S. Korean women ‘resist’ intense beauty pressure

‘Natural size model’

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 continuously deny who she truly is.

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.

Movement

Her newfound 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 “nondiscriminatory” 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 50 kilograms (110 pounds) is considered by many to be chubby, regardless of how tall she is.

Park herself is 165 centimeters (5 feet 5 inches) tall and weighs 62 kilograms (137 pounds), which she says puts her far from the minimum 170 centimeters (5 feet 7 inches) and 40 to 48 kilograms (88 to 106 pounds) 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 lowestranking G-20 countries.

According to a 2018 survey by Saramin, a leading South Korean recruitment website, 57 percent 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.

Consider, for instance, a video by Cha Ji Won, a 24-year-old YouTuber who runs a channel called “Korean Womyn.” The video, which has gotten more than 720,000 views, shows her daily routine after she stopped obsessing over her hair and wearing makeup every day and began choosing and wearing comfortable clothes. It now takes her half the time to prepare to go outside as in the past, and she says she eats whatever she wants and doesn’t think about calories.

“I hoped that by letting other women know that there is someone like me, I could remind them that they don’t have to care too much (about how they look) and spend so much money and time on their appearance,” Cha said in an interview.

The movement can also be found in schools.

An 18-year-old high school senior who wished to be identified only by her last name, Hong, because of worries about her future studies recently exposed a series of lectures at her all girls’ school that promoted a focus on women’s appearance as they entered college. The lecture titles included, “Makeup for college freshmen,” ‘’Fashion styling for college freshmen” and “How to make a healthy body figure.”

Hong objected to her high school recommending classes that appeared to encourage female students to “take care” of their appearance. Hong and some other students contacted journalists to complain about the lectures, prompting the school to remove the classes.

Hong said she put on makeup for the first time when she was in elementary school and was wearing full makeup by high school. She no longer wears makeup and questions why women must always be judged on how they look. However, many children are ashamed of what in Korean is called ssaeng-eol, or bare face, Hong says, and won’t go outside without makeup.