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James on Wonder Girls

(START UPDATE #1 — 2:12 am same night):

Well, Lime tells me that, no, it really is “boys and ajeoshis” who are the main consumers of Wonder Girls CDs. If this is the case, then this adds a more disturbing layer to my reading of the Tell Me video, since that would mean it’s a representation of a “girl’s fantasy” that’s constructed for the edification of male consumers. But the thing I have to wonder is, was the band aimed at male consumers from the beginning — from the release of “Tell Me”? And is it really true that the majority of consumers for Wonder Girls CDs are male, or is this another case of the news media reporting on the ever-important ajeoshi and ignoring the real story, that’s happening somewhere else in society? I don’t know, but I have a strong distrust of the media ever since they spun the netizen critique of the Afghanistan Hostage Crisis as if the Netizens were simply being jerks and backlashing, when what really happened was a sudden shift in the permissibility to criticize religious extremism in Korea. So I do wonder… are the ajeoshis drooling, or is this just spin? Are girls listening to and consuming Wonder Girls, or is it boys? That’s a hard question to answer, since everything is so processed that even the audiences in lives shows are something I’d imagine are selected to control the spin on the group. I do so wish there was a way to find out how much of the hype is, well, hype. Or whether groups like Wonder Girls, even if they’re not actively consumed by girls, still impact on teenager’s perceptions and imaginative experimentation with their understandings of adulthood and femininity.)

(Hmm. On the other hand, either way, my main concern is addressed, which is that this kind of cruddy music being part of the mainstream of what’s on offer and what’s being consumed by adult males, however disturbing it might be, is further more disheartening.)

(End Update #1)

Note: There are probably a few glitches in this. I’ll be back to look again tomorrow, but since I spent so much time writing, and the gist is clear, I’m going to go ahead and post this now. Hopefully it’s of interest to a few people out there.


I said I wasn’t going to post about this for a few days, but I can’t help it. If I don’t write something soon, it’ll go by the wayside, and end up irretrievably lost. So here goes:

James of The Grand Narrative is one of a number of foreigners (including Michael at Scribblings of the Metropolitician, and Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling) who has been discussing the complexity of the Wonder Girls, a Korean girl group.

You really should check out his posts, Lolita Pizza?, and Tell Me: Why do the Wondergirls Matter?, because what follows won’t make too much sense unless you’re aware of what he’s written. Despite my disagreements in some areas, I think it’s a fascinating analysis of a Korean pop culture phenomenon.

But I’ll sum it up here, for those too lazy to click through. (And include all the videos he’s discussing, as well.)

And yet…

Now, this concept of the age of consent should give us pause here. After all, like the education system, like the corporate structure, like the supposedly democratic politics, the age of consent is an imported concept, one that’s been sticky-taped onto older concepts of sexual maturity (and desirability). And perhaps, when we see oddness floating around the issue of the age of consent — differing practice or apparent thinking from what people say out loud about it — then we need to stop and interrogate that notion in itself.

Not that Korean society didn’t have an equivalent notion to the Western “age of consent,” mind you. But whatever it was — and I imagine a Korea studies specialist is the person to ask — it cannot have been what it is now. If you look at texts that date back to the Joseon era, marriage arrangements could be codified in early childhood, at least among those families with any real stake in the matter; but it’s also certain that marriage could and did often during what we now consider “childhood” — that in-between, here-and-there period of life known as puberty or adolescence. If I remember right, Lady Hyegyong was married and having Prince Sado’s babies by the time she was the age of the youngest member of Wondergirls. This doesn’t provoke any kind of furore, but of course.

Why is that? Well, it’s partly because we accept the notion, “That was then and this is now.” There’s no sense getting all fired up about how people lived a few hundred years ago, because it’s not like anything can be done or said to change that situation. But it’s also because we’re all too aware of our own history — however unconsciously — and how we westerners, too, had daughters marrying off at fifteen or sixteen. Like, as recently as Jerry Lee Lewis and his child bride, for one. (Who was thirteen, by the way — the management insisted she was fifteen as part of damage control!)

It’s not that this was the norm in the 1950s — it wasn’t — but the point is that it has been the norm at various points and in different cultures, and that a great deal of human the biology and (evolutionary) psychology is tied up with that; this should give us pause to reflect. That, and our own history of the notion of youth, our own construction of childhood.

Construction — yeah, that red-alarm, postmodernist, deconstructionist word. But it’s also a pretty good word for how our current set of ideas about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood came to be. These ideas were built up over time, by artists, poets, philosophers, legislators, psychologists, clergymen, and people in general.

A thirty-year-old man being considered a “youth” because he has not yet married is something very interesting. When I was a grad student and reading Georges Duby on this subject — in his chapter “Youth in Aristocratic Society” from The Chivalrous Society — I found the notion of an adult man being considered a “youth” (and the notion of adulthood as being unattainable without marriage and the establishment of a family) both odd and somehow strangely familiar, understandable.

There is a sense in which, in contemporary Western society, marriage is linked to adulthood, as is parenthood. We say that it isn’t, we claim childless adults are people who’ve just made a value-neutral choice, but we don’t, I suspect, really, truly believe it. We imply, with a very politically correct choice of words, that not having a kid allows people to grow selfish, or to obsess about random, odd things. The perception is not at all gone… it’s still there, just under the surface. If you don’t believe me, watch a film like Knocked Up, or Juno. Or, for that matter, Office Space, or Six Feet Under. It’s one of those things we’ve all thought, looking at some older person without a kid, but of course, none of us will admit that, and we’re likely to chastise ourselves for thinking it, to mince words when we express it (if we do).

What all of this signals is that it’s a locus of anxiety. And what I’ve been hammering away at with my students in my Understanding Popular Cultures course is this same issue: that entertainment, especially narrative entertainment, is, among other things, a kind of encyclopedic collection of the anxieties of a culture. Yes, I’m stealing a page from Edward Said, who called the novel “an incoporative, quasi-encyclopedic cultural form” in Culture and Imperialism (on page 71, for those interested) — except, to update the fact that these days, film, videos, TV, and the bizarre marriage of all three in the media onslaught that is at the heart of pop culture marketing is the incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic cultural form of our day: TV, films, and music videos, especially, are the index of a culture’s obsessions — admissible and otherwise — in our era. In short, like Said, I’m arguing that our fundamental anxieties shine brightly in the heart of the narratives we choose to entertain ourselves with.

Entertainment thrives on the grey areas — the seething titillation that Sharon Stone offered audiences in Basic Instinct and the ceaselessly transgressive mockery of “family values” in a TV series like Weeds included, but not the norm. One need not openly transgress in order to play upon, and prey upon, the anxieties of its most fervent audiences.

Case in point? Well, how about Katie Holmes, the lead female actress in Dawson’s Creek? The fact is, Joey — in script — was 15 — the same age as the youngest of the Wonder Girls — or perhaps, depending on her birthday, 16 — in the first season of Dawson’s Creek. Yet plenty of young adults — in their late teens, in their 20s — found Joey Potter beautiful, pretty, the dream high school girlfriend. They were attracted to her — and she was undeniably attractive as a character — because she pushed every button in the book: pretty, girly, underprivileged (read: damsel-in-mild-distress), bright, sassy, and most of all, desired by the male lead. It’s arguable that this one of the reasons she ascended to such a height of desirability that, in the star-currency economics of Hollywood Marriage, she could be “worthy” of Tom Cruise. (Whatever we think of him and his rants these days, he was for a long time the iconically desirable male in Hollywood film.)

But if you asked guys at the time the kinds of questions that Westerners are bluntly asking Koreans about Wonder Girls, you’d get a similar reaction.

Interviewer: So, is Joey Potter pretty, in your opinion?

Average North American Male: That chick in Dawson’s Creek? Dude. Sure.

Interviewer: Would you say she’s attractive, then?

Average North American Male: I mean, er, not like that.

Interviewer: But don’t you find it odd, the way that her role in Dawson’s Creek casts her as the ultimate girlfriend, the perfect girl, and how thousands of adult men tune in and have their fantasies massaged by the vicarious experience of having Dawson fall for her, mess things up, and then stumble around trying to fix things again?

Average North American Male: But, like, it’s a good show. And she’s cute.

Interviewer: Like, cute? Nice ass? Good body?

Average North American Male: (Awkwardly silent for a moment.) Nah, man. She’s a kid. A teenager. It’s not like that. Jesus, are you soem kind of pedophile or something? It’s not like this is porno or something.

And Dawson’s Creek wasn’t porno; it wasn’t even close, from the little I remember. Yet thousands of men — millions, actually, I’d guess, by how long the series ran, and the star cred that Katie Holmes retained — tuned in every week and watched the show. Actually, the interview above would probably only have happened if you caught a guy watching it. Otherwise, he’d probably deny it. But the ratings were there.

And the real point is, Holmes wasn’t really 15 or 16. The character Joey was born in 1983. But Katie Holmes was born in 1978, and was well over the age of consent by the time she started playing Joey on Dawson’s Creek. Think about that for a moment: they had a twenty-year-old woman playing a fifteen year old girl who was the love interest of (what was in-script) a fifteen-year-old boy being played by a twenty-two year old man. Yes, Dawson’s Creek is far from the only show doing this — I could have used Beverly Hills: 90210 or any number of films as an example — and I’m far from the first person to comment on this. But it does seem worth considering, when we’re consider grey-area weirdness in connection with the Age of Consent in another culture’s entertainment media.

And no, this is not some game of equivalency. Having older women play younger roles is not exactly the same as have young girls display the trappings of sexual maturity. But creating characters that are supposed to be sexually immature, or in the awkward pubescent age range, and then having them played by adults who are absolutely sexually mature, and whom, in another context — if you saw them on the street — you might assume were sexually active represents a rather profound display of anxiety with regard to the actuality of sexuality in pubescent teenagers. Heaven forbid we have actual teenagers — who look like teenagers — playing those characters as they considered sleeping together or started making out and kissing and whatever. That, I guarantee you, would have been too much for network TV at the time the show first aired, in 1998. Whatever is going on, Dawson’s Creek is working very similar psychological terrain, by somehow hypersexualizing teens — giving them incongruously adult bodies — just the same way Wonder Girls’ fashion coordinator is giving the girls incongruously “adult” (in several senses) fashions.

Which is to say that we westerners also have a lot of weirdness in our entertainment media floating around that grey area of the age of consent. We’re profoundly uncomfortable with — and at the same time fascinated by — the period where sexuality begins to form in the mind of people, and the moment at which that sexuality becomes permissible. Straight-laced objectionability is, in fact, the greatest determinant in whether you’ll see a sex scene between two characters in a film. This is why we so rarely see plain, slightly overweight forty-year-olds having marital sex in a film. Doubtless, there must be some plain-looking middle-aged married couples out there who have passionate, enviable sex lives, but you’ll never see that in more than a few films, because it’s the most permissible sex on the planet. It’s when sex becomes imaginably objectionable — transgressive — that it becomes worthy of depiction:

In fact, it’s pretty much taken for granted that the Western notion of romance, as generated by the troubadours in Provençe in the 14th-century, defines “love” as transgressive; extramarital, forbidden, socially exclusionary and isolating, secret, and dangerous. We have issues, and the grey area is one of them — it’s located in part of that terrain of “danger” and “forbidden” that long ago was occupied by rich older ladies married to greying lords or knights — the fantasy of young knights being to slaughter the old men and marry their wives, inheriting both land and wealth and attaining adulthood in one fell swoop. (All of this discussed by Duby in various texts, and visible in all kinds of Medieval poems, most memorably in some of the Lais of Marie de France.)

Putting aside the Middle Ages for a bit, it’s not surprising that, in Korea, similar anxieties exist since, after all, we’re all the same species. Humans are attracted to forbidden things, and have always had a transgressive streak. We like to break the rules, or tend to, when the temptation is big enough.

So what has this to do with adult Korean males’ fascination with, and backpedaling defense of, the Wondergirls? Why is what seems so obvious to us (outsiders) so unspeakable to so many here?

Well, for one thing, there’s the observer bias. Most educated anglophones are quite self-righteously sensitive to this kind of thing, because there is no society more sensitized to the dangers of media tastelessly exploiting young people than ours… Japan might be more explotative, as James argues pretty convincingly, but we’re more sensitive about it, and obsessed about it. North American anglophones especially, since we get both worlds — a dose of the edgiest form of this exploitation in the American media, as well as a dose of the puritanical obsession with sex that so oddly characterizes the culture of the USA. (And, in fact, it’s likely the two are linked: if sex were not such an obsession, America probably would not be so concerned with being politically correct about it.)

This isn’t exactly how things work in Korea, but of course, all of that is obscured in the debate here, as soon as it involves even one westerner. It’s obscured, in part, by the standard, near-universal conviction among Koreans that a positive image of Korea must be presented to the world. It goes without saying that, in this sense, the image can only really be positive if it’s presented in terms that will appear positive on the world’s terms, rather than on Korea’s terms. And of course, like between every culture, there are differences in what is considered acceptable. What this gives rise to is a further adherence to the pattern that many Koreans learn as essential, polite etiquette: that is, prevarication for the sake of the group, or of the “authority.” (Such as replying to their bosses, “Sure, this is great ice cream!” loudly when half the people are sitting there thinking, “This ice cream SUCKS!“)

What I’m saying is that any direct response to a Westerner’s criticism that the Wonder Girls are overtly sexualized is, unfortunately, going to be distorted by the fact that in Korea, it’s almost never just a discussion of ideas: on some level, for many Koreans, a discussion is also a promo-op, a chance to represent the nation in a positive light, to make people think well of their nation; or, if it is not that, it devolves into a more basic “defense” of the nation, which is hardly any more useful for finding out people’s real opinions.

Of course, that’s not the whole picture either. The fact that James has pointed out, time and time again, is that these girls are adolescents. The significance of that, for us, is that they fall into the category of child, rather than of adult. This is the whole point of the age of consent, and it’s the age of consent — 18 — that comes up most often in discussions of the Wonder Girls. Not directly by mention, of course — the number that is most often bandied about is fifteen, which is the age of the youngest group member, and the one, James argues, most often decked out in the shortest skirt on stage.

But it’s like saying, “He’s FOUR foot EIGHT?” — saying that implies that a different number is normal… maybe five foot eight, maybe six feet tall, it’s not clear. But when the number 15 is used in discussions of the Wonder Girls, with the implication that 15 is unacceptable, the unspoken (or sometimes spoken) corollary is that, once they’re 18, sexualized media exploitation is fine, it’s oh-whatever, it’s “fair play.” It’s, oooh, let’s find some images of Hyori and Jeon Ji Hyun and post them on our blogs. (No offense, James, this is not a criticism of your site.)

I think this is something worth stopped to consider, since, once again, we’ve bumped up against the Age of Consent.

On one level, it’s a chicken-and-egg question: is the sexualization of teenagers in (foreigner-accessible) media a result of the longstanding sexualization of teenagers in other venues? Or does the media has a reverberating effect on society, as teenagers begin to dress (and behave) more and more like how they think adult women do. My answer to this is that I do not know. I think some of the comments on James’ post are unconvincing because the commenter is unwittingly supporting James’ argument. Chris argues that Daegu schoolgirls are dressing in a way relatively similar to the Wonder Girls, and perhaps he is right. Perhaps that actually confirms James’ point. Or perhaps it debunks it. I don’t know.

Actually, it’d be worth going for an afternoon wander in Seoul, just to see: after all, Seoul is the cutting edge; Seoul is where everything happens first, in this country, for a combination of reasons. My last visit during the weekend, I was surprised to see some young women who I decided were probably teenagers dressed in ways that you usually only see adult women — specifically, in Korean society, single adult women, usually under 30, and definitely those of college age — dressing. At the same time, one could reply to Chris that maybe South Korean teenagers are dressing this way in part because of their role models, which at the moment are media concotions like Wonder Girls and Hyori and whomever else is in the spotlight these days.

However, on another level, we need to stop and consider whether the exploitation of women — by men, and by media — suddenly starts being alright at age 18. Yes, the prostitutes in Korea demonstrated against the sex trade crackdown. I hardly think that’s an advertisement for the benefits of working in the sex trade, or a rebuttal to the idea that sex work is, indeed, exploitative. …

But the really interesting question is, why the deep-seated faith in the age of consent, let alone the deep-seated faith in its applicability to a foreign culture, let alone the shock and consternation that such a foreign culture hasn’t effectively applied it to their aesthetics and their culture, as well as their legal system (however haphazardly)?

An interesting analogy is the age at which one can drink in certain parts of the world. For example, I grew up in Saskatchewan, where the drinking age is 19. In Alberta, just over an invisible and purely administrative line, the drinking age is 18. Predictably, Saskatchewan kids, on their 18th birthday, would drive over the line and suddenly, magically reach the age of consent. They were able to go to bars, drink, and do things that were illegal for them in their home province, because legally in their home province, they were still technically children. So they would drive out to Lloydminster, a city that straddles the border between Saskatchewan and Alberta, and they would get hammered. I didn’t do it, but it was common enough that people would assume their friends were going to do it.

This highlights a point: when do adolescents attain adulthood? Well, really, this is one of those things where bureaucrats have chosen to draw a specific line in the sand, but have pulled the criteria for where to draw that line essentially out of their backsides. Do teenagers become more responsible suddenly at age 18? No, we all know they don’t. When do they become more responsible? Well, some do it at seventeen. Some at fifteen. Some don’t until they’re 30. Some people never bloody well attain adulthood.

What the Age of Consent does is it draws a line at a specific point where mental adulthood has been attained. And it’s a relatively good one, we’d argue.

Well, you’d think we would. I’m not sure I would. I don’t think I really reached mental adulthood till much later, more like age 25 or 26. (And a lot of the young westerners I meet here reinforce this notion of mine.) Then again, there are ways in which I’m still working on it at age 34, too. Adulthood isn’t really a stage of life, it’s a continuous process that starts somewhere in puberty and doesn’t stop till death or second childhood.

And so the grey area is inescapable. But at the same time, it is inescapably the locus of anxiety.

Then there’s biopsychology, or evolutionary biology. The simple fact is that human beings did not, for the majority of human history, have any such concept as the Age of Consent. Human males are not attracted to females displaying secondary sexual characteristics and the evidence of fertility who are also legally available to them as potential partners: the instinctual base of the male psyche doesn’t have a slot where laws can be plugged in. Which is not an argument in favor of wonjo gyojae (see Gusts of Popular Feeling, here, for an excellent discussion of this phenomenon, one of several he’s written), not at all: human beings have the ability to choose whether to be driven by instincts or abstract ideals, whether to limit their behaviours or not.

And I’m not saying that all men are potential Humbert Humberts, either — or defending those who are! Not by a bloody long shot — I find that sort of thing reprehensible. But I am saying that there’s a grey area, and a long and colorful history of varied attitudes towards it, for a reason. At certain times and places, menstruation was a sign of womanhood marriageability, and every last one of the Wonder Girls would, by this criteria, have been a wife and mother by now. (Though, then again, I’ve read that ovulation is starting earlier and earlier, thanks to modern agriculture and chemical additives in our food. So maybe they wouldn’t have all been married by now. Then again, Lady Hyegyong was having kids by that age, as far as I remember.) The thing is, whatever we might call physical adulthood is, just as with mental maturity, attained much earlier by some that by others. That is, some girls acquire the trappings of adulthood, their secondary sexual characteristics — much sooner. This doesn’t mean they are adults, or should be treated as if they were. But they’re not exactly children, either, and some ambiguity arises from that. Some anxiety, too, surely, when you add in makeup, and hip-grinding dance moves, and all the other trappings of adult sex idols.

And what this does is it places them smack dab in the grey area, ripe for exploitation by media, because media, as I’ve said before, is the master exploiter of anxieties. Bill Hicks says it better than I can, and he said it before I even thought it:

<a href=”http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/6a47ba5483″>Bill Hicks on Marketing</a> on <a href=”http://www.funnyordie.com/”>FunnyOrDie.com</a>

As James pointed out, it will use your social anxieties to sell you pizza:

or to urge you to vote:

or to buy CDs:

It will even take adult women:

and reduce them (temporarily) to girly icons (something I’ve discussed more here):

… or even infantilize them completely, while having them show off their S-lines and their butt, once voted “best ass in Korea” online, if that’ll tickle you in your grey area, because, hey, makeup, printers: women’s bodies will sell them all.

Still, there’s one angle that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere, and this, too, concerns me.

James has written a great deal about how the construction of femininity, of womanhood, of gender roles, is undergoing transformation here. He’s been quite intelligent about it, and I want to applaud him for that. But he’s missed something very important in the area, and something that I think needs to be brought up, which is the following…

As much as we fuss and worry about the “sexualization” of youth, there’s a degree to which, like everything else, for even the most straight-laced teenager, his or her sexuality is an immense unknown — an undiscovered country. In Korea especially, their own sexuality is an undiscovered country for most teenagers because the quality of the sex-education system is to damned poor. The country has been discovered umpteen times, but nobody’s been thoughtful enough to send the maps back for those who have yet to embark. You don’t have to be Korean to experience a great deal of anxiety in the subject, either: Nora Ephron’s wonderful essay, “A Few Words About Breasts” (which I can’t find online, but it’s great, go dig it up, it’s worth it!) describes what a hellish experience it can be for a girl when her breasts start coming in… or when they don’t.

Now, imagine being a teenager in Korea, right now. Especially a teenaged girl. You’re being bombarded by a whole host of different ideas. Look at the range of ideas and where they’re coming from: the traditionalists one knows will be selling the whole package of traditionalist values, which in Korea not only include being a good (officially “chaste”) girl, but also connect up uncomfortably with Confucian ideas which, let’s be frank, put women lower on the totem pole. Yet there are other messages available too, and those are images that seem empowering, that seem to speak of discarding the necessity of a man, or of male approval. I’m not saying that the Wonder Girls are some kind of grrrrrrl! power feminist movement, or anything — I’m just as discomfited as anyone by the fact that many adult males were crazy about them — but at the same time, we shouldn’t treat girls as if they’re wholly passive, or wholly stupid. I mean, unless we’re willing to assume teenaged girls are stupid, at which point I think we maybe need to stop and reconsider our motives for discussing this. Are we really just conjuring a generation of imaginary damsels-in-distress, so that we can cleverly sit about racionating about how oppressed they are, and what puppets they’re going to be to the whole media-entertainment complex?

Vulnerable, yes, they are indeed. But teenaged girls are vulnerable anyway, in the absence of this sort of media. It’s not TV or movies that wonjo kyojae springs from. I’m pretty sure there’s a tradition of it dating back very far, as far as the written historical record goes, and that it was just, in those earlier days, called something else because there wasn’t a modern, Western concept like the “Age of Consent” stickytaped onto it. As I said, the position of women in a Confucian isn’t so hot, and in the Korean form of this philosophy, the more extremist “Neo-Confucianism” that was taken up by, and promoted by, the early Joseon Dynasty, things are even worse for women. So it’s not like there’s a grand tradition of lovely family values here, any more than there was a sterile, clean universality of what Republicans like to call “family values” in America in the 1950s, or the 1920s, or however far back you go. Girls have always had it tough, growing up with definitions flying at them from all directions. Definitions, assumptions, imperatives.

So these girls are, like so many before them, stuck between a rock and a hard place. They’re sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, and we have to ask ourselves, what is the way through? And I think, ironically, the video for Tell Me could be argued to enunciate it:

The beginning of the video is quite prosaic: we’re in the real world, where a bunch of average looking schoolgirls are sitting around a TV.

What they see on TV is ridiculous, it’s weird, it’s silly. A woman is pictured in full “regalia” seated next to a man, before swishing her “petticoats” in his face:

A band (guys) singing and dancing and the words emblazoned on the screen read, “She’s pretty… She’s pretty” follows, a little later, by
“She was pretty.”

The girls react like any teenaged girls would: with anxious laughter, and loud, protestatory exclamations of disgust…

… that belie what they’re really feeling, and which finally comes forth: their intense interest, as the TV becomes the central object in the screen and they are drawn “into it.”

The trope of them being drawn into, and popping out of, screens is something we saw earlier, in the voting ad. Maybe there’s something to be made of that, I don’t know. But in this context, it’s clear what this means, this movement toward the screen, for suddenly, we find ourselves in a place where the previous order of the world is suspended: the very girls who were acting disgusted by the lingerie and lovesong routines on TV are now dressed up in decidedly unschoolgirl-like clothes — clothing rather like what any college girl wears to class, but being worn by girls who, moments before, in the real world, were dressed in the plain, day-in-day-out school uniform. (And this is not the School Uniform of the Japanese porn star: it is the ill-fitting, plain, unflattering garb of every teenaged girl in the country for years on end. Their hair is permed — this, in a society where girls are not allowed to perm their hair, by the dictates of their school principals.

It’s quite clear we’re in a space of fantasy. And insofar as we take that into account, a lot suddenly becomes clearer. Why are the girls dressed like adults? Because every prisoner dreams of being outside the prison, and there’s no institution in the world that so resembles a prison than a school — especially, my Korean friends have told me over the years, a Korean high school! (And, tellingly, the end of the video is of the Wonder Woman character — one of the singers — dashing out of the school.)

Yet despite this, the video itself keep bouncing back and forth between more realistic images of schoolgirl life — the girls in their classroom, on the school bus…

… and, yeah, the girls’ locker room. (And it’s an interesting moment, because while we could be cynical, I think it’s an important moment, symbolically, in the video. I’ll get into that later, but I’ll let you rewatch the video on your own if you like, now that you’re seeing it through my eyes.)

Throughout the video, images of the girls in their fantasized transfiguration into young women alternate between images of them as normal school kids. Yeah, there’s something of the “Miss Congeniality” about it — how Sandra Bullock is made into a plain-jane so that when she becomes [conventionally, drably, marketably] “pretty”, it’s an affecting transformation. There’s something very lipstick feminist about this, and I have the same misgivings about it that many mainstream feminists have mentioned. And I don’t think that we can thank the management company that brought us Wonder Girls for this, mind you. Who knows if this was even anywhere like as deeply thought out as what I’ve written, or James has written, or Michael, or Bulgasari.

I daresay that I suspect, if these girls’ skirts were a little shorter, or if this were a kids’ picture book, we’d be talking about right now is a narrative that simultaneously acts out girlish empowerment (as the superhero), and fantasizes about a premature escape from the drudgery of school. All the grown-up dancing and fashion and makeup, which is donned in a space where only females interact, significantly, if anything, seems to add up to a conflation of these two central ideas in a package that also conveniently can be marketed as a standard music video. It’s quite interesting, in that capacity. Fascinating, actually.

But the most important thing we need to consider when analyzing the narrative of this particular video is that we avoid clinging to the intentional fallacy. The point of the Wonder Girls is to make money — that was the point of their forming, of making the video, and so on — but what Korean girls choose to do with it is another thing. Every discussion I’ve seen has patronized them, treated them as empty vessels, emphasized that they are susceptible to all kinds of bad messages in this and other videos.

And concern is not completely unwarranted. After all, it’s one thing — and a valid, understandable thing — to object to the sexualization of young women who are being commodified — not just their images, but their very bodies, as with what I consider the revolting practice of wonjo gyojae. It’s quite another to object to any degree of sexuality on the part of girls who, after all, are not asexual. That’s not to say they ought to be sleeping with boys in seventh grade, or even in twelfth grade — the stakes are pretty high for them, and sex education is abysmal here, and anyway, sex even in the twelfth grade can mess up someone’s life, or confidence, or whatever.

But to get too concerned about a video in which, anyway, girls’ sexuality is somehow being expressed in a space which is not open to males, it seems, is to deny them even the right to fantasize about what it’s like to be a woman, free, grown-up, not stuck in a school uniform and allowed to do what she wants with her hair. It’s a grey area, yes, and as adults we’re very anxious about it, and when we see the media exploiting it for money, we get even more anxious… but at the same time, it’s useful to ask ourselves what young women are indeed seeing when they watch it.

(And yes, I’m thinking that an online poll of young women would be very useful in discussing this, but I haven’t the faintest idea how to construct one.)

As James has pointed out elsewhere, women showing more skin and being more provocative in their dress choices can be linked (at least, according to some women themselves) as a sign of, and a tool of, empowerment. I’m leery as always, but I also think it’s worth it not to just shoo off the voices of the women who say this, since, considering our academic models of “media influence” — about which I’ve always been somewhat dubious — their comments are important because they reflects the subjective self-assessment of influence by women themselves. One thing I don’t see, when I go to Seoul, is teenaged girls in high heels and short skirts who are selling themselves to ajeoshis on the street. Whether the explosion in girls assertively experimenting with their sexuality even deserves to be linked to wonjo gyojae is, to me, an open question. After all, girls who are more assertive of their sexuality and desires and self-image may well be girls less prone to manipulation by older men, or less likely to sell themselves to an ugly old man like the one who invades the girls’ shared, communal, and private space in the Tell Me video (the flasher who goes into the girls’ change room and is summarily cast out by a female superhero). Whatever that video does communicate — a consumerism-dependent, superficial sense of femininity, to be sure, but one that’s already near-universal here anyway — I don’t think it suggests girls should be cozying up with perverted old men, or even being passive, letting men manipulate them, or anything like that.

And one more thing: while it’s easy for men to start ranting about how makeup is artifical, is exploitative, and so on, I know that, growing up with sisters, one thing I can say is this: learning to use makeup is part of growing up. Sure, plenty of Korean women (and superstars) never get past that point where it’s a constant thing, a necessity. Unfortunately, makeup is part of the official woman’s uniform in this society. But it already is, and many women who grow up here without learning how to use it — I know some — eventually hit a crisis spot and decide that, even if they won’t use it every day, they want to know how. It’s kind of like men wanting to know how to throw a punch, even if they plan on never doing it. (Would that more girls knew how to throw a punch too… it’d be a better world.)

What I’m saying is, like them or not, the trappings of adult femininity are something that teenaged girls need to grapple with. If the girliness of so many young (or even not-so-young) adult women is taken into account, it’s hardly inexplicable that Wonder Girls would also act girly. It’s almost a necessity, if they’re to speak to their main audience, which is girls, and it is girls, if the fantasy-logic of the video can be trusted. Despite whatever older male viewers the video gets, I believe there is a cryptic girl-language being spoken in the video, and I expect that most teenaged Korean girls will grasp it much more quickly than us clever, academic, big-word-toting white guys ever did, with all our social analysis. Fantasy, after all, reacts to the world, but it does not operate within the world. Fantasy is kind of like the experimental laboratory of the identity.

Perhaps, indeed, it is the incongruity of the trappings of adult femininity, on the youngest members most exaggeratedly, that renders it “safe.” If the eldest of the troupe were always in the shortest skirts, there might be some risk, but it’s easier for adult males to dismiss the incongruity when it’s the youngest member of the group. And in a sense, perhaps this is the general Korean perception — that this is some teenaged girls playing dressup. What echoes rather discomfitingly for us with, say, the ick of young children in beauty pageants might resonate, for Koreans, much more strongly with kids playing dress-up. We default to the suspicious, dark reading, especially those of us with academic training and concern for the undiscussable side of Korean culture, while perhaps for Koreans, it’s more natural to default to the, “Aw, cute!” reaction where what they see is not children being made to mimick adults, but a simulacrum of children actually mimicking adults. As Susan Blackmore noted in The Meme Machine, humans are, first and foremost, consummate imitators. In children, especially, imitation is the experimental lab in which identity is manufactured — imitation of adults. And yeah, this one is being co-sponsored by an entertainment corporation, but then again, entertainment corporations have one goal — to make money — and this goal is attained by speaking to the fantasy-needs of their clientele. And the only people who still buy CDs in Korea anymore are teenagers, right?

Then again, that’s because the only music being mass-produced here is fit only for teenagers. If that. Which brings me to my much bigger concern with regard to Wonder Girls… which is, well, again, something that Bill Hicks said wonderfully in reference to the New Kids on the Block:

<a href=”http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/30ec6a0523″>Bill Hicks – Play From Your Fucking Heart</a> on <a href=”http://www.funnyordie.com/”>FunnyOrDie.com</a>

Okay, maybe I don’t want musicians who shoot themselves on stage, but for Christ’s sake, it’s depressing to see people — even adults — taken in en masse by this marketing crap. Hicks’ question — “When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children?” — is desperately important, and I don’t see anyone who’s arguing it never did, in Korean society. I see, honestly, very little alternative to banal mediocrity when it comes to pop music culture. Whatever is subversive, transgressive, or resistant to the banality, the marketing machine, the commodification of everything — putting dollar signs on everything, as Hicks rails — is banished from radio play, stuck in “live clubs” in Hong Ik, hidden away from the young. Teenagers where I was growing up lived in a cultural wasteland, too, but they had access to more alternatives. My friend Mike was able to actually get into techno when nobody else we knew was really into it. I was able to be a jazzhead in high school. The “cool kids” didn’t listen to New Kids, they listened to The Smiths and old tapes of The Cure. And we had music like the Beatles which, though it wasn’t them my cup of tea, wasn’t so ephemeral and discarded — so unavailable — that young people, like my sisters, couldn’t get into it as some alternative to the popular trash.

(Speaking of discarded, a co-worker emailed me this link to a ton of old Korean rock music. I can’t get it to load on my Linux browser, but I’ll be checking it out when I get a chance to boot into Windows. Thanks Bradley!)

When I see the Wonder Girls, I just see another formulaic invention of a star-making agency, a few kids who were chosen for their looks, dressed up like grown-ups, and sent onto stage to generate money. Nobody who’s actually heard music played from the heart — whether it’s Robert Johnson, or Hwang Sin Hae Band (황신혜 밴드), or Cassandra Wilson, or Nick Drake, or Third Line Butterfly (삼호선 버터프라이), or Jimi Hendrix, or Miles Davis, or Billie Holiday, can listen to and adore the Wonder Girls for their musical performances. It would be like a world-renowed performer of Bach keyboard music suddenly giving it all up to play accompaniment for a Debbie Gibson look-alike. The music of the Wonder Girls, like the images generated with their bodies, like the experiences that are made available for the price of a concert ticket, are simply a marketing product. If the money dropped out of the industry, they would cease to exist in an instant. Like the professor who doesn’t write comments on feedback on essays, like the businessman who doesn’t love to sell cars, they’re just doing a job.

And while it’s unfortnate that the industry into whose clutches these kids who are now the Wonder Girls fallen into will exploit them, it’s even more unfortunate that there’s such a big audience for what is, in the end, cotton candy. Like Bill Hicks, “I want my [unborn] children to listen to people who fucking rock!” — in the way that Bach, John Coltrane, Hendrix, Marley, the Beatles, Kim Kwang Seok, the Uh Uh Boo Project band, and countless others do or did. They can listen to what they want, but I hope for more, for my children, than being mere sheep when it comes to popular culture; adult men declaring they like “ballad” when asked what their favorite music is; adult women trying to learn the steps to a crappy dance because everyone around them seems to think it’s cool; legions of adults muttering “Tell Me, Tell Me, da da-da da-da daaaaaa-da…” for months on end because they never turn off their TVs.

You see, I can’t seem to shake the notion that Wonder Girls is much less a cause of trouble, and much more — on many levels — a symptom. Not so much a symptom of what is, after all, a fairly universal anxiety about the Age of Consent, one we can see traces of in all modernized cultures; but rather, more alarmingly, their popularity is a symptom of something alarming: the cultural cannibalization that’s happened here, and is ongoing. There’s no real music for grownups. There’s no performance art for grownups, either, sans TV. This is a very bad thing.

And that, to me, is the real reason that boundaries are looking more unstable, that these kinds of limits are being pushed increasingly in public. When your heritage — all the little bit that gets romanticized and thrown into high school textbooks — is regarded as ballast, you find out, sooner or later, that somewhere along the way, the astrolabe and the sextant went over the side. You’ve no idea of where you are, because you have only the foggiest, and most distorted of senses, of where you have been. And from there on, as we Westerners discovered when we jettisoned the last shreds of the culture we had inherited in favor of short-term flash and glam, what is left is unfortunately very rough sailing.

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