The Grand Narrative

(Photo by annick777)

Introduction

At least by the editors of women’s magazines anyway (with apologies to the S&M crowd). Sure, your first impression may well be that in that sense then almost all women like “being told what to do,” but then the consensus of those that have actually studied the damn things (magazines I mean) is that in this part of the world they’re unique in the prescriptive tone of language that they use, much more akin to that of teachers in schools and after-school institutes than anything else. And when I say “unique”, I mean that very few other kinds of written media are so patronizing towards readers, even in a region where a constant acknowledgement of someone’s higher rank and status is fundamental to the languages.

I’ve already discussed possible reasons for this in these posts; today’s is just a quick a presentation of evidence for and confirmation of those from Keiko Tanaka’s chapter entitled ”Japanese Women’s Magazines: the language of aspiration” in the book The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, edited by D.P. Martinez (1998). The book itself has been sitting unopened in my bookcase for years, bought back when I was doing my MA and could convince my wife that I was required to buy up to a dozen books for it every few months (occupational hazard of being married to a geek), and there it would have remained had my research for a Korea Studies conference not forced me into a desperate search for any sources on East Asian popular culture that I could find.

(Source)

Readers may be surprised that I took so long to read it, especially as Japanese popular culture is usually the first thing that East Asia geeks like myself begin studying in any real depth. For those few of you that aren’t yet East Asia geeks yourself, the reason for that is because of being corrupted by Japanese history lecturers, who have a strange tendency in otherwise normal lectures to suddenly whip out, say, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife onto the overhead projector and then proceed to talk at great length and detail about tentacle sex manga, all the while in the same nonchalant manner and style of voice that he or she was talking about Edo Period economic policy five minutes earlier. Once one’s interest is aroused, as tends to happen after going through that surreal experience, then there’s more than enough interesting books on oddities like it to keep one occupied for a lifetime…and I don’t have the money.

Having said that, there’s a lot of crap out there too, and much of it, like tentacle sex manga, up there with ASEAN and postmodernism in being created for the sole purpose of providing jobs and publishing opportunities for academics. Oh yes, and for shocking students with too. Although saying things like “period pain” to mixed groups of 19 year-olds is about as risqué as I could get at my last job myself, I have to say that watching pompous freshmen squirm in embarrassment at it has been one of the highlights of my ESL career.  

(Source)

No tentacle sex in this otherwise excellent book though, maybe because most of it was researched before the internet really took off. And while the usual caveats about extending Tanaka’s conclusions apply, I’d be very surprised if they weren’t just as relevant today as in 1998, or to women’s magazines of most other East Asian countries too. Of Korean women’s magazines in particular, while I don’t go so far as to religiously read them myself (no, really), I do have sufficient Korean ability and experience with different media here to bet money on them applying to those for instance.

The Prescriptive Character of Contemporary Women’s Magazines

(Photo by Wallami)

I’ll let Tanaka herself do most of the talking from now on. Starting off after her short potted history of the industry then:

The prescriptiveness of the language employed in women’s magazines is a striking characteristic. The tone of the many of the features is blunt and hectoring, a curious point, given the alleged Japanese concern with politeness and the avoidance of confrontation. Even when not directly ordering readers about, the magazines draw lessons for young women from a surprising variety of events.

By arguing that there is a characteristic common to [these] magazines, I do not intend to suggest homogeneity amongst [them] or their readership….I hope that by examining a feature shared by these magazines, some general strategies in production of this particular form of popular culture will emerge.

The core of my argument is that these magazines not only provide detail, but also tell their readers what to do and what not to do. The manner in which this is done could be seen as almost patronizing and condescending. Compared to Japanese features, English equivalents may be similarly detailed but do not have the same prescriptive tone. (p. 117)

And with that she provides the first of ultimately over 100 examples from magazines, which to be polite, are a bit of a drag typing out here. I will do some, which I’ve underlined to make easier to pick out, but I think I can be forgiven for only providing the bare minimum to make my point, and especially for dispensing with mention of the sources and a romanization of the original Japanese!

( “Her Bikini’s Still Ugly” by 27)

The examples she starts with are used to contrast the overall prescriptive tone of Japanese women’s magazines with the overall more suggestive tone of English ones, but then she demonstrates with more that prescription is hardly unique to the former, which also sometimes use suggestions too. But:

This said, audiences are more often told what to look out for:

Céline motifs…it is effective to show them off by using a number of them concentrated around the region of your hands.

The loafers which have been popular all this time cannot be overlooked either.” (p. 118-119)

Japanese magazines know what is right for their audiences and tell them so in no uncertain terms:

This is about the best length for the jacket.

It is desireable to have all four basic items.

These magazines even make up their readers’ minds for them:

You no longer want anything less than “cheap and good” clothes.

We have decided to have your hair done in a bob next time. (p. 119)

And then she says that while statements of this type translate rather well into English, in Japanese they may well be regarded as patronizing, something which I’ve found can just as readily be lost in the translation of Korean to English too. But the success of these magazines suggests that readers do not mind the language, and in fact her informants have told her:

…that the tone has never caused them any annoyance or irritation. They all mention as a reason for buying the magazines that they can expect practical and detailed information on fashion and other related matters.

This raises the question as to where such language might come from, and my suggestion, from the resonance of the language, is that it comes from the authoritarian tone used by Japanese teachers in school.

(Photo by alexanderbot)

She then gives examples of expressions used which rely on familiar phrases from the classroom, then those that demonstrate how:

The magazines are keen on grading and they sometimes flatter their audience for following what they say with a kind of ranking:

Please enjoy this fashion, which is superior by one rank.

Those who in the senior grade should give it a finishing touch with a purple scarf. (p. 120)

In some magazines, expressions “reminiscent of school tests are rife:

You get a circle [for a correct answer] for wearing a long-knitted jacket or a waistcoat on top.

This suit is only just a borderline pass mark.

The last two expressions were from magazines that cater for young twenty-somethings and even high-school students, and so that language would obviously be more familiar and acceptable to them than older women. As a whole, the language of those magazines specifically targeted at that age group:

…tends to be fairly colloquial, closer to spoken language than is usually the case in a written textbook, but similar to the language of cram school textbooks, which are meant to reproduce live lectures; many of these prescriptive expressions…are strikingly similar to those used in [cram school] textbooks….and a high proportion of the readership of the magazines would have attended such institutions. (p. 121, emphasis mine)

( Photo by superlocal)

Sound like somewhere you know?

On the surface it may not seem all that surprising or profound to hear that these magazines for 18-25 year-old Japanese women talk to them like schoolchildren, and that most of the readers don’t mind…hell, some of them are schoolchildren. But think about it: what Western 18 year-old doesn’t think that he or she is more knowledgeable than the adults and authority figures that previously had to be deferred to, and revelling in new-found freedoms and independence? A magazine that treated them as the language used here seems to, as “pupils who aspire to achieve standards defined by the editors” (p.127), would go under before the ink on the pages was dry.

Ultimately, the language of Japanese magazines, which doesn’t translate well, is masking profound and deep differences between cultures. In particular, Tanaka writes of the particularly prescriptive 25 ans magazine:

…this tendency…may be related to its main objective, which is expressed as “For nurturing discerning eyes and individuality”. I have argued elsewhere that in Japan individuality (kosei) is more about being fashionable and sophisticated than about actually “doing one’s own thing”. (pp. 121-122, emphasis mine)

And there you have it: evidence from Japanese women’s magazines demonstrates that what Taeyeon Kim and Minjeong Kim and Shannon Lennon have said of the real meaning of “individuality” in Korea is completely paralleled in Japan. This is what one would expect if the former’s arguments about Neo-Confucian notions of women as “subjectless bodies” applied not just to Korea but all of East Asia, not coincidentally the gist of the abstract I’m writing. It’s also yet another case of some aspect of East Asian life that superficially appears identical to its Western counterparts, especially to outsiders and expats, but which in reality even the briefest of investigations proves to be quite different.

( “Seoul City Hall” by jstifani)

And that’s the point I wanted to make. There is a great deal more to Tanaka’s article, mostly her reaction to various counterarguments to the above, and especially to the charge that she is portraying young Japanese women as too passive, naive and unthinking, but for the sake of reader’s eyesight I think I should stop there! But the rest is just as interesting, and I’d be quite happy to devote a second post to it if any readers want.

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( “Gravity” by nickwheeleroz)

Korea and the World

At the end of Part One, I mentioned that the Korean education system is routinely held up as a model for the West by foreign observers, and gave an example from The Economist magazine here. Here is a more recent example from The New York Times too. 

Now before I came to Korea, I had a great deal of respect for both news sources, but the longer I’m here and the more articles about Korea I read in them, I realise that I can’t trust the accuracy of either.  Anyone with just a few months of teaching experience in either a Korean university, public-school, or after-school institute knows that the system as a whole possesses numerous and systematic flaws, and that Korean parents themselves are simply desperate to have their children taught overseas. So what gives? Why do reporters that supposedly “read between the lines,” always “question everything,” and are paid to do the research that I do for free routinely produce such complete crap about Korea? If I lived in, say, Syria, would I find the same of English-language articles produced about that country? Or is this something…surely not unique, but more pronounced in Korea than elsewhere?

Scott Burgeson, introduced in Part 1, makes a convincing case for the latter. To finish my discussion of his thoughts on the decline of Korean Studies programs overseas:

…the fact of the matter is that it is almost impossible for a non-Korean critic to make a decent living writing about Korean culture for English-speaking readers. Thus, the lack of public or private grant assistance for Western critics covering Korean culture means that it is difficult to find commenters on Korean culture in the popular English-language press who actually know what they’re talking about (or who are not simply hacks).

I remember when I interviewed the Japanese director Suzuki Seijun in Tokyo nearly ten years ago, the staff at the Japan Foundation were extremely happy to hear about my work and went out of their way to provide stills from his films to print in my magazine at no cost to myself. They did not care whether I had a degree behind my name or not, but were simply pleased that I was helping to promote Japanese culture to an English-speaking readership — and I might note that an extremely transgressive director Suzuki is hardly a “respectable” standard-bearer of Japanese culture. My interactions with the Korea Foundation have been, well, in the interests of being diplomatic, quite the opposite. Perhaps I am burning bridges by posting this kind of message to the List, but since I gave up applying for grants here many years ago, I know that it will not affect me one way or the other so I really don’t care anymore.

There are many reasons why Korean culture is and shall continue to remain relatively obscure on the world stage, and my experiences as an independent critic here are just one more example of why this is so.

As explained in Part One, much of the problem is most Koreans thinking that only those affiliated to a university are “qualified” to write about Korea. Sure, there would be no direct link between that and those reporters mentioned above, but it reduces the already limited pool of people “engaged” with Korea, and like I explain here, their connections with Korea and Koreans have an impact far greater than they may at first appear. Hence, for one, the ultimately unsustainable nature of the Korean Wave compared to its Japanese counterpart, which I’ve discussed in many posts here.

(Image by gyoul)

This reminds me of what GordSellar has described as:

…the standard, near-universal conviction among Koreans that a positive image of Korea must be presented to the world. It goes without saying that, in this sense, the image can only really be positive if it’s presented in terms that will appear positive on the world’s terms, rather than on Korea’s terms.

And the fact that, in Korea:

…on some level, for many Koreans, a discussion is also a promo-op, a chance to represent the nation in a positive light, to make people think well of their nation; or, if it is not that, it devolves into a more basic “defense” of the nation, which is hardly any more useful for finding out people’s real opinions.

Previously I’d thought that the monstrosities in the English-language media presenting news of the “success” of the Korean Wave overseas were as bad as they were because they primarily for a domestic audience; over 95% of the readers of the English-language Korea Herald, for instance, are Koreans. And for sure, that still plays a large role, as too does the fact that most Korean authors on the Korean Wave are well aware that they’re writing propaganda rather than actual news. But seeing as how most Koreans think that Korea must always be presented positively to non-Koreans, but positive in their terms rather than Koreans’, then I’m increasingly convinced many of those authors are genuinely convinced that what they’re writing is what non-Koreans want and will respond positively to. That the results are usually anything but is, I think, a reflection of the self-imposed relative isolation of Korea that I’ve described in these two posts.

It’s a long shot, and for sure there is bad English all over the world, but nothing symbolizes this to me more than the signage at stadiums for the 2002 World Cup here. Billions spent on what in many cases have become little more than white elephants 6 years later, but the designers of things specifically designed for non-Koreans didn’t feel the need to consult even a dictionary, let alone the opinions of an actual non-Korean:

(Source)

(Update: There wasn’t really any appropriate place for it in this post, but I did want to mention this factoid often uncritically accepted overseas too. See this article on that too, and thanks to GordSellar for passing it on)

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( “Mask” by sam samant,a)

1. Introduction 

Back in the second part of Part Two, I discuss the phenomenon of so many Korean women using whitening make-up, usually to excess and in situations where it is completely inappropriate, like on the treadmill at the gym. It’s easy to sound like I’m exaggerating when I describe how much it is used in Korea, but in fact Korean women’s desire for light skin is so strong that, by the time they reach menopause, they have serious vitamin D deficiencies (actually the worst in the world). Apparently, that’s what three decades of not being able to even cross a sunny street without covering your face does to women.

It sounds inconvenient and unhealthy and, based on what I discuss about the socio-biology of cosmetics in Part Two, anti-instinctive too. Clearly, there must be some strong cultural pressures towards and/or advantages to light skin for Korean women that outweigh these disadvanages. In the comments to that last post GordSellar and SkinnySteve argue that the primary explanation is the historical association of light skins with sedentary, indoor elites, and while I agree that that certainly plays a role, it can’t explain why the practice is so widespread across Northeast Asian countries in particular, nor why the vast majority of the ”ideal”, light-skinned Northeast Asian women in those countries’ medias have undergone such a plethora of cosmetic surgery operations also. I’ll respond to their comments in detail in the third section of this post.

( “Eye of Blue” by ~Dezz~)

Meanwhile, the most notable of those operations is “double-eyelid” surgery, which I variously hear that 60-80% of Korean women have received by their mid-20s, and both argue that the practice either predates contact with Westerners and/or is not reflective of a Korean desire to look Caucasian. Personally, I think it’s too much of a coincidence that the most sought after cosmetic surgery operation by Korean women is for a bodily feature found naturally in much greater numbers amongst Caucasians. By itself it could be coincidence, but combined with: the skin-whitening as explained; the decades of articles in Korean women’s magazines extorting readers to turn their “incorrect” and “flawed” Korean bodies into Caucasian ideal shapes and forms (which I’ll explain momentarily); and finally the numbers of Caucasians in Korean advertisements, (which I’ll cover in section four), then naturally I do think that the primary purpose of whitening make-up and cosmetic surgery by Korean women is indeed for the specific purpose of making them look more Caucasian. As least in 2008.

2. Sources

 (Photo by Scoubi) 

To be fair to Gord and Steve, so far I’ve never mentioned on the blog the fact that, say, Korean women’s magazines do explicitly say that the Korean body is flawed and Caucasian bodies the ideal. There’s very little on the subject in English, especially on Korea (in fact the 2006 article I discuss in the fourth section is the first of its kind), and unless you’re fluent in Korean and are an avid reader of women’s magazines yourself then the only real way of knowing this would be to read the journal articles that I have. I’m not saying that having read them makes me smarter than readers, or that the journal articles themselves aren’t open to interpretation, but…well, that’s what they say, and they do appear to fatally undermine arguments against the links I make between cosmetic surgery, skin-whitening, and a desire to look Caucasian.

Let me (belatedly) provide an example:

The article presents what it considers to be particular features of Korean women - short legs, big face, yellow skin - as problem features that can be corrected by certain types of clothing and colours: ‘For Korean women the best look is the formal tailored suit with padded shoulders. This square shaped suit helps make big faces look smaller and puts the entire body in order’ (italics added). [The author] implies that the imperfect Korean body is disordered but can be put back in order through the tricks of fashion. The body is something to be rearranged so its apparent flaws are concealed or eliminated. These flaws themselves stand out as imperfections because they are features peculiar to Koreans and absent in white models.

That was from page 104 of the 2003 journal article “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society” by Taeyeon Kim (details and abstract here), which was the basis for these posts that I started last month. Since finishing those, I’ve read very similar descriptions of articles in Japanese, Taiwanese and Singaporean women’s magazines too, and because women in those countries also desire light skins and share “Eurasian” ideals of women’s bodies, then I think that basing, say, modern ideals of Japanese women’s skin colours and body forms the white-face painting of geisha is useful and necessary, in a parallel of what commentators said about Korea, but neither the Japanese or Korean hostorical specifics can explain why those ideals are so common to the region.

(Korean Jeon Ji-hyun (전지현). Photo by wongtai231, from this ad)

What does link the region then? Let me adapt the remainder of Taeyeon Kim’s paragraph above, by replacing “Korean” with “East Asian”:

All three elements, the Neo-Confucian woman’s subjectlessness, the perception of East Asian bodies as imperfect, and fashion’s function to re-order the disordered East Asian bodies, make East Asian women’s bodies particularly prone to alterations, rearrangements, and re-creations of the body.

In simple terms, these elements provided a base upon which individual countries’ own culture and histories of the use of cosmetics and so forth built upon. They were important, but I do seriously doubt that those East Asian populations with the means to afford cosmetic surgery operations would have done so quite so readily and in such large numbers without a shared philosophical framework that gave such leeway and encouragement for women to do so.

( “Asian or Caucasian?” by c0nn0r. Anybody know who she is?)

That’s the gist of what my theory, anyway, which I’m in the process of researching and fleshing-out, like I discuss here. But for the remainder of this post, first I’ll address points Gord and Steve raised in much more detail, and after that I’ll discuss the phenomenon of large numbers of Caucasians in Korean advertisements.

3. Response to Comments

Sorry in advance if my chopping and pasting and combining of comments maybe (inadvertently) misrepresents commentators’ arguments; I encourage readers to click on the links to their names and read their comments in full before moving on. Also, much of what I’m quoting below I’ve already responded to earlier (they’re the detritus of many rewrites of this post, sorry), so here I’ll try to concentrate on things I haven’t mentioned already.

Here goes then:

In Part Two, Steve said:

In regards to Korean women trying to whiten their skin in order to look more Caucasian, I used to agree, but as I’ve learned more about Korean history and culture, as well as seeing traditional dance performances, I’ve come to conclude that Korean women have been painting their faces ghostly white for a long, long, time because it makes them look more upper-class in the sense that they’re not out working the fields in the hot sun.

And Gord said:

I also would take issue with the idea that Korean women are (at least consciously) trying to look white. After all, as far as I can tell the double-eyelid obsession was in place BEFORE they met us folk, since some percentage of Koreans are born with it naturally (like my fiancée, for one). Paleness, again, would be a sign of domesticity, and thereby a sign of higher status. (And anyway, there’s lots of anecdotal evidence that even in very remote, non-Westernized societies, there are preferences for paler members of the group…my mom has observed it in many groups living in the bush in Malawi, for example.)

I readily agree that Koreans have historically associated lighter skin with stuck-indoors-all-day elites, and that it may well be a universal phenomenon; I first read of it myself while studying Medieval history when I was fourteen, and if you’re interested you can read a specific chronology here of how tanning in turn became a signifier of the leisured (Caucasian) classes, starting in the early 20th Century. But while it’s difficult to empirically quantify, things like Korean women’s vitamin D deficiencies do point to specifically Koreans (and East Asians) desiring lighter skins to a surprising degree, and I don’t think these historical associations are a sufficient explanation.

I’m very surprised to hear about Koreans being obsessed with double-eyelids before meeting Westerners, especially before modern cosmetic surgery allowed Koreans to get them for themselves (I’ll return to this point in a moment). I’d be the last person to doubt the veracity of anything Gord said, but I’d be very grateful if he or anyone else could point me in the direction of sources on that; after all, if all goes well, I’ll be presenting a paper on it in Fukuoka in September!

(Photo by bowtie614)

Steve continued: 

Nowadays, though, I think that it may be playing a part (like, 30-40%), but I still don’t think attempting to look Caucasian is the motivation. I think a Korean woman might say “I buy face whitening cream to look more beautiful” but highly doubt she’d say, “I buy face whitening cream to look like a white woman.” You still don’t see that many Korean women with dyed blond hair walking around, after all.

Like Gord mentions earlier, I’ve never said that Korean women consciously want to look Caucasian (although I still think that some surely do). Arguing that they do reminds me of the British stand-up comedian Ben Elton making a joke about women thinking about making their faces resemble their aroused vaginas as they put on lipstick in the morning (God, considering he said that in 1985, no wonder he got the reputation that he did!); that they don’t doesn’t mean that it is not ultimately a factor in the origins of the cultural habit, just like I won’t think about the universal desire for humans to distinguish ourselves from other animals when I shave tomorrow morning, or that my tie is actually a phallic symbol when I get dressed after that. Well, actually I will now, in a pink elephants fashion, but you get the idea.

What do they consciously say are their motivations then? Well, Gord says:

I’d say Korean women, at least younger ones, are trying more to look like Hyori or Jeon Ji Hyun or some other icon of Korean femininity than, say, Julia Roberts.

As this old post of Robert Koehler’s demonstrates, that’s certainly true. Steve also says:

As far as the double-eyelid surgery is concerned though, I think if anything that trend has come about from Koreans’ own desire to conform. I read somewhere (actually, I think it was an MTV documentary by Soojin Pak, but I can’t remember the title) that a certain percentage of Asians naturally have the double eyelid, so it’s not as if the feature is alien to Korea/Asia. What they see, though, is all the rich and famous people in the world sporting the double eyelids, combined with the Koreans that already have it, and now the double eyelid is considered trendy and beautiful. Again, it doesn’t strike me as overtly trying to look like a Caucasian person. It seems like Koreans are fascinated with big eyes as well, a feature that tends to creep me out more than anything, and I suspect the double-eyelid surgery may haveus much to do with giving an appearance of having bigger eyes than anything else.

(Photo from PopSeoul!)

But I think the point that average Korean women are whitening their skins and undergoing cosmetic surgery because they want to look like rich and famous Korean women is, to be blunt, irrelevant: it merely changes the focus of our attention, but doesn’t answer the question of why rich and famous Korean women (rather than average Korean women) are doing so. And returning to the point about double-eyelids, I confess that when I first read Gord’s comment that Koreans were obsessed with them before Western contact, personally I doubted it very much. And were it to be true (and for sure, it might be), I still find it too much of a coincidence that that particular body feature, which Caucasians just so happen to naturally have in far greater numbers than East Asians, has become virtually a mandatory requirement for young Korean women.

(Update: Sorry, I just realised that I forgot to respond to Steve’s point about Koreans’ fascination with big eyes. But personally, I don’t think that that fascination is exlusively Korean or even East Asian for that matter. And while I’ll readily admit that big eyes are certainly, say, a prominent feature of manhwa (만화) or manga for instance, that is more to make especially female characters look more youthful rather than a fascination with big eyes per se )

Steve also says:

So, yes, it LOOKS like Korean women are trying to look Caucasian, but that doesn’t mean that’s the real motivation, and I haven’t seen any evidence to really suggest that Korean women are running around trying to meet a beauty standard intended for the whole purpose of appearing like the very Caucasians Korea is continuously trying to keep at arm’s length.

( “Swede Revenge” by cheese bikini)

That last point is very eloquent, and is a good, pithy way to round off a university paper or a newspaper article, let alone a comment in a humble blog. Unfortunately, it’s also completely wrong. It doesn’t take academic study of Korea and/or of Anti-Americanism in Korea and abroad to know that public displays of antipathy towards America and/or Caucasians and/or Foreigners usually go hand in hand with fascination, jealousy, and extensive trade and cultural links, and the stark differences in the way Caucasian and non-Caucasian foreigners in Korea are treated is evidence enough that Koreans don’t want to keep Caucasians “at arm’s length.” When non-Koreans are negatively-portrayed and scapegoated by the Korean media - and I’ll be the first to admit that that happens entirely too often - invariably it’s for domestic political purposes and/or to deflect attention from Korean society’s own flaws.

Finally, Gord says:

There’s no shortage of students who are happy to suggest that contemporary images of Korean femininity are *fueled* by Western icons of “beauty,” but I think it’s worth throwing in a grain of salt, since many of the same students who are talking about this now, were one semester ago regurgitating rather distorted versions of Edward Said’s Orientalism. *shrug*

For sure, and that’s something to bear in mind when reading the next section.

4. Images of Caucasians in Korean Women’s Magazines

(Photo by Mr Rock Man)

Because this post is already rather long, I’ll do little more then outline the conclusions Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon come to in their article ”Content Analysis of Diet Advertisements: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” (Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, October 2006), and readers can form their own opinions from those.

Because of a lack of prior research (pretty typical for Korean Studies) they write that null hypotheses were developed:

Hypothesis 1: There will be no difference in the percentage of diet advertisements in Korean and U.S. Women’s magazines.

Hypothesis 2: There will be no difference in the percentage of female model’s ethnicity in Korean and U.S. Women’s magazines.

The two Korean magazines they used were Women Sense/우먼센스 and Jubu Life/주부생활, and the two U.S. magazines were Red Book and Good Housekeeping. You can read details of the hypotheses and methods of the samples from pp. 351-353, and details of the results from pp. 353-359.

 (Source)

Hypothesis 1 isn’t relevant to this post, but it is to Parts One and Two, and is still very interesting.

In a nutshell, Kim and Lennon found that the hypothesis was false, and the percentage of diet ads in Korean women’s magazines was significantly higher than the percentage in U.S. women’s magazines (11.8% to 3.5%), and also that they tended to promote passive dieting methods, reinforcing the idea that buying their advertised product will solve weight problems with no effort required on the part of the user. Unfortunately, most of those claims are completely false, but because diet products are technically considered supplements in Korea, they are not regulated by the strict guidelines used for pharmaceutical products. Even in the rare cases that companies are prosecuted by the Korean Consumer Protection Board, penalties are minimal and companies often merely close down, reopen under a new name, and go on selling the same product with a different name.

Shocked? Unfortunately asbsent or ineffective regulations are a fact of life here, as things like almost all Korean Vitamin C drinks containing carcinogenic benzene and 88% of Korean organic food is completely fake demonstrate.  Not only is little done about this, but I recall that in that benzene case above the KFDA wasn’t allowed to mention the names of the three vitamin C drinks that didn’t have benzene…how ironic that Koreans have to turn to a Chinese news source to find out what they’re drinking.

In such circumstances, it’s no wonder that impressionable young girls take the messages of dieting product companies to heart: as Kim and Lennon report (p. 357), in 2002 half of Korean high school girls were anemic because of dieting-induced malnutrition, and were considered unqualified to give blood.

(Source)

Hypothesis 2 was also found to be false: U.S. magazines had larger percentages of White than non-White models (84.9% vs. 15.1%), whereas Korean magazines had much more equal percentages of White and non-White models (52.3% vs. 47.7%).

In Kim and Lennon’s words:

Instead of having predominantly non-White (Korean) female models in Korean magazines, White female models were as common as non-White models. The number of White models was actually greater than the number of non-White models. The presence of White female models in Korean women’s magazines to this extent suggests that the Western cultural ideal for women is ubiquitous and widely accepted among Korean women. Korean magazines seem to portray and promote Western feminine beauty as ideal and subsequently pressure Korean women to achieve the Western ideal. Subsequently, this indicates that the Western cultural beauty is not limited to Western countries anymore but has gone global. (p. 358)

Naturally I agree: it’s certainly telling that Korean women’s magazines have more Caucasians than Koreans in them. But it’s not unreasonable to argue that Kim and Lennon are making too much of a conceptual leap, without also considering the extent to which having Caucasian models in advertisements is a sign of wealth, class, and of a country having “made it.” Not coincidentally, the first time Caucasian models were even allowed in Korean advertisements was shortly before Korea was admitted to the OECD in 1996. As Taeyeon Kim (referenced earlier) explains:

 A casual browser of Korean women’s magazines might observe that many of the models or settings in the advertisments are Euro-American or look Euro-American. This image has become ever more pervasive. In June 1994, changes in laws allowed the Korean advertising industry to use foreign models and celebrities, which quickly led to a sharp increase in the use of foreign models to sell domestic wares. No longer were only foreign products sold to Koreans with a foreign face, now even domestic products were marketed to Koreans by the likes of Cindy Crawford, Meg Ryan, and Claudia Schiffer. (p. 103)

(Photo by Mmmonica)

She still comes to much the same conclusions as Kim and Lennon though:

While there does seem to have been a gradual increase in recent years of Korean models in domestic advertisements, these Korean models nearly all have features that have already been reconstructed to meet the prevailing standards of beauty which, if not totally white, are at least a melding of Asian and Western features, the ideal encapsulated by the increasingly popular ‘Eurasian’ look. Many of the articles and beauty tips in these magazines function on the assumption that the Korean body is flawed while the white body is the standard norm.

I don’t read Korean women’s magazines, but I have noticed the virtual absence of Korean women in lingerie advertisements here (it’s difficult not to notice, given the number of ads on subways and cable TV here). Or to be more precise, the fact that Korean models in them will almost invariably be fully clothed (a very rare exception below), but Caucasian (usually Russian) models will more usually be wearing only the lingerie. Sometimes in the same infomercial you’ll have Russian models in their lingerie but the Korean models fully clothed, holding the lingerie in a hanger. Seeing those for the first time years ago, it was difficult not to conclude that they reflected some pretty warped notions of Korean feminine virtue and foreign lasciviousness. 

(Photo by menacingPanda)

To be sure, many Koreans do indeed have some warped notions of Korean feminine virtue and foreign lasciviousness. But now I think I was mistaken, and realising that the Russian models are signifiers of “developed country status” makes their numbers and their sharp distinctions with Korean models in ads more explicable. So despite what the two journal articles I’ve quoted at length in this post say, the mere presence of Caucasians in Korean advertisements certainly does not necessarily mean that Koreans have embraced and aspire to Western ideals of feminine beauty. But having said that, I do find the overall weight of evidence compelling.

And on that note, because I sense I’m beginning to lose the thread of things at this late stage of a much too long post, I’ll put this subject to rest for now!

Update 3: Years ago, Robert Koehler mentioned the Korean model Jang Yun-ju (장윤주), one of the few Korean models “that nobody will ever accuse her of cutting up her face to look white”. In a less academic phase of the blog (hey, we’ve all been there), I linked to many pictures of her here.

Update 2: Great, just great. I type all that, and only then do I discover this post of Michael Hurt’s on the same topic.

Update 1: By coincidence, KoreaBeat has just posted a link to photos with the theme “Korean Girl Discovers the Joys of Whiteness”.

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( “You can’t always save face” by qwurky)

Recent Focus on Korean Women’s Body Images

This was originally only going to be an introduction to another post, but then I noticed that it had been five days since the last one, and finishing the (now) next one may take almost as long again. So I just thought I’d let readers know what was happening.

I’ve started a new job recently, and although it doesn’t involve much more actual work per se, it does confine me to a wi-fi and power socket-less desk from 2:30-9:30pm five days a week. Previously I’d just written posts when I’d felt like it, but now with afternoons and evenings away from the computer, and mornings wisely spent with my daughter rather than the blog, then I’m going to do more planning, confine my writing to weekends, and arrange to stagger posts throughout the week. I would have started last weekend, but my Korean test distracted me.

But readers can be forgiven if they thought I already do formulate and stick to plans. For instance, if you look closely at what I’ve written in the past five weeks, you’ll find posts about:

• The increasingly sexual imagery used in soju advertisements (and then here and finally here)
• The relationship between Neo-Confucianism, Consumerism, and modern Korean women’s body images, in three parts (here, here and here)
• The Wondergirls phenomenon here and here
• What Lee Hyori’s breasts tell us about Korean celebrity culture
• Korean Women’s prevailing opinions on dating and dieting, exercise and cosmetics, and now this post.

In hindsight, it does seem like I’ve been steadily and dogmatically analysing, say, certain aspects of the objectification and commodification of women in Korea. I certainly wish I had been. Instead, I’ve merely written after being inspired by, respectively:

• Seeing soju advertisements on the street
• Digging out old journal articles from my MA notes
• Seeing a pizza advertisement on the TV
• Stupid promises to translate articles
• And finally reading things like this about Korean women’s attitudes to obesity.

So, although I have indeed written a lot about Korean women recently, approaching all of those individual topics on a whim and with a blank slate as it were has meant that it’s taken me a lot longer to see their connections than I might have otherwise. But still, you don’t write about related topics for five weeks without beginning to see some connections and make conclusions. And I did a lot of work on them years ago as part of my MA too, which writing recent posts has both helped me to remember and to see in a new light.

( “Allegory of the Cave” by sparkleice)

Finally then, I feel like I’m on the cusp of being able to provide my own grand narrative of events. Or in other words, I dare to suggest that there is some sociological macro-theory that underlies the objectification and commodification of modern Korean and Northeast Asian women, and endless discussions about how provocative the Wondergirls’ dancing is or isn’t, or if Korean women get double-eyelid surgery to look Caucasian or not, or if Korea’s abysmal Gender Empowerment Measure is related to the numbers of “Narrator Models” (나레이터모델) here somehow…they’re all such minutiae. Such hot air.

Epiphany

In a nutshell, I think that certain aspects of the objectification and commodification of women found in (primarily) Northeast Asian countries rely much more heavily on their shared Neo-Confucian notions of women’s “subjectless bodies” than previously thought.

Sorry if you were expecting something more revolutionary-sounding. But it is to me. To be more specific, I’ve realised how much the practices of using women’s bodies to sell everything from tuna fish, new stores, washing powder and, in the supreme irony, the sending of the first Korean woman into space, epitomise the pervasiveness of these notions in this part of the world, and ultimately the high prevalence of cosmetic surgery amongst those East Asian populations rich enough to afford it (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, HK, some Chinese coastal regions and Singapore) and, yes, the increasing acceptance of the sexual commodification of teenagers too, are both symptoms and causes of the same ethos too.   

(Source, found via Scribblings of the Metropolitician)

But while I say “Northeast Asian countries”, this idea of mine is based on observations I’ve made about primarily Korean women, and extrapolating those to the whole region and beyond obviously requires many caveats and qualifications. And of course, correlation doesn’t imply causation either. Still, I do know enough about Northeast Asia to boldy assert my claim, but rather than mere vibes from books and travels, now I need to do some basic fact-collecting before continuing.

(Source)

Research Plans

On top of all that, there is the 4th World Congress on Korea Studies calling for papers, to be held in September in Fukuoka. I have no illusions of a paper of mine on any subject being accepted (recently having to abandon my MA due to the expense, I’m still only a mere BA graduate), but everything I’ve written recently does make me want to forge ahead and write a 1000 word abstract on that above hypothesis of mine. If nothing else, it’ll provide me with a useful framework for the above research, so my blogging and pretentious and naive academic plans will nicely doevtail. But with the deadline for submitting papers only being 17 days away, I will have to work (and post here) much more quickly than I’m used to.

That’s the plan for the next 3 weeks or so then. Meanwhile, the post after next will be about the evidence that Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon provide that demonstrate the extent to which Korean women have indeed now incorporated a Western cultural ideal of beauty into their own body images. I’ll discuss some aspects of their article ”Content Analysis of Diet Advertisements: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” (Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, October 2006) much more directly than I did parts one and two, and will also address some counter-arguments that readers have made in comments too.

Until then!

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(Update2: Those technical problems in turn mean that I can’t reply to a notorious troll over there, but fortunately his comments don’t really deserve a reply. Still, he’s no ordinary troll, and you have to admire his skill in trying to goad me into a response)

(Update: I’d like to thank bumfromkorea over at the Marmot’s Hole for telling me about Time and Cinderella, two movies that deal with the Korean plastic surgery industry. I would thank (probably) him there, but for some reason every time I write a comment on that post it just disappears)  

(“Liberty Leading the People“ by Eugène Delacroix)

Introduction

Today’s post is a bit of a light-hearted break from all the intense and/or very academic posts I’ve been writing recently, but I think that the points I’m making are still quite valid. Sure, if I’d wanted to convey that impression more effectively then probably I should have used a different title instead, but then I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t usually choose them with SEO in mind (Search Engine Optimization to non-bloggers). Sorry if that sounds a little cynical, but then consider this internet classic on the differences between what people say they read and what they actually do read on the internet. Meanwhile, if pictures of Lee Hyori are what you’re really after, then you’ll find plently to choose from here.

Korean Celebrity Culture 1: Different Standards

(Photo by lej pics. Yes, I know Lee Eun-ju/이은주 on the right committed suicide in 2005, but rather than making my choice of picture tasteless, actually I think that that illustrates my points all the more)

The original motivation for this post was my volunteering to translate this ”news” article about Lee Hyori’s recent chest X-rays for readers over at Dave’s ESL Cafe (I guess I’m a real glutton for punishment). I did last night, but PopSeoul! has already translated something very similar here, saving me the trouble of putting it up.

The article I translated is stupid, as is the endless speculation about whether or not Lee Hyori has received breast enlargement surgery: for one, you can see the before and after evidence for yourself here, and I discuss that in more detail here. Of course she has. Like I say there, I think she was very attractive without them, but they certainly didn’t harm her career, and while I may often sound critical of plastic surgery, I’m not against it per se. But why then, this endless, repetitive speculation? Because she refuses to admit it. Or rather, ironically, being a celebrity means that she’s not allowed to admit it, at least in Korea.

(Photo by mona)

I’ve already written a great deal about the differences between Western and Korean celebrity culture, so let me just give the briefest outlines of them here.

Discounting the big differences between Western countries, to a greater or lesser extent Westerners almost expect their celebrities to live hedonistic lives, and the public and the justice system as a whole gives them a great deal of leniency to do so that is not granted to ordinary mortals like ourselves. But Korea is the exact opposite, and female celebrities in particular are held to impossibly higher standards. Hence when it is revealed that they have taken drugs or had sex before marriage, for instance, then the public reaction is swift and severe, even if they didn’t actually do the heinous crimes of which they’re accused.

And so while Korea has one of the largest plastic surgery industries in the world, and a majority of women have had some form of operation or another, Koreans seem to want to keep this a secret from non-Koreans, and celebrities in particular definitely can’t admit to having received it themselves (with exceptions for aspiring stars).

I think that the movie 200 Pounds Beauty/미녀는 귀로워? is one of the rare popular Korean movies that draws attention to this (I discuss it here); if readers know of any others, please let me know. I also think that the dichotomy between the Korean public’s standards for themselves and for celebrities also partially plays a role in the their toleration of sexually-suggestive dancing and provocative clothes from the Wondergirls/원더걸스 too, because many parents, say, that regard both as innocent and cute would never tolerate the same from their own daughters. But after all the virtual ink I’ve already spilled on that, I’ll wisely stop there and let readers make their own judgements.

Korean Celebrity Culture 2: Promotion of the Mundane

(D-War/디워)

Amongst non-Koreans living in Korea at least, the both the Korean and especially English-language Korean media is notorious for portraying any cultural product destined for overseas consumption as world-class, on a par with Hollywood productions (if it is a film), and enthusiastically received by non-Korean audiences, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Gordsellar describes it as a “standard, near-universal conviction among Koreans that a positive image of Korea must be presented to the world”, and I myself (somewhere amongst these posts) have interpreted the effects of this on the Korean media to be its portrayal of the Korean Wave/한류 as Koreans would like it be received rather than it actually is, and even if this was the only problem the Korean media had, then it would be in a very sorry state indeed. Unfortunately, it’s not, as this and the following case reveals.

By this stage, you may well be asking how on Earth the Korean Wave is related to Lee Hyori’s breasts? Are they a cultural product? Well…yes. Consider this article about her trip to Hong Kong in 2003, but before you do, let me provide some background:

• Men like women’s breasts
• There are some men in Hong Kong
• Lee Hyori has breasts
• Lee Hyori went to Hong Kong

Therefore, even before the big event I would have bet money on some men in Hong Kong liking her breasts while she was there. An article about the test of that hypothesis is not news, and of course the fact that it was in a Korean tabloid also means that it wasn’t news too. But ironically, this celebration of Hong Kong men’s interest in Lee Hyori’s breasts is news precisely because it was in a Korean tabloid.

The mainstream Korean news media is amongst the most populist, unprofessional, racist and xenophobic in the world, and is more than happy to portray all non-Korean men as perverted, pedophilic sexual predators whenever it suits them, so you can imagine what the tabolid press is like. Not unsurprisingly, this means that many Korean men (but by no means all) are resentful of Korean women in relationships with non-Koreans. Hence KoreaBeat points out that it was simply bizarre that a Korean tabloid newspaper would revel in non-Korean men ogling one of “their” women, and I’m suprised that I didn’t notice the incongruity myself when I read it at the time.

Now, I’d be the last person to describe Lee Hyori’s breasts as mundane…but sorry, at the end of the day, they’re still just breasts. So considering all the above, is there any other explanation for the positive spin of the article other than the desire for self-promotion overriding the xenophobia, which, after all, is usually just a mere convenient device to use when Koreans want to deflect attention away from their own problems?

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(Number 5 of 7 Pictures of the Wondergirls on this Chinese porn site, found a whole three minutes after typing “Wondergirls” into Yahoo Image Search. Sorry to those of you who have regrets about the picture suddenly appearing on the screen in front of all of your students and colleagues, but, as you shall see, that you have those regrets at all neatly demonstrates one of the points I’ll be making!)

This post is a direct response to the second comment left by Chris in my last post on the Wondergirls. While I still think that he has deeply mistaken views about the Wondergirls and the issues they raise, I also think that a great number of people probably share them, and so it is worth me devoting a post to specifically addressing some (though not all) of his points, rather than losing my arguments at the end of a long line of comments that few people would bother scrolling through again.

Before I do, I must apologise in advance to Chris if highlighting what he said word for word here feels like a personal attack on him. But I don’t know how to avoid that.

Look More Closely

Fortunately for the sake of warming up readers up, we can start with something simple:

James, I don’t know how to convince you of Daegu high school girls’ clothing habits, but when out downtown on a weekend you can’t walk 10 feet without seeing a young woman who is obviously under 18, wearing high heels and/or a short skirt. Even when we took our high school students to the Busan Aquarium for a field trip, my very own students dressed much the same as some of the WG. You’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

This may sounds facetious, but I’m afraid that I really don’t think I can be convinced without photographic evidence.

I’ve put both videos up again below to stop people have to scroll between posts: in the first video certainly, the quasi-uniforms that a couple of the girls are wearing would be a strange sight in real-life. but are still within the boundaries of appropriateness and good taste. I never actually said that they weren’t. I don’t think many school students are wearing shorts as high as those orange ones between 0:14 and 0:17 though, but I’m willing to concede that there may be some, although I’ve never seen any myself.

But none of those observations apply at all to the second ad:

To paraphrase Bulgasari, bizarrely, if the ad to encourage voting was indeed re-fashioned to sell teenage sex instead, then the ad wouldn’t need to be changed much visually. To mention its features in order of least suggestive to the most, there are: none of the shirts being tucked in; two of the girls wearing suggestions of waistcoats, one of which is more akin to a crop-top considering it starts just underneath her breasts; and that one looks to be wearing a skirt but is in fact wearing an extremely high and tight pair of shorts with the pattern of the skirt. And don’t get me started on the dancing, or what any of all this has to do with voting.

Certainly, two girls are wearing clothes not dissimilar to normal school uniforms, and I think that when combined with the quasi-uniform patterns and designs of the other girl’s clothes, certainly would give the impression of normality with just a casual, single viewing. But repeated viewings and pausing reveals that 3 of the uniforms are anything but, and not at all like what you’d see at any Korean school, whether in Daegu or anywhere else.

Cultural Relativism?

Second point is perception. You and many others find the WG clothing and dance overly suggestive, while myself and many others do not. Who’s to say who’s correct? You say one of the girls strokes her breasts, I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestingly blase manner….

I won’t insult Chris’s intelligence by saying that he doesn’t know what cultural relativism is, but let me refer readers to When One Culture’s Custom Is Another’s Taboo by Barbara Crossette (New York Times, March 6 1999), to my mind a classic on the different but related and relevant subject of how “do democratic, pluralistic societies like the United States, based on religious and cultural tolerance, respond to customs and rituals that may be repellent to the majority?”. It’s also very short, well worth spending the 5 minutes it would take to read in its entirety. But for now, let’s consider just this: 

But going more than half way to tolerate what look like disturbing cultural practices unsettles some historians, aid experts, economists and others with experience in developing societies. Such relativism, they say, undermines the very notion of progress. What’s more, it raises the question of how far acceptance can go before there is no core American culture, no shared values left.

Many years of living in a variety of cultures, said Urban Jonsson, a Swede who directs the U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, in sub-Saharan Africa, has led him to conclude that there is “a global moral minimum,” which he has heard articulated by Asian Buddhists and African thinkers as well as by Western human rights advocates.

“There is a nonethnocentric global morality,” he said, and scholars would be better occupied looking for it rather than denying it. “I am upset by the anthropological interest in mystifying what we have already demystified. All cultures have their bad and good things.”

Murder was a legitimate form of expression in Europe centuries ago when honor was involved, Jonsson points out. Those days may be gone in most places, but in Afghanistan, a wronged family may demand the death penalty and carry it out themselves with official blessing. Does that restore it to respectability in the 21st century?

(bold added)

(Number 2 of the aforementioned series)

I hope that reference doesn’t make Chris rehash accusations of Orientalism against me, because the point I gained from that was that there are standards and limits that can not be crossed by the glib defence that him and I, and by extension Koreans and Westerners too, have merely different, but equally valid perceptions of what is and isn’t sexually suggestive. Somewhere out there, there are divisions between innocent and sexually suggestive that the vast majority of humans would agree upon, even though there will always be some individuals and groups of people that don’t for various reasons, and I think Gord explains very well why in this particular instance Koreans themselves do not see the Wondergirls as sex symbols.

But while they have limited exposure outside of Korea, the rest of the world does see them that way. Pictures or videos of the Wondergirls are certainly still some distance from child pornography, but then the first picture above especially and the place where I found them in particular give at least one demonstration of what’s being done with them and what non-Koreans consider them as, and that should at least give pause to the people who still protest that they’re nothing more than, say, innocent fashion shoots. And remove the Korean element from them, and the first thing most people familiar with the topic would say is that both photos above look like they’re from a Japanese schoolgirl photobook.

I’ll grant that despite my saying that there are limits to what 15 year-olds should be able to do and wear on national TV, it’s still a grey area and there are indeed issues of freedom of expression to consider too. But in Japan, the refusal of legislators to draw more specific lines between supposedly artistic pictures of underage girls in school uniforms and swimsuits and child pornography, for instance, led to nearly two decades of “art” photographers constantly pushing the boundaries, ultimately ending up last year with U-15s and even preteens in variously:

• their lingerie
• g-strings
• shoestring bikinis or whatever they’re called, with only the smallest of triangles covering their nipples
• doggy-style poses
• swimsuits stretched tightly over their labia while they’re on a gyrating chair simulating the “cowgirl” sexual position, their genitals sometimes only 10cm away from the camera.

All still technically legal because the law only prohibited nudity. It was only with those latter, most recent cases that legislators finally and belatedly stepped in and started making prosecutions (as I discuss here). I’m not saying that this will inevitably happen in Korea, Japan has a long pornographic tradition that Korea lacks for one, but not drawing lines between innocent and sexually suggestive dancing and photos at earlier points in Japan did ultimately lead from swimsuits to in-your-face child pornography there. So while sexually suggestive photos and videos of 15 year-old girls on TV will not lead to child pornography in themselves, unchallenged they certainly are a significant potential step in the same direction. And that is why the Wondergirls matter.

This is also connected to what Chris says later:

So far all I’ve seen regarding this issue from blogs like the Metropolitician and now the Grand Narrative are emphatic but nebulous statements that there is most definitely some correlation between the rise in popularity of wonjo gyojae and the increased sexualization of young women in Korea, OR that the WG are inappropriate because they might lead to REALLY bad things like that 6-year old girl who was really wearing next to nothing for no reason at all and dancing wayyyy more suggestively than the WG do in that youtube video. This is like when George W. said that gay marriage should not be allowed because, well if you let two men or two women get married, what’s to stop people from marrying their dogs or washing machines?

Chris does mention other factors behind the rise of wonjo gyojae/원조교제 than Korean teenagers’ increased sexualization as represented to me by the Wondergirls phenomenon, and these are all just as valid, but the absence of hard evidence for a correlation between, say, a future increase in teenage prostitution and the emergence of Wondergirls phenomenon, doesn’t mean that they can’t at least be a factor either. Even if they end up being 100% responsible, I’m not sure that hard evidence of a correlation that would satisfy Chris would even be possible, and am open to suggestions. But Chris seems to be saying that the absence of hard evidence means that media images of teenagers aren’t a factor in teenage prosituion at all, and that’s clearly not true. It would though, be difficult to accept if you didn’t view the above ads as sexual at all. Here is some extra evidence, although I sense that for some people there will never be enough:

Forced Sexualization, Cause and Effect

Actually, the second part of that original comment is the most revealing:

You say one of the girls strokes her breasts [in the first video], I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestingly blase manner….

Sure, she’s not working in a strip club, but her hands definitely go over her breasts, albeit very quickly. And I can’t imagine that there is a single woman in the world who wouldn’t make the same, really very unnatural gesture without knowing exactly what she’s doing. In that girl’s case, that she’s doing so in “an uninterestingly blase manner” is spot on, and suggests two possibilities:

1. That she knows what she’s doing and why a woman would do it, but her youth and sexual inexperience means that while she knows the basic mechanics of the gesture, she doesn’t really know how to pull it off in a more sexually appealing manner (ie, smiling, looking in the viewer’s eye, maybe licking her lips).

2. That she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and is only doing it because she’s being specifically told to do so by the producer of the video, and it’s thus to her it’s just another, uninteresting part of the video to be gotten over with. And judging by the other moves that the producer got her to which weren’t in the video, then I’d say that this explanation is much the more likely. See 3:02-3:32 of this video which shows the making of the commercial too:

My ass that that’s “just dancing”. Well, her ass rubbing against the big letter G at 3:26 to be precise. Why did the producer want her to do that? Maybe, just maybe, to use her ass to titillate male viewers, thereby helping to sell the product? Heaven forbid!

On a final note, and going back to the notion of hard evidence for links between the Wondergirls and other issues, I recall that there are a pair of orange books about Korean feminism sitting in most English sections of Korean bookstores which I’ve been meaning to buy ever since I started writing so much about Korean women’s body images several months ago (I don’t know the names sorry). I didn’t buy them earlier because they were full of mostly postmodernist waffle, but I desperately want one of them now because I recall that one essay in it discusses how Shim Mina/심민아’s (a.k.a “Miss World Cup 2002″) unconventional means of gaining public attention meant that, years later, it become perfectly acceptable for women to wear such revealing clothes in public, starting with similar national sporting events and increasingly outside of them too.

This is an example of supposedly “nebulous links” being more concrete than they first appear, and in this case may well have even provided part of the background to what the Wondergirls do being considered acceptable by Koreans. So I’ll try to find and buy the book soon.

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