Ruminations in Korea

"She’s got looks that kill!

She’s got looks that kill!"

- Motley Crue

I have had several discussions over the past week or so, mostly with Jae from My Resonating Life, regarding women and beauty. What is beauty? How do women see themselves? Why have cosmetic surgery? What are the pressures that society puts on women?

Given that I am a man, I don’t understand a lot about these issues. However, I do know what I see, and I see some disturbing things here in korea that I thought would improve, but which have only gotten worse. To be honest, it distresses me.

When I first set foot on Korean soil back in 1988, one of the first observations I made was that women here wore entirely too much makeup. I speculated that garden trowls must sell well here because it seemed that every girl had one with which to apply her makeup. I thought it strange because it seemed that some very pretty women making themselves uglier in a misguided effort to make themselves prettier.

I have asked girls, in my own special sensitive way, why they wear so much make up. One of the surprising answers has been that they have a bad complexion so they need to wear makeup to cover these imperfections. I have an idea. How about not clogging your pores with all of that goop?

Makeup use has not diminished since then. In fact, the situation has worsened as more and better products have become available. As more and more money is thrown at marketing beauty through television, movies, magazines, etc., this quest for beauty has so taken the minds of Korean men and women that women are turning in droves to hacking, slashing, stuffing, and sucking their faces and bodies to conform to what marketers have convinced Korean women and men is beautiful.

The lengths to which women here will go to in order to seek beauty through surgery has become so extreme that it is now costing people their lives. My thoughts and discussions were prompted by the death of a 25-year old woman here in Pusan a couple of weeks ago. The story finaly hit the English-language news in this article in the Korean Herald.

In her six-page suicide note, the unidentified pharmacy major said she always wanted to be beautiful. However, she explained, her last hope to attain the look she wanted failed with an unsuccessful plastic surgery.

Here is a young woman who felt so bad about the way she looked that she turned to a knife in order to make herself look more like something that someone has convinced her she should look like. When the surgery failed to make her look perfect, when the knife failed to give her self-esteem she did a Peter Pan out the 13th floor of her building.

How widespread is the problem of low self-esteem and dissatisfaction with looks among Korean women?

Marie France, a well-known beauty clinic based in England, released a survey on the weekend that suggested almost 79 per cent of Korean females who responded are not satisfied with their appearances.

One 26 year old woman said:

"If I had a lot of money, I would go for cosmetic surgery. I think a pretty face gains you more attention in modern society. Why is it so bad that you want nice face?"

I was stunned by the completely screwed up view of herself, but I am told that a huge number of Korean women think that way. My question to her is, "What is so wrong with your face?" It is truly gut-wrenching to see a very nice looking, healthy woman who think she needs bigger eyes, smaller cheeks, bigger chin, more chiseled nose, etc. What is wrong with they way you look?!?

Personally, nothing makes me cringe like seeing a Korean women with unnaturally large, unnaturally round eyes who reveals shiny scars across her eyelids every time she blinks. The women generally are unaware of the obviousness of the scaring because they can’t see themselves with their eyes closed.

Also, there are very few things more aesthetically displeasing that a woman with breasts that are unnaturally larger than they should be. Just a note, breasts are supposed to move when you run and they are not supposed to stand straight up when you lay on your back. Breast implants are supposedly designed to make people appreciate a woman’s beauty, but to me, as with eye surgery, I mostly notice that something just doesn’t look right and I am slightly uneasy until I discover what it is. Breast implants, if you are so vain as to want them, should be an enhancement, not a distraction.

This addiction to appearance is not new to Korean society as many women have sought plastic surgery since the early 1990s. However, it seems to be getting more serious as something called the "eoljjang syndrome" has found its way into the nation’s vocabulary. Eoljjang is slang, meaning pretty face in English.

Eoljjang cam about through a bunch of Korean girls throwing to gether a "hot or not" sort of website.

From the original slang, a second new word has emerged. "Momjjang" is now the pop term for those judged to have good body shapes.

This fixation on looks has increased to the point where bad people are being idolized simply because they are cute.

A fan site for an attractive female bank burglar was recently organized. Regardless of evidence against her, some believed she was too pretty to have committed such crimes.

Beauty stereotypes are thrown at Korean women from all sides. The girls are raised and molded under the influence of these stereotypes. Boyfriends will tell their already rail-thin girlfriends that she needs to lose weight. Women are just merciless to each other. Magazines are full of unrealistically beautiful women. You can’t turn the TV on without seeing at least four or five channels pitching diet products. There are always four or five channels seeling underwear or lingerie, but the underwear is being modeled by foreign women, not Korean women.

Because of this you have Korean women who are turning more and more to anorexia, bulemia, laxitives and other eating disorders and medication as they try desperately to make themselves ridiculously thin. At the same time, they are trying to develop a body to fill the underwear modeled by the foriegners. You simply cannot do both.

You can’t look like Olive Oyl and a Victoria’s Secret model at the same time!

Not only are people, male and female continually told what they need to look like, how beautiful they need to be, and so forth, Korean TV goes a step further. Korean TV incessantly and mercilously makes fun of and blasts people that look normal. Thus, if you are a normal-looking person and see a normal looking person on TV, you are made to feel worse as people savage the normal-looking person and degrade them.

Kim Hee-jin, a professor of mass communication at Yonsei University, agrees.

Some shows feature guests who make fun of other participants for perceived flaws in their appearances.

"If they do not stop these behaviors, it may have a bad influence on young audiences," Nah said, adding strong regulations for such TV programs are necessary.

This is true. But I think it is a cycle…Society is like that, so TV does it, so society does it. Got a pimple? rest assured some Korean will come up to you, point at it and say very loudly "WOW!!! You have an enormous zit on your face!" God forbid you are even slightly overweight. You will never hear the end of it.

"Serious complexes and morbid addiction to beauty are a kind of mental disease," Miso Clinic psychiatrist Oh Dong-jae said. "If you keep living with these complexes, you may develop depression.

"Though you don’t have a pretty face, you may have a lot of other abilities. You must find them out and develop them. You must know facial beauty is not the most important thing in your life."

I think this psychiatrist has made an error. Who wants to hear, "You are ugly, but you can still do stuff." Wouldn’t women be much better off if they were taught to be happy and satisfied with with they way they look. Most girls and Korean women do not realize that the women in those magazines have every last flaw and blemish meticulously air-brushed and digitally edited away. You can’t do that to a real person. The proper view should be that even though you don’t look like this artificial creation in a magazine or on TV, you are still a beautiful person.

The most extreme example of this "beauty at all costs" mindset is that larger and larger numbers of people are turning to osteogenetic surgery…or limb-lengthening procedures… Here is a Taipei Times article with a fairly good description of that procedure

Kong Jing-wen has paid ?5,700 (US$10,075) to have both of her legs broken and stretched on a rack. The pretty college graduate is now lying in bed, clearly still in considerable pain three days after a doctor sawed through the flesh and bone below her knee to insert what looks an awful lot like knitting needles through the length of her tibiae. . . .

These giant steel pins are connected by eight screws punched horizontally through her ankle and calf to a steel cage surrounding each leg. Once the bone starts to heal, these cages will act like a medieval torture device — each day over the next few months Kong will turn the screws a fraction and stretch her limbs more and more until she has grown by 8cm. . . .

Each procedure has three stages. First comes the operation in which the legs are broken and steel pins — 27cm long and 8mm in diameter — are pushed through the bone. These are fixed to an external frame by eight or so screws, each of which is 4mm in diameter. Next comes the stretching, which is carried out over several months (depending on how much the customer wants to grow) by turning the screws each day and lengthening the bone at the point where it was broken. When the stretching is completed the external frame is removed. In the final stage, the steel pins are left in place for about a year as a support for the newly regenerated bone.

Once it has hardened, the pins are removed. . . .

Bones stretched too rapidly will not grow strong enough to support the body’s weight. Legs extended at different speeds can become misshapen and nerves can be damaged. Horror stories about other less capable surgeons appear from time to time in the Chinese media.

Young women have reportedly been left with their feet splayed outwards on legs that are weirdly twisted; the bones of others have never properly healed and they keep breaking at the slightest knock.

In one of the worst reported cases, a 31-year-old woman was left in the frame for a year because her bones proved so brittle that they could not support her weight after being stretched. Her feet still point in odd directions and she is unable to squat.

It is simply disgusting that someone would even think that they need to subject themselves to this procedures simply for the sake of making a boyfriend or potential employer happy. It is dangerous, painful, and this particular surgery makes what were once normal-looking legs into unnatural legs with freakishly long shins.

Be happy with yourself! I am much more attracted to natural beauty. I would take someone who wears no make and goes natural that some beautied up, make-up covered, surgically altered woman any day. Nothing can compete with the healthy glow of a natural face. Make up, surgery, accessories, hair product, etc. only take away from the beauty of nature.

Women should be proud and happy to show their natural beauty, and not forced into depression and even suicide becuase they feel that they have no chance of living up to the impossible and unobtainable demands that males and other females place on them.