Childhood Ruined: Internalized Misogyny and Elitism in Asian Dramas
Internalized Misogyny and Elitism in Asian Dramas
by Sarah Feng
Childhood Ruined is a four-part series by the COUNTERCLOCK blog editors. We partnered with the concept of Twitter, your mother’s photo albums, and the reboot of Arrested Development to ruin your childhood. Specifically, we will review and interrogate shows from the past to recognize and name some of their underlying problematic aspects. By doing this series, we intend to honor the media we cherish by being critical of where our media has failed us and, by extension, confront our own unconscious biases.
If you missed it, revisit Woody’s introduction to the series, or continue reading with Ashira’s article on hypermasculinity in Johnny Bravo, Noreen’s article on Filipinx American representation in Steven Universe, and Woody’s article on neoliberal recuperation in The Legend of Korra!
If I were to describe K-dramas and C-dramas with one word, it would be this: pre-packaged. However much I’m suckered into these rosy, pasteled versions of college campuses, cliché lines of dialogue, and baggy but inexplicably expensive-looking clothing, I can’t help but sense a distinctly plastic rigidity to the relationships, which remain locked in the traditional gender roles, even smoothed over visually with the disturbingly inelastic ruler of Asian beauty standards and classist elitism.
Despite the fact that in recent years a flux of dramas have strived to break this mold, what many traditional Korean and Chinese romantic dramas “sell” are stories that fetishize and flatten each member’s role in a relationship: the girl is “not like other girls,” while the boy is “untouchable” but must serve the girl’s desire at each of her whims. All of this is exaggerated by the uniformity of appearance that is less present in Western TV shows, where each protagonist’s complexion and body shape are held to a rigid standard. (This article does not criticize all K- and C-dramas, but only the subset—which is, thankfully, shrinking rapidly—that promotes these values.) Allowing the viewer to subscribe to the notion that girls must be separate in some way from their peers and pitted against other females as competition, these shows envelop selfish hostility and self-objectification in the florid sets of start-ups, gaming headquarters, and web cafés. Males are flattened into symbols for elitism by class. The ones I will discuss here are those that fall distinctly into this category, and I will refer to “female lead” and “male lead” because of the largely heteronormative trends of these shows.
Despite the fact that in recent years a flux of dramas have strived to break this mold, what many traditional Korean and Chinese romantic dramas “sell” are stories that fetishize and flatten each member’s role in a relationship: the girl is “not like other girls,” while the boy is “untouchable” but must serve the girl’s desire at each of her whims.
What disturbs me the most about the objectifying of the female lead in this type of soapy drama is that she’s always separate from the girls around her. Romantic desire is portrayed as shallow and “overly feminine,” something that the protagonist is distinctly uninterested in. While this fact is, in itself, completely innocuous and insignificant, it’s heightened by personality traits singular to the protagonist: most innocently, it’s her intelligence, being intellectually superior to her more vapid and fashion-obsessed roommates, like the computer science brainiac in Love O2O, but more insidiously, and rarely spoken onscreen, is her weight and complexion. In A Love So Beautiful, Weightlifting Fairy: Kim Bok Joo, and Put Your Head on my Shoulder, the uniformity of the appearances grows claustrophobic if one consumes these shows in a row: the girls are pale, fair-skinned, doe-eyed, and very thin or athletic and strong, contrasted next to larger characters who are clearly there to serve as the butt of the joke or a prosthetic to the plot as the thin character protects or defends them from harassment.
All of these traits culminate in the fact that the female protagonist is often pitted against any other girl who is vaguely interesting and three-dimensional, making all other females in the show either comedic relief intended to spotlight the protagonist’s elitism or competition for the male lead’s attention—a frankly toxic depiction of female relationships to young, 10- to 11-year-old girls consuming these shows. In Weightlifting Fairy: Kim Bok Joo, the only other main girl character besides the protagonist, a hardworking, resilient, and loyal gymnast, is portrayed as jealous and obsessive, even though she could have been a fascinatingly strong character and a friend to Bok Joo. The greatest goal of the show is to attract the attention of the male lead, overshadowing or making insignificant true problems in the girls’ personal lives.
The greatest goal of the show is to attract the attention of the male lead, overshadowing or making insignificant true problems in the girls’ personal lives.
In Meteor Garden, the protagonist Shancai is struggling desperately to pay the bills for her expensive and prestigious university. While her relationships with her parents and her self-inflicted responsibility might have formed a storyline that allows the viewer to empathize with her indomitable sense of duty, the show instead revolves around her dramatic infatuations with an arbitrary quadrumvirate of privileged, unrealistically intelligent men. Conflict arises from arguments and jealous fits surrounding the male lead, just as female bonding also occurs surrounding helping each other “get the guy,” as with Tang Xue and her roommates in Skate into Love. Shining the spotlight on romantic endeavours makes complete sense for this genre, which is intended to provide a fluffy escape into the world of perfect endings, but the shows fail to actually create riveting female desires, struggles, and relationships that exist separate from the men. Instead, there should be a healthy balance in a way that passes the Bechdel test.
The objectification continues with the male lead, although it’s less obvious, and emphasizes unhealthy expectations for males in relationships, extending beyond poor and two-dimensional character building. The proportion of male leads who are in executive positions at organizations or unbelievably intelligent in certain academic fields, compared to the more “average” female lead, is unnatural. CEOs like in Strong Girl Do Bong Soon, What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim, Unintended Love, and countless others communicate the subtle—and completely false—message that a man’s desirability is defined by his intellect and financial success, equating privilege and untouchability with what the female lead wants, like a reverse Great Gatsby. There’s nothing wrong with the trope of the male being successful at all, but I feel that I haven’t ever seen the reverse, where the woman is in the position of power, and the man is not.
CEOs like in Strong Girl Do Bong Soon, What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim, Unintended Love, and countless others communicate the subtle—and completely false—message that a man’s desirability is defined by his intellect and financial success, equating privilege and untouchability with what the female lead wants, like a reverse Great Gatsby.
The male lead’s past traumas are packaged into convenient plot devices to excuse manipulative, and gaslighting behavior—in spite of the show’s popularity, I was put off by how Secretary Kim’s boss’s controlling demands were depicted as romantic instead of abusive and exploitative—and, just as how female relationships are consumed with “getting the guy,” the male lead’s life also becomes consumed with either obsessing over the female or being jealous over other men obsessing over the female. He’s heroic, noble, and perfectly static, unchanging throughout the show to match the idealized fantasy of the elite, objectifying the “escape” represented by the female lead—just as the female lead objectifies him as “another world.” Unrealistic levels of protectiveness and random chance meetings provoke the hypersensitivity of both characters to react in exaggerated ways, instead of having self-respect and acknowledging that the other person has platonic friendships to preserve in the opposite gender.
K- and C-dramas are entertaining because of their simplicity and overused tropes of amnesia, meet-cute settings, and secretaries, and I think there are ways to preserve the velvety escape of these shows without sacrificing the integrity of the characters and what they might represent to a young viewer. Traces of the “pre-packaged” quality remain in the visual representations of the characters, where every character is highly pale, thin, well-dressed, and often insensitive about class, either talking about growing up in the working class with a martyr-like, fetishizing tone or just excessively rich. Still, so many of these storytelling tropes are changing to fit a more modern audience, where the positions of power are reversed and subverted, the woman becomes more decisive and powerful. For example, Strong Girl Do Bong Soon’s superhuman-strength-endowed Do Bong Soon and It’s Okay to Not Be Okay’s influential and dominant Ko Mun-yeong refreshingly depict the woman as the one who knows exactly what she wants and isn’t afraid to go after it.
Sarah Feng is the editor-in-chief of COUNTERCLOCK Journal and the director of the Arts Collective. Her creative writing has been awarded by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Adroit Prizes in Prose & Poetry, NCTE, the Critical Pass Review, American High School Poets, the Leyla Beban Young Author’s Foundation, Teen Vogue, and the New York Times. She plays piano and dabbles in charcoals, and she thinks rhythm and light and lyric pulse in every field of the creative arts – if you can call them distinct fields at all. In other words, she has faith in the power of the interdisciplinary arts and their persistence in our memories and minds. She studies at Yale University.