"Fetish"

Freud says that objects of fetish are simply things charged with the sexualized memories of early childhood development. For example, he argued, when little tots lock their little Freudian libidos onto Mom, her feet are the parts of her body often in closest proximity. Post-Freudian arguments would more broadly point to fetishized objects parts metonymically representative of the whole – the high-heeled female foot, in this interpretation, is an object given sexualized power by society as the embodiment of something essentially feminine and sexual. The high heel is a both a symbol of the entire sexually desirable female figure herself, even as the object/part itself takes on its own sexualized meaning. Put even more simply, it is a part that represents the whole (e.g. high heel=woman), but has special meaning as an object with meaning unto itself. The high heel is woman or femininity itself, a fact that helps charge the object with its special meaning.

I kinda like this argument the best (and we can throw in some Freud there, too), because if we assume that Korean society in general 1) values women more for their appearance and sexual attractiveness than any other attribute, and 2) their bodies are constantly presented in a quantitatively and qualitatively more sexually commodified way (see previous posts), then we can come to the tentative conclusion that women in Korea are much more fetishized. They simply value, utilize, wear, and purposefully display more of the totem objects of sexualized femininity. Indeed, as we look at the heavy accessorizing that is positively a pastime here on the streets of almost any neighborhood where large numbers of people go, this almost goes without saying, without even need of the long, theoretical argument that I just presented. But we know darn well that if I didn't give it, people would just say that I was talking out the side of my neck. At least you know now on exactly what bases I am resting my assumptions.

Since images of women's fetishization is part of what I'm trying to capture on film, being apologetic for my male gaze – the "fetishistic scopophilia" that I was told during my first film class all heterosexual men possessed – would be counterproductive and downright futile. Of course, sometimes I feel like a big, fat pervert trying to capture the pull of the fetish with my camera, especially since disconnecting my pleasure in the process is impossible; but not taking a picture and regretting it later is a far worse feeling than that caused by an occasional passersby looking at me as if I were a big brown pervert with a camera. And to a certain extent, they're right anyway. As more than just a passive watcher, when I am enabled by my camera, fetishistic scopophilia is in full effect.

So let me drop the academic façade that most people entering into controversial waters tend to hide behind, and let my male gaze guide the rest of this essay, just as it has my camera. Let me break down for you how I see the image of sexualized woman as nothing more than the sum of her fetishized parts. As a person possessing desire for the female form here - whether you are a straight man, lesbian, or gay man who just appreciates pure fabulosity itself – perhaps you might recognize some of the parts that draw not just my own eye, but yours as well. And if they weren't really important, why else would these parts be the object of so much attention, consumption, and presentation? And these are not fetishes I noticed before coming to Korea - some of them are quite learned, and recently so. Freud ain't in effect as much as many of us would have it. As the more contemporary, albeit fictional, psychoanalyst Hannibal Lecter so aptly observed "We covet what we see every day." Let's think about what those things are on the level of fetishistic, photographic detail – from coiffed head to pedicured toe – and see what we come up with:

- the sheen of shiny, straight black hair, like in the Prell™ commercials
- the confident "hair flip," or twirl, or continued absent-minded stroking
- big, black false eyelashes, flitting up and down, up and down
- big, round, black contacts to make doe-eyes with
- shiny peach lip gloss, always reapplied
- the ever-present Korean female "pout"
- the paleness of the classical Korean face, as maintained by whitening powders, creams, and base/foundation Twincake™
- big eyes and noses with European bridges
- French-manicured, slender fingers always formed in poses of feminine delicacy
- upper arms that are similar in thickness to the forearms
- stockinged thighs peeking out from under checkered, pleated skirts
- thin legs in jeans made to look longer in heels reaching out under an overly long pantleg
- the rounded legs of "office girls" in stocking and slippers
- thigh-hi tights like in the old Britney Spears schoolgirl video nobody ever admits to having made any effort to watch
- knee-high tights
- pedicured feet and toes in the barest sandal heels possible, coupled with a high skirt, to create the "near-naked" effect
- heels dangling from suspended feet, twirling in the air
- the "skinny fat" legs that are thin, yet jiggle with each step because of the lack of exercise and likely impact of past eating disorder
- pigeon-toed walking
- overly effeminate hip-swaying and sashaying, a la Ru Paul

Now, I'm not saying that all Korean young women display these totems, or engage in the specific behavior described above. And the fetish elements listed above is not exhaustive. The point is that all of the little fetishes are fairly universal, and are practiced by women in my own culture, as well as other places I have been that have thriving consumer cultures that fetishize women. They are all elements that are designed to catch the male gaze. But what is different is that when I am in America, these fetishes and totems don't occur with nearly the same frequency as they do here. In fact, they occur with a low enough frequency as to mark someone who engages in a large number of these fetishes at the same time as unusual. Here, it's more common, I would humbly argue, than not.

My male gaze is always engaged here, whereas in the States, even on the Berkeley campus, which is supposed to be home to America's weirdest and wild, I can turn it off. Or my gaze isn't activated enough for it to be constantly noticeable. If the fetish signals given off by women were detectable as a tick on a mechanical detector, in America, I would get occasional clicks as I pass by the occasional outright fetishistic display, with rapid buzzes caused by a relative few number of women who've really laid it on thick and heavy. In Korea, the sound emanating from my detector would be more of a constant dull roar, increasing and decreasing in volume and density, depending on where you went. This is how I see Korea as different from America, or most other places in the West I have ever been to – well, besides Italy.

So, I said in a previous post that the very character of feminity is different here, and that it's not a fundamental difference in form as much as it is simply a matter of sheer effort. The interesting test of this idea lies in considering the way men of different cultures visually and physically consume women here.
Applying my logic within a sort of self-enclosed set of conditions, like an Einsteinian "thought experiment," let's think about the ever-popular and (from my eye) strangely controversial topic of foreign men who date Korean women.

We know the arguments. Foreign men - especially white, North American men - enjoy all kinds of sexual license with Korean women, alternatively loving and leaving them. Korean women are hapless dupes under the spell of unscrupulous white men who come to take advantage of the cultural capital of their priveleged passports, English native speaker status, white skin, and most importantly - the innocence and trust of the Korean female. What's more, the ultimate evil rears its ugly head as white men "exoticize" and "objectify" Korean women. Oh, lawdy, no! Hide de wimmins!

And I'm not saying that there aren't a heaping helpin' of sleazy foreigners who are only here for life that is not much more than easy money and beaucoup bootay. C'mon. You know who you are. Back when I was here in 1994, 90% of the people I saw in Korea were not much of a step above bail jumpers, straight up. All the money was in Japan (with the powerful yen), Korea was much more ruff, ruff, ruff around the edges, and Korea was still sort of under the radar of even the most ardent Asiaphiles. Contracts were worth not even the paper they were printed on, and hagwon owners did unspeakable things to keep their warm, foreign bodies prisoner. Who, other than a fugitive from justice, would come here? Well, another 5% were the Men in Black, who brought the Bible and a buddy to keep them clean amidst a whole lotta unholy temptation. Then there were the last 5%, of which I was a part, who came in really specific, yet random ways, as part of the Peace Corps in the old days, or the Fulbright ETA program, which was the latter-day reincarnation of that venerable program after it had been shut down in the 80's. There were also a few people who were simply curious, truly open-minded, and simply here for the adventure. I always tipped my hat to that 10% of us who were all here on a mission – whether personal or otherwise.

But don't let all this qualifyin' and dodgin' the issue fool you: the majority of foreigners at the time were male, and the majority of us waegukin were pretty slimy. Nowadays, things are decidedly different, despite what certain "liberal" comrades of mine say about their "motives". I find the perhaps less-than-honorable motives of some members of my gender fairly non-surprising. It's not a matter of a particularly problematic way of looking at Korean women; it's really just a question of the relative amount of social capital that the exoticism of foreignness and Americanness provides.

So, it's not just the heady cocktail of exoticized, racial difference topped off with a spritz of unequal power relations between nationalities - as most detractors of interracial mixing and/or people who are "concerned" about the "power dynamics" tend to imagine in terms of the stereotyped image of the oversexed and predatory, white male English teacher sowing his oats with hapless Korean virgins - but without even going into what I think is often a façade for plain old racist uncomfortableness with seeing evidence of race mixing, there's something else to be described here.

What is more interesting to me is the fundamental way men and women interact here, how Korean "men" and "women" signify themselves as gendered and sexualized beings in this culture. I would argue then, that the white male hagweon teacher with a case of sex on the brain isn't necessarily just looking at Korean women as exotic, racialized objects to be conquered, although that is part of the picture, surely, in some cases. But I think that particular guy is also picking up on the way gendered sexuality and relations happen in general, as well as how they happen in Korea, especially since the signals themselves - the glint of thigh peeking out of a short skirt, the extra curve of the calves created by high heels, meticulously-applied makeup, the ubiquitous straight perm falling around the sides of the face, an affected and knowingly cutesy pout, specks of light caught on gold anklets and hoop earrings, accentuated by the nowadays de rigeur pedicure, along wth myriad other accountrements ad nauseum - are not so culturally specific.

It is certainly not the far more culturally specific charm of a coy, half-hidden smile behind a veil, nor is it the Chosun-era sexy curve of the upturned big toe in a white, traditional shoe peeking out from beneath the skirtline of a pink hanbok. The fetish signs given nowadays are, for all intents and purposes, universal in their meaning. A Korean woman could easily walk down the streets of Paris or Cairo and turn heads, were she appropriately armed with all the necessary fetishistic ammunition. It is important to illustrate that if a western woman wore what Korean women wear back in her home country, the signals would be clear, even if the background contexts are different in terms of relative levels of accepted fetish (e.g. a woman wearing knee socks, high heels and a Britney Spears skirt in the middle of winter in Ohio might get cars stopping, whereas in New York City, she might get just a few ogling stares, and in Seoul at the moment, she would just be part of the crowd.)

My point here is that foriegn men don't necessarily fetishize Korean women differently than Korean men do. They just have more sexual and fiscal capital that results from possessing any or all of the following factors above what everyday Korean men have, namely: white skin, an American passport, being a native speaker of English, and in general being a curio for adventurous Korean women. And let's not forget the agency of the Korean women in this equation, and that it takes two to tango. After living here for as long as I have, in as many places and roles that I have, I would say that the assumption that social and sexual power rise in direct proportion to one another is correct one, and the associated bad behavior that I have seen men possessing a lot of such power has been pretty equally spread across nationalities in the male gender.

Put simply, both Korean and non-Korean men with high degrees of sexual capital, seem to behave equally "badly" towards women. This is why both white English teachers and hunky Korean men with money tend to have the same stereotypes among many Korean women. And if we want to talk - albeit anecdotally - about bad ethics in the sowing of male oats, Korean American men are by far the worst offenders. The KA's I have seen here get the full force of the American power trip, but justified and rationalized by the idea that it's ok, since these are "our" women. In other words, it's ok because it's not interracial. On the part of the the criticizers, sounds like good ol' fashioned race thinkin' to me. In the big picture, there are not bad guys, or good guys. The number of "bad guys" seems to be - at least in part - a reflection of the general state of gendered interaction in The Land of the Morning After. And nobody's less of an asshole just because they're part of the same gene pool. To flip the warped logic of identity politics on its ear - at least the "white boys" have the excuse of being exotifying foreigners. What excuse do Korean and Korean American men have? Is it ok to not receive the same criticism and social derision just because they're "our" women? Or that it doesn't become evidence of the ultimate sin of identity politics – "selling out" – which is often academic-speak cover for more old-fashioned feelings of loathing for so-called "anti-miscegenation." Something to make you go "hmmm."

Comments

[gordsellar]

Of course, one has to ask the question of how these men have such sexual capital. One could delve into deep history for excuses, really: the status of women in Korea never was better than now, perhaps, but in the beginning of the Joseon period it took a nosedive.

Still, that was hundreds of years ago, and women were in comparably bad positions in places where such a state of affairs no longer exists (at least not to the degree you're talking about in Korea).

See, the thing is, when you talk about sexual capital, the question that comes up for me is, "Who is recognizing this currency?"

The answer to the question is interesting because it seems to me we only get there by looking at how women look at the men who are gazing at them.

Now, even the most handsome foreign man doesn't stand a chance with the majority of Korean women, if you ask me. Yet, I believe that for the same reason, the same foreign man has an increased likelihood of "successfully hookinh up with" a smaller and specific subset of Korean women. The reason for both is not his foreignness, mind you: it is the Korean woman's *fetishization* of his foreignness.

After all, gaze is a two-way-street. Many is the time when I have been walking down the street, minding my own business, and caught a Korean woman staring at me, with curiosity, with intensity that surprises me, and so on... sometimes I'd swear it was a bizarre combination of "Come get me!" and "Don't even dream about it, weirdo!" which I've heard some black American men report they have gotten from white women.

And then she never speaks to me, never even tries. Many was the time (back when I was single) when a Korean woman flirted with me in halting English and fled (perhaps afraid I might proposition her) when it seemed apparent it was getting time to leave the bar. Hell, one of the first words I ever learned in Korean was "saeng-ma", which means sex maniac. I was told this because, in one of those bars frequented by college boys and staffed exclusively by pretty, fetish-displaying young women, I was asking the barmaid who was chatting with me to explain how to say this and that in Korean... things like "squid chips" and "popcorn" and "beer", as this was really soon after my arrival. I was told that I was tempting her and trying to get her to sleep with me, and the subsequent (and not too harsh) conversation with the guy who told me that was quite surprising and revealing.

What are the fetishes of white foreign men?

• They're sex maniacs, as everyone knows. Their sex organs are extra-big. (Don't I wish.)


• They all have big, beautiful eyes. Their eyes are always blue.


• They can't speak Korean or read Hangeul.


• They're inevitably transient, as all white foreigners eventually go back to America.


• They're all very interested in Korean girls, who are the prettiest girls in the world.


• They're all well-to-do, because America is a right country.


• They're all American.


• They don't like Korean food, and can't eat it, the poor things.


• Every one of them looks like some famous white guy. Even I, when I was 30 kilos overweight, looked just like Chandler on Friends.


• They're all lonely and miss their mothers. (Well, some of us do miss our families, but Koreans tend to imagine we miss our families the way they describe after long trips.)


• They're all very sexually experienced, and have been involved in a lot of relationships before. (Which is, some of my student-friends admitted finally, the assumption that led them to come to me for love advice all the time.)


• They come from a society of sexual freedom comparable to what you see in Hollywood.


• They're exotic.


• In general they're bad boys who are willing to do things Korean men would never do.

Okay, my list is far from exhaustive and it meanders a bit, but it does address the way Koreans—actually both male and female alike—fetishize male white-foreignness.

But Korean women also fetishize Korean men, and Korean men display those totems too: the immaculate clothing, the hair, the style of glasses, the macho attitude that's put on sometimes, like when a man steals a woman's ice-cream cone and then drags her across the street (great photo, that one!), and so on. While Korean men come in all shapes, sizes, and dispositions, the Fetishized Male Korean is a sweater-clad, smiling, tough, loving, tearful-during-melodramas, macho when necessary, honest, and deeply dependent creature... as seen on television. Many Korean women seem to expect this of Korean men. Even the "bad behaviour" seems to me to be a totem of the fetishized male (foreign or Korean) in general, from the Korean woman's point of view. In fact, Korean womens' tolerance of all kinds of pathetic crap from men, both Korean and foreign, is something I have a great deal of trouble explaining without recourse to the idea that they kind of idealize it (or totemize it) as part of the troubled, fixable nature of men. Or something.

Of course, I am speaking in generalities here, just as you are. There are Korean women who see through this crap and have no time to waste with the majority of it, though even they are occasionally susceptible to it—just as we men who don't have any interest in princesses still sometimes get our gaze in during walkabout.

There was one gaze-relationship I noticed you missed out mentioning in your post: you mentioned male-female,and of course noted that there is agency with women in relation to men. But what about the female-female gaze? In my wanderings around Jeonju lately, I've noticed my girlfriend noticing and commenting on the more spectacular-looking examples of Korean women in full totem-display mode.

I tend to go back to evolutionary roots when puzzling through things like this, and it's old hat to retrace the old argument but really, it makes sense that to some degree, women are displaying those totems not only to attract the male gaze, but also to secure a kind of female gaze as well. Whether it's to ward of competition from their mates, or to fend off too much negative attention from other females (who are often as bad as men when it comes to telling a woman she should get some damned makeup on), or simply a kind of badge of fellow-womanhood that secures a kind of recognition as "one of the girls"—or to what degree it is each of these—I'm not sure, but the female-female gaze is something that one must not overlook when considering the fetishizing of women.

Hell, I'd go one step further and note that the self-directed gaze probably also plays some part in this. Do what degree women feel themselves to be feminine and womanly is probably in part related to the totems they display, especially considering the way in which ajummas are radically desexualized beings. A noteworthy fact is that the women you're talking about here are all either agashi (young and single), or else they're just barely ajummas and able to pass as agashi. Control over one's identity in this sense is critically important in an age-conscious society, which may be why women here go to what seem like great extremes to us to be "girly" (not just feminine, but also apparently youthful).

For that matter, it seems to me as if Korean and foreign men generally speaking have certain fetishistic perspectives on one another too. The common stereotypical one (far from reality in most of the Korean men I know) is that Korean men envy foreign men all that sexual capital and depravity (and the license to get whatever they want). A lot of foreign women, by the way, often share this view of foreign men, who usually are more interested in dating Korean women than foreigners. Foreign men, on the other hand, often end up painting all Korean men with the same brush as misgynistic, ultra-conservative, whoring, bad at sex, childish, and selfish... a stereotype so common that some of my friends and I just raise eyebrows whenever someone starts in on that particular, sad rant. How foreign men is something a little more problematic, but mostly they're either "like one of the guys", or else maladjusted, bitchy, unattractive blobs; and yes, it often stays at that level, where attractiveness is the determining factor in the judgment. After all, foreign mens' gaze is saturated with totems, and in some days the totem-less foreign women effectively ajumma-ize themselves to everyone else around them (and perhaps even to themselves).

Which leads me back to Franz Fanon, again and again. What a thorny, strange mess it is. Maybe my familiarity with the Fanon model (from _Black Skin, White Masks_) is why I think if you want to investigate this carefully, the whole quadrangle of Korean man-Korean woman-foreign man-foreign woman will need to be examined.

Anyway, I am curious to see how you continue on this thread. It's a fascinating subject.

[gordsellar]

"America is a right country"? I meant rich. Ooops.

[Nomad]

Michael - another excellent post.

Gord - "Now, even the most handsome foreign man doesn't stand a chance with the majority of Korean women, if you ask me."

Can you elaborate on that statement a little bit?

[gordsellar]

Nomad,

I think that a majority of Korean women are absolutely not interested in any relationship (even a fleeting one) with foreign men.

For some, it's just not even on the radar, it's too weird or strange or different, with the stakes for difference being very very high in this society.

For other women, they might be curious about such a thing, or have an interest in a specific foreign man, but the other considerations outweigh this: familial pressures, up to and including parental threats of disownment, an example many women I've known have mentioned when asked (especially those who secretly date foreigners); another is the reactions and difficulty of dealing with friends in such a situation. Some friends react badly, and as some women are aware, one sometimes finds oneself between worlds no matter how things turn out.

Then there's dealing with the society in general. I don't know about Seoul, but anyway, Seoul is only sort-of in Korea, in my opinion. The rest of the country is ten or more years behind in the liberalization department, in terms of relationships between foreigners and Koreans. In the sticks it takes a strong woman to shrug off the stares, weird comments, and other rudeness exhibited by total strangers, including cab drivers and "concerned citizens" who take it upon themselves to inform her of her betrayal of the nation, her depravity, or whatever.

Then there's the often-claimned fact—I hardly think it's true of all women all the time, but it is sort of true of a lot of women some of the time, anyway—is that dating is something that can only happen once the man is seen is marriageable. Out here in the sticks, anyway, or at least in Jeonbuk, this actually does govern a lot of womens' dating lives; why waste the time and energy on a man you "know" won't marry you, or isn't going to stay in the country? The widely held belief is that foreigners always leave, so relationships with foreign men are assumed to be transitory a lot of the time. For someone brought up within the reach of an amazingly powerful propaganda machine (deployed in the public education curriculum) that people of Korea are "of one blood", misgivings of miscegenation—making half-Korean babies, called dui-gi, is not really something the society respects, or is even polite about—is also inexorably tied to marriage, since marriage and reproduction are almost (because of Confucian tradition and resultant family expectations) almost synonymous... many young women get pregnant within a year of marriage, and it's quite explicitly expected to happen, from what I'm told, if not in the first year, well, then soon. Making a half-and-half baby probably ain't too likely to please grandma, any way you slice it.

And then there's just the anxiety so many people outside of Seoul feel towards foreigners. In some places you're still pointed at in shock, and I'm not kidding. It doesn't happen much in Jeonju, but it's still quite common in smaller cities and towns. (And this is white people. Blacks, Indians, and other non-white foreigners cause a shockwave of attention that outrivals even an oriental chick in a Britney Spears skirt in Nebraska would get, and it's not quite as positive either.)

(I should note this kind of pressure applies not just to women, but also to men. Men are expected to marry nice Korean girls, who can cook Korean food and teach kids Korean values. It excludes not just white foreigners, or nonwhite foreigners... it also excludes Asian foreigners, though less violently, I suspect. I know a guy who was deep in love with a Chinese girl, and wanted to marry her. His mom forbade it on the grounds that she couldn't make kimchi and a Chinese could never learn how to do it right, either.)

There are, of course, those for whom those kinds of pressures don't come into play. The less social (or monetary, in fact) capital a female Korean has, the less likely she'll play the game. The less happy she is within Korea, the more likely she'll be willing to break the rules, and risk hooking up with an outsider, and maybe even being "taken back to his country" after some time. The more critical she is of these ideas, or the more liberal her family is, the more likely she'll be less concerned about these things.

But I mean, there's only really a small percentage of people in any society who are truly willing to fly in the face of convention. I suspect it's even fewer when the penalties for doing so are as grave as they are here.

And by a chance, I mean both "getting involved" in a longer-term sense, and and in a short term sense, though of course the long term sense is more of an issue... maybe more women would be willing to experiment for a night, or a week, or a month, in relative secrecy. Far fewer would allow their violation of the norms become public knowledge or big enough a part of their lives to affect its general shape.

Does that clear up what I mean about that?

And yes, I want to echo Nomad: this series is excellent, Michael. Sorry if I am commenting too much here, I'm just so caught up in finding someone else thinking about some of the same things I'm thinking about these days. It's like meeting someone on the street singing the same song that you're humming to yourself as you walk past.

[Kotaji]

Excellent stuff... Particularly your annhilation of identity politics.

[hardyandtiny]

Good work, a bit closer to the fact that the physical world is a figment of the imagination.

[craig]

quote:

"But what is different is that when I am in America, these fetishes and totems don't occur with nearly the same frequency as they do here."

I see new teachers sometimes trying to block this out. I know I did when I first came here. Now after many years here, in certain situations ~ not all, I can be an unabashed oglist.

[reader]

Isn't there an image here in this clause "if a western woman wore what Korean women wear back in her home country" that might give some small clue as to why "in America, these fetishes and totems don't occur with nearly the same frequency as they do here"? Your own itemized list of fetishized images reveals the dependency of so many of them on underweight body types. Not only the items where you mention it, such as "slender fingers", "'skinny fat' "legs that are thin", "upper arms that are similar in thickness to the forearms", "thin legs in jeans" but also the others, such as the "knee-high tights" and the "stockinged thighs" are likely to go unnoticed on a woman with a weight problem. You make enough generalizations that I would say I'm safe in postulating that overweightness just doesn't "occur with nearly the same frequency" in Korea as it does in North America. I think it bears mentioning if you compare frequency of fetish elements, which you do.
Having said this, I don't believe it hurts your argument significantly. You've already mentioned the "sheer effort" on the part of Korean women. I don't believe that that alone can account for the general differences in physique but at the very least they are related. Moreover, the absence of totems on Western women can perhaps be traced, to some degree, to the relatively small percentage of the population who conform to ideal of female beauty or to the fact that this ideal has been denounced in Western society so as to "mark someone who engages in a large number of these fetishes at the same time as unusual".
I am surprised that neither you nor Gordsellar would point out living alone (or at least independently of parents or other family), often in large apartments, as part of the sexual capital possessed by foreign men. As for the part of the foreign men, while I agree with your summary of motives on most accounts, let's not forget sheer numbers as an explanation for the stereotype of foreign men dating Korean women. I haven't seen these, mind you, for the teaching population but I've never been in a gathering or a workplace where foreign men didn't outnumber foreign women by at least three to one and if you count the U.S. military, there is no contest. If you assumed there were any reason whatsoever for a foreign man to end up with a foreign woman before a Korean woman, the vast majority would still be out of luck. If you assumed there were no correlation, of course, foreign women constitute only a tiny percentage of the total eligible female population and so any foreigner who ends up with a foreign mate could be viewed, as having beaten the numbers game or perhaps as having made a "racialized" choice.
I am surprised by this comment: "My point here is that foreign men don't necessarily fetishize Korean women differently than Korean men do." I am still baffled by the degree to which an arbitrarily commonplace foreign man can seem to attract so much more attention from Korean men than an attractive Korean woman.

[salome]

Dear Michael,

quite a writing and reading you have started going there. A passionate one, and it should be so
because everything starts out of passion, as it is well known. But what exactly is your passion, or pain
about? What do you want to know? About yourself as well?
You see, I'm trying to put all this in a different perspective. To make things more clear,
I must say I'm a 32 year old foreign woman, married to a Korean man and we have two sons.
And having lived that much I see your critisisms and questioning as a search for your own sexual identity.
Sounds strange uh? and who am I to tell you this? But lets' see - you try to analize things that you analyze, I wont
repeat all this again. You take pictures of women and you are brave and self conscious to admit you do it as a male,
that's fine. But you do it with dissaproval, too, you give bad names as "Fetish" and princessdesease and more. And then trying
to be faire to women, you look for explanations to their dieting and suffering- hair does and high heels and even plastic surgery
in the way men want to see women, and then, why do men want to see women like that, and why do they treat women bad, but then again,
why women put up with a lot of mistreating from the men? Never ending story.
Because I have two sons, I'm concerned with these questions, especially from the man's point of view. I think I have solved my point of
view as a woman, but we are talking not about that (though it could be helpfull, too). So I had a luck to come across a book on man's identity.
It's written in French, I have looked for an English translation, but no such look. It's from the Man's studies field, sorry cannot
remember authors name now, the book is not with me now, but it's title is "XY. On Man's Identity". And I think I have found really satisfying
answers there.
The most amazing and eye openning insight was that men construct their sexual identity through denying and opposing, while
women are just accepting it. Men are xy, women are xx. May seem too simbolic and simplified, but there are plenty of examples from the different
cultures of rituals for boys turning into men, some very cruel and scary ones. Every boy is born from a woman and he spends some time in this particular
feminine world, but when becoming a man he must see a woman as sexual partner, not as a care giver anymore. So a boy needs to learn to hate
everything from a womans world, to fear not to become like her again, to "kill"his mother. He must be everything what is not a woman - agressive, ugly, harsh,
strong. He learns to desire a woman, conquer her, but still hate her, fear her and never love her. But women, they are comfortable with
their sexuality, they love beauty, sensual things. All these things - clothes and heels and hair is fun and it's celebration but not a
sacrifice.( Plastic surgery is a problem of conformity, not of sexual identity.) Me too, I enjoy wearing high heels because my mother did as to be
like her, but not to fetishize her. I want to look like a woman, not like a man, and I always wonder at "nice" girls in khakis, stripe shirts and
thick soles boots, with no make-up of course. Why men like them - is it because they are no more diffetent and no more scary, but as familiar
as another male aquantance? They look like men maybe they act like men as in "yopkijogin kunyo"?
When I talk to my male friends about that, some of them run and hide and call this a crap, but some hope that there would be more understanding
on their part, because man's life is tough, more tough and deprived and miserable than woman's.
I know there are holes in this message, so you are welcome to ask or comment any ideas you might have.

[gordsellar]

reader,

Actually, more than half the time I've spent living in Korea, I have not lived alone. Now I live in a 13-byeong apartment, though some of that is eaten up by the parking lot space alloted to me, and the size of my hallway, and whatever. I live in a plain one-room full of bookshelves and my lowly yo, and while it's not a case of a roomate-in-a-oneroom that some of my college student friends had to live with back in Iksan, it's not a huge luxury apartment like you might imagine. In fact, many, many hakwon teachers have shared accomodation, often with other foreign coworkers (sometimes, as you can see in rant forums online, very weird foreigners), and while it's not always an impediment to dating Korean women, it can be an impediment to the kind of necessary private time of a couple that functions as most foreigners would expect.

That said, I think plenty of couples (wholly Korean and half Korean alike) probably make do with other locations for their privacy time. A guy at work actually once walked in on a couple at a campus club room on a Saturday, who were on the verge of coitus. I know of people who've done it in an unoccupied gwallishil (you know, a security guard's booth) and in various DVD/Video/Norae-bangs. This is, according to young people I know, not so unusual... deprived of any mainstream possibility for privacy, couples find it wherever they can. (There was a movie, I think set in Beijing or Hong Kong, about this very struggle, apparently... it was in a film fest booklet but I never saw the film, though it sounded funny.)

I think one of the things you've brought up here is that the analysis of the foreigner's identity is crucial to the foreigner's analysis of the identity of the Korean woman dating the foreign man. That is, foreign mens' identity as foreigners in Korea must play some role in how we understand the kinds of relationships Korean men and Korean women have with them.

As many foreigner women have complained about online (to the point where it's a bit of a stereotype), foreign men tend generally to seek partners among young available Korean women to the preference of finding partners among available foreign women. The reasons are probably manifold, and include in part things Michael has mentioned, like the endless performance of "femininity" by many young Korean women. However, I think there's also a significant amount of stuff going on in a foreign man's mind about his place in the country, his adjustment to the culture; sometimes it's a conquest thing, yes, but often, it's probably more to do with a kind of anchoring to the culture he finds himself in, a kind of part of his haphazard, incomplete (And incompleteable) assimilation into life in Korea. This can be pathetic, as in when (as we commonly see) foreign men marry Korean women who are then asked to help in every stupid task including ordering food, calling the water company, getting cell phone service for their foreigner buddies, and so on. But it can be deeper than that; in one way, the woman I'm with provides me with a native counterpoint to my foreign udnerstanding of Korea, and my foreign understanding of myself in Korea. It's more than her telling me the news, telling me her critical understanding of it, it's also about her reminding me that my understanding of the news isn't the only one possible. In good relationships, it can go deeper, into being a major part of one anothers' life, and then it's more than just a native woman anchoring a man into this place. The experience of dating a foreign man does change a woman culturally; her version of Korean culture changes as radically, in some cases, as the version of Korean culture living in people who grow up as kyopos. And the Western culture of a foreign man in Korea can also change as radically, and in many relationships between foreigners and Koreans there's a meeting in between the cultures, or a kind of melding of the elements of the two (or more) cultures that exist within each person.

I'll be writing about that soon, hopefully next month, and I'll email you when it's posted, as I'm curious to see what you'd have to say.

Salome: I betcha that book on male identity was written by a woman, wasn't it? Sounds like it. Actually sounds something like some Monique Wittig I read once, if I recall correctly. Or Joanna Russ's early writings, most notably her SF classic The Female Man.

I wouldn't separate the issues involved in, say, plastic surgery, so quickly as you have done. Why are the problem of conformity and the problem of sexual identity so separate? From what I've seen, conformity and sexual identity are very much related, and the connection is explicitly rehearsed in the Korean public sphere, in my experience.

Finally, Michael, I'm curious about your take on the whole English Spectrum pseudo-controversy, as covered so extensively by The Marmot of late. I'd post a link but I'm informed that I am not allowed.

[gordsellar]

Ooops. Submitted that too quickly. I am informed I am not allowed by your blog, that is. No links in the comments...

By the way, Salome:

I think Michael's point about "fetishizing" is that it is a manufactured set of mannerisms or behaviours or appearances that present the performance of femininity: they're actions that, aside from any small cosmetic effects they have, simply declare femininity in and of themselves. If you think about it, there's nothing in the evolutionary history of humanity that would make a woman balancing on ridiculous shoes with long spiky heels a more attractive mate, except (as some female friends claim) the fact her legs look better that way. (I'm not convinced, but then all the girls I actually respect and like refuse to wear skirts.)

Makeup's more problematic. Blush, for example, basically simulates young healthfulness and artificially signals to males reproductive availability and desirability. But the excesses to which Korean womens' skin-care and makeup-caking go well beyond this, into a set of symbols or signs which signal nothing absolutely hardwired into humanity, but rather are symbols of distilled femininity in themselves. I don't think it's too far to consider them a mild form of bondage, a much-softened version of the hoop skirt or corset, a soft and matte-edged prison of identity enforcement restriction.

That said, I suspect the men who like women who reject all those tokens of femininity do so because... okay, well, I can't speak for everyone. I can say for myself that it's been largely my experience that women who are critical of the demands placed on them to conform to stereotypes of femininity, and who dare to resist them, tend to be more intelligent, more interesting, more thoughtful. They're women who read Thoreau and wonder what you think of his ideas, or who comment that they ought to read more Camus, or complain guiltily that they're falling behind on news in Iraq, as opposed to telling you that you simply MUST try DDR or that books are bad for your eyes and it's better to play Starcraft or to go to church instead of being such a bookworm. (Yes, those are real examples of things "princesses" have said to me.) They're more engaging to be around, and conversation tends not to involve things like requesting complements, which I'm sorry to say is what I've experienced time and time again with female students of the "princess" variety pegged by Michael, a term I should add they use themselves, sometimes with pride.

Which is not to say that sometimes "girlier" women aren't intelligent; I've met a few. But I've noted pretty strong trends that determine not just my dating history in Korea (if you could actually call it that), but also (more revealingly, I believe) the pattern of my friendships with women here. I'd say about 85% of the interesting women I've had long conversations with or cultivated close friendships with, for example, eschew the skirt in all its forms, and largely avoid more than the bare minimum of makeup (or eschew it altogether as well).

I do not think that women who refuse makeup and girly-fashion look like men; they do not remind me of men in the least, well, not most of them anyway. Jeon Ji Hyun's character in "My Sassy Girl" is no comparison, as she's just a very "sassy" girl, and when I say "girl" I mean in the sense that she's a fetishized, girlified woman, with a few tough and scary traits that only accentuate how girly she actually truly is.

I don't know what you mean by a man's life being more tough and deprived and miserable than a woman's life, and especially I wonder if you mean in a generalized sense or specifically in terms of the Korean situation. Given some of the stats Michael has posted in the past about womens' role in the Korean economy, I'm not so sure men on average lead worse lives than women.

[tiff]

excellent.

nice to see a someone use laura mulvey for good instead of evil.