Okay, I'm finally going to go there. Maybe it's because I believe I have been here long enough to make a fair assessment in context, or maybe it's just because it's Sunday, it's raining, and we haven't really done anything blog worthy this week. When I was a younger woman, I used to complain about how appearance obsessed my contemporaries were. Well, I had not seen anything yet.
Awhile back, a friend pointed out the plastic surgery billboards downtown, and once I noticed them, I noticed how many there were. Asian women are renowned for their beauty, but Korean women--in particular, as I noticed after visiting China and Japan--have a noticeably airbrushed look. Well, there's a reason for this.
Did you notice the BMI index in Korea, which is vastly different from ours? Also, that the plastic surgeon was counseling an underweight woman to get liposuction because she is "bigger than most of the women her age?" Perhaps you caught the part about job interviews. Koreans actually have to attach a picture of themselves to their resumes!
I know Americans have our own issues with body image. It seems like we have a hard time doing anything in moderation. We're either too large or way too small, and either way we're completely obsessed with food and dieting. But over here, it's institutionalized. I should also point out that the people on treadmills are all over 40. This is because muscles are not considered sexy, so young women prefer starvation diets to the diet-and-exercise combo that doctors recommend.
I could also touch on how Korea is miles behind the rest of the industrialized world in women's employment, women's involvement in politics, and the women to men's salary ratio (60 cents to the dollar!) Sometimes I think I'm surrounded by Henrick Ibsen's A Doll's House writ large. I guess that's all I'll say on that.
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