South Korea is a strange place for women, certainly much freer than any developing country, women command important jobs in South Korean companies and are able to have six figure salaries. Whilst there has not been a sexual revolution, and social mores are still more restrictive in Sexual practices. An illustration of this is one of my best Korean friends is a really normal guy, kind, funny, with a slightly cheeky wit. You would expect him to be a demon with ladies; not a bit of it, he has a very steady girlfriend, and he knows to the day when they got together. What is so wonderful about this couple for me is how normal they are by Western standards; they have similar interests, the same "major" etc. The funny thing is, the boy is better looking. He told me his society is plagued by what is called in Korean "lookism". Yet he is not defined by that, and he does not critically engage with his culture. He doesn't really see how terribly shallow South Korean popular culture is even by the low standards of western popular culture in general. He told me he likes his girlfriend for her heart (in the Korean world view there is no heart/mind distinction). This male friend of mine is irreligious, but he has the sexual ethics of a strict Christian; he says he will not have sex until he gets married. This is an old way and he is not the only man in Korea like this. Its strange sometimes, you meet people who are on the surface very western, they watch western TV, listen to Rap, and yet they aren't.
Another close Korean friend of mine has exactly the same sexual ethics, and he is even more steeped in Americanization, considering the fact he lives in America. It's very weird to hear a liberal, ethnic Korean with an American accent tell me, he has never had sex and doesn't want to think about it until he gets married. Part of me is quite envious, sex is so confusing and complicating. But here is the paradox, my second friend likes women who have been surgically "enhanced". What is meant by this is that the woman is made to look more westernized through surgery.
The most popular surgery in Korea is the splitting of the eyelid. I have feminist Korean friends who have fathers that want them to get surgery in order to increase their confidence with men. Its really unbearably sad for me to think of otherwise descent parents pressuring their children to have their faces (the very representation of their soul, their uniqueness), mutilated, defaced, turned into a lie, in order to please the rabble. This is the paradox of westernization, it liberates women from old pre-modern patriarchal power structures. Specifically women are no longer forced to stay at home, they have economic freedom. Yet in the case of South Korea, the cultural westernization has just created a new, unrealistic perception of beauty. Women are supposed to have bigger noses, straighter cheeks and bigger eyes. I have arguments with people about this, they say it is a choice, and many people do it for themselves and not for men. But this is clearly bullshit, we define ourselves in looks terms by what we desire, and what the desired wants. Its Stockholm syndrome, the prison guards, the dumb rabble who wants vacuous, mutilated, plastic women has won; so many women in South Korea now think of their own interests and that of the object of their desire as one and the same. A whole new internalized patriarchy exists.
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I think cross-cultural comparisons like this one (maybe not quite) are really important, because they demonstrate to their observer how much of our world is shaped by social constructs and shallow masquerades, which are much easier to detect if seen in another culture and then traced back to the equivalent in one's own.
Yeah, it seriously in korea society,cos South Korean think, beauty is 'westerner' , you know, westerner tall and big nose big eyes, ,etc, that they wanna change it
and company, especially for women, Interviewer awfully too care bout face and body sth(as far as i know,not exactly ^^:)
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