Trigger Warnings: body image, fat shaming, cyberbullying

Winning the title of Miss Korea supposedly indicates that the winner is the “most beautiful woman in Korea.” Yet, the winner of Miss Korea 2018, Soo Min Kim, received major backlash after winning the competition because netizens deemed her to be too fat. In Korea, women over 50 kg or about 110 lbs. are considered “chubby” (Asian Boss). At 5’8’’ and 130 lbs. (58.9kg), Soo Min was shunned by Korean netizens because she was considered overweight and therefore cannot represent Korean beauty. As a result, she had to temporarily quit Instagram because of the overwhelming amount of hate comments that she was receiving. Soo Min’s experience and Korea’s reaction demonstrate the problematic beauty standards that permeate not only the controversial beauty pageant, but also Korea’s society as a whole.

Beauty pageants are problematic and have historically perpetuated sexist ideologies and objectified women’s bodies. Additionally, pageants implicitly create regionally specific beauty standards and send a message of what the archetypal woman should look like. In other words, the winner of a beauty pageant carries the burden of representing what beauty means to a region, and in the case of Soo Min, she failed to live up to that standard according to Korean netizens. In the interview above, Soo Min attributes the cause of Korean’s harsh beauty standards to be social media and the ability to circulate immensely-edited imagery that perpetuates lookism. She also talks about the role that celebrities play in crafting the image of the ideal weight and the ideal body. It’s not hard to find similar issues in the K-Pop industry, where many K-Pop idols are under constant scrutiny by not only their labels and management, but also by the audience that they serve.

In 2017, a member of a Korean girl group (PRISTIN), 15-year-old Kyla Massie, was intensely fat-shamed by Korean netizens and asked to be removed from the group. Many comments online criticized her for “not taking care of herself,” and demanded that she went on a diet immediately. This expectation for a public figure to self-manage and present their bodies in a way that is “socially acceptable” is ridiculous and illustrates the unspoken responsibilities of K-Pop idols to fit within a prescribed box – a box of limitations that refrain them from being themselves. Furthermore, the prevalence of social media platforms allows for people to voice their opinions anonymously, which adds fuel to the fire as it provides an opportunity for cyberbullying and tarnishing the body image and self-esteem of those in question. On the other hand, there are also “influencers” who feel the need to add to the conversation (*ahem* Edward Avila), which inevitably perpetuates the negative social commentary towards a public target.

The world of K-Pop and K-Culture is not all glitz and glamorous as most people would like to believe. As consumers of these cultural products, there is a need to constantly re-assess the social and cultural influence that media forms can have. It’s easy to point to self-love as a solution, but self-love, as Professor Lee writes in “Beauty Between Empires,” is itself a form of self-governance that is used paradoxically to justify the existence of practices like plastic surgery. Instead of viewing plastic surgery or other forms of body alterations as methods to “heal a psychological complaint,” it’s important for a nation to recognize the extensiveness and the problematic permeation of media forms that contribute to creating imagery of the “perfect appearance”, whether it is the Miss Korea pageant, K-Pop girl groups, or the relentless advertising of plastic surgery throughout the country. The media has the responsibility to shift the paradigm and engage people in conversations that need to happen in order to spark change.

Bonus Read: Exploring Korea’s Skinny Obsession and The Plus-Size Models Fighting Back

Big, round eyes. Sharp, pointy nose. Long, straight hair. Smaller face. Slim figure. Lighter skin.

All of the features above were described as the “typical Asian beauty standards” that would define Korean women as beautiful and ideal. In an interview by Koreaboo Studios, Korean men were asked to describe their ideal Korean girl and what she would look like. Most responded with similar answers, with a spectrum of responses that nevertheless included at least one of the features aforementioned. Yet there shouldn’t be anything “typical” about these standards.

South Korea is known for its extreme beauty standards that make the country a global center for plastic surgery. In fact, South Korean high school girls are often known to receive plastic surgery as a high school graduation gift from their parents. As described in Hoang’s “Constructing Desirable Bodies,” plastic surgery is considered as a technology of embodiment, or “the process through which women produce, transform, or manipulate their bodies through particular kinds of body work that signify divergent perceptions of national progress.” The presence of such a signifier indicates that there’s a receiver on the other end, such as the clientele of Vietnam sex workers, whose needs are satisfied accordingly in order to increase the status of the region. Vietnam sex workers altered their bodies in order to fulfill the radicalized and classed desires of their clients, which in turn transforms them into representatives of Vietnam. In other words, they symbolize and signal the growing potential of the nation to its potential investors, and their bodies and performances of femininity are used as signifiers of modernity and economic strength of their nation.

As Hoang pointed out, technologies of embodiment are rapidly evolving and can often quickly respond to evolving standards of beauty. For example, a “boy band” named FFC-Acrush was announced in China in 2017 as China’s answer to K-Pop. The group became a major sensation in China with almost a million fans on Weibo. But the catch is: All of the members are actually girls posing as boys and prefer to be referred to as “mei-shao-nan,” or a gender-free term that translates to “handsome youths” in Chinese. The group’s androgynous style made waves in not only China but also in the West. The mastermind behind the group, Wang Tianhai, stated that the intention of the group is to tap into the unique beauty of gender neutral and to celebrate “a special sense of beauty and a unique sense of handsomeness”. The group’s unique positioning demonstrates their appeal to a new demographic in this generation, in which the image of a female is no longer dictated by “big eyes, small face, long hair, slim figure.” With distinctly gender-segregated groups in K-Pop, perhaps this is China’s rebellious act to push C-Pop to the global stage.