How Korean Girls Learn to be Insecure About Their Bodies

( Found via Mongdori )

Seriously, it’s great that the makers of this video are trying to encourage children to eat foods with fermented bean paste (된장) rather than candy, but do 8 year-olds really need to be told (0:49) that it’s good for their “S-lines” and “V-lines” too?

For those few of you that don’t know what either are, this next commercial in particular makes the former pretty clear:

( Source. The text reads “The S-line you want to have” )

( For a wide screen version, click here )

Anybody wanting to know more about Go Ara (고아라) in the commercial, you can read my biography of her here. As her face in these photos from the commercial make clear, she was much actually younger (sixteen) than she looked in the video.

Meanwhile, complaining about mention of the term in a children’s cartoon doesn’t mean that I’ll pretend that I don’t find women with S-lines figures attractive myself, or that there isn’t an inherent physiological reason for me to instinctively do so either. But many people may be surprised to know that the term itself has been around since at least the 1950s, and it possibly goes back even further still:

The bustle, a fixture of women’s fashion for about twenty years in the latter half of the nineteenth century, added to the general broadness of the hips and to the imagery of reproductive bounty. Bustles worn in conjunction with corsets effected the posture known as the “Grecian bend,” or the “S-curve.” With the buttocks pushed up and back, and the back driven forward, the bend approximated the posture of a female animal and heat, anticipating rear penetration by the male. In the midst of restrictive purity, the implication was of a continual sexual readiness.

(p. 99, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of the American Consciousness, Stuart Ewen & Elizabeth Ewen, 1992).

Having read that, then however arousing, suddenly Go-Ara’s figurehead-like pose in the screenshot above looks very uncomfortable.

(Update: As does this pose of Jeon Hye-bin’s (전혜빈) look too. Minor Korean stars by no means have a monopoly on stupidity, but I can’t imagine too many non-Korean women will be walking around in that particular pose anytime soon)

( Source: PopSeoul! )

In contrast, I find the concept of the V-line very unnatural, here demonstrated rather languidly by BoA (보아). I’m sure that were I to pose the question of its origins to advertisers then they’d mention some historical basis for it, but even if so, why reinvent it other than for the sake of creating a new market of the supposedly unattractive women that lack it?

Lest that commercial foster the idea that what exactly constitutes a V-line is open to interpretation, Kim Tae-hee (김태희) helps remind us that there is really only one definitive standard for Korean beauty:

Not by coincidence, I noticed these “face rollers” starting to appear all over Korea not long after I first heard of V-lines. I’ve read that they are also commonly used for many years in Japan and Taiwan too, and so Korean women may well have been using for a long time before they started worrying about their V-lines specifically. But then they weren’t popular enough for me to have noticed them at all until last year, and certainly sellers of them have been making explicit references to V-lines ever since the concept first appeared:

( Source )

(No, I’m not entirely certain why an ad explicitly for women opens with some not particularly flattering shots of men either. That’s singer Lee Seung-gi (이승기) on the left and comedian Kang Ho-dong (강호동) on the right)

Finally, in addition to S-lines and V-lines, PopSeoul! also mentions “U-lines” and men’s “M-lines”, but these are much less well-used. Sometimes efforts by advertisers to develop new ways for consumers to be dissatisfied with their bodies aren’t always successful then, even when Korean consumers (and women in particular) have acknowledged themselves that they are more conformist than most.

But regardless of that positive note above, all of my quibbles with the various terms, or that children in other countries don’t also learn (through various implicit and explicit means) what their bodies “should” look like as they develop, did those concepts have to be promoted so damn blatantly, to children so young?

Given that, is it any wonder that the first time I ever saw a face roller was not in the hands of a woman, but one of my 13 year-old students instead?

Naturally, I don’t think that 13 year-olds using them are “just cute”, but in an environment where Korean teachers are completely free to berate their students for being too “fat” (and regularly do), then I don’t anticipate things changing anytime soon. Certainly many other, more important things need reforming in Korean education, most notably corporal punishment needing to be abolished, but just on the basis of what negative images of their bodies girls may learn there alone my daughter(s) will not be attending any Korean school for very long.

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