South Korea tough place to challenge beauty myth
As she pursued her dream of becoming a fashion model, veering for years between extreme dieting and overeating, Park I Seul realized she had a problem: She was not tall and skinny, like typical runway models, nor was she big enough to be a plus-size model. She also realized that the only way to meet South Korea’s lofty beauty standards was for her to deny who she truly is, continuously.
So Park, 25, began calling herself a “natural-size model” — a nearly unheard-of term in South Korea — which she defines as someone with the same kind of body you see in daily life, as opposed to a difficult-to-attain ideal. She began to get work, and she started a popular YouTube channel where she introduces fashions for women who look more like her than like the women in fashion magazines.
Her new-found positive view of her body makes her part of a growing movement by South Korean women to resist what they see as extreme pressure to look a certain way.
Hundreds of young women have taken to social media with the hashtag “talcorset,” or take off the corset, to encourage others to free themselves from social stereotypes about their appearance that they feel have long bound them.
Park recently held what she called a “non-discriminatory” fashion show in Seoul, where models varied in height and weight confidently strode across the stage.
Other women have posted online photos or video clips showing themselves cutting their hair short, destroying their beauty products and going to school or work without makeup.
In South Korea, a woman weighing over 110 pounds (50 kilograms) is considered by many to be chubby, regardless of how tall she is.
Park herself is five-foot-five (165 centimetres) and weighs 137 pounds (62 kg), which she says puts her far from the minimum five-foot-seven (170 cm) and 88 to 106 pounds (40 to 48 kg) weight that conventional fashion models have; she’s also nowhere near the XL and above sizes demanded for plus-size models.
“I used to think that my fat body wasn’t the real me and that living in such a body wasn’t my real life. I kept denying myself. I believed that my life would only become happy after I lost weight,” Park said.
“I’ve come to think that I look good enough just the way I am.” South Korea is a deeply conservative country, and experts say its patriarchal society encourages rampant sexism. It had the largest gender pay gap among developed countries in 2017, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and ranks 115th out of 149 nations in the World Economic Forum’s global index of overall gender parity in 2018, among the lowest-ranking G20 countries.
According to a 2018 survey by Saramin, a leading South Korean recruitment website, 57 per cent of human resources managers at South Korean companies agreed that job applicants’ appearances influenced their evaluations. The survey also showed that female applicants are more affected by their looks on their job evaluations than male applicants.
As more women begin to embrace feminism, there’s also a new willingness to challenge strict South Korean societal demands that force women to take extreme care of their looks, according to Sohn Hee-jeong, a researcher at the Institute of Gender Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul.
Still, there’s often intense beauty pressure at work.
Choi Min Jeong, a former employee at a beverage company, still remembers her boss telling her that she had to work harder because she wasn’t as beautiful as a popular South Korean actress. “Although he said it as a joke, I thought it was ridiculous that he said it when ... my job was unrelated to appearance,” Choi said.