Sexuality and Korean Advertising: En Passant
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Despite Korea’s much-vaunted broadband penetration and web-savvy citizens, much about the Korean internet is outdated, and for the non-Korean often effectively unusable, requiring Korean spouses and/or friends for often the most basic of purchases and/or reservations online. Personally, I have the additional problem of an increasing number of Korean portal sites preventing visitors from saving images, which naturally makes blogging about Korean men and women’s body images, advertising and the media and so forth sometimes a very time-consuming and frustrating process.
Undoubtedly that technical feature is hardly unique to Korean sites, and having entire posts on this blog regularly plagiarized myself then I do understand and appreciate the copyright issues that underline it. Moreover, while portal sites like Naver don’t allow saves, they do allow members to distribute and use images internally for their own blogs and forums. But that is of little use to non-members like most of my readers though, and on top of that even Korean companies themselves are (strangely) offering fewer and fewer of their own advertisements on their own websites these days. Either in response or by deliberate design, there is now a plethora of Korean sites offering the material instead, albeit for monthly fees ranging from 12,500 to 40,000+ won.
Hence it’s increasingly rare to come across freely available high-definition images of Korean advertisements these days, so finding them in passing during my research for other things this evening, I thought I’d quickly share these ones for the drink Jachungbi (자청비) with Kim Ah-jung (김아중). You’ll quickly notice that her hands are resting in her pelvic region in them, a common motif in advertisements as they tend to point to what’s on our minds, and such poses are particularly noteworthy in the specific context of a Korean alcohol advertisement as I’ll explain. Meanwhile, they also happen to produce an eye-catching, rather photogenic addition to the blog too.
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The primary reason for my (renewed) interest in them is that, since I last wrote about the increasing sexualization of alcohol advertising in recent years in Korea, soju companies in particular seem to have lost all inhibitions in recent months, with models’ breasts literally almost spilling out of their tops in posters as they lean forward almost 90 degrees to grasp the phallic stem of a soju bottle, mouths pointedly agape. It was pictures and commentary on those that I was looking for originally.
While this development was predictable, especially given the, hell, banality and ubiquity of the commodification of the female body here, the speed was still surprising, even for someone like me that often stresses how quickly Korean society is changing. Indeed, regardless of how absurd I now often find soju advertisements personally, sociologically speaking they’re one hell of a transformation from the previous hyper-virginal norm just a year ago, the posters of which still hang up – somewhat incongruously - alongside those new varieties.
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But as for how and why, that will have to wait (some time) for Part Five of this series I’m afraid. Meanwhile, in the above version of the juchungbi advertisement, a drink with slightly different, overall still much more conservative advertising norms compared to soju, I argued back in March that Kim Ah-Jung had a sexually assertive “cowgirl” stance – which would have been a rare positive step for women, given the meek, passive and virginal social norms that Korean women still have to live up to. A commenter on that post disagreed with my interpretation however, quite convincingly arguing that all signs pointed to her wanting to be literally being swept of her feet by the male gazer instead.
While the first new advertisement in this post is somewhat ambiguous in further clarifying that, this last one leaves no room for doubt:
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But recall from those earlier posts that this drink is in fact deliberately marketed to women, not men. Again, sexually suggestive poses literally arouse the interest of both sexes…but then as discussed, clearly the image discussed in that earlier post is designed for a male gaze, as is this one too.
Unlike many advertisements for women that feature a great deal of skin, I don’t think that the argument that men desire the model and women desire to be like the model can apply here. Is this therefore a case where advertisers have unconciously internalized male sexual norms, so much so that an advertisement ostensibly aimed at women becomes one in fact almost exclusively appealing to men?
Points to ponder while I get through my huge backlog of promised posts.
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Have you tried using Mozilla Firefox to view Naver? I’ve found you can grab pictures when you use Tool>Page Info and then click on the Media tab. Scroll through the items listed there and Save As .jpg, .gif, .png, etc.
Hello again,
I’ve been in Seoul for over three months now, and have been following your blog…
I find this quote odd:
“Is this then a case where advertisers have indeed unconciously internalized male sexual norms, so much so that an advertisement ostensibly aimed at women becomes one almost exclusively appealing to men?”
Are you somehow implying that advertisers are men and women who are completely cognizant of both their own and their culture’s prevailing attitudes towards sex and sexuality, and that the advertising process takes place within a mental framework that calculates reception based on this total awareness?
I would suggest that in all likelihood, yes, there are probably some advertisers out there who understand psychology, culture, and marketing well enough to make decisions in such a state of near perfect perception. However, I would guess that most advertising companies are engaged in a “following” game wherein the aim is simply to copy a proven style/design strategy.
What you really need to find out is whether or not the poses that end up on the posters are just coincidentally the shots that came out best from the photoshoot, or whether they shot the model specifically to get the cowgirl pose, or the bending over pose, or the hands at the waist pose. The question is how early in the design process was the decision made (if it was even a decision at all) to photograph the model in that specific pose, and the reasoning behind that decision.
Any experienced model can rattle off several dozen standard sexy poses…perhaps the shot that we see as the end result in an advertisement is simply the one in which the lighting looked the best or the one on which several people standing over a table of multiple shots were able to find consensus.
In other words, what I find missing from your analysis (and you said you wanted to get more academic) is a discussion of the business of advertising, commercial photography, and modeling.
I take a little bit of offense at the suggestion (not in this post) that sexy advertisements with a specific kind of “assertive” pose represent a positive step. A positive step for whom? Again, were you implying that this was an accidental positive step, or one intended by the advertisers? If it was intended by the advertisers, why be so veiled about it? And just to be clear, was exactly is your definition of a positive step in popular advertising?
(Update by James, 10:53: I discuss that in my reply below, but in hindsight the question of whom was indeed a little ambiguous, so I’ve edited the original text. Sorry about that)
Sorry to be so critical, but I like your writing and your blog, and the more I like something the more critical I tend to be. Anyway, if you’ve already answered these questions in other posts, my bad.
익명,
whoa! I’m only a recent convert to Firefox, primarily liking for its spellchecker while I type but not seeing what the big deal is otherwise, but that changes everything. I knew that there had to be some way to work around it, but I had no idea that it would be so simple.
Thank you very much. As you can probably tell, that’s helped me out a lot.
Kevin,
glad to hear you’re all settled into Seoul. I’ve just added your blog to my list at http://www.bloglines.com (you should really add it to your name when you type comments so that people can find it that way too!).
I’m sorry that you didn’t understand my sentence:
“Is this then a case where advertisers have indeed unconsciously internalized male sexual norms, so much so that an advertisement ostensibly aimed at women becomes one almost exclusively appealing to men?”,
but I’m afraid that I don’t really understand your comments about it in turn sorry.
Regardless, what I mean is that when women’s bodies are objectified so routinely in advertising, Western or Korean, at some point that objectification that was originally for the sexual titillation of male consumers becomes viewed as normal, non-sexist and/or merely “provocative”, from then on used for and considered normal for most advertisements, frequently for products marketed exclusively towards women too.
The Vidal Sassoon shampoo advertisement with Lee Hyori mentioned here is a good example, and another is the ubiquitous use of “narrator models” for the opening of virtually all new stores in Korea. What does it say about the position of women in a country when both men and women think that it’s absolutely necessary to have girls in bikinis or PVC crop-tops or miniskirts dancing outside for 12 hours on a store’s opening day? Or, indeed, that a woman with only a slightly longer mini-skirt is needed to sell sesame oil – of all things – to housewives in supermarkets? I can be accused of overgeneralizing perhaps, but that Korean women don’t seem to be up in arms about that indicates to me that they do accept it, are used to it, and regard such blatant sexism as normal and possibly not even sexist, or at least much less so than most of their Western counterparts would. Despite all that though, I doubt that they’re particularly effective advertising strategies to women in the first place, which is why I say that the advertisements end up only appealing to men really.
I disagree that I need to find out:
“whether or not the poses that end up on the posters are just coincidentally the shots that came out best from the photoshoot, or whether they shot the model specifically to get the cowgirl pose, or the bending over pose, or the hands at the waist pose.”
as certainly hundreds, if not thousands of pictures would have been taken for this advertisement and the best few selected from them, but to suggest that the photographer(s) began the shooting with no idea what they were after, just shooting randomly, sounds rather naïve to me, particularly in light of the huge expense and limited time involved in working with a major star like Kim Ah-jung. I can assure you that the poses you see above were definitely what the advertiser intended, and that very very little in any advertisement is ever left to chance.
“In other words, what I find missing from your analysis (and you said you wanted to get more academic) is a discussion of the business of advertising, commercial photography, and modeling.”
Just in this post, or in general? I assume the later, because, after all, the title of this post was “en passant”, ie a light-hearted (for me) post “in passing” on a Sunday night. Again I disagree though: since my earlier phase of looking at alcohol advertising back in March, I have been providing much more in-depth, referenced analyzes of the evolving social mores underlying advertising that took weeks to write and research, so I deserve a little bit more credit than that! But as for the discussion of specifically the business of advertising and so on, certainly I haven’t covered that yet, but then I don’t see how it would be substantially different from the industry elsewhere in the world, nor how that specifically would make my discussions more academic per se. That is not to say that its not important, but I do have to prioritize, which usually means focusing on what makes Korea unique. But having said that, next month I’ll be discussing how surplus female labor in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to both the huge size of the Korean sex industry and the later rise of narrator models and women’s bodes used to sell mundane products in supermarkets and so on, which I suppose is partially related to the business side of things.
“I take a little bit of offense at the suggestion (not in this post) that sexy advertisements with a specific kind of “assertive” pose represent a positive step. A positive step for whom? Again, were you implying that this was an accidental positive step, or one intended by the advertisers? If it was intended by the advertisers, why be so veiled about it? And just to be clear, was exactly is your definition of a positive step in popular advertising?”
If not by this post, could you be a little more specific about what or whom exactly you’re being offended by? You quote this post, so it certainly seems like it is indeed this one that you take offense at!
(Update, 10:56: As I mention in an aside to Kevin’s point above, the original text was indeed a little ambiguous, so I’ve gone back and edited it)
I mention what I mean by that more in earlier posts, so I’ll be brief here. As I’m sure you’re aware, unmarried Korean women are expected to give off a public appearance of virginity and sexual meekness and passivity until marriage, and asexuality after that, and so naturally I regard any public acceptance of images of women as sexual beings, with the right to be sexually assertive themselves, as a positive step for Korean women and sexuality as a whole. Given what I said earlier, I regard that as deliberately intended by advertisers, and I’ve already discussed the reasons for the change in the earlier posts too.
Not that you so say this, but that is not quite the same as simply showing more skin, so I confess that I’m at a loss as to what’s at all offensive about my statement.
No need to apologize for offering criticisms, and despite my tone here I do welcome them…I don’t have to agree with them though! :)
I’ll just chime in on one thing – I spent 7 years as the marketing director of a Community College District in Northern California. For out print ads we did in fact take 100s of pictures in various poses, but we knew what we were looking for ahead of time, even if we didn’t know the exact pose (often times we did know the exact pose – I still took tons of ’safety’ shots). Multiple photos is the only way to go. But James is right that none of this was “coincidental,” rather we have very specific model choices, locations, and concepts that we were shooting for.
And we were third rate.
No way Jinro or Juchungbi adverts are less thought out than Community College ones. ;-)
“En Passim?” That’s even more pretentious than “The Korean Fantastique” parts 1-9.
I love how you have this psuedo-academic blog but still post photo after photo after photo of scantily clad hot Korean chicks, under the ruse of writing about Korean marketing and sexuality. Please.
Drop the pretense, dude. We see through you.
And your blog would be way more interesting if you weren’t too much of a pussy to publish negative comments.
Roger,
thanks for adding that.
Saladin,
If you don’t like the blog so much or find it so pretentious, then please feel free not to visit it.
Disregarding the increasing numbers of pictures of men that also I’ve been putting on the blog for the moment, then sure, pictures of scantily-clad women do indeed help the blog to get hits, and I readily admit to inserting sexual terms and/or female body parts in their titles to help with that too: it helps push up my Google Page Rank for all searches.
Last time I checked though, the women in them are not usually particularly scantily-clad, nor are there all that many of them either…if that’s all the blog was really about as you claim, then don’t you think that I could be going about it just a little bit more efficiently? Perhaps, say, by posting more pictures rather than writing 5000+ word posts on sexuality and advertising?
Also, your argument that I don’t publish negative comments is completely false, as any 2 minute glance at most posts will show you. Hell, even Kevin’s in this one doesn’t exactly sing my praises. Other then hundreds by one particular troll, I have deleted precisely two comments by others that I can recall, one of which – “Call this academic? Please!” – in an earlier post sounds much like you, although the IP address was different. Is that what you base your claim on? If not, then on what? Regardless, can you please tell me how either that comment or yours makes the blog ” way more interesting” somehow?
Like I say in my comments policy in the link in the top right, criticisms are welcome, but without justifications they’re simply useless, and will be deleted without a second thought. As I should have done with yours, but I was in a forgiving mood today.
Sigh. I wasted entirely too much time on this.
Hmmm…I took another look at the post, and in hindsight in one small part it did unintentionally look like I was making out that the pictures had absolutely nothing to do with hits, and so I’ve edited the offending two sentences.
Also, I made a mistake with the post title and have changed that too: “En Passim” should have been “En Passant”, meaning “In Passing”; I thought they meant the same until I checked. Probably still too pretentious for Saladin though.
James,
Thanks for all the clarification. I’m new to your line of thinking, and jumping in midstream always makes for misunderstandings. But still, I wonder where you think an actual interview with the photographer and/or advertising designers fits in to your analysis. I think there are lots of interesting questions to ask there…
Or are those questions irrelevant here? I mean, are you more focused on; well here’s what they made, it doesn’t really matter what thought process went into it because what really matters is the reaction? Or, are you suggesting that the end product tells us exactly what the thought process was and there are therefore no questions to ask?
I guess I’m saying that even with Roger’s point, there are still lots of decisions that get made in the process of making a product (in this case advertisements) that can tell us a lot of interesting information. Just curious about your thoughts there.
http://kr.youtube.com/watch?v=RgjyT0f_Pso
I just spotted this on google. . . looks like Jinro soju’s been using sex to sell soju for a long, long time.
Kevin,
thanks for being so gracious. Like I’ve added to our comments above, in hindsight some things in my original post were indeed ambiguous, and so I’ve considerably cleaned up the text since this morning (without removing changing the original meanings though).
Are interviews with photographers and advertisers and so on what you meant by “a discussion of the business of advertising, commercial photography, and modeling”? If so then I heartily agree that they’re needed, although they would all have to be taken with a grain of salt. If you scroll back a little you’ll see some translations from advertising magazine articles of what went into various advertisements and commercials (there’s some more from internet sources in my archives for March and February too), and in fact they’ll be a regular feature of the blog from now on (the next post will be one as it happens), but unfortunately they tend to be more about the mechanics of photoshoots and so forth rather than the mindset behind them. Moreover, I seriously doubt that most advertisers are frank enough to discuss the use of women’s body parts and so on in their advertisements and the reactions from consumers that they hoped to provoke with them, no matter how blatant. At least not with non-advertisers anyway.
Must go to bed. I’ll see if I want to write more after my coffee tomorrow!
Roboseyo,
bit of an exaggeration…but hell, that’s quite a find!
James,
Many Korean sites don’t allow saving of photo’s but you can just press ‘print screen’ and them paste that into whatever image editing program you use…
Richard,
thanks for passing that on, and actually I used to use that occasionally, even though it required a lot of editing of the screenshot later. But 익명’s solution is very simple to use.
Oh man, I must get back to that Gin Lane & Soju-ro thing.
I’ll just note two things:
1. Gin also had a feminine folk identity — many vendors were women, but gin itself was referred to in the feminine, as Madame Geneva or Mother Gin.
2. The South Sea Stock collapse of 1720 (Britain’s equivalent, at the time, of the so-called “IMF crisis”) certainly had something to do with the explosion of gin-consumption. One wonders just how much soju consumption went up before, during, and immediately after 1997, and also how much it increased before the financial crisis here. The buzz about the economy here right now is such that one would expect a sharp rise in soju consumption. Maybe the ads are rapidly shifting in correlation to that; working the instinctual drive to mate as much as possible before scarcity hits?
Yes, I should really continue that series of posts. Soon as I get time…
Gord,
thanks, and changing levels of the consumption of drinks that I discuss the advertisements of is definitely something I need to consider in all future posts. In hindsight, they’re quite lacking otherwise.
Finding links between ads and economic conditions may practically be quite difficult though. I’m inundated with advertisements for soju and other Korean alcohols at the moment, and the the more I look at them the more I find a hodgepodge of virginal and sexual images, many of the latter going back much further than I thought when I wrote this post. Certainly I’d still say that there’s a definite trend from the former towards the latter, and that this may well be influenced and/or accelerated by recent economic events, but with so many alcohol companies going in so many different directions at once it’s difficult to get a handle on things.
In the future, I’d like to examine only a specific company’s ads at any one time and try to make definitive conclusions about how just those are evolving, but unfortunately there’s no systematic archives out there, even the companies’ websites themselves having very very little available like I mention in the post, and piecing together the odd ad I can find (slowly) via Naver searches isn’t exactly analytically rigorous either.
Probably best would be for me to examine ads in specific magazines over time and make conclusions about only specifically those, but unless there’s a presentation at a conference and/or a paper in a journal involved then I don’t feel exactly feel like buying 5 years worth of back issues of them to do so!
I guess I’m at a bit of an impasse ads-wise then?