The Other F Word: Feminism versus Korean Drama

Family’s Honor: “I do...give up everything about my life so I can
go on shopping sprees with your obnoxious mother and dust your living room.
Remind me again what you’re giving up for this relationship?”

This week’s post could have been devoted to sane and sensible things that people might actually be interested in reading, like reviews of the new crop of Kdramas. Being a difficult human being, I instead opted to write the following diatribe about the finer points of gender relations in Kdramas. Sorry.

Feminism is a weirdly fraught topic in America, as if there’s something controversial about the notion that women are equal to men and deserve to be treated as such. I suspect that it’s even more so in Korea—as in most of Asia, Confucian-rooted patriarchy is still a major cultural force there.

I’ve always considered myself to be a feminist. This can be a difficult thing to reconcile with a love of Korean drama: As much as fun as I have watching these shows, I often find myself cringing when it comes to their depictions of relationships between men and women. Dramas that are geared toward younger audiences generally aren’t so bad, but I’m quickly learning to carefully approach series with more adult appeal, lest their depictions of gender roles leave me clutching the back of my neck in psychosomatic pain, Kdrama-style.

The two most off-putting shows I’ve seen to date when it comes to women’s rights have been A Gentleman’s Dignity and Family’s Honor, a 56-episode drama that aired in 2008. Both shows were targeted at audiences in their forties, an age group that seems more likely to have attitudes about women that are contrary to my own beliefs.

What I would consider casual sexism suffuses the plot of A Gentleman’s Dignity: Hate your older wife and cheat on her constantly but don’t want to divorce her because you need her money? Fine. Express your admiration for the woman you like by forcibly pinning her against a bathroom door against her will? No problem. Tell your friends you’re not interested in a girl because “to me, she’s not a woman, she’s a human being”? Right on! But for the kind of show it was—one trying to appeal to both older viewers and male audiences—A Gentleman’s Dignity could have been a lot worse. 

It was Family’s Honor that really broke my heart. Its portrayal of traditional family life was one of the most interesting things about this funny, sweet drama, but it also required an old-fashioned approach to women’s rights. When its characters got married, the women were expected to completely abandon their pasts and their birth families to fill a domestic role in their husbands’ households. Marriage vows in the world of Family’s Honor aren’t a pact between two people; they’re very much a pact between two families, with the daughter-in-law functioning as equal parts hostage and maid. (Seeing this made me appreciate why there’s so much Kdrama conflict about children’s spouses. Getting that perfect daughter-in-law is like hiring an employee whose responsibilities include bearing your grandchildren.)

The worst thing, though, was hearing the capable, confident female lead in Family’s Honor tell her new husband that for the duration of their marriage, he would never see her without makeup. Up to this point I had really loved her character—in spite of being a goodie-two shoes raised in a deeply traditional environment, she brought a healthy serving of snark to the table. So a tiny sliver of my soul died when she told him it was her responsibility to be up early every morning so she could look good for him when he woke up, just as her grandmother had done for her grandfather. The male lead only grinned bashfully in response, as if he couldn’t believe his good luck. This seems like no kind of intimacy to me: If you can’t allow someone to see you as you really are underneath the mask you very literally wear in the public sphere, you can’t let them love you, either.

In the youthful, girl-centric dramas I usually seek out, the patriarchal nature of Korean culture has a subtler influence. But it’s still here, sometimes in unexpected ways.

“I’ll take responsibility.”

If you’ve seen more than one or two Kdramas, you’ve almost certainly come across this sentence. Most often spoken by a dashing male lead, it’s an oblique, drama-ese proposal of marriage. A character who says these words is stepping forward as a potential husband, as someone who will be around for his significant other through good and bad, thick and thin. I definitely kvelled the first time I came across a character saying he would “take responsibility,” back when I was watching the 2006 noona romance What’s Up Fox. But then I really thought about what the words meant, and now find it a bit harder to get excited about them.

“I’ll take responsibility for you and our relationship,” the man is declaring to his object of desire, as if she’s a pet in need of an owner, not an adult woman capable of caring for herself. Ultimately, it’s not a confession of love—it’s an acknowledgment of an uneven balance of power. It’s the person in control deigning to take on the burden of a wife, begrudgingly accepting the role of being her leader, boss, and master.

Gentleman's Dignity: “Duh...Wait! I mean otokay!”

“Otokay?!?”

Many Kdrama indicators of women’s status are external, acted upon one character by another. Some, however, are internal—like the exclamation “Otokay?” (What to do?).  This rhetorical expression of uncertainty and doubt is used by characters who feel out of their league and unable to chart a course of action.

Drama characters of both genders have been known to say it, but Otokay is a predominantly a female exclamation. In particular, it’s perhaps the most essential vocabulary word for rom-com leads. Of late, the character Yi Soo in A Gentleman’s Dignity has been driving me especially crazy with it—in every single episode, she’s had at least one spazz fit where she dances around, impotently moaning otakay in the face of whatever small-scale, childish embarrassment the show’s male lead has inflicted on her.

To me, otokay is an uncomfortable admission of helplessness and self-doubt that actually functions as an apology for the personal agency of female characters. Sure, they eventually make the decisions the plot requires of them, but not before the writers take time to stress just how hard it is for their women to think independently and solve their own problems.

One of the things that I love most about Korean drama is that it values any technique that allows the viewer to fully experience a character’s emotional life. And this is a key factor why otokay plays such an important role in so many dramas: it’s an opportunity to depict on screen what’s going on in someone’s head. I just wish that it didn’t preclude showing Kdrama girls in a self-confident, take-charge light.

Heartstrings: If a girl won’t do what you want, make her.
 It’s the Kdrama way.

The wrist grab.

I watched a number of dramas before it even occurred to me that the wrist grab existed—if you’re not paying close attention, it doesn’t look so different from holding hands, after all. But the distinction between the two is still worth considering: Holding hands is a mutual act of connection in which both sides are equal; if you don’t want to hold someone’s hand, you let go. In contrast, grabbing someone’s wrist is a one-sided assumption of power, with the grabber in complete control; as a physical gesture, it’s much more difficult to reject.

And guess who’s always the grabber and who’s always the grabbee? That’s right—men grab women to drag them off for lengthy, one-sided conversations; to prevent them from leaving the room; or to steer them in crowds. In all my many, many hours of watching Korean television, I can’t think of a single instance of a woman taking a man’s wrist. The only parallel thing Kdrama women are allowed is to grip the edge of a man’s jacket, something they generally do in fear or to ensure that they’re not separated from him on the street. Yet it’s always clear that grabbing a wrist is an assertion of power and a denial of the other person’s free will, while grabbing a jacket is an admission of weakness.

The ultimate wrist grab, I think, comes toward the end of Boys over Flowers. While standing in a huddle of irate characters, Joon Pyo took what he thought was Jan Di’s wrist and dragged her for blocks. What he didn’t realize until far too late was that the wrist he grabbed belonged not to Jan Di, but to her rival for his affections. This was played for comedy, but it’s actually just a reminder what a one-sided, impersonal act of aggression the wrist grab actually is: He dragged that girl so far she had to ask for cab fare to get back to where they started, without ever realizing who it was.

“No” means “Whatever you say, Sir.”

Wrist grabbing is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to domineering physical contact in Kdramas. Again and again, we see men who force women to do things against their will. Whether it’s Ra Im’s struggles against Joo Won’s “romantic” kisses in Secret Garden or Jan Di’s eternal ambivalence to Joon Pyo’s obsession with her in Boys over Flowers, what female characters want isn’t of the utmost importance even in Kdramas geared toward women.

Seemingly progressive shows like I Need Romance 2012 aren’t immune, either: This series didn’t even make it past its third episode before a female character was physically restrained and carried into her bedroom for her first sexual encounter with her boyfriend, in spite of her longstanding protests that she wasn’t ready for that kind of relationship with him. It’s true that the show painted said boyfriend as a creep, but not because he was a date rapist—because he was a jerk who didn’t please her once he got her into bed, and then had the nerve to criticize her sexual skills in public.

When it comes to desire and physical relationships in Kdramas, women are doubly cursed. Only in the rarest of circumstances are they allowed to want to touch a man, but when that man wants to touch them they’re almost always expected to let him do so. Episode 5 of A Gentleman’s Dignity included a particularly skin-crawl-y example: Do Jin, the male lead, had been pursuing the female lead, Yi Soo, for a number of episodes. She had yet to give in, though, and regularly told him to get lost. One night she was in desperate need a ride and called him for help; he took Yi Soo to her house and invited himself in. While eventually excusing himself, Do Jin gazed leeringly at Yi Soo and said “I’d better leave, or I’ll do something bad.” The line was delivered as if it were scampish and charming, much in the tone I’d use to fret about being alone with a quart of Ben & Jerry’s. But this isn’t ice cream he’s talking about—it’s a person with an agenda and motivations fully independent of his own, and someone who is clearly disinclined to accept his sexual advances. I might be helpless against the impulse to devour that tub of Chunky Monkey. But what “bad” thing is he threatening to do here, when alone with this woman he professes to have a crush on? I wonder. And would it matter what Yi Soo had to say about it?

Secret Garden: “Her hands might be saying no, but I’ll make her mouth say yes.”

“How will she run the household?”

I love Coffee Prince like other people love air, at least partially because it’s a shining bastion of girl power. Both its female leads live the lives they want, in spite of the world’s expectations of them. But even Coffee Prince doesn’t completely escape the patriarchal nature of Korean society.

Undercurrents throughout the show hint at just what the tomboy Eun Chan should be, but isn’t. When faced with the possibility of acquiring such an unorthodox daughter-in-law, the male lead’s mother was flummoxed at the thought of how the household would be run under her supervision. Because, of course, when a woman becomes a wife in Kdrama it’s usually expected that she also becomes a professional housekeeper—either for the male lead, or, as in this case, his entire family.

And then there’s the male lead himself. Unspeakably charming and supportive as he is, even Choi Han Gyul doesn’t exist outside of the patriarchy. “What kind of man do you think I am? Of course you can keep working after we get married,” he says to Eun Chan after she’s confessed she’s unwilling to marry him immediately. The stickler here is that it actually matters what kind of man Han Gyul is when it comes to Eun Chan’s ability to remain active in the world outside his home. It’s understood by every character in the drama that once they’re officially together, everything about her life becomes his prerogative.




It’s not that I think these characters (or the writers who created them) have to-do lists including the item “be culpable in the oppression of women.” It’s just that as an outsider seeing Korean culture for the first time, I’m not desensitized to these things the way someone who grew up there would be. Just like in America, some things are so embedded in the native worldview that their actual meaning has been all but forgotten. Although a man might say “I’ll take responsibility,” I suspect it’s the equivalent of someone like me buying Uncle Ben’s rice at the grocery store. If I really stop and think about the history of racism and slavery in America as represented by this product’s name and marketing, it’s damn upsetting. But in my day-to-day life, it’s just another box on the shelf. And in his day-to-day life, it’s just what you say when you want to marry someone. 

And while my own values and those shown in Korean dramas are sometimes in conflict, Kdrama does have a lot to offer women viewers. Koreans are not afraid to tell stories from a female point of view, even if they’re meant for general audiences (Girl K, Miss Ripley). Kdrama girls who work hard and believe in themselves always, always win in the end (Shining Inheritance, Sungkyunkwan Scandal). In Korean drama, women are rarely sexualized (Boy over Flowers, which never showed a single Korean girl in a bikini, in spite of ample opportunities). I would also like to add, with no small degree of irony, that to the best of my knowledge Park Shi Hoo has never yet made a drama without at least one shirtless scene.

• • •

Fascinating things discovered while procrastinating about this post:

Why Everybody Should Watch Korean Drama

on Homegrown Social Critique

Korean Dramas, Domineering Men, and the Worries of a Chick-Flick Loving Feminist

on Not Another Wave

Coffee Prince: Anatomy of a Scene

on Idle Revelry

Master List of Feminism x Kdrama Blog Posts
on Malariamonsters