I changed schools a lot in elementary school, mostly just because my family moved around a lot. When we arrived in Prince Albert, a town in Northern Saskatchewan, I ended up at this small elementary school where one of my classmates was a kid named Todd. Now, this was in the fourth grade, when secondary sexual characteristics aren’t really, er, apparent yet. Todd had a somewhat girlish face, but was built big, and had short-ish (but not quite short) curly hair.
And I guess it was for this reason that Todd was often ridiculed by classmates as a “girl.” I remember being quite confused by this — Todd had asked to hold my hand while we were ice-skating, maybe because I obviously was a terrible skater who obviously needed help — and I remember classmates calling him a “faggot.” I didn’t know what the word meant, so when I got home and said to my mom I met a kid at school, and she had helped me ice skate, and she was a faggot, my mother sat me down and explained that “faggot” was not a nice word, and besides a word describing boys, and maybe this Todd was a boy?
Which might seem obvious, but we’d been living in places where the genders of names were not always, er, a major consideration in their application to children. I’d been in school with kids whose names did not fit their gender before, and so I was confused. But I was sure no boy would want to hold another boy’s hand, so I was, therefore, sure that Todd was a weirdly-named girl.
Imagine my shock when I discovered otherwise. Eventually, I asked someone in the room quietly, in confidence, whether Todd was a boy or a girl, and the truth came out: he was a boy, but, someone say, a kind of girly sort of boy. I think the person I talked to even suggested he might be gay, something I did understand, though I didn’t at the time know that “faggot” was a pejorative for gay. After that, I was a little more leery of Todd and his offers of help. We ended up not being friends, not even years later when we’d both gravitated towards artistic/creative pursuits, and maybe that’s because I was moving around from school to school — and only knew met him again briefly, and in passing, in tenth grade, but maybe some of my unease also had to do with, well, you know.
What does this have to do with Peanut?
Longtime readers of this blog know that Lime and I adopted Peanut this summer. Peanut has grown up quite a bit since we took her in.
Wait, let me rephrase that: Peanut has grown up quite a bit since we took her him in.
Now that you’ve stopped laughing, let me explain. We took in Peanut knowing basically nothing about cats. I’d never had one before, and I wasn’t as into cats as Lime so I didn’t think much about it. We rolled the cat over one day and looked, saw no penis, and figured, huh, it must be a girl.
Yes, I know now that cats have an internal penis, and I know how to tell, but at the time, we figured, well, we’d see something if it were a boy. That scrotum? We didn’t think that was a scrotum.
You’re probably thinking we’re idiots, but wait, wait. We asked the veterinarian. He said, “Yes, it’s a girl.” I swear! Even as recently as a week ago, when Peanut was ill, Lime and I asked, “So when can we get the cat spayed?” Now, yes, you could say, “Language barrier!” and all that, but that’s not it, because Lime specifically asked about what the process was in Korean, and the vet’s response began with, “Well, you see, because Peanut is a female, it’s a much more involved process for her…”
So imagine poor Lime’s shock when the cat, sleeping, rolled onto her his belly and this little red… organ… crept out from inside her him. Oh my. It was like a major shock for Lime. Suddenly, the cat’s new name — Buffy — became totally inappropriate, which is why the cat is now 100% Peanut. Which is a funny pun, indeed, because a cat’s testicles are sometimes referred to (by cat enthusiasts) as “peanuts” in Korean.
Yes, a shock. Doubly so, since we’d gone to some trouble just the day before to make sure we got a female playmate for Peanut:
… a one-month old stray from Suwon who has yet to be named. (When we thought Peanut was Buffy, we began to think that Willow would be a good name for the new kitty, but now, the name seems to remind us of our idiocy, so maybe we’ll find another name.)
Anyway, as it is, they seem to be getting along:
… so we’ll probably just be keeping the new kitty and letting them hang out. We’ll have to get them both fixed, but we were going to anyway.
As for the new kitty, she seems pretty good-natured — less finicky than Peanut, less hypersensitive, more personable, as well as a good eater and quite patient with Peanut’s aggressive mode of play. In other words, she’s a keeper.
But we remain slightly surprised, though, in another way, a lot of things about Peanut suddenly sort of make more sense.
Sir, you have exceeded teh intraweb’s limits for cuteness.
Of course, Peanut was actually a girl…
I think the moral of the story is that you were a closeted cat person, and when you were exposed to the liddle bitty kitty you succumbed to the tewwwible cuteness. ( : (mock rolling eyes and gagging at the sentimentality noises…even though kittens can make my brain melt too)
Hee hee hee.
Willow seems like a good name for the teeny orange newcomer, somehow. And hey, if you get a surprise with her too, well there’s Willow Ufgood, after all.
Although for some reason when I look her her picture, I find myself hearing “heita3” on Youtube who does the vegetable instruments bit saying “Papurika-des” but I don’t know how you say pepper in Korean. And hey, Poppy works for short. Thoughts?
Its a pity you never made friends with Todd but its hard when you’re still trying to puzzle the world together…. I was teased for being indeterminate in school (heck, with my indeterminate name I still confuse folks on the intarrrweb) and I find it striking the three contrasting images of androgyny (particularly male androgyny) we see in western culture at least (although some Bebop viewing suggests my sample isn’t that skewed–either ridiculous like Pat on Saturday Night Live (who I never saw but with whose name I was teased), threat (like the guy in Silence of the Lambs), or pathetic (like Radclyffe Hall’s characters).
Female androgyny is a newer thing and it seems it was easier to valorize since of course the “inferior” gender would always want to pretend to be better than they were, like peasants breaking sumptuary laws. Ok, that was a total tangent. I admit I’d like to hear more about gender in modern Korea, but I could do that at the library or with more internet research I know…
Shawn,
You’re welcome! :)
Cuccu,
No, seriously, Peanut is a boy!
Val,
Actually, I don’t know. It’s not so much the cuteness as the vulnerability. The few times the baby kitty has scratched me, the scratches have involved bad reactions, so I think I may be allergic to that one. But she’s vulnernable, and seems settled in already, and it’s not severe, so…
The new one definitely is female. We checked carefully, and it’s much easier to tell now.
“pepper” in Korean — well, Papeurika is for bell peppers, where hot peppers are gochu. But gochu is also the euphemism for “penis” so it doesn’t fit a female cat, and somehow paprika isn’t quite right for this one either. We may well go with Willow.
As for Todd, I can’t say that not becoming friends is any big deal. Literarily, though, there’s some reference to male androgyny in the beginning of Woolf’s wonderful novel Orlando (which is all about that theme of gender and mutability and so on) and I was disappointed not to find a parallel reference to it at the end, as there is in the film version. I loved that, in the film, where suddenly in the “modern” setting, it’s considered chic to be androgynous as a woman, just as it was for men in Shaxper’s time.
If you’re interested in gender issues in Korea, I only touch on it occasionally, but James discusses it a lot.
Personally, I’d say the status of androgyny here is that men are gravitating towards it as an alternative to the previously extant (mainly post-military, self-sacrificing breadwinner) stereotype that was previously normative, but only to some degree. Young men are wearing pink and preening a lot, though, is what it adds up to.
As for androgyny among women, I was about to say there’s less of it, but I should say, there’s less of it among the young. There’s an old adage here that claims there are three genders: man, woman, and ajumma. (Ajummas are older, married women, stereotypically less attractive, and well, many women in that age category do sort of give up on their appearance completely. Grandma perms at 40, clothes merely as body-coverings, and so on. The change is probably more striking since younger women are almost all trying their hardest to be feminine, or downright girly.
There’s another exception, though, which is that a certain number of young women who seem to be, well, resistant to the girliness and everything that comes with it do sort of gravitate towards a more androgynous look: shorter hair, a lot of polo shirts, and so on. Also, heavier young women (who have even fewer fashion options in Korea than in most places) tend to wear hip-hop clothes, which is more androgynous, though I don’t know to what degree Koreans would call it that way. I have mistaken several younger women — especially the polo-shirt wearing/short-haired ones — as male, but it’s relatively rare in my experience…
But Dead-Like-Me Peanut is/was a girl. Isn’t he named after her?
Cuccu,
Ah, that Peanut. Yeah, and I think Rube probably would only use that term of derisive endearment on a girl, but, ah well… it suits him anyway. :)
Dead Like Me?
Maybe name the new kitty Daisy?
Thank you for your comments on gender in Korea. Interesting.
As to the ajummas…it makes me think of the way in which folks who are not socially viewed as sexually or reproductively active are degendered or regendered . . . making me think of some discussion of the different ways folks may be gendered by others based on class or disability in _Surviving Poverty In Medieval Paris_, a very interesting book…
My family had much the same experience with our own cat when I was younger. We called her “Polly”, an antiquated name that conjures up images of long-dead, slightly batty aunts of your grandmother, but which seemed very suited to her strange personality. Once we realized that she was a he then we tried to change it to “Apollo” instead, but Polly stuck. He ended up quite well-traveled as cats go, as we took him when we emigrated to New Zealand and Australia and so on, which included 6 months in quarantine when we returned to the UK.
Two points to add to men’s drift towards androgynous and/or increasingly feminine looks, in addition to what we’ve both already mentioned on our blogs. Well three, because I’m happy to report that it looks like I’ll finally be doing a Master’s thesis on this next year (let you know when it’s finalized!). One was identified by my future supervisor then, who points out that in the post-IMF era, appearance became a much more important criterion for young men to get into suddenly scarce jobs and then in turn to get ahead. Another I just read in the paper in the link below and which I’ll write about this weekend, which is that if you apply the criteria developed by Erving Goffman used to determine subtle but pernicious sexism in advertisements to depictions of Korean men instead of women, then ironically it turns out that they too are often portrayed in a very demeaning way. The authors conclude that Korean men are not immune to commercial and sexual objectification like women, but in Korea both involve a heavy dose of childishness and cuteness that, like you’ve pointed out in earlier posts, seems almost de rigueur for non ajumma but still adult women, as least in the media.
Erk, that’s a long link! Apologies, and could you please clean that up?(ED:
See here for more on that.)
Before I forget, two things. First, I was too late to really add anything in the comments to it, but I still enjoyed your post on Bean-paste Girls by the way. Also, thanks for linking to me, but actually the link goes, well…straight back to this post! But no big deal of course.
Hmmrpth! I “clicked to edit” that, but after doing so was informed that I “didn’t have permission”. Sigh.
One thing I didn’t mention above then, was that saying that Korean advertisements also objectify and demean men, albeit far less than women, is not to imply that you get some advertisements like in the West, that say, have semi-nude men on a leash being ground down by a woman with a high-heel, which I seriously doubt Korean men would tolerate for a moment! Rather, that with their childlike, smiling, and gormless expressions and so on, I still personally see them as quite emasculated.
What would be the female equivalent of that term? It’s surely telling that none comes to mind!
James,
Wow, 6 months in quarantine? (Without visits? Or with?) Is that normal? I imagine that could mess up a cat’s mind, to be honest.
Sorry about the cack link — it’s fixed. It was because of a missing = sign, of all things.
Congrats on the grad program! That’s excellent! Looking forward to more details. (You coming to Seoul, then? Got a job lined up? I’m on the hunt at the moment…)
While I agree that a focus on appearance probably correlates with (“good”) job scarcity, I fail to see the connection between feminized appearance and job scarcity. Looking at films from the 80s, idealized Korean masculinity seems to involve either tank tops and muscles, or conservative suits and lots of money or power. (ie. an aesthetic vaguely comparable to Hollywood ca. 1960s.) I can’t help but wonder how come the feminizing or emasculated look came in after IMF. (Though it’s also around that time that a surge in Japanese cultural imports came.)
I think you’ve hit a great point holding up ads of men against the Goffman thing, though. And since it’s very often young men, it’s almost as if they’re being “put in their place” or something.
I’d also tender that we Westerners, by listening to feminist complaints about advertising — valid as they are — missed the fact that in advertising and pop culture in general, everyone and everything is commercialized and nearly (or indeed absolutely) everyone is sexually objectified.
That’s probably too broad a brush, of course. I don’t know to what degree Bette Midler was sexualized in Beaches, for example, but we can agree that humans in mass media and advertising are constantly sexualized. Men, too, have body issues and complexes about their appearance. Maybe fewer — one rarely sees a woman on TV who looks like Robbie Coltrane, but one also relatively rarely sees a man who looks like Robbie Coltrane.
Not to play with equivalencies: the point is just that it hardly surprises me that Korean men are sexualized and commercialized in Korean ads; I kind of just assumed everything in advertising is denatured (see: plastic food in every food ad!) for the sake of pushing evolutionary buttons in our collective heads.
Somewhere in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of Thomas Disch claimed that Madonna was an impossibility in American culture without SF… that we got the Madonna we did because SF paved the way. I’m not sure about that, but in some ways, as a “do it all” character — highly sexual, highly assertive, always in some kind of position of power, and openly flaunting fetishistic gear and whatever — I imagine Madonna might be the kind of pop star that Heinlein might have written about.
(I guess by reputation, as, for shame, I have read no Heinlein to date.)
And I seriously doubt we’d have ads with women in heels leading half-naked men about on leashes if it were not for Madonna. So — yay! — SF leads to TV ads that emasulate men.
Which, yes, is a word that seems not to have a direct equivalent (or at least not a well-known one) when discussing women. Probably because the state of emasculation for men is unusual, but the equivalent state for women was, until recently, simply the default state for “normal” women. Maybe that’s it? There are other things we could throw in, like the notion that women are gendered by their society and men aren’t (they’re just the “normal default human”), so that emasculation is the feminizing of women — that the absence of masculinity is synonymous with femininity. I’m dubious about that, of course, but it’s something to look at. And then there’s the possibility that the construction of masculinity and of femininity respectively differ such that emasculation (demasculinization) is perceived as a loss of maleness, or as a feminization, while the same thing done to (or self-imposed by) women denotes the adoption of androgyny or, in some cases, masculinity. I imagine more women adopt such a departure consciously for whatever benefits they perceive will accrue, while more (Anglo/Western) men perceive such a state as so anathema that it would have to be imposed on them, with negative consequences.
So, yes, very suggestive and interesting. Especially when you see more and more young Korean men adopting the “emasculated” look and fewer and fewer women adopting anything like an “androgynous” look.
Perhaps there’s some parallel if we look at popcultural influences on the construction of idealized maleness. Maybe the “childlike, smiling, and gormless expressions” are some kind of borrowed trope from, oh, I don’t know, J-manga (or the Korean version of the stuff)? From Japanese TV stereotypes? (It might be looking to Japan is a mistake, but the opening of the Japanese floodgates in the late 90s, and the sudden shifts in pop culture, combined with the Korean media’s penchant to, er, copy successful media from abroad, all make me think it’s a good place to look. I certainly see hairstyles on young men that I have encountered almost absolute likenesses of in older or contemperaneous manga.
(Fullmetal Alchemist and Death Note — the latter of which I utterly hated — come to mind. But I’m not well-versed in manga. I betcha if you looked at which manga were most popular, and looked at hairstyles throughout the nulls, you’d find a correlation. Maybe clothing styles too.)
It also reminds me of an ajumma who claimed to me, over coffee, that Korean society isn’t really patriarchal at all… it’s just that women let men think they’re running the show. While it’s clear that lots in Korean society (like most societies on Earth) is unfairly slanted towards male interests, there’s a kind of complexity in the way labour (and power) is divided inside families. For example, some women are loathe to surrender control over decisions related to child-rearing or the household finances. (Just as loathe as some older men are to see their wives work outside the home.) I’m not saying this makes it all equal, but then, I’m skeptical that the corporatized solution popular in the West (women should be able to work outside the home, but men needn’t pick up the slack or lessen their workloads, say to two or days a week and a day or two of telecommuting, when possible) to be more involved in childrearing) is satisfactory, either. (As I elaborate here.)
What we end up with in the West is children raised by teachers and strangers. What you end up with in Korea is mothers (especially mothers) so invested in their children’s success that the kids have to fight not to be suffocated. Neither solution is really that great. I think the real issue is that until men’s role changes to better accommodate the essential needs of human families, we’re stuck with a gaping hole that was, before, filled mostly by mothers. And I believe that, worldwide, the solution is not to go back, but to get men’s position changed up too. To stop pretending that business should get to structure our family lives to the detriment of families, society, etc.
As for my post on the Bean Paste Girls, thanks, but there’s another one (at least) much better and in more depth waiting to get written… I just haven’t had time yet. Job hunt and all that.
By the way, I think you couldn’t edit your comment because the plugin hadn’t yet been upgraded, but my installation of WordPress had been. A few plugin functions might be wonky for a few days, as plugin authors begin upgrading their plugins to function on the new version. Sorry!
I have upgraded that particular plugin now — I think it became available in the past day or two — so it should work now. Please let me know if it doesn’t!
Gord,
Yeah, 6 months is routine, just over the gestation period for rabies. I’ve heard arguments that the English Channel renders it unnecessary, rivers in Europe usually slowing the spread of various outbreaks of it by several years, but the policy has still been in place for at least as long as I remember. For various reasons, when our cat was staying in the government cattery we were living eight hours drive away, which meant that we only got to see him once in that time. He seemed none the worse for wear after we took him home though.
I shouldn’t say too much about the grad school thing yet, not because these comments are public or anything like that but more because these things have a habit of getting me all excited but then ultimately leading nowhere, although I’m still much more confident about this one. But either way, it’ll be online via a New Zealand university, as will be the PhD after that.
More on topic, I realize now that I was a little sloppy with what I wrote, and agree with your point that men’s increased focus on their appearance would correlate with job scarcity since the late-1990s, but also that there’s no reason to suppose that this would necessarily be a feminized appearance. Having said that, it’s curious how the very act of a male paying attention to his appearance seems almost inherently feminine. Or at least, I can’t personally think of any instances in Anglo-American media and popular culture in which the shift is not depicted this way, with the possible exception of the opening scene in American Psycho with Christian Bale discussing his skincare routine as he showers.
My future supervisor, by the way, coined the phrase “Pan Asian Soft Masculinity” to describe the phenomenon in East Asia we’re discussing here, and like you ascribes much more agency to Japanese cultural imports than I do – almost inherent in that term of his I think – although I must admit that I’m rapidly becoming much more sympathetic to both your arguments. Personally I have identified from the literature quite a sea-change in the way women’s sexuality was portrayed in Korean popular culture in the mid-1990s, and whether the feminization of previous ideals of men as protectors and breadwinner shortly thereafter came from Japanese imports, expressions of women’s resentment of such men for being overwhelmingly targeted for lay-offs due to the IMF Crisis, or, more likely, both, the late-1990s were certainly very ripe for huge changes in ideals of male attractiveness.
But I’ve yet to see those 12, 13 year-old movies that were so revolutionary at the time, and so for the sake of my thesis have a great deal of DVD watching to tide me over the winter. I’d be grateful if you can recommend any of those movies from the 1980s you mention for me too though, because I’ll need to place the 1990s ones in some context.
I liked your point about it overwhelmingly being young men being feminized in the media too, obvious in hindsight but which I’d never noticed. It is indeed almost like they’re being put in their place…which makes me recall the 2002 SES music video that Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling discussed, about which he argued that the middle-aged Western men humiliated in it were really proxies for their Korean equivalents, who then at least (and probably still now) simply wouldn’t tolerate the same level of public criticism. Again, I’m getting a sense of backlash, with younger Korean men acceptable alternatives for being put in their place but also to be romantically involved with by both young and older women, like you’ve mentioned expressed in many movies, and perhaps the commensurate Japanese imports of a time nicely fulfilled a need.
So much more to discuss in your last comment, especially about Heinlien – I’m quite a fan – and so on, but after two hours spent on this one I’d better start winding up it up. But for one last point, about your ajumma friend…I think you’d probably agree, she has quite romantic notions of modern Korean life. Moreover, from all I’ve read (and blogged) about Korean consumerism recently, her image of a gendered division of power and labor seems much more akin to the 19th Century than today. While there certainly is that child-rearing and finances emphasis to female domestic life here, virtually every author on Korean consumerism I’ve read comments that both are in many senses a false autonomy that doesn’t quite replace the genuine power women had then, and the overemphasis on and zealousness with which many Korean purchase consumer goods, be an education mom, speculate in real–estate, and so on are therefore somewhat predictable, and eerie in their parallels to Western societies during their suburbanization drives. Like the fact that modernization has meant housewifization in every developed society, albeit more marked in Korea than most places (Korea has one of the lowest women’s workforce participation rates in the OECD), it seems almost an inherent stage of capitalism that Korea too invariably pass through too, if only because its lack of children will ensure that women will soon be given every encouragement to work.
But I discuss that more in the link above, so let me stop there and hit “publish” before I regret not spending another two hours on editing all that…!
P.S. Well, I say “more on topic”, but somewhere along the way I forgot that this post was actually about your cats…
James,
I’m glad your cat came out okay. Six months seems long… one wonders why they don’t just do a blood test or something. (Can’t they detect rabies in some other way than waiting for it to show up?)
I won’t say more about grad school till it’s firm, but it’s still cool. I, too, am considering some form of doctoral work.
That’s partly because you’re not looking backwards far enough, I’m guessing. Well, maybe. I think if you explore The Dandy — a literary character but also a real lifestyle from back in the 1790s into the 1800s — you’ll find what’s probably closest in the English-speaking world to the young fashionable man in Korea today. (To the point that when I see young men preening in front of mirrors in the subway or in front of an elevator or restroom mirror, I think of one famous dandy — I can’t remember his name, but someone discussed by Byron, I think — who was rumored to spent many hours each day before a mirror. Of course, these guys also impacted fashion permanently (we have pants because of them), and they popularized a kind of public persona of wit, gentility, and whatever:
… that is, in some ways, still with us.
I’d be curious to read more about the way representations of women have changed; I see a lot of continuity from the older stuff I’ve seen, but then, I’m thinking more in terms of character archetypes. Unfortunately, the older 80s films I’m talking about are films I’ve just seen parts of, in passing, on TV. However, the Masterly Master Lee website on Korean pulp might be a good starting point. Also, the KOFA archive is somewhere you need to start hanging out if you ever get to Seoul… they have TONS of old movies you can watch, and probably resources too. Another place you could research is at the Korean movie database. I have to confess I don’t know how revolutionary they were, these films I’m thinking of — I just remember “tough guys” being “tough guys” in white tank tops, not gentle and innocent in pink polo shirts. I do think, though, that a great deal of 70s films would be of interest to you — especially the very popular and very pulpy stuff that looks like Western sexploitation films. Woman Detective Mary is one I discussed a while back which is certainly different from what you see in films from the 90s or nulls.
As for films with younger men and older women, I think I’ve written about that. There’s something weird and interesting going on with depiction of younger men, as we agree. And I’m pleased to see you coming around in terms of the question of Japanese influence. I’ll have more to say about that next time we meet in person, if that ever happens. :)
Didn’t know you were a big Heinlein fan. I’ll be getting to him soon — one must, really. What’s your favorite of his books?
I think that’s not uncommon among people living here. (Expats included, though their “romantic notions” are more dystopian.)
I don’t know about inherent stages — I’m kind of skeptical — but I do think that the “sense of false autonomy” is, well: it’s ubiquitous in capitalist societies. That is, it’s not just housewives that experience it… so do career women and career men and househusbands and everyone else. We only are paying attention to it in women’s lives because it’s more apparent and admissible there (thanks to feminism raising the issue).
Which is not to say that more advantages aren’t available to some men, but to say that it seems odd to me to discuss “false autonomy” in the lives of housewives in Korea without discussing it in the lives of salarymen, or college students, or career women, or pretty much everyone. It’s more apparent when you see it in another society, of course, but it gives one pause… just long enough to see it’s ubiquitous to the developed world, in some way or other.