On the Korean Language of Sex
Korean Women on Top
Anybody remember this ad with Go Hyeon-jeong (고현정) from last year? Apparently it caused quite a storm in a teacup at the time:
Blink and you’ll miss it (update: and it doesn’t seem to be even loading in Internet Explorer too!), so these screen captures below should help you get the gist of it. In order, the text in them reads:
- “Be picky”.
- “Embrace your desires”.
- “Be lazy”.
- “Think differently”.
- “Look at them [men] humorously”.
- “Don’t wait”.
- “Don’t even look up [at him]“.
- “Shout”.
- “Dios Women Cheer Project” (the name of the ad campaign).
- And finally “Women buying tomorrow. Dios”.
( Source )
To just about everybody reading this, I’d imagine that the ad appears completely innocuous, but it still managed to offend many netizens:
디오스 냉장고 광고, 역차별·된장녀 조장 2007/03/13
Dios Fridge Advertisement Encourages Women to Become Bean-paste Girls and to Discriminate Against Men
(For a definition of “Bean-paste Girl”, see here)
최근 TV를 통해 방영중인 LG 냉장고 ‘디오스 여자만세 프로젝트’ 광고가 네티즌들로부터 거센 비판을 받고 있다. 무엇보다 표현이 상식수준을 넘어 보기 민망할 정도로 지나치고 심지어 남녀 역차별을 조장하고 있다는 점을 들어 포털사이트 다음 아고라에서는 ‘디오스 여자만세 프로젝트’ 광고 중지를 요구하는 청원 서명까지 벌이고 있다.
Netizens have strongly criticized the “Dios Woman Cheer Project” advertisement that has recently been playing on Korean TV. On the Daum Agora discussion forum, they have complained that the things said in it defy common-sense standards of decency, even going so far as to promote discrimination against men, and so have set up an online petition calling for it to be taken off the air.
광고에는 ‘여자들이여 까다롭게 굴어라, 더 욕심 부려라, 게을러져라, 딴 생각해라, 우습게 보라, 기다리지 마라, 거들떠보지 마라, 큰소리 쳐라’ 등의 문구가 여성이 남성을 인형처럼 조정하는 자극적인 장면과 함께 등장한다.
In the advertisement, the voiceover and the text say: “Hey, women! Be picky! Embrace your desires! Be lazy! Think differently! Look at them (men) humorously! Don’t wait! Don’t even look up (at him)! Shout!”, and so forth. In one scene women are even encouraged to treat men like puppets.
서명을 주도하고 있는 네티즌 ‘꽃순이’는 “‘여성만세 프로젝트’라는 거창한 이름으로 좋지 않은 말들만 열거하고, 그 대상을 남자로 유도하고 있다”며 “방송에서 안볼 수 있게 해 달라”고 요청하고 나섰다. 또 다른 네티즌은 “만약 남녀 반대로 광고가 만들어졌다면, 사회적으로 큰 파장이 왔을 것”이라며 “남녀 역차별을 조장하고 있다”고 주장했다.
According to the netizen “Flower-Suni” that initiated the petition, “The grand-sounding ‘Woman Cheer Project’ advertisement merely lists and induces negative behavior towards men”, that “people don’t really want to see on their screens”, and demanded that it be taken off the air. Another netizen added that “if an advertisement portraying the same sentiments towards women had been made, then all sectors of society would have been quickly up in arms and insisted that “it promotes inequality”.
광고 내용이 눈에 거슬리기는 여성들도 마찬가지다. 여성이라고 밝힌 네티즌들 대부분 “저런 광고는 여성들에게도 달갑지 않다”, “괜히 여자 안티를 만드는 광고”, “광고가 무척 거슬렸다. 된장녀를 만드는 것인가”라고 비난했으며 “남녀평등이란 서로 만드는 것이다, 한쪽만 강조하는 평등은 또 다른 불평등을 가져온다” 고 지적했다.
By no means is it only men that feel that the contents of the ad were inappropriate. Of those female netizens who have made their gender public on discussion boards, most criticized it, saying things like “it is unacceptable to women just as much as men”; that “the advertisement will make people anti-women”; and that ”the advertisement is very offensive, and encourages women to be Bean-paste Girls”. Finally one netizen pointed out that “men and women have to become equal together, and if you overemphasize only one aspect of that then it will actually only lead to further inequality.” (Source)
( Image Credit: !ºjeon ji-hyun )
But considering that I found only two other news reports on the petition (here and here) from last year and which say virtually the same thing as this one, then I guess that the petition was unsuccessful. No great surprise after Korean women have been eagerly watching 6 years of Sex and the City, and so a rare positive news item I guess.
On “Sex” in Korea
I said that translations on the blog weren’t about learning Korean, but then the term “역차별” in the title (or “남녀 역차별” used in the text) proved very problematic, and figuring it out ultimately gave me some insights into the ways many Koreans may actually think about sexism and so forth, literally a foreign concept until relatively recently.
Now, “차별” without the “여” is of course “discrimination” and “남녀” is “men and women”, so the “차별” referred to must be “sexual discrimination”, but “역차별”? It wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, and my wife, whose English is pretty much as good as is possible for a Korean who hasn’t lived overseas, really struggled to understand it herself, let alone explain it to me.
It turns out that the word “discrimination” itself only really conjurs up images of sexual discrimination against women in Korean. Certainly much the same can be said of English speakers’ initial images too, but then we are definitely aware of the concepts of and regularly use terms like “racial discrimination”, ”age discrimination”, ”religious discrimination”, “positive discrimination” and so forth too.
“역차별” then, is literally “anti-discrimination”, but more accurately “opposite-sexual discrimination against women”. But what does that mean exactly? Anti-sexual discrimination? Equality? No. In this case as least, ultimately the opposite of sexual discrimination against women proved to be sexual discrimination against men.
( Image Credit: lavendamemory )
I may well be making too much of this, especially as I’ve only heard it from precisely one fluent Korean person so far (alebit an extremely intelligent one), but then recall, say, how problematic most readers found the ways in which Koreans used the word “foreigner” or “way-gook-in” (외국인) for all non-ethnic Koreans, even if they were living in and were citizens of foreign countires themselves. Or how “our country” or “oo-ri-nara” (우리나라) means “Korea”? On that latter, I fear that many discussions with Koreans about Korean history (despite my image, not what I usually talk about with friends, Korean or Western) may founder on us lacking a common understanding of really quite basic terms and concepts, much like what happened to discussions of socialism I had at university as a political studies student. It sounds a little elitist of me, but I soon learned to not to discuss it with people not doing the same major (let alone non-students), as ”my” socialism being different to “their” socialism meant we’d end up talking past each other. Which is not to say that my version was right (although it was), but I’m sure you get the point.
(By the way, for any fellow political-studies geeks out there interested in the problems of defining socialism, I recommend the first chapter of this classic)
Ergo, even simple words often belie fundamental differences in worldviews between Koreans and Westerners, especially if they are only recently adopted concepts incorporated into the language and Korean life. I’m finding this issue cropping up again and again as I study advertising, images of women, and popular culture as they all reacted to and reflected the Korean concept of “modernization” from the mid-1970s, one proving to be very different to that I’ve gained from my books on Korean development.
To illustrate this incompleteness, let me leave you with So-hee Lee’s experiences with these linguistic issues in the 1980s and 90s, from her opening to her chapter “The Concept of Female Sexuality in Korean Popular Culture” in Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, edited by Laurel Kendall (2002):
First, let me begin with my own experience of the term “sexuality.” I went to Britain for the first time in August 1986, as a British Council Study Fellow in the Faculty of English, Cambridge University. My topic was “Women Characters in Victorian Novels”. During the lectures and seminars, I was acutely embarassed by what I heard. Why was everyone talking about sexuality, masculinity, and femininity?…
In those days, Koreans did not have exact counterpart terms for “sex”, “sexuality”, “sexual intercourse”, and “gender”. I was very confused as I struggled to determine the appropriate meanings. In Korean, one very general term “seong” (성) could be used for these four concepts, its particular meaning dependent on the speaking and listening context….
It’s actually a little more complicated than that, “성” really being the chinese character that means “nature” and “life” as well as “sex”, but that probably adds to rather than detracts from her point.
….Korean society in the mid-1980s did not find it necessary to make sharp distinctions between these concepts. At the annual Korean Women’s Studies Association Conference in 1989, the issue of sex language was raised and discussed. More recently, the Korean countepart of the term “sexual intercourse” (성교) has gained wide usage, accompanied by the frquent use of the a Korean counterpart for the term “sexual violence” (성폭행)….Sexual violence has now become a recognized issue in need of a discourse.
Korean concepts of sexuality have changed profoundly since the Democratic Revolution of 1987….In 1995, the most popular topics among university students were sexuality, sexual identity, and other sexual subjects. There are many reasons for this….In Korea, there is still no broad popular social discourse on female sexuality outside of marriage.
On the basis of that last paragraph, would it be too much of a generalization to say that in Korea the understanding of the concept of sexual discrimination, despite a relative lack of practical successes in combating it, has advanced in leaps and bounds compared to that of racial discrimination?
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[...] Turnbull on the Grand Narrative provides several great insights into the Korean language of sex — or better, the complete lack of a language as recent as [...]
““역차별” then, is literally “anti-discrimination””
Ummm how about “reverse discrimination,” see also “역주행.”
I see no fundamental difference between this and English “sexual discrimination” meaning discrimination against women and “reverse sexual discrimination” meaning discrimination against men.
Aha! Yes, quite right. My electronic dictionary gives one meaning of “역” [逆] as “contrariness; the reverse; the inverse”, and the yahoo online dictionary is pretty clear on it too.
Please forgive my tired wife last night and my own sloppiness for not rechecking in the morning, and thanks for taking the time to correct me. Given what my wife said though, the jury’s still out on the Korean connotations of “차별” for me personally, but I’ll concede that you’re probably right. I’ll ask my wife what she makes of your comment in the morning.
Still, hopefully it doesn’t detract from the points So-he Lee makes, although perhaps it does make them more dated than I thought.
Ahhh…coffee…
My wife completely agrees with you, and is inordinantly embarassed over the mistake she made…at 12:30am after a long day looking after a 2 year-old while heavily pregnant! Like I said it’s more my fault for not rechecking in the morning and for basing a whole half a post on it, but hopefully including So-he Lee’s thoughts goes some way towards redeeming it.
What’s a “bean-paste girl” ???
“Bean paste girl” (된장녀) is a derisive term that Korean men use for independent, Westernized Korean women. It’s especially aimed at the women who frequent Starbucks and the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. I imagine any Korean woman who regularly watches “Sex and The City” would qualify as well. What beanpaste has to do with any of it escapes me (and my Korean girlfriend, who originally explained the concept to me).
Sorry about that. I did include a link to a definition, but the font used for the headline hid it. I’ve put it underneath instead.
I’m not so sure it means “Westernized” or “independent” though. More a woman who is into brands and status symbols and so forth (albeit mostly Western), but can’t really afford them.
Yeah, everything I thought in terms of, “Wouldn’t it just be “reverse sexual discrimination” was stated, though, interestingly, in Korean it gets clarified with 남녀. Just in case someone might think the reversal is discrimination against men being reversed? (It’s probably one of those early-on archaisms that drops out of language over time, like how words in English go from being separate, to hyphenated, to a single word.
But as for 된장녀 — ARGH! I hate that word, and when it first surfaced in my classes, I always made an effort to ask why I was only ever hearing a word that put down women for having a penchant for pricey coffee and fashions. Some people came back with, “Oh, not, there’s a word for men like that too — it was something like 간장남 or 쌈장남, I can’t remember. Anyway, when they said that, I would say, “Okay, but I’ve never heard anyone use it before except when I ask why there isn’t a word for me. But I hear 된장녀 ten times a day every day! Why is that?”
The inherent sexism wasn’t lost on everyone, of course: one student in a writing class (where this stuff wasn’t discussed) wrote a perceptive, if slightly garbled, essay on just that subject. But often women and men alike seemed to just take the word at face value: young women who are wasteful of money and think themselves deserving of a little luxury and maybe some conspicuous consumption. And by the way, as it was explained to me, it was less about “inability to afford” those tokens of Western sophistication, and more about the perceived wastefulness involved in procuring them.
(Which, of course, is laughable; if that were the real deciding factor, all those ajummas with five-million-won coats and Luis Vuitton bags and tremendous credit card debt would be called that, and they aren’t. You have to be a young woman, a fan of Sex and the City, a Starbucks fan, and in possession of some of those Western tokens, including accoutrements like fashion or pricey bags, in order to be one. And all of that seems to me to bespeak a much deeper anxiety: the ajummas may go out for coffee with friends, may buy expensive clothes and watch TV shows men would never like, but they depend on men for all that to be possible, they didn’t have the resources to actually become more competent than men professionally, and so on. That’s where I think the real threat is perceived to be, to be honest.)
And the other thing that makes me hate that word is that it almost always first entered discussions by popping out of the mouth of the least intelligent male in the room. (Not just worst English, mind you; the least intelligent guy, period.) At least, that was the pattern I observed for a full semester. There was something about that — the plaintive muttering of that word — that made me irate deep down inside, though I think I hid it well enough most of the time. One of the finest moments in one of my classes was when a very bright, overachieving young woman gave a guy hell for calling her that; she told him off in near-perfect English, he muttered impotently in pidgin English, and I just stood there watching with a little smile on my face before moving on to another group.
Ooops, went and checked with Lime, and the male equivalent is 고추장남 — pepper paste man, which makes sense, since 고추 is a euphemism for the male organ.
She also suspects that 된장 in 된장녀 comes from 젠장, a mild curse roughly equivalent to “damn” in English which is, by some, softened further by being substituted 된장. Kind of like how some older English-speaking women substitute “Sugar!” for “Shit!” or my father used to say, “Fuh-Cryin’ in a bloody bucket!” instead of “Fuck!” (Say it aloud, you can clearly hear the word “Fuck” in there, as long as you have British-enough accent.
So maybe “Those Damn Girls!” becomes “Those Beanpaste Girls!” Ugh. Which makes me hate that invidious little term even more.
Further murkification to come… but I’ll post about it at my own site, instead of clogging the comments here…
Me being lazy again: being into brands but not being able to afford them would of course mean many women! I too understood the term to mean the sort of woman who would spend a great deal of time and money in acquiring those brands, sometimes to the detriment of her accomodation, her diet and even her health.
Because of a combination of not teaching adults, various oddities at my workplace, Korean friends leaving Busan, and 1.66 kids and no money and so on then other than my wife I don’t get many conversations with adult Koreans these days, so I didn’t realise how commonly the term was used and who tended to be the people using it. Hence I understand and empathize with your hatred of the word.
Still, although I agree with the origins of the word being partially…naaah, probably fully…in reaction to a perceived threat from young, single, living the high-life and independent (of men) women, I can’t find myself thinking it appropriate to be used for high-spending ajumma too, or thinking there is too much significance in that it isn’t. But not that I’m saying that you’re wrong: not hearing it as often from thick, sexist men like you do then possibly I still overemphasize the living beyond your means rather than the sexism in the term. Hell, come to think of it I’ve never heard it, just read it… no wonder then!
I’ve got a big fat post coming on the (meta-)topic. Now I just need to get the time to translate some stuff for it.
Ironically, when 된장 is used for men (or when it used to be used for men), it had pretty much the opposite meaning — for a country bumpkin type. I seem to recall hearing the term (used for men) around 10 years ago or so, but now only hear 된장녀. The misogyny lurking in the word is almost tactile.
I didn’t know that, but did always think that bean paste was a pretty strange metaphor for someone seeking to be sophisticated. The country bumpkin type certainly made more sense.
If 된장남 simply meant country bumpkin (like the original meaning of the word “coon,” which for a long, long time was used described white country hicks — in coonskin caps — until it was used as the name of soon-to-be popular 19th-century blackface minstrel character, Zip Coon), it seems weird. But if 된장남 was used to describe hicks trying to pass themselves off as sophisticated, then it might make more sense. I suppose both meanings could be contained — they seem to have both applied in the term “coon” when it was first used to describe Zip Coon, as he was played as an ignorant country slave who’d come to the city and was trying to pass himself off as a “colored gentleman.” Dressed in finery, but talking like a coon, and ignorant, and quite countrified.
After all, 된장녀 also seems to imply some kind of counterfeited classiness. Maybe the 된장 partially lost the countryish implications — or those aren’t loudly proclaimed by those explaining the term — but retained an implication of counterfeit sophistication?
By the way, one more thing I’ll mention that Lime explained to me was that one reason young men have started using it is often to describe exactly the girls they would date if they could afford to. They don’t know brands, but they see a girl who does and think she’s a prize… but also resent her being likely to expect a boyfriend to support her spending habits. On the other hands, some young women have taken it ironically as a badge of pride in being willing to treat themselves. Lime and a professional female friend of hers sometimes agree to do “된장놀이” — “Soybean Paste Playing” sounds dumb, so let’s say, “Playing Soybean Paste Hooky” — which consists of having really good coffee even if it’s a little more expensive, and nice food together, etc. Basically, treating themselves in a way most [Korean] boys would not “understand” or think of doing, and doing so in the company of another woman.
Much more to say, but later…
All very logical. Not that I come across the term much myself in daily life like I said, but whether used for men or women, I personally find it difficult to remove the “country” from at least the origins of the term, so ingrained are the blocks of dried bean paste hanging up on ropes in my and probably most Koreans’ images of the Korean countryside.
I liked the “된장놀이” reference. It reminds of women getting manicures, something I could not simply not understand for years…so much money on something ostensibly for appearance’s sake, but which men couldn’t care less about…until a female friend explained it was mostly done (by women like her) to pamper themselves, and imagine, for a moment, that they could afford to get things like that down everyday.
I read the article ‘Korean Women on Top’. the translations from the Korean are somewhat literal and don’t convey the actual concept as we would use in English. ‘Be picky’ is better trsnalted as ‘Don’t settle for second best’. ‘Embrace your desires’ is better translated as ‘Followe your dreams / heart’. ‘Be lazy’ is probably better translated as ‘Take time to refresh’ or ‘Make time for yourself’ or similar thing. ‘Thinkdifferently’ is better tranlsated as ‘Be an individual’ or ‘Have your own opinions’ or ‘Be creative’. Don’t wait’ is better tranlsated as ‘Go for it’ or ‘Just do it’. ‘Shout’ is better translated as ‘Be heard’ or ‘Have a voice’ or ‘Speak up’.
Like I said your tranlstions are too literal you need to translate the concepts of the meanings that are trying to be conveyed.
I don’t mean to be too crass but I heard from my Korean male friends a few different explanations about the meaning / origins of 된장녀. I’ll try to keep it as clean as possible. I heard ages ago by a few different peole that it is a reference to girls who have money (or expensive things) and probably got the money from working as hostesses in singing rooms etc (it was quite common for university students to work in massage parlours etc or other forms of prostituiton for money). Anyway, I heard that the 된장 is suppossed to refer to the amount of semen in their vaginas from all the sex they had to get the money. There are other terms as well instead of bean paste such as ‘barley porridge’ 보리죽 etc ( I won’t list the other words I’ve heard – it’s easy to get the visual picture ). I heard they also refer to the girls from well-off families etc who are sexually liberated and sleep around (unlike the mythical pious Korean 30 year old female virgins).
I think those girls are the ones that think and act like they are a bit too good for eveyone and only want to date rich men or men with some sort of higher social status or foereign guys etc rather than the avergae Korean male. Most Korean men hate these type of Korean girls and refer to them as 된장녀 which from how I’ve seen the word used in context can have a variety of meanings depending on the situation – sometimes I’ve seen used as ‘whore’ ’slut’ ’snob’ ’stuck-up bitch’ ‘gold digger’ ‘rich bitch’ etc
It might depend on the age of the user as well as to the context – obviously a 16 year old high school student will use it in a different context to a 35 year old single middle class male trying to pick up in an expensive night club that he can’t really afford to be drinkiing in – but the rich girls from the rich families or with the rich boy friends can.
Sean,
thanks for taking the time to point out my mistakes with the translation; any help with my Korean is much appreciated. Still, I think “Be picky” and “Embrace your desires” are fine though, especially given the accompanying pictures, and while in hindsight my “Think differently” is perhaps not appropriate for the shot with the ice cream, I’m not sure that your alternatives are better either (it’s a strange choice of accompanying shot however it’s translated, yes?). I guess we can just agree to disagree about some of them!
Your point about the origins of the term 된장녀 is very convincing though. Not that Gord Sellar’s points aren’t still useful for understanding its origins and especially the ways in which its used today, but still, I didn’t really quite get the whole bean paste connection. Thanks to your explanation, now everything suddenly makes sense.
I worked for 4 years in Seoul for SK as an Engineer. My last 2 years were at SKT HQ, the new (ish) SKT Tower. I’ve been back in the UK for 2 years.
My experience of the meaning of 된장녀 as explained to me by my collegues and friends is:-
The girl is only, publicly, interested in expensive items, cheap = rubbish. Plain white t-shirt for 5000 won or plain white t-shirt for 50000 won, the 50000 won t-shirt must be better.
“Lets drink wine!”, for the team dinner, (and wipe out the whole team entertainment budget for the whole year). “I only drink wine”.
AND THEN
“I’ve got a problem. Can you come back to the office and help me? I’ll buy you dinner, JinChul comming in as well”. We end up in the cheapest samgyeopsal place in Jongno, drinking soju, she’s drinking it like it’s going out of fashion. She doesn’t pay of course, urgently called home by her Mother whilst in the toilet.
“I’ll drink Guinness!” everyone else is drinking draft OB at 2000 won. She will drink more in terms of money than the other 3 people at the table. Will she pay? I’ve never seen a girl pay in any group situation.
“Lets have spaggetti for team lunch!” You could probably feed the whole division for the cost. So we sit down and shovel the food in as fast as possible, just as usual. Spaggetti, its student food for gods sake! and lunch in a Korean office is a really functional meal – fill your stomach as quickly as possible and have some time to relax before 2pm.
I think the reason the men complain is because:-
1) We know the girl likes soju, Korean beer, makkoli, 된장jigge etc.. . She had to drink these kinds of alcohol with her high school friends and at University. (Sweeping generalization).
2) She tries to stand out from the group.
3) She tries to stand out from the group and it costs the men money – even if they are not intimate. If the guy says to his friends, “let’s go to a hof”, you know he is not thinking about spending a lot of money. This type of girl cranks up the price range beyond what you intended, possibly encouraging other girls to do the same when we know, roughly, what her salary is and that she has to give most of it to her Mother so we know that inspite of her protestations that she is only used to the finer things in life she is quite used to drinking the same as everyone else. She will meet her elementary school friends and have samgyeopsal and soju because they won’t let her get away with it.
4) Everyone likes to buy nice things from time to time but “hey, do you like my new LV bag? … BTW can you buy me lunch?” winds everyone up.
I was just rereading my post. It might seem that 된장jigge is a type of alcohol which of course it isn’t.
Frank,
I don’t know what to add to that sorry, having so little experience with the type myself, but thanks for taking the time to write all that. It certainly sounds like a very accurate description!
A very late reply to all of this . . .
I’m intrigued by all the variant explanations for the term 된장녀, since despite having heard the term over and over again since I returned to Korea last year. Prior to this, I’d only heard one explanation for the term, but from two different sources so I didn’t even realize that there were more floating around! To wit: 된장녀 refers to women who consume conspicuously (expensive coffee shops, brand name goods, etc.) and manage to afford them by skimping and saving on things like meals and items that are not part of visible, public consumption. The supposed “typical” lunch for these women is the cheap and hearty 된장찌개, hence the “된장녀” part of the equation.
boy, I need to learn not to write comments after bedtime . . . do please excuse the sloppy grammar.
Gomushin Girl,
don’t ever worry about being too late, and I’ll be darned if I can find a grammar mistake in your comment…
It is interesting how many different explanations there are for it, isn’t it? (Not unlike your 부대찌개!) But personally Sean’s still sounds the most convincing to me, as I can’t see why 된장찌개 in particular would be viewed as cheaper and heartier than any other Korean meal. If I had to guess one that women like you describe would choose to eat, then I’d probably plump for 김치찌개: a bachelor food because it’s easy, sure, but there’s also nothing cheaper for men or women than throwing virtually anything they have lying around into the pot.
But following that line of reasoning, “라면녀” might be even more appropriate though…
Having said all that, I’m sure the term means different things depending on who’s using it and what source is discussing it. Yours and not Sean’s would definitely be what is being referred to by most article writers in the media these days though, and this can’t but have come to have an effect on the ways it’s used in practice by Korean men, whatever its crass origins. Indeed, I’ve just argued precisely that in my most recent post here, and Gord Sellar said much the same on his own blog at the same time here.
Does “성/性” seriously mean “life” and “nature,” too? I’m just speaking from a knowledge of the character as it appears in Japanese, but aren’t you thinking of “生”? They’re pronounced the same in Korean as they are in Chinese and Japanese, as I understand it. “Nature” I can understand, at least in the English sense of “human nature” or such, but the “life” reading seems specious. I think of “性” as having the three meanings of “sex,” “gender,” and “character.” Unless of course it really does mean life in Korean, and I’m just a useless and loudmouthed Japanophone.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to say how much I like your blog. I’ve kind of devoured it over the past few hours, definitely to my betterment. I’m sort of freaked out by my new knowledge of Korean culture – I suppose it was silly to think I’d never find a society that could beat Japan for getting under my very Western skin – but it’s definitely been pleasant having some of my illusions shattered. I think you may have inspired me to take up my study of Korean from where I left off in 10th grade. Thanks!
Sarah, you’re quite right. While I am by no means an expert on Hanja, and actually just know the Korean sounds and meanings of them without knowing how to
drawwrite them, looking at p124 of this book (simply essential for learners of Korean, even for someone who already speaks and writes Japanese like yourself) it turns out that “성/性” is indeed described as “sex;nature (quality),” and all the “nature” references are to character or human nature, like 본성/original nature or real character, 성질/nature or disposition, 성미/disposition or temperament, 성격/personality or character, 개성/individuality…and so on.I’m a bit too busy to go back and reread the original post, but I hope that my too quick reading or misunderstanding of that didn’t affect it too much.
And thank you very much for the compliments. I’m intrigued by the phrase “…getting under my very Western skin” though, and confess that I’m at a loss as to if you mean that in a good or a bad way? Please explain! :)
Oh, no, it’s just the kind of minor issue that sticks out when you’re doing a close reading of something.
“Getting under my skin”… I guess it’s both bad and good. I learn about my prejudices by learning about other people’s prejudices. It’s just a very different culture, isn’t it? And it’s not even as modernized – or Westernized – as Japan. Actually, the tension between the ideas of modernization and westernization is probably at the heart of my conflicted affection for East Asian culture. As a feminist, and someone with a love for the very open and prototypically Western city of my birth, reading about so much sexism and bigotry in Korean culture is really disturbing to me, not least because I always assumed Korea wasn’t quite so… different. And I have to remind myself time and time again that different isn’t bad… except when it is, like about the Ok So-Ri thing or South Korea’s plummeting birth rates. I feel anxious, I guess, and also incredibly interested. But that’s the fun thing about looking outside one’s bubble, isn’t it?
Completely agreed on all points, and by coincidence Korea appearing to be modern on the surface but only having a “veneer of modernity” in a reality is a phrase I’ve been bandying about much recently. But I should also echo your point that different isn’t always bad; like Gord Sellar ably explains in passing here, expats and bloggers do tend to focus on the negatives but long-timers like myself wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think that the positives more than outweighed them. And although on balance, I will ultimately choose New Zealand for my children to grow up in, it doesn’t mean that Korean society isn’t superior to that of New Zealand in many respects (albeit not so much for kids though!).