The perils of being female in Korea
| December 7, 2009 | Filled under Blog, Internerd |
The Awl’s take on The Korea Times’ report that one in five South Korea women are starving themselves to be “beautiful.” No shit!
If you asked a South Korean woman to draw what she thought she looked like on a wall in crayon, she would FORGET THE TASK BECAUSE SHE IS SO HUNGRY.
Even I wasn’t immune to that image pressure bullshit, when boutiques only sell one size of clothing and it’s the one you don’t fit into, when most Korean women wouldn’t dare leave the house without five layers of make-up and ten of hairspray on, when it’s the year 2009 and Korea still remains a culture where a woman’s main value is how many babies she can produce and how she’s more attractive to look at than listen to. This culminates into 99.99% of what made living there so hard for me, a feminist, an opinionated, and outspoken woman trapped in something akin to 1950s America.
