Flawless by Elise Hu

Author:Elise Hu [Hu, Elise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

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What emerges from my research and conversations with Korean women is that plastic surgery and body modification through disordered eating—both practices where Korea stands out—share similar motivations and expressions. On one hand, the fear of being a social outcast, and on the other, a genuine desire for empowerment in a system of aspirational capitalistic individualism. In Korea, after the Asian financial crisis, everyone is expected to be a hardworking entrepreneur. Appearances matter as much as, if not more than, abilities. The endurance of extreme dieting culture can’t be written off as girlish superficiality. Rather, it’s viewed by many of its adherents as empowerment in a highly visual, consumption-heavy system where our bodies are laboring and competing in the market. K-pop starlet Park Boram said it: You see the results in me, and that was motivating for people.

South Korea’s modernity created major shifts in the practice of Korean womanhood. Women went from primarily identifying as mothers, then primarily as wives, and now in the current era of consumer culture, they can compete as sexy enterprises of their own. As such, as sociologist Cho Joo-hyun argues, body enhancement and modification are a means of enhancing human capital that does not depend on “the womanly virtues of traditional ethics,” such as motherhood, but instead “on measurable and quantifiable factors such as height, weight, and BMI index.”[56] Or a 1:1>1 face. Korea’s factors are both unique to its history and culture but also share American thinking—unquestioned faith in markets and belief in individual responsibility. It reminded me that Korea’s local pressures and influences don’t happen in a vacuum. The Korean Dream, as Sharon Heijin Lee has described it, is a combination of collectivist values and neoliberal ideas—a souped-up version of the American Dream, in which what the market needs, and what we can privately gain, take precedence over everything else. There’s nothing hard work and money can’t get you.

Modern culture urges women to become “neoliberal entrepreneurs,” prioritizing managing ourselves by managing our bodies. For Koreans, those of us influenced by K-culture, and anyone who’s internalized the logic of maximizing our appearance to be competitive, K-beauty, K-surgery, and restrictive eating are means to that end. If you’re trying to wring the most out of an asset—in this case, a human—you can get didactic about how to do it. Haein Shim, for example, fell into an eating disorder after her parents began restricting her food when she hit puberty. Once she dropped to a sub-50-kilogram (110 pounds) weight and appeared as a smaller, slighter, and quieter version of herself, “Everybody around me told me that I’m so wonderful at self-care,” she said. “I’d been starving and working out. I was far away from self-care. However, in Korean society, the term self-care refers to women who regulate their weight and follow the grooming standard.” Self-care is circumscribed with values of achievement and conformity.

Empowerment, in this framework, is not internal. It is attaining our imagined selves on the outside, and more often than not, our imaginations are limited by what everyone else is striving for.

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