Living In a Society That Demands Sex Appeal

Living in South Korea as a Young Woman (7)

Appearance Management And the Freedom of Expression 

By Seol-gyeong

Published: June 23, 2016

Translated by Marilyn Hook

※ Editor’s note: To begin a new feminist discourse in 2016, Ilda is running a series on “Living as a Young Woman in South Korea.” The series receives support from the Korea Foundation for Women’s “Funding for Gender-Equal Society.”

Blind dating introduced me to the gaze of others

When I became a university student,
putting on makeup felt awkward to me.

I can still remember vividly the time when I first entered university. Outside of the school uniform skirts I’d been wearing my whole life, I had never worn a skirt. Getting a perm and putting on makeup felt awkward to me. Even though walking up a hill in shoes that already hurt my feet was uncomfortable, the thought that “still, now I’m a university student” made me put on a skirt, shoes, and makeup just like others, and leave the house.

And at some point, I started to wonder if that me was the real me. I thought not. So from that day I started going to school in comfortable clothes, with a bare face and sneakers. I had no interest in being pretty, and wasn’t good at dressing myself up, so I wasn’t sure what looking like that meant. Before I started going on blind dates, that is.

“If you want a blind date to go well, you have to wear a pretty dress.” The older university student who set me up on a blind date told me this as a tip. Because the first impression would be decisive, I had to wear a blouse and skirt, or a dress.

That wasn’t all. There were more tips for “succeeding” on a blind date. Don’t blather on, you have to laugh at your date’s jokes and look innocent. So her explanation was that it was good manners and a virtue not to be myself, but to fit myself into the image of what men want in a woman. 

I think it was from that time that I started to be aware of how I looked in other people’s eyes and how I should look. I started to feel embarrassed about not wearing makeup, to notice ugly parts of my face, and to worry about whether I looked like I had gained weight. I started to try properly(?) to look good, and people said I had gotten prettier. But it wasn’t that I had gotten pretty, it was only that I had gotten used to trying to fit myself into what other people wanted.

‘Is this what university festivals are normally like?’

At university, there is an event that is held once a year. People not affiliated with the university can attend, it’s an unavoidable part of university life – that’s right, the university festival. Most student clubs spend a long time preparing performances and booths for it, and students put their hearts and souls into it, so I had big expectations. There was a festival in high school, too, but because it didn’t feel like a student-led event, I wanted to experience the freedom that could only be enjoyed in university. 

But the festival that I actually experienced crushed my hopes. I still can’t forget the scene I saw at my freshman-year festival. Female students under red lights, wearing short skirts and bunny ears, taking the arms of male customers visiting the school and acting like they were soliciting them. Pub tents with signs reading “Booking 100%” and “Miari Texas.” Loud music and lone women sitting at tables with groups of male customers... this was all a huge shock to me.

Is this freedom? Is this what university festivals are normally like? I was horribly uncomfortable and had no choice but to leave quickly. After that, I would go home early during festivals. I felt like a lone outsider in that foreign atmosphere and culture. I became someone who “didn’t know how to have fun at a festival,” and spent the next few years avoiding them, even at my own school.

 Who owns the festival? Students raise questions

A poster used to advertise 

for one Sookmyung Women’s University 

department’s pub tent.

But it turns out that I wasn’t the only one made uncomfortable by the atmosphere of student festivals. Aside from a few students belonging to groups and clubs that operate pub tents at the festival, most students didn’t actually have much to do with pub tents. There were many who said they never once went to a festival in four years of university. There were awfully many who had a critical view of festival culture.

There were two main problems with the festivals at that time. The first was the suggestive atmosphere, which included the clothing. I felt repulsion at the female students wearing sexy outfits and seeming to solicit male customers. The second was that the nighttime pub tents were operated as places for male customers from outside the university instead of for current female students. The criticism was that the current students, the ones who were supposed to be enjoying the festival, ended up being excluded from it.

Criticism began to come from all quarters. A common sense of something being wrong could be found even among the students who had operated pub tents. The clothes that they wore were uniforms determined by the department or club; they had had no freedom of choice and had simply worn what senior students had told them to.

Before and after the festival every year, criticism and introspection appeared on the school’s anonymous Internet forums. Questions could be heard about whether this was really the festival that we wanted and why the pub tents just had to be operated this way every year. The students couldn’t speak with one voice but did make a constant outcry.

Finally, in 2014, the university student council and student president council gathered 110 student representatives to hold an “All Students Representative Council” and discuss this problem. As a result, the “2014 Sookmyeong Festival Regulation” was created. It limits suggestive clothing for students operating pub tents and stipulates penalties, among other things. Because they harbored expectations that we would stop ourselves from allowing the festival atmosphere to be like that again, most students have welcomed the regulation.

How the media consumes “female university students”

And then one day, someone asked if I had seen a post a criticizing our university’s festival. As soon as I opened my browser, I could see that the main page of the popular portal site was plastered with articles criticizing the lasciviousness of the women’s universities’ festivals.

And every article included one particular poster for a pub tent, which had my school’s name and the woman dressed as a maid, bending over and showing her mesh stockings and garter belt. Needless to say, the department that had made it had chosen a “sexy maid” concept for their pub tent and had the tent staff students dress up as maids to serve customers. The articles had attracted countless comments, calling the poster lewd, asking if female students should look so cheap, and bemoaning today’s university students in general.

The media and netizens had two opposing views. One was “Suggestive and promiscuous female university students” and the other was “if they’re regulating clothing, how are they different from domineering old people?” Both views built conclusions without knowledge of the context from which the students’ voices and the regulations for pub tents had come. The media was consuming “women’s university festivals” as they wanted.

Criticism about promiscuous female university students revealed a stereotypical view of them. It was a reaction full of anger and reprimand, that seemed to say, “You are supposed to be good, modest, and pure, so is it okay for you to be so suggestive and promiscuous?” The mass media had no interest in the student discussions surrounding the festival and simply pumped out articles that used keywords like “female university student” “suggestive” and “promiscuous” to gain page views. I felt like the way that our society consumes female university students is awfully harmful.

Is it sexual liberation or sexual commodification?

There were a few articles criticizing the students’ decision to regulate clothing. They – and the comments – said things like, “The regulation isn’t cool,” “It’s like during the military dictatorships when they regulated skirt length,” and “Women’s university students are reversing sexual liberation and running towards sexual conservativism.”

I think that these opinions show a lack of knowledge about university festival culture. They assume that university festivals are totally free, the clothing worn is the result of individual choices, and regulating that freedom is unjust.

The problem of sexual commodification at festival pub tents 

is not one that exists only at my university. These pictures come from reports on this problem from the newspapers of other schools (both women’s and co-ed)

But the festival that I saw wasn’t free at all. Students have said that they had no choice but to wear what older students told them to, and it was capitalist logic and not respect for autonomy that was operating in the groups using the pub tents to make money for the clubs or departments. More than anything, it wasn’t free because the women were learning to and being forced to fit themselves into the image that men in our society want.

That female college students operating pub tents at university festivals dress sexily and solicit male customers – it is clear that there is a context other than that of freedom of expression at work here. That’s sexual commodification, not sexual liberation. So students decided that it was necessary to put the brakes on with autonomous student regulations (not those of professors, faculty, or others), in order to change this entrenched festival culture.

Living in a culture that demands a “friendly” figure

These incidents made me think deeply about the connection between women’s grooming habits, sex appeal, and femininity. It’s easy to mistake plastic surgery, dieting, and getting dressed up and made up as behavior that “voluntarily” reveals women’s own desires. But I learned that on the hidden side of it, there is something that can’t be explained by freedom of expression, fulfillment of individual desires, or autonomy: discrimination against and oppression of women.

Of course, I don’t want to say that women getting dressed up and being sexy can only be called a passive action meant to make themselves visually pleasing to men. I believe that women attempting to independently express themselves as sexual beings is very meaningful. When viewed from the outside, it can be impossible to distinguish the two, and it may be conveyed in a distorted way by the media, but sexual expression by women who want to escape from men’s gazes and become freer continues unbowed and must be supported. What is clear is that the weight of a culture that compels femininity is heavy.

Women are pressured to fit their bodies to the image that men want.

In our society, young women are more used to seeing their bodies through the eyes of others instead of their own. Internet shopping sites whose customers are mainly women in their 20s use copy like “A dress that will make your boyfriend’s jaw drop,” “Hair that will make him stop hesitating,” and “A style that men like” to sell their goods. Even if you just want a pair of shoes, you see ads that tell you to buy “shoes that men like,” and soon get used to this kind of writing. 

In a male-centric society, women grow up feeling pressure to fit their bodies to men’s image of women. In a society in which a “good-natured body,” being pretty, and having a good character are virtues of equal weight. Not putting on make-up is bad manners, and not being thin means you are a lazy person who doesn’t take care of herself.

Telecom companies that choose female pop stars as spokesmodels gain popularity with ads that showed their curvy figures but have nothing to do with telecommunication. Female weather forecasters wear tight, sexy clothing when talking about the weather. The sexual commodification that is everywhere in the media – I wonder what kind of message it gives to girls and how much it affects them. I think it’s a problem that our society needs to think deeply about.

We’re living in a era in which women’s rights are better than they’ve ever been, but in which it’s also difficult to use the word “autonomy” about even my own body.

*Miari Texas: A famous red-light district in Seoul.

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/7508