Korean Sociological Image #42: Sunset for the Red She Devils? | James Turnbull

The story begins with a single-panel cartoon, showing a white woman wearing a low-cut top, jeans and flip-flops walking in one direction on a street, and a Korean woman wearing a high-necked t-shirt, very short shorts and heels walking in the other direction. A dotted line indicates that the white woman's vision is glued to the Korean woman's legs, and a thought balloon above her head reads "Geez, could you show any MORE skink?" A similar line-of-site depiction runs from the Korean woman's eyes to the white woman's chest, but the words in her thought bubble are in Korean. James Turnbull, the author of the article tells us they transliterate to "yahada" which means "too revealing" or "too sexual." This clash between Western and Korean ideas of what makes women's clothing "too skimpy," combined with the fact that pushing the boundaries on these norms doesn't fix underlying problems of sexual and gender repression or body image, makes for another great article from SexGenderBody.

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Tiger Beatdown › On Heavy Girls and Sexy Time

Responding to MSNBC reports of an unpublished study saying "overweight girls are more likely to start having sex early, to have multiple partners during their teen years, and to eschew condoms compared to thinner teens," Silvana at TigerBeatdown.com explains why the report is badly biased. She says, "There is so much wrong with the analysis of this study’s results," which predictably cites male lust and girls' low self-esteem as causes for the study's findings.

"Do we understand so little about sex that we think the question of who’s having sex and who’s not is just about who is the most attractive to men? […] According to this analysis, the correlation goes like this: fat→low self-esteem→can’t say no→sexy time." Silvana says a combination of "fatness-shame" and "anti-sex messages" work hand-in-hand to make younger girls "undergo deep, deep dissociation with their bodies" at the onset of puberty.

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