Lusting After Teenagers…or the Maturing of Women’s Fan Culture?

When living at home forces young Koreans to keep their sexual encounters a secret, it’s no great surprise that Korean society strongly discourages open expressions of sexuality outside of marriage.

In particular, rare expressions of assertive female sexuality in the media seem to get parodied until they lose all their impact, if they’re not banned outright. And from teenagers? Simply unthinkable, despite abundant evidence of their sexual activity.

Which is not to say that they don’t exist. Rather, that while most Koreans will readily admit the sexual nature to, say, the clothing and dance moves of a 20 year-old female singer (at least privately), they will probably be much more reluctant to do so if she is 16.

Don’t get me wrong: regardless of their age, I think it’s perfectly natural to feel sexually-attracted to a fully-developed member of the opposite sex (acting on that attraction, however, is a different matter). Deny that sexual element though, and there are are few social inhibitions against grown men expressing their liking of teen members of girl groups like Girls’ Generation or the Wondergirls and so on.

Or are there? While 46 year-old Mr. Kim has no qualms about waxing lyrical about Girl’s Generation on the front cover of Metro newspaper above, I doubt that he would be quite so forthcoming in real life, nobody really fooled that his interest was entirely asexual. And only skimming the first few paragraphs when I first saw it, highlighting that subtext was my original intention in translating this article for you. After all, in just the third sentence you have him denying that he has a “Lolita complex.”

But actually the article is about how middle-aged Korean men and women are increasingly dominating young celebrities’ fan clubs instead. And as I’ll explain, this struck a chord with me because of what I’ve already read about women’s fan clubs earlier this decade.

Unfortunately I can’t speak for the male fan clubs, which I’ve never studied. But in short, I think that the demographic shift within Korean fan culture described is genuine, and so I’ve decided to make this post a discussion of the reasons for the shift that the article lacks. But first, the article itself:

Middle-aged People are Head Over Heels about Young Idols

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Fan Culture is Changing

#1. Mr. Kim (46), a department manager of a medium-sized business, knows the names and personalities of all 9 members of Girls’ Generation. He thinks that the Wondergirls and 2NE1 do not even come close in terms of purity and class. He dismisses accusations of having a Lolita complex, and says that watching the girls of Girls’ Generation, who are about the same age as his daughter, give him a feeling of life and vitality.

#2. Film company CEO Mrs. Kim (39), suffered severe depression after her movie did extremely badly 2 years ago. But she was able to recover because of her interest in male idol groups, and when she analyzes the charms of members of 2PM, or discusses the potential for the new group MBLAQ, she is indistinguishable from an expert in the music industry. Her dream is to make a movie like Attack on the Pin-up Boys (2007) that Super Junior starred in.

Middle-aged People Are Actively Participating in Fan Clubs

As the name implies, “older brother” fan club members used to be mainly teenagers, but this is no longer the case. But as active consumers of culture, middle-aged women passionate about flower men‘ and middle-aged men heavily into girl groups are actively changing fan culture.

For instance, on flower man Lee Min-ho’s fan club “Dave,” there is an “older sister” section of  for 30-50 year old women to exchange information about their star, and when there are fan meetings with him they make up over 80% of the audience. And whenever SS501 (James: if you don’t want to show your age, say “double-ess” rather than “ess-ess”!) have a concert in Korea or attend some event in their region, their middle-aged female fans prepare packed lunches with healthy foods such as red ginseng for them.

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And whenever there is an event featuring Rain, his middle-aged female fans call the media and request favorable coverage. Before the release of his first Hollywood movie Ninja Assassin (2009), they even delivered rice-cakes to them, a symbol of good luck for a new venture.

Indeed, it has become quite normal to only allow women older than the flower men themselves to join their fan clubs. And this is true for male-only fan clubs for female idols too. In the Girls’ Generation’s “Girls’ Generation’s Party” and the Wondergirls’ “Wonderful” fan clubs for instance, middle-aged men have regular virtual meetings where they exchange opinions about how the groups can progress and thoroughly how they can celebrate group anniversaries and birthdays and so on.

A New Fan Culture is Actively Forming

Many people have dim views of middle-aged men and women who don’t act their age, dismissing them as merely chasing after their lost youth. But an alternate view is that this demographic shift in membership is an inevitable change.

Professor Tak Hyeon-min, on sabbatical in the Cultural Contents Department of Hanyang University, said “People of the 386 Generation, who have finally established their own unique culture, are used to actively absorbing new things,” and that “from their 20s until now, they have demonstrated that they are the biggest consumers and purchasers of cultural products.”

Also, “members of this generation are stuck with heavy family, home, and/or social responsibilities, so as a means of escapism and renewing themselves, they have created a middle-aged fandom in a sense, fundamentally changing Korean fan-club culture in the process.” (end)

( “Oooh! Whatever shall we strut around in hotpants to sell next?” Source )

Now, the reasons for this shift? Well, I’d wager that most 30-something members of the female ones were also active “Red Devils” during the World Cup of 2002.

Granted, that sounds obvious. But for those that witnessed it, 2002 was a simply amazing time to be young and in Korea. And as it turned out, a watershed in Korean sexual politics too, primarily because of the unprecedented participation of women.

It is the factors that made that participation possible that makes this cohort of women so interesting. For they appear to be applying the same lessons to fan clubs today.

Consider how before the World Cup began, soccer was considered an exclusively male sport, and a rather dull and unglamorous one at that. Members of the national team even made less money than I did as an English teacher.

Within a few short weeks however, Koreans turned out on the streets in their millions to watch their team’s games on giant TV screens across the country. And – crucially – not only were two-thirds of them women, and their restrictions on the amount of skin they could publicly display suddenly lifted, but the male players’ bodies were transformed into a product for their consumption also.

True, this did build on trends already existing in music videos in the late-1990s, but only with the World Cup did it suddenly became socially acceptable to discuss men’s bodies in the media like men already did of women’s.

As an aside, please note that this is not contradicting what I said in the introduction about expressions of sexuality being restricted in the Korean media though. There are still limits, all too easy to overlook if a particular cultural product is studied devoid of its context.

For instance, consider one recent manifestation of the male objectification sparked by the World Cup, a commercial involving women admiring the abs of a half-naked male singer on a poster, then poking them to see if they are real. While it may appear rather “Western” though, one will struggle in vain to find references in the Korean media to what one might actually want to do with an attractive male singers or his abs. Similarly, consider how the Korean language has readily adopted the English word “sexy,” but is frequently used in ways that are completely devoid of anything remotely sexual (sometimes perversely so), or how it can even be quite a trial to get many Koreans to publicly admit that a women thrusting her buttocks in your face on television can be sexual.

To be fair, Korean films are rather different. And all that is not to say that the Western media is replete with discussions à la Sex and the City either. But sexual liberation in the Korean media is very much just a veneer, and it is important not to overestimate the extent of the changes I describe. Indeed, I could go on and point out how in 2002 Korean women could still not publicly discuss foreign men’s bodies in the same way they suddenly could for Korean men’s for instance (the Korean media laughing at Japanese women for doing so), and even today it is extremely rare to see foreign male-Korean female relationships in the Korean media. Also, while standards of dress for women did indeed change permanently, many people that had tolerated crop-tops, say, during the World Cup, were less willing to do so once they were no longer in the service of a national cause.

But rather than diminishing from Korean women’s achievements in 2002, perhaps these limits demonstrate just how remarkable it was that women effected any change at all?

Apologies for the whirlwind tour of 2002 I’ve provided so far, but that’s because I have already discussed it at great length here, which also has a list of the sources if you’re interested. It is one of those – Hyun-Mee Kim, “Feminization of the 2002 World Cup and Women’s Fandom” in Feminist Cultural Politics in Korea, ed. by Jung-Hwa Oh, 2005, pp. 228-243 – that I rely heavily on for the examination of oppa budae (오빠부대), or “squads of teenage female fans” that is my focus for the remainder of this post.

She notes that in 2002, one’s support for soccer was interpreted differently depending on one’s age and gender, and the dominant opinion on women’s sudden enthusiasm for it was that due simply to the male stars. As such, they were easily looked down upon as ppasnsuni (판순이), slang for female teens chasing after male entertainers, and often denounced by the media as “being subordinate to the stars and used for the commercial strategy of the management companies.” But this Frankfurt School reading of the relationship between the media and the consumer, which I’ve discussed in another context here, is a gross oversimplification:

Just because these women go fanatical over the male entertainers, it does not mean that they are blind followers, and the power relations between many of the women fans and the male stars are not fixed, but rather multivocal and dynamic. Looking at only the images represented in the Korean media with no information about the politics of fandom, these women in their teens and their 20s seem like reckless followers. But this World Cup provided a momentum for a new interpretation….(pp. 231-232)

Also:

Actually to the women fans, heterosexual desire and social activism are not separate….consumers of mass culture and followers of stars are carrying out “civil movements” within their social conditions through efforts such as fan club activities. Even if they may have initially become fans because they were attracted to the images and appearances of the soccer players, the woman fans create regulations and change the culture in the process of forming their identities as fans.

Usually, fans of a popular star wield a collective “power,” which helps the pop star to climb the ladder from being an “entertainer” to being a “star,” and this power is formed through certain rules and negotiations. This is why to have an identity as a fan is to consciously to learn specific behaviors.  For an oppa budae to demonstrate its power as a budae (squad), individual fans must train their actions and languages in an organized and systematic was. They must wear the same clothes, shout the same slogans, and show contained passion. Therefore, “fandom,” which signifies the identity as a fan of a star, is not something that is formed or practised abruptly. (p. 232)

And she gives further examples of the often considerable time and effort one must invest to become a respected member of an oppa buddae, also noting that collectively, they try to maintain “grace” in the face of attacks from other fan clubs and so on. Of course that is not always the case, as 2PM’s fans recently attacking Ivy for having the temerity to arouse…er…member Nikhun during a joint performance recently demonstrates. But that is an exception, and most importantly, it is not so much a description of female members of the Red Devils as what they brought with them to that group:

“Not a small number…have had this experience of fandom as teenagers and 20-somethings and have imitated and practiced basic actions that are required to root for and support stars. By devoting themselves to such efforts that demand time and money, fans not only consume image of stars, but also become acquainted with a certain “civil spirit” in the process of embodying fandom….the codes and action trained and familiarized by women fans in their teens and 20s were grafted onto the cheering culture of the Red Devils…(p. 233, my emphasis)

Bear in mind that the internet component of civil society is not to be underestimated in a country with such a recent experience of democratization, that relationships between 30-something women and 20-something women have become popular in Korean cinema over the past decade, and that – to paraphrase Hyun-Mee Kim – when women manifestly lack political and economic power in Korea, that they will gravitate towards displays of resistance and subversiveness in those arenas that they can affect a measure of change.

In which case, is it any wonder that nearly a decade later, the she-devils of 2002 would come to dominate fan clubs of male idols again?

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Korean Advertising: Just Beautiful Women Holding Bottles?

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Some words of wisdom from Londoner Bruce Haines, currently head of Korea’s largest ad agency Cheil Worldwide (제일기획):

Q) What’s one big difference between advertising in Korea and the UK?

A) Celebrity endorsement – a huge proportion of Korean ads depend on famous people. Of course, it’s not uncommon in the West for stars to endorse a product, but generally the ad has a core idea and makes use of the celebrity endorsement to enhance the original concept. Not so in Korea. In its crudest form, Korean advertising degenerates to beautiful people holding a bottle. This is one of the things holding back the reputation of Korean advertising worldwide.  (10 Magazine)

At first, I thought “Korean advertising degenerates to celebrities holding a bottle” would have been more accurate myself. And regardless of the rather unflattering picture of Wondergirls singer Sohee (안소희) I chose above!^^

But Haines’s wording does have a nice ring to it. And however obvious his point may be to readers, I confess that it would never have occurred to me personally. Spending most of my adult life in Korea, he made me realize that I fail to notice Korean advertising’s peculiarities sometimes.

Which got me thinking about others. An obvious one, at least to a blogger forcing himself to include more images of men in his posts(!), was that although male celebrities are increasingly used to advertise alcohol in Korea, I really struggled to find any men endorsing a soft drink to illustrate this post with.

Yes: even after half an hour spent flicking through my old Korean advertising magazines, this was still the only one I could think of (although as I write this, this recent one for Powerade is coming to mind; but the actors are not celebrities and thanks to Seri for pointing out that it features the group Epik High). If anyone can think of any more, then please let me know.* But if not, then overwhelmingly having women in Korean soft drink commercials aimed at women seems to provides additional evidence for their preference for passive approaches to losing weight, in the sense that “drink this and get a body like mine” – rather than, say, “drink this as part of a balanced, healthy lifestyle” – is the only narrative offered.

( Source: unknown )

Of course, soft drink commercials would say that. But the point is that this narrative of passivity is echoed in Korean advertising for a surprising array of products aimed at women.

In particular, as reader Seamus Walsh recently commented, it’s strange (and a pity) just how many Korean female singers get great bodies by dancing, only then to appear in advertisements claiming that it was all the result of drinking, say, a watery tea. A good illustration of which is the Brown Eyed Girls (브라운아이드걸스; above), who – to my great dismay – recently choose to endorse the diet company Juvis (쥬비스), a company I’d already criticized back in February.

And for alternatives? Again I’d struggle, as female celebrities advocating something involving mere exercise instead are unfortunately very rare, either personally or via endorsing related products like exercise equipment or sports clothing. BoA (보아) is one, but can anyone think of any others?

Lest you feel that I’m overemphasizing and/or exaggerating Korean differences regardless though, none of that is to deny that marketing to Korean women does indeed still share many similarities with that of Western countries for instance. And apologies for rehashing a topic already familiar to many readers, albeit from a new and – to me – rather unexpected angle.

But the differences are real, and as a final surprising demonstration of this, consider how gendered yogurt is in Western countries for instance, as demonstrated hilariously by American comedian Sarah Haskins below (see here for many more videos like it). As far as I can tell though, so far yogurt has yet to become “the official food of women” in Korea:

Is that difference because the idea of, well, “drinking” for health is so ingrained in the Korean psyche? Or perhaps for some other reason?

p.s. For examples of what Korean advertising does have to offer the world, see my “Creative Korean Advertising” series here.

*As soon as my head hit the pillow, a few more examples came to mind, and I realized I needed to make a greater distinction between different kinds of soft drinks: advertisements for tea-drinks at least do indeed almost exclusively feature women, but those for sodas are more mixed, and – with the exception of laxatives – the more medicine-like a health-drink is marketed as, and to be found in a pharmacy, the more likely it is to feature and be intended for men. But I think the distinction I identify in the text is still generally true, and as further evidence for that I suggest thinking of what celebrities you know of that have regularly endorsed any form of soft-drink. I’d wager that while several women will come to mind, you’d still be hard-pressed to think of any men!

Kim Daul’s Death: A Sense of Perspective

I despise Korean netizens.

No really: they have a political influence wholly out of proportion to their numbers, and are notorious for ruining celebrities’ careers, particularly those of women who challenge Korea’s conservative and hypocritical sexual standards. And while they’re not responsible for Korea’s culture of “noble” suicide themselves, their criticisms are undoubtedly the trigger for many.

Despite myself though, and probably against my better judgment, yet again I find myself playing devil’s advocate for them.

But first: for those of you that don’t know, Kim Daul (김다울) was a very successful Korean-born model, found hanging in her Paris apartment on Friday (she was 20). While she has been described as “an icon for her country” and “the ambassador for the beauty of Korean women” though, in fact she spent most of her life outside of the country, and – before last weekend at least – was not particularly well known inside Korea: of my fifty 20 and 30-something students for example, only two rather fashion-conscious students had ever heard of her.

And although I couldn’t put my finger on it when I first read it, that was the main reason I had problems with the following comment on her death by Micheal Hurt, on his blog Scribblings of the Metropolitician:

…One wonders if pressure from people back in the muthaland contributed to her death, but given the common factor of cyberbullying being in so many cases of prominent Korean figures killing themselves, I have my suspicions. It’s apropos, I guess, that we just finished talking about these cases in my lecture yesterday, the important of “chemyeon” in this rule-bound, neo-Confucian society, and how women are “socially disciplined” when they step out of line, e.g. the examples of “dog poop girl” or the social spectre of the “bean-paste girl.” Combine that into suicide being the #1 cause of death for Koreans in their teens, twenties, and thirties, and you see some sort of pattern here.

I guess this is the sad end to the story arc, and a “teaching moment,” I guess. I just wish the right people would get it and stop mercilessly attacking anyone who becomes famous or successful in this country. I’ll let the post peace out with her words, which I hope future cyberbullies take to heart…

Granted, Michael does allow for the possibility that Korean cyberbullying didn’t contribute to her death. But he certainly appears to be projecting that narrative onto it, and this is simply wrong. I didn’t realize just how wrong though, until I read the following comment by “eskeemo” at this forum:

I don’t want to take anything away from her tragic death, doubtless it is a tragedy, but sifting through the thread there are many sweeping generalizations. My Korean girlfriend has pointed out a few things we should all know about.

This is not a case of Korean society driving a well-to-do Korean girl to death. She had mental problems originating from her own country, which is not Korea.

First, has anyone noticed that Daul speaks with a strong Korean accent? Yeah, a strong one, because her native tongue is not Korean. She was raised in Singapore, spent her formative years there, and on her blog identified herself as culturally Singaporean, ethnically Korean.

Second, she spent relatively little time in Korea (she had been living in Paris at the time of her death). She was harangued by the Singaporean press more so than the Korean, where she was only moderately known. Worst most, she was fiercely harangued by her family, irrespective of country (her blog postings masked in “Korean society” lingo could in lieu be aimed at her extended family in Singapore and enemies).

Third, as a student she had few friends.

Again, I do not want to deflate or underestimate the circumstances surrounding her death.

Daul confides on her blog that she was problematic growing up. She befriended few peers, quibbled daily with school officials, fought with parents, and turned to modeling modeling as an escape (according to her blog). She also claims to have always been lonely. Mind you this is all before her brief stint in Seoul. Doubtless my GF points out Korean culture does drive people to death, oh God it does, and that she was badgered by the Korean press, but not to the extent of other press-channels. Daul had her own issues, exacerbated by yet other issues.

The above posts don’t have it right, and I don’t blame them because I was as reactionary as the guy above me until my GF pointed out some things. It’s not that simple.

With apologies to the readers who’ve been emailing since Friday for a post like this, but I could never have put that quite so succinctly. And, I confess, it led me to projecting a little myself.

In my earlier post on Kim Daul, I found it curious how English-speaking netizens were so ready to congratulate her for her defiance against critical comments by Korean netizens, despite no actual evidence for them. While it turns out that those had indeed existed, but had been deleted prior to writing her response, the point was still valid. Similarly, when I began planning this post this morning, I seemed to find a great many blog posts and forum threads blaming Korean netizens for her death, despite – as eskeemo demonstrates – the lack of any real evidence for that. But while those certainly exist, after a second look I’d have to admit that that definitely isn’t the majority opinion.

Instead, people are simply shocked and saddened by her tragic death, as is natural.

No, this isn’t an attempt to somehow “atone” for my earlier post; I was entitled not to have liked her blog. Nor has my opinion of Korean netizens improved by their relative lack of a role in this particular celebrity death, or that death made any less tragic by that fact that Singaporean rather than Korean netizens may have been more to blame for it. However trite and cliched it sounds though, or ironic coming from the author of a sociological blog, it behooves us to see her as an individual before anything else.

Rest in peace, Kim Daul.

Update: There is some interesting commentary at Sociological Images about a news story that mentions that “her blog contained many posts about the pressure and loneliness of being a model”, and yet has links and advertisements surrounding the story that “undermine any message that we should actually care about [that].” On the other hand, one commenter on that post argues that, like do here, SI is likewise erroneously presenting her death as part of a wider narrative. In this case though, it’s one about excessively thin models: 

It seems to me that Daul had severe depression, and I think acknowledgement of that and taking the opportunity to increase awareness of depression is being side-lined here in favour of making another criticism of the size of models.

Read the rest on your own.

( Image sources: first and third – Sosohan Fashion Blog {NSFW}; second – Manzgood )