (My fiancée, for one, ironically, since it’s so idolized and I have no opinion either way on “eye size”. Then again, people sometimes says she “doesn’t look Korean,” or suspect her of having had a nose job, too, things she’s never even considered.) It makes sense that rarer things are valued more, but it doesn’t make sense that that thing was valued only because of its rarity. Perhaps I picked up the idea in conversations, or in some old text where a woman was said to have large, pretty eyes or something. I can’t really remember.
Another think worth noting is that a lot of Korean women I’ve known, when confronted with a real-life Western woman, have been revolted. Western women who don’t look like how Western women look in fashion magazines, that is — imperfect hair, pear-shaped bodies, less-than-pronounced ankles — elicit quite the (often politely muted) reaction, and praise to the gods above and devils below that they don’t look like that.
But that doesn’t really speak to your argument, as much as clarify that Korean women are trying to look like the “distillation of beauty” among Korean women; that this has been modified, remixed with a tincture of Westernized ideas of beauty, is quite (strongly) possible. (With the caveat that most Western women also don’t achieve the Western ideals of beauty, but many more have given up on, or rejected, those ideals. A host of factors, including Neo-Confucianism undoubtedly, seem to make it harder for Korean women to reject those ideals in the same way. Or maybe just that feminism has made less progress?)
For what it’s worth, Lime thinks it is foreign influence, just because double-eyelids are so rarely occurring naturally. I was thinking about where I’d look to disconfirm this idea of mine, and my thought is fashion images from the days before such surgery was possible, though this, again, could betray a Western influence. That requires us to look further back, but since photography, let alone idolizing photography, only goes back so far, and since representational painting offers some potential problems — stylization, as well as perhaps issues of who got painted and why — I’d guess the place to go look would be texts. To which I have limited access, unfortunately.
In my cursory search just now, I only found one Yi Teongmu’s Small Manners of Scholars (1775), as cited in (editors) Ch’oe, Lee, and De Bary’s Sources of Korean Tradition Volume 2: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries:
Nothing about eye size, per se, but definitely a Confucian emphasis on women’s appearance, as well as the boundaries for acceptability. It reminded me of certain edicts in the Taiping Tiengguo (75 years later, in Southern China) by Hong Xuquan that women did not need to be ostentatious in their dress, or lovely of face, for God did not mind an unpretty face, but that cleanliness and neat dress were imperative. (Among his harems.) I could find the source of that for you, if you like, though it’s pretty far off. (I have a bunch more resources on the Taipings than on old Korean lit, for fiction-research reasons.)
Anyway, I think if you want to demonstrate change in beauty standards, you’ll probably need to dig into old “media” the way you’re digging into the new stuff. Especially with the mention of “make-up” in that 1775 source — which I’d wager (though I’m not sure) is white-face makeup to lighten the skin. I’ve heard older people say the ideals of beauty have changed. A judicious survey of older advertisements would be one way to go. Old films can get you to the Japanese Colonial era, right? Prior to that, I’m guessing textual sources would be the easiest way to go.
Figure this article might be of interest, if you haven’t seen it already. (Maybe you’ve seen and mentioned it already. The abstract makes me cringe a little, but then, lots of things do.)
Oh, and maybe some of this? (No idea how reliable, but…)
And I found this interesting, if only for the link provided to the Coreana Cosmetics museum. (Click INFORMATION and you’ll see the map and rates.)
that picture is of gemma ward, and she’s australian
Question: have you considered the role multinational corporations/advertising campaigns play in the construction of the beauty ideal? My friend traveled to India, where women traditionally don’t, and see no need to, shave their legs, and there was an ad before a movie from an American cosmetics company that was attempting to create a feeling of shame for women who have hairy legs, in order to create a market for their line of ladies shaving products — it is more efficient and cost-effective if multinational advertisers create a global standard of beauty — it saves the expense of tailoring ad campaigns for each different culture. Of course, if multinational companies like Elizabeth Arden and Chanel have one image of beauty, local companies will follow, won’t they?
Multinationals appeared relatively late on the scene compared to the pale-skin and double-eyelid obsession, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that they’re probably exacerbating the situation.
Just thought I’d throw that into the mix.
Also… beneze? FUCK! And how nice of them to protect the company instead of the consumer. This is the government, right? Who works for the… oh, yes, the nation, not the people. Korporation uber alles. Too bad the media is too gutless and lazy to go find the information themselves.
A bit late to the punch on this one … Further to what the first commenter said, I agree consumerism and the general desire to keep up with the joneses plays a big part. My wife had the double eyelid procedure and a nose job after she finished school. She dreaded getting the work done, saw no need for it, and begged her (otherwise lovely) mum to call it off, but to no avail. I suspect at least part of the motivation is to show that you have the wealth to get it done, and done well, not badly.
I’m better now, but…Erk, where to begin? Seeing as everyone seems to be responding to the post rather than each other’s comments (naturally) I’ll get started on my replies one by one I guess. I’ll add to this comment over the course of today and tomorrow (lot’s to do after 4 days of wishing I was dead was the only thing keeping you alive!), so if people don’t see their names up here yet, they will be soon enough!
Kevin, and Palapo, have either of you read my series entitled “Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society” here, here and here? Your points are quite valid, but I mention similar things there, and you may be interested in commenting and carrying on the discussion in those posts.
My fault. Over the weekend I’m very belatedly going to try and rearrange my sidebar so that posts like those become much easier to find.
SkinnySteve, thanks for being so gracious, seeing as I do criticise much of what you wrote pretty harshly! If it helps, I tend to write atrocious, cringe-worthy comments on other people’s blogs myself (I can give you many examples!), and I really should restrain myself and write them in MS Word or something before pasting them. Yours, in contrast, brought up several reasonable (and readable!) points, which is why I spent so much time on it.
I’ve always felt that bloggers tend to have an unfair advantage in discussions, seeing as we can type and edit long comments to our heart’s content, but once a commentator’s comment is up, then it’s up, warts and all. If and when I move to self-hosted server, I’ll be sure to get a comments program like Dramabeans has (in my blogroll), which gives people 15 mins to edit their comments before they’re “set”.
Gord seems to figured out all the codes and things to get italics and indents and so forth though, so I should really learn to do the same.
Thanks for the link, I’ll be sure to check it out once I’m through all these
damnmuch appreciated comments and emails.Gord, thank you very much for all the links, you’ve given me quite a bit to munch over as I get through my abstract for the conference this weekend.
I especially liked what you said here:
It reminds me of a what a female friend said of her first few weeks in England, there for a year to study English (and pick up an adorable English accent). Before she went, because of movies she thought all Westeners were buff and attractive, so the reality on the streets of Brighton was quite a shock to her…
Sureyya, thanks, and oops! But in my defense the photographer too didn’t know whether she was Asian or Caucasian, and she for a Caucasian she does seem to look remarkably like the “Eurasians” I describe.
Roboseyo, thanks, I haven’t considered the role of corporations and advertising campaigns yet, although obviously it’s to their advantage to get women to associate new looks obtained by using their product with cleanliness and sophistication and so forth. But I think that the huge domestic industry here also promotes Caucasian ideals demonstrates that other factors have more of a role, seeing as it is just as plausible that the domestic industry could have promoted traditional looks and presented non-Korean companies and their beuty ideals as unpatriotic. That sounds simplistic, but as I explained in those links I gave to Kevin and Palapo, most Koreans are highly nationalistic in their consumption choices.
Gord again, yes it was. I’m also curious at what exactly the KFDA thought it would acheive by saying that 30 companies’ drinks were carcinogenic, but not saying which ones. But I was only reading the English language media at the time, and there may well have been plently of information about them made available by Korean netizens.
I know a lot of Koreans, I’ve heard some people getting the double eyelid surgery but never heard about people whitening their skin? I know a lot that go to the tanning bed however!
Gord said:
“… After all, as far as I can tell the double-eyelid obsession was in place BEFORE they met us folk, since some percentage of Koreans are born with it naturally (like my fiancée, for one). ”
JT said:
‘ I’d be the last person to doubt the veracity of anything Gord said…’
Well, I generally trust Gord’s word in both integrity and judgement. If his fiance is Korean, however, I for one doubt the veracity of her word, and so if his/ your line of reasoning is based on her word, I’d say the judgement of taking her word for a sound precept is pretty darn risky.
This both is and is not a cultural judgement. I love Korea and have been here and am enjoying being here still after several years. I am, however, still trying to adjust to the concept that lying is openly accepted as being a cultural norm. Of course lying happens in our original home countries too, but it’s not accepted as being a normal part of an everyday conversation.
I was chatting with a student after class a couple of weeks ago, and otherwise wouldn’t have noticed her sweatshirt, which had a nicely stylised silhouete of that comedian guy from the TV show House, with the words underneath: Everybody lies. Perhaps this is true enough, but the cultural context where such is acceptable or not is vastly different. If we’re looking at the influence of western movie stars for example, they actually tend to be fairly open about when they’ve had cosmetic surgery or not.
Last weekend a friend and I dropped by the local bar where more than 50% of patrons are typically foreigners. The nice waitress there, with a nose the size of tic-tac, was chatting with a foreign woman about cosmetic surgery in a fairly open conversation, so we weren’t really evedropping when the foreigner asked the waitress if she’d had a nose job. With barely an eye batting the waitress simply stated she hadn’t. The other guy and I just rolled our eyes and walked out.
I had a coffee date with a nice young Korean woman once. She was pretty smart: had passed the teacher’s exam first try, but was struggling through settling into teaching and life working full-time while still being a pampered over-protected/sheltered younger daughter. (She wasn’t that smart, as she assumed that I would be impressed by her self-confessed proclamation of being a princess.) She knew enough to be honest as often as she could though. She admitted that she would not tell the truth even if she had had cosmetic surgery.
I won’t bore you with any more anecdotal life stories (not even the ones about my ex-near-fiance). I will, however, say: please keep examining the precepts, presumptions and foundations involved in all your arguments, especially if they pertain to anything stated by Koreans and cosmetic surgery.
The other thing I would like to see examined more closely, though you’ve already started, is the influence (lies…?) of marketing of cosmetics and the spread of its influence.
I was watching late night TV a few years ago (back when I was staying over somewhere that had a TV - it wasn’t actually mine to drop off the balcony as I’d rather do with it) and there was an older Korean drama from about the 1970s, set probably around the start of the last century or soon thereafter. It was about a farmer or country guy and his wife, and how he went to town one day to sell stuff at the market and was impressed by a salesman with a crowd of people listening as he convinced them that a white powder (probably just baking powder) would make women more attractive, so the guys spends his hard-earned money on this tin of powder and takes it home.. and drama unfolds which I don’t remember so well. There’s a fire, at least one person dies, and this tin of powder is left somewhere. My Korean is still basic so I didn’t grasp it all, but it was obviously including a comment on the origins of spending money to attain some concept of ‘beauty’.
Which leads to a final comment:
just as the cosmetic surgeons, product company owners and marketing industry tend to be dominated by males, all the comments here would appear to be by men, too.
Julian, you have some good points, but for someone who claims to love Korea you come across as extremely cynical. And implying that all Koreans routinely lie to each other and especially their non-Korean spouses, partners and/or friends is pretty dammed offensive. Not just to Koreans, but also to people like Gord or myself, who apparently were too stupid to notice and/or didn’t care that our Korean partners lie to us so often.
Sure, while lying in general is viewed differently and is much more acceptable in Korea, seeing as more Koreans than Westerners think that saving face and/or avoiding confrontation is more important, it doesn’t mean that all Koreans lie, all the time. There are indeed some Koreans that do a great deal, especially for the sake of defending Korea against all criticisms from non-Koreans, but very few of us become so much as friends with such people, let alone marry them.
I’m not sure what your point about men is either. I presume, seeing as you are a man, that you’re not saying that the discussion is somehow diminished by us being men. But the lack of female commentators so far would be a reflection of the greater numbers of men than women being interested in Korea more than anything else.
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