With a title like that, I better get some major linkage, right?
OK – so I still Korean "UCC" is still pretty lame, in that it is so commercialized so fast that there are barely any real content producers out there who aren't trying to either win a cash prize or simply get on TV. And that's assuming that they aren't actually shills for big media companies, or straight-up commercials. I've already blogged about this, though, so please review if you'd like.
However, I did take to task the UCC star-of-the-minute, whom I'll call the "Pink Pajama Girl" from now on. I saw the video that got her all known, and it was pretty lame. So I took it as a sign of how lame the state of Korean UCC must be to have her video be national news.
Well, I must say that the one I saw was pretty, ahem...tame. I must also admit that this kid has hella balls (figuratively, that is) to get up and do the dance moves she did in her pink pajamas in a scandal-hungry culture that values public propriety and has been known to use young ladies who publicly violate traditional gender, sex, and other social roles in public as whipping boys (ahem, girls) for reinforcing social norms.
And I also have to give the kid kudos for choosing Janet Jackson's "I Miss You Much." I'm getting so old that anything 80's sounds good to me.
"Dog poop girl" (and here and here) and that girl in the Hongdae club (included in my post "The Politics of Pictures and Privacy" and you should read my post "Korean Photo Paranoia, 초상권, and Legal Inexactitude" if you're really into photo law) who dared dance with a wet t-shirt with two white boys, who were both cyberstalked and whose names, home addresses, citizens numbers, school names and majors, as well as other personal information, were scrounged up by enraged (male) netizens as scapegoats for national pride and propriety.
I won't even get into the politics of underaged girls dancing in pink pajamas for the camera, why that's obviously problematic, and my whole schtick on the extreme sexual commodification of the female body in South Korea that extends way too far into everyday culture. (Well, I just did, a little, but hey.)
I'll just stop and say that in terms of social role transgression – or you could just say, having the courage to do the dance that she did – that girl deserves some kudos, and gets some respect from this Metropolitician. Yeah, this is old and annoying news on YouTube, and high school kids awkwardly shaking ass on the small tube isn't anything to write in national newspapers about, but remember that Korea is a public culture in which stars are banned from the airwaves for having been caught having pre-marital sex, even as the universities and many naughty sections of town are veritably brimming over with love motels for which you have to make reservations on the weekend.
Now, that's a whole lotta contradiction.
Yet, the penalty for asserting one's sexuality, especially as a young (underage?) girl, is harsh, often to the point of being misogynistic, at the very least chock full of double-standard thinking.
So I say that now, watching that second saucy selection, that I kind of get why it's national news. Kiiinda. Unfortunately, and if the patterns I see in people's attempts to recreate fame and fortune here hold true, prepare yourselves for a whole slew of "sexy dancing" girls putting their posts up on Pandora TV or whatnot to try to become the next national sensation, perhaps by upping the ante (and lowering inhibitions and flesh coverage) in order to compete.
And before anyone calls me a perv for looking, I'll just tell you that when I flipped on my computer, my Windoze window started flashing me that video as a "hot issue" video, blinking for me to watch. So I didn't have to go very far to see the saucy one.
And it's not like you're NOT gonna look, either. Or are you really gonna close this post without pushing that play button below? As if.
Gotcha. Now, we're all pervs. And that kinda annoys me.
P.S. What also annoys me is how irritatingly hard it is to get the embed code for these videos if you're not part of a Korean blogging service. Do these companies care that they're so hard to use, and impossible for anyone who doesn't speak Korean? I guess while the rest of the world's Internet companies are global in reach, the aims of Korean ones are far lower.
For anyone using Pandora, choose the embed code for Naver/Daum/Buddy Buddy flash embeds. That seems to work like YouTube's. If this video is centered and playing OK, then it's all good.
P.P.S. Typical - it doesn't work on my Mac browsers, but it does on Windoze, probably with some voodoo-causing Active X enabling it. Flash is not platform-specific...hellllloooooo? Argh! For you fellow beleagured Mac or other users, I can only offer you a direct link (which probably won't do you much better, since you can't watch Pandora TV without installing an Active-X thingie).
"Korean waves" are hard to propagate if you keep damming your own gates.
