Sexuality and Korean Advertising, Part 1: International Influences?

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A provocative opening image perhaps, and not technically an advertisement but one of sixty pictures included with Lee Hyori’s latest CD too, but then not only is the fact that it can now be plastered all around the Korean internet with no repercussions significant in itself, for all her frequent plagiarism of Western singers her music is ultimately largely home-grown too. In short, not at all unlike Korea’s advertising industry today, and an image which I simply couldn’t resist posting.

Epiphany

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

(Vacillation, Verse IV, William Butler Yeats. See here for a discussion of it)

“Understanding is Happiness”

(Rama Revealed, 1993, Arthur C. Clarke)

An unusual literary turn for the blog, and I dare say that that’s the first poem of Yeat’s I’ve ever read too, but then it’s very rare that I have a personal epiphany comparable to that I’ve had in the last ten days or so, so it seemed appropriate.

In this case, the catalyst was a few slides from the otherwise unremarkable US National Organization for Women (NOW)’s flash presentation entitled Sex, Stereotypes and Beauty: The ABCs and Ds of Commercial Images of Women that I posted last week (and include again below), and this post will be about some quick conclusions about Korean advertising that I came to from those.

Part Two (“The World Cup Changed Everything”) is much more in depth, based primarily on Hyun-Mee Kim’s chapter “Feminization of the 2002 World Cup and Women’s Fandom” in Feminist Cultural Politics in Korea, edited by Jung-Hwa Oh (2005) that I was fortunate to be reading at about the same time. Although it was the former flash presentation that put me in the right frame of mind to appreciate it, suffice to say that that chapter was such a revelation that it’s had me doing little else but avidly (re)reading all my other books on gender and/or advertising ever since, some of which I first read over five years ago and was nonplussed with at the time, but which have only just now begun to make sense. Finally, Part Three (“Mix and Match Bloodlines”) will be about some of my own observations on the new acceptability of Korean male-Caucasian female relationships in Korean advertising.

(edit: as I explain in Part Two, now called “The Lead-up to the 2002 World Cup”, my research made me realize that i need to spend more time discussing changes in the 1990s, so that will be Part Three and “Mix and Match Bloodlines” will be Part Four)

Practicalities

Unfortunately, all that reading was at the expense of writing, which I only just began to realize a couple of days ago when I took a rare 5 minutes away from reading and occasionally eating, drinking, sleeping and teaching classes. That did get me writing, determined to write a masterpiece worthy of my epiphany…but it was only at about the 6000 word mark did I belatedly realize that perhaps, just maybe, I was going about this the wrong way.

So, it is with the greatest reluctance that I’ve split the original post up into three separate ones (edit: four), and have dispensed with doing more than the minimum of editing that that involves in favor of getting an actual post up instead. A week is I think the longest break between posts I’ve ever had, and I apologize for it.

Sorry also for putting off the second half of Part Two of my series on Gender and Militarism despite my promise. It is coming, but this epiphany being what it was, I really did have to sit down and focus on nothing else for a week to take full advantage of it. So much so that I haven’t even studied Korean for a week, despite my promising start with the last couple of posts.

And so with no further ado…

Sexist?

( Kwon Sang-woo [권상우]. Source )

Although unintended, I’ve just realized that this post features almost exclusively pictures of women while those of Parts Two and Three (edit: and Four ) will be mostly of men, which perhaps provides an opportune moment to discuss whether the latter balances the former somehow. In a comment to that post last week, Brian said that it did (although his one line shouldn’t be overanalysed) to which Gord Sellar responded on his own blog with:

A big alarm bell went off in my head when I read that, but not because I had a sudden revelation that ads objectify male bodies. Advertisements really do objectify female bodies in a much more in-your-face way, and more often, than they do male bodies.

And:

Of course, the parallel to objectification of women’s bodies in advertising might not be simply or straightforwardly the objectification of men’s bodies in advertising.

Readers may find notable UK Feminist Catherine Redfern’s thoughts on that interesting too. The following is in response to men who accused her of being hypocritical by not complaining about advertisements that objectified and/or humiliated men too:

I’m sick to the back teeth, sick and tired, of feminists being accused of sexism and hypocrisy unless we spend exactly half our time and resources pointing out every instance of how ‘patriarchy’ hurts men too’. Gay rights activists aren’t expected to spend half their time campaigning for heterosexuals. Anti-racism activists aren’t expected to spend ages campaigning on behalf of white people. Yet it is a different story with feminism, isn’t it? The most infuriating thing about this is that – as regular readers will know – I do think that feminism is important for men as well as women and I encourage both men and women to critique mainstream masculinity as well as femininity. But that doesn’t mean that I think that every single instance of feminist activism has to be prefaced with a disclaimer about how this also benefits men. Frankly, I’m getting a little bored of it. I believe it strongly, but there’s only so many times I am forced to repeat it before it gets a little wearing and I start to wonder why I have to keep doing it in the first place.

I personally disagree with much of what she says in that article as a whole, but she certainly has a point there.

International Influences

( Banned Dolce & Gabbana Advertisement. Image by LiveU4 )

On the one hand, NOW’s flash presentation is a good overall introduction to the subject of sexism in advertising, and the world (and especially Korea) would be a much better place for women if everybody watched it, but on the other it is also incredibly one-sided and naive. When I first wrote about it last week I was planning to discuss the issues I had with it in much more detail, but in hindsight that would lead to a wider discussion about sexism as a whole, not uninteresting – obviously – but a little out of place here, and potentially never-ending. Instead, for now I’m going to focus specifically on what I learned about Korean advertisements from it.

( Found via MsParkerinKorea )

First, consider the advertisements for men’s cologne in slide 37 out of 84. Sorry that the numbers are difficult to make out, but as it’s the only borderline NSFW one, with a warning on the slide preceding it, then you’ll certainly know once you reach it.

After seeing those, the first things that personally came to mind were these advertisements for the Cyon Bikini Phone:

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Technically pictures again sure, but you can see the original advertisements in the June 2008 edition of the Korean edition of Gentleman’s Quarterly here. I’m curious, has anybody seen them on the windows of phone stores? I have seen this next, less provocative one, but not those two specifically:

Certainly Korean advertisers are not stuck for choice for Western advertisements featuring women’s breasts, crotches and/or navels to get inspiration, and so there probably isn’t a direct link between those GQ advertisements and those for cologne. But the realization I made was that no matter how provocative and/or daring certain advertisements may be in a Korean context, generally speaking they are both well behind but also clearly heavily influenced by particularly the US advertising industry. So far, so obvious. But please bear with me for a moment and consider these next two slides, which I’ve included the text of to make them easier to find:

Through images like these, women come to think of themselves as always on display (29/84)

The male fantasy of multiple women is played out in many ads (49/84)

The former has an image of Caucasian women nonchalantly sitting around in their underwear, which instantly reminded me of two images in a post that Michael Hurt wrote over at the Scribblings of the Metropolitician nearly 3 years ago. Here they are, with Micheal’s commentary:

One thing that I also notice is that in underwear and other commercials that require people to be scantily-clad, only white people seem to be plastered up on walls in the near-buff. Now, it may be the sense that Korean folks – especially women – would be considered too reserved and above that sort of thing (what I call the “cult of Confucian domesticity”). Maybe that’s linked to the stereotyped expectation that white people always be running around all nasty and hanging out already, as is their “way.” Another possibility has to do with the reaction I hear from Korean people when I mention this, which is that white people just “look better” with less clothes, since Koreans have “short leg” syndrome and gams that look like “radishes.” The men are more “manly” and just look more “natural” with their shirts off. Hmm. The thoughts of the culturally colonialized? Perhaps I’m being too harsh? My hunch is that it’s all of the above. Take a look.

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I like this one as well for its similar level of ridiculousness, in that the folks sitting around in their skivvies could just as well be on the veranda of a bistro in the south of France. Eating strawberries in a bathtub in lingerie, with a towel wrapped around one’s head. Ah, those Westerners! So fancy free!

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As regular readers will know, I’ve argued and presented a great deal of evidence for Korean women having Caucasian ideals of beauty, and one piece of which is/was the large numbers of non-Korean models in Korean women’s magazines, sometimes exceeding more than 50% (see here for a statistical analysis, and here for my discussion of it). Since all of those were written however, it’s emerged that Korean female models do indeed have a disdain for lingerie modeling, and this reality of the Korean fashion industry may well explain the high numbers of Russian and Eastern European models much more than abstract notions of Caucasian beauty ideals do. Of course, I do still think that those ideals exist – there’s much more to it than simple numbers of foreign models – but I recognize that some aspects of my argument need rethinking in light of this new evidence. At the very least, because that statistical analysis doesn’t make a distinction between lingerie and other forms of advertisements, then I have no choice but to some day buy some women’s magazines and analyze them for myself. Hopefully spending some afternoons looking at pictures of attractive women in their bras and panties will make up for the strange looks the bookstore owners will give me.

More seriously, it was very perceptive of Michael to acknowledge other possibilities, and for all the debate about numbers of models of certain ethnicities, the image of Caucasians (or Caucasian Westerners to be precise) projected in those advertisements that he mentions remains enduring. Against that, one commentator to his post mentioned the Korean lingerie company Maru which he or she says uses Korean models a great deal, and I have indeed noticed Korean models in quick, furtive glances at their store windows, but still, go to their website today and advertisements like these are the only ones you’ll find:

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Those two pictures reminded me of the second slide mentioned that discusses male fantasies of multiple partners. But is this what Koreans really think Westerners get up to? Probably, at least if Korean portrayals of Westerners in the media are any guide.

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And rather than editing that to make it sound like more of a stand-alone post, Part Two will take up straight where this one leaves off. Apologies again for the delay.

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