Giving the Consumer What She Wants? Korean Women’s Role in the Westernization of the Korean Media

Introduction

To quickly remind readers, in this post last month I expressed surprise that advertisements for the LG “Bikini Phone” in the June issue of Vogue Korea were much more sexist than those for the same phone in Gentlemen’s Quarterly Korea – despite the former being a women’s magazine – and that prompted me to discuss some of the differences between Western and Korean advertising, focusing on how the former came to be much more objectifying, provocative, and/or sexist despite the much greater empowerment of women in Western countries compared to Korea. Since then, I’ve read two new sources by Oh and Frith (2006) and Nam, Lee, and Hwang (2007) on that and related subjects, and this post is a (very) loose discussion about what I’ve learned from the former about the ways in which international magazines can affect the domestic Korean magazine industry and especially the form of the advertisements therein. But first, I want to quickly mention how the latter paper has helped me resolve the above contradiction, although I’ll discuss the paper itself in more detail in the next post.

In short, the contradiction exists because the criteria used in Goffman’s (1979) framework for determining sexism in advertisements are increasingly out of date. Yes, I apologize for mentioning Goffman again: I hadn’t ever heard of him myself until a few months ago, and I’d be surprised if those few readers of mine that aren’t currently doing an MA in sociology (yes, there are some ) had either, so an introduction to his framework from me is well overdue. Now that my own copy of his book has arrived from the US then I promise to work on that in the next post, but in the meantime, you don’t need to have to have read it to appreciate, say, the problems of blindly using it to study Korean advertisements regardless of models’ races, or that its criteria have surely been affected by how much women’s sexuality has changed in three decades. Or at least in the ways it is/can be publicly expressed that is: displays of skin and so on in an advertisement are no longer sexist per se, and this is not purely because advertisers and consumers have internalized male-centered, sexist norms, which I perhaps inadvertently gave the impression of arguing earlier. I’ve also probably overemphasized the negative aspects of Western advertisers portraying women’s liberation as mere sexual assertiveness from the 1970s that underlay those changes too, which were driven in turn by the cosmetics and fashion industries searching for new ways to make their (then) increasingly unpopular products appeal to the “New Women” influenced by Second Wave Feminism.

To compensate, I should acknowledge that while the goals and successes of the various women’s movements under that rubric should certainly have never been reduced to mere newfound sexual assertiveness, that doesn’t mean that development wasn’t still an eminently positive result of them, nor that advertisements portraying it via displays of skin and so on were automatically sexist and/or couldn’t be a harbinger of or even positive force in themselves of bringing such behavior about. While it is certainly possible to abuse that argument – not least by advertisers themselves – it still has some validity, and Korean advertisements in that vein in the last decade surely had at least some role to play in Korean women becoming more comfortable with their bodies in public over the past few years for instance, something that I pointed out with regards to Korean alcohol advertisements earlier this year.

( Jun Ji-hyun (전지현) on the left, in many such Korean advertisements ever since this Giordano commercial of hers with Jung Woo-sung (정우성) was banned in 2004. As I explain here, this ironically had the exact opposite effect to what censors intended. Source: Bugforever )

As Nam et. al point out, this considerably complicates the results of previous empirical studies that compared the sexism of East Asian and Western advertisements, as it is ironically demure and modest clothing in East Asian advertisements that may in fact be a much better indicator of traditional attitudes. To further complicate matters, there are also some (gender-neutral) aspects of East Asian culture and social habits, particularly those to do with rituals that indicate one’s status to others, that render some of Goffman’s criteria non-sexist in a specifically East Asian context, although the vast majority are still okay.

But I’ll cover that in the next post. Returning to this post’s title topic, I’ll begin by attempting to answer one obvious question that I should have made sure to raise and address in earlier posts: why, given Korea’s different, more conservative social context as I mentioned, would the Bikini Phone be marketed in Vogue Korea using provocative, semi-nude, Western-style advertisements that are too extreme for most domestic publications? Surely Korean consumers would have rejected the misreading of the more traditional Korean market and, notoriously sensitive to slights on national culture and sovereignty, heavily criticized the subtle cultural imperialism implied therein?

Well, in short…no, and while to an extent that somewhat cliched reading of globalization is indeed true of the transnational advertising agencies (TNAAs) that create uniform international advertisement campaigns, not only is the view that Koreans are conservative is somewhat naive (which is putting it mildly: see here, here and here), but the implied passivity of (legally-required) Korean partners of international magazines and their Korean consumers is arguably patronizing. As I’ll discuss and you can probably already tell from this post’s title, in fact both positively embrace “Westernization”.

International Magazines in the Korean Women’s Magazine Market

( Song Hye-gyo (송혜교) in the June 2007 issue of Vogue Korea. Source )

Of course, if I had only wanted to answer the question of Vogue Korea’s inappropriate advertisements, then I needn’t have gone very far: Vogue is, well, Vogue, eminently worthy of the criticisms of sexism and racism regularly leveled against it. But then the advertisements could just have readily come from any number of Korean editions of international magazines in the market, as listed in the table below from Oh and Frith’s paper. While a quick glance in a bookstore window reveals it to already be a little dated, with several new titles available and I think Cosmo Girl at least having been restarted (the ” * ” means discontinued), it still provides a handy summary.

Next is a graph showing the market share of those magazines, although note that the percentages in the graph do not refer to circulation figures but instead to what percentage of all women’s magazines available in Korea were Korean editions of international magazines in any given year: for instance, in 2003 there were 19 out of a total of 40 available, hence 47.5%. Circulation figures themselves are difficult to obtain because they are not made public, but based on interviews of editors in 2005 the authors state that the highest selling Korean women’s magazines like Jubu Life (주부생활) then sold 70,000 copies a month, whereas the highest selling Western magazines like Vogue Korea sold 45,000, and that this difference had large implications for the latter’s style, content and reliance on advertisements for revenue as I’ll explain soon.

For a potted history of the liberalization of the media industry in Korea that led to the above it’s probably best that you read the paper itself, but one thing of note is that before January 1999 international magazines could only be published in Korea through licensing agreements, under which:

…a local publisher can use the brand name and editorial strategies of a foreign magazine for a fee or royalties in order to publish a national edition of the foreign magazine. Through the licensing system, a foreign magazine can cede the right to utilize its name to a local publisher under specific conditions. This helps the local publisher avoid the excessive outlays and mitigate the risks of failure in launching a new title.

Don’t worry: I included that because I didn’t know what a licensing agreement was exactly either. At that point in 1999 though, the law was changed to allow foreign companies to own up to a 50% interest in magazines and a 30% one in newspapers, and as you can see from the table, many owners of magazines already in Korea quickly took advantage of the possibilities for new ownership arrangements.

Cultural Imperialism?

( Locked into choosing international brands? Source: singhalex )

Although ignoring the niceties of local markets can potentially prove disastrous for multinational companies (MNCs) and the TNAAs that they work with, it’s also true that there are stronger motivations for TNAAs to impose the same advertisements on consumers regardless. One is that when MNCs enter new, unfamiliar markets they understandably want to retain a sense of control over their brand image; another is that practically speaking it is immensely cheaper and easier for them to negotiate a single deal with a TNAA for a global campaign, rather than a plethora of smaller ones varying from country to country and which would serve to dilute it. Rather than being a measure of last resort however, doing so also serves the wider aim of nurturing what Oh and Frith (p. 6) describe as “global consumer tribes linked by lifestyle values or preferences rather than by spatial location”.

Lest that sound like media jargon, then let me explain by looking the ways in which the sexist Korean term “Bean-paste Girl” (된장녀) has become conflated with the American series Sex and City for instance. Nowadays generally referring to a woman who places her appearance and the buying of brand-name luxury goods above all else (like the financial means to pay for them), then obviously the Korean English-language media making (somewhat repetitive) connections between Korean women like that and the characters in the series was somewhat inevitable, but I speculate that the first people to mention both in the same breath were probably none other than the same sorts of men with the mentality to use the term in the first place, only now feeling further threatened by the confident, no-bullshit role models for women that the show provided. Now, I know that many many 20 and 30-something Korean women especially talked about the series a great deal and either subconsciously or deliberately altered their behavior and spending patterns because of watching it, so it’s not unreasonable to suggest that in so doing it defined them as separate from, say, 40-something viewers who may have found the series too raunchy, or that it wouldn’t have had similar effects on women in similar societies where they are expected to be more restrained. Ergo, “global consumer tribes”, and with one’s generation already being a such a strong marker of identity in rapidly changing societies in East Asia (comparable to race in the US), then they almost certainly have more in common with each other than with, say, 40 year-olds from their own countries.

( Korean? Taiwanese? Japanese? Chinese? )

The existence of groups like that might seem rather obvious for television programs, but then no matter how much this notion is encouraged by companies (and thereby makes it distasteful), all of us are still to a greater or lesser extent defined and linked by our consumer choices. Magazines, cosmetics and clothes are brands and therefore identity choices too, and indeed many of both are mentioned in Sex and the City and the purchase of them explicitly part of their characters’ identities.

How is this relevant? Because by definition cultural imperialism is both imposed by outsiders and a negative, but then of course MNCs benefit from uniform global advertising campaigns and consumers that will react positively to them regardless of their nationality: it is disingenuous to suggest that MNCs would not or should not follow this course if they are given the choice to do so. Again, this seems to place the onus for the Westernization of the Korean media squarely on Korean consumers themselves, but before getting to them there is the context of some features of (generic) women’s magazines unique to the genre and the exaggerated role of consumerism in Korea’s postwar development that I want to explore, the combination of which serves to greatly encourage Western rather than Korean advertisements and content. Certainly there is Korea’s cultural cringe vis-á-vis the West that is also greatly responsible and which I’ll discuss after those factors, but to attribute everything to merely that would again be at odds with the more nuanced view of Korean consumers that I’m trying to promote here.

(Update: Great minds think alike: Gord Sellar has just written this piece further exploring the links between the “Bean-paste Girl” term and consumerism)

“Consumption is Virtuous”

( Actress Lee Young-ae (이영애) advertising an LG air conditioner. Source )

Lest I have given the wrong impression so far, perhaps I should point out here that I still regard most women’s magazines as de facto 500+ page catelogues, with the odd piece of attention-grabbing tabloid journalism here and there. But I do have more faith in their readers: while I doubt that most of them have given much thought to their advertorials, concealed advertisements, and the restrictions advertisers have on negative content and so on, and while I’m sure that some are just as vacuous as the magazines’ contents, at the same time I’m confident that most readers simply regard them as harmless fun. But then…why buy them? I doubt the crossover between buyers of women’s magazines and tabloid newspapers is very large, so why do buyers of the former tolerate the standards of the latter? Or, to put it another way, women’s magazines weren’t always mindless trash, so how and why did that become the standard for them? And why for just that subset of all magazines available? I’m hard-pressed to think of any equivalents in the publishing world.

Unfortunately Oh and Frith don’t answer any of those questions directly, but they do provide a hint by mentioning Betty Friedan (1963), who as early as the 1960s noticed the essential function of women’s magazines as a promoter of consumption, observing that:

Why is it never said that the really crucial function…that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house… somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives…it would take a pretty clever economist to figure out what would keep our affluent economy going if the housewife market began to fall off (p. 197).

Friedan also pointed out that this consumption was a source of false autonomy, and that marketers in magazines:

“…manipulated housewives into becoming insecure consumers of household products, by giving the housewife a ’sense of achievement’ to compensate her for a task that was ‘endless’ and ‘time-consuming’ (Oh & Frith, p. 10).

( 1989 Miss Korea runner-up Go Hyun-jung (고현정) advertising an LG dishwasher. Source )

Now, “housewifization” has been a process inherent to modernization in all developed and developing societies (further evidence in the convergence vs divergence debate), and one still very much in flux in Korea: in recent years more and more households are finding that two incomes are required to survive financially, and advertisements are slowly beginning to reflect this, albeit still more as the exception rather than the norm. Take the above advertisement for instance: at first glance it depicts Go Hyun-jung both as a housewife rendered elegant and sophisticated by her purchase of the dishwasher and as a working woman, but in reality the latter image is included merely to convey the sentiment in the bottom-left caption that the dishwasher can do the job of two whole women. But while this stage of a proto-representation of working Korean women in the media undoubtedly parallels similar stages in the economic and social modernization of Western countries and will eventually pass, I’d argue that the former, more typical image will prove much more enduring than it did there. One reason is because Korea has a very closed economy, and, judging by the recent protests over the US-South Korea FTA, it is likely to remain that way for some time. This may be surprising to outside observers (but not investors!) as South Korea’s exports are well-known globally, but then the corollary of chaebol like Samsung, LG and Hyundai developing into the competitive export powerhouses that they are today is that the domestic sector was closed off to competition, and is thus stagnant and backward by comparison. Hence the strong protectionist element to the protests, and one reason why Korea’s manufacturing sector is still disproportionately large and its service sector comparatively undeveloped for an economy of its size. But why did Korea’s notoriously fickle consumers, especially housewives, tolerate overpriced, poor quality and little variety of products?

As I cover in detail in this earlier post, the main reason is because Korea’s successive military dictatorships not only gave them little choice in the matter but explicitly promoted the notion of consumption as economic and therefore national security, leading to such ditties as the government slogan “Consumption is Virtuous” in the late-1970s that I read about as an undergraduate student (and which I’d like to track down again!). Hence commercials like the following with Lee Young-ae, its hyperreal associations of apartments and modern appliances with modernity and civilization I’d argue a huge qualitative and mental leap beyond any such links in the minds of Westerners. Or rather a leap backward to 1950s and 1960s, because, as with so much about Korean society, perhaps the Western concepts of consumption during and immediately after suburbanization there are a much more appropriate parallel:

Ironically, herein lies a problem with Oh and Frith’s paper, and the reason why I won’t discuss the results of their study in any great detail here. In a nutshell, they decided to compare advertisements between the four most popular international and domestic magazines, specifically Elle, Vogue, Women Sense (우먼센스) and Yeosung Joongang (여성중앙) respectively, but seeing as the former are aimed at single women in their 20s while the latter are aimed at married women in their 30s and 40s, then I’d argue that the large differences found – the most common category of advertisements in the latter being for household items for instance, but which the international magazines lacked completely (p. 24) – were somewhat predictable and unenlightening. If I was doing a similar study, I would have compared the former with Korean magazines also aimed at women in their 20s instead such as Céci (쎄씨) and the recently discontinued Cindy The Perky (신디 더 퍼키), and I’m quite certain that I would have found that the content and advertisements of all four were much more similar to each other than to magazines for older women from their countries of origin.

But again, why? Most young Korean women naturally react angrily to the notion that they are passive and unthinking consumers of Western culture, but then how else to explain why all Korean women’s magazines are becoming more similar to international ones all the time, albeit with the proviso that magazines for 20-somethings are already virtual clones of them, but those for older women still have some way to go? Of course, much of the reason is that many if not most Korean women are indeed admirers of Western culture and have associations of glamor and sophistication with it, something there’s nothing at all wrong with and which, perhaps despite impressions to the contrary, I’ve never actually denied. But the crucial point is that magazine owners know this too, and this gives them obvious incentives to emphasize Western content.

Korea on the Cultural Periphery: The Corresponding Demands of the Korean Magazine Business

( Source: nathanbrown )

Unfortunately, Oh and Frith’s choice of magazines to study was somewhat misguided as explained, yet they don’t seem to have any qualms about making observations about the differences between all Korean editions of international magazines and Korean ones based on such a small and unrepresentative sample. Bearing in mind that by the term “international magazines” I mean ones catered to women in their 20s and by “domestic magazines” I mean ones catered to women in their 30s and 40s then, some of their points do still have some merit though.

One is that although it is difficult to keep track of the “average” prices of women’s magazines because of constant special issues and promotions (invariably more expensive than normal, a trend sparked by the increased competition since the opening of the market), international magazines are both generally cheaper than domestic ones and their circulation much smaller, both of which would give them a correspondingly higher reliance on advertising for their revenue and in turn a greater number of advertisements and influence by advertisers on content. Paradoxically however, advertising rates for international magazines are often double those of domestic magazines.

One reason for that is the justification by the owners of international magazines, who claim that:

…they use modern printing techniques, higher quality paper, glossy covers, and more sophisticated advertising techniques and that they can deliver the ‘right target’ to advertisers. (p. 17)

Clearly that last point is the most important, and single women in their 20s with high disposable incomes are obviously much more desirable to clothes and cosmetics manufacturers than married ones. But this still doesn’t explain the choice of Western brands, and, given young Koreans’ exaggerated but still strong nationalism and anti-Americanism, those arguably aren’t an obvious choice for Koreans in particular either.

( Jang Yun-ju (장윤주), bucking the trend of Korean models to make their faces look Caucasian. Source )

But in reality, the political and economic protectionist undercurrents to displays of anti-Americanism in Korea usually bear little resemblance to consumer sentiments, and at worst Koreans could be described as having a love-hate relationship with the US. While it is also true that TNAAs have more money to spend than local advertisers and are partially responsible for Western content, and that domestic magazines have started to change their formats and content into their desired forms to attract them, the reality is that:

…even when local advertisers are willing to pay the higher ad rates…their offers are generally not accepted as international women’s magazines believe that the brand image and quality of transnational advertising is more compatible with their own magazine image. (p. 18)

Hence unspoken arrangements that pages in the inside and back covers of international magazines will only feature international brands for instance. But why would international magazines would reject high quality  advertisements from domestic brands? While there is a chicken and the egg element to all of this, presumably that is primarily in response to consumer’s tastes.

And on that note, Oh and Frith conclude that:

…international women’s magazines’ eagerness to attract major international consumer product brands has [possibly] led them to focus on more specific editorial categories, such as beauty and fashion.

Besides diverting readers and advertisers away from local women’s magazines, international women’s magazines also play an important role in disseminating global ideas and materialistic values via their standardized and western-orientated transnational advertising. Some Korean women’s magazines have chosen to follow the unquestioned lead of these international magazines because they believe that their readers favor foreign over local. Similarly, some local advertisers opt to advertise their fashion and beauty products in international magazines as they want the positive association that these foreign luxury transnational brands bring. This social and ideological trend accounts for the local magazine’s eagerness in imitating international women’s magazines. (p. 27)

And if you feel that this last section of my post was a bit rushed…then you’d be quite right(!), and my apologies. This post has taken a week and 2000 words longer than expected, no mean feat with my two daughters, so please forgive me for wanting to finish it sooner rather than later!

____

Frieden, Betty (1963), The Feminine Mystique.

Goffman, E. (1979), Gender Advertisements.

Nam, Kyoungtae., Lee, Guiohk. and Hwang, Jang-Sun (2007) “Gender Role Stereotypes Depicted by Western and Korean Advertising Models in Korean Adolescent Girls’ Magazines“, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, San Francisco, CA, May 23, 2007.

Oh, Hyun Sook. and Frith, Katherine (2006) “International Women’s Magazines and Transnational Advertising in South Korea”, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, Jun 16, 2006.

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