Comments on: “Love Your W” raises funds for breast cancer

By: Korean Women Are Not Alphabets! « The Grand Narrative

Korean Women Are Not Alphabets! « The Grand Narrative — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:04:41 +0000

[...] this practice seems frivolous on the surface, says blogger Javabeans “it actually belies much more pernicious trends in society at large,” and something is surely [...]

By: Did Eve Have an S-line? Women as Walking Alphabets in South Korea « The Grand Narrative

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:16:41 +0000

[...] it has on the way people think and behave. I think that the blogger JavaBeans puts this best, in a comment that I’ve already quoted before and undoubtedly will quote again: The “W” [...]

By: Because a woman’s legs can NEVER be too thin… « The Grand Narrative

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:17:44 +0000

[...] predilection for ascribing letters to every conceivable form of a woman’s body (see here and here), then probably I shouldn’t have been surprised that there’s a Korean word (각선미) [...]

By: Maica

Maica — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:09:56 +0000

Everything looks loose for Jung Ryeo Won. :p

By: Korean Women’s Changing Attitudes to Lingerie, Bikinis and their Bodies in the 2000s « The Grand Narrative

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 08:02:27 +0000

[...] over at DramaBeans I read about the “Love your W” breast cancer fund-raising event in Seoul on October [...]

By: James Turnbull

James Turnbull — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:35:36 +0000

Yes, of course it’s all part and parcel of that naming fixation, and I completely understand the rant. Actually I’ve complained about it myself on my own blog on numerous occasions, most recently about a cartoon encouraging 8 year-old children to eat healthily for the sake of their S-line and V-lines (link in my name), and something like that is reason in itself for my family to leave Korea before my 2 young daughters reach, say, middle-school age.

What you wrote may sound like just a rant to you, but actually I think it’s really very well put(!), especially “Anglicization-as-legitimization” and “…we’re all just Latin letters waiting to be objectified as a beauty ideal”. I’ll have to quote you soon!

By: javabeans

javabeans — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:19:04 +0000

@marz and @James Turnbull,

The “W” originates from the stupid Korean fixation with naming body parts after letters in the English alphabet. It’s a great pet peeve of mine, and I have half a mind to go off on an extended rant about how the stupid Korean media fetish with physical beauty, coupled with their belief in Anglicization-as-legitimization, is responsible for an inane, ridiculous practice.

U-line (lower back), V-line (face/chin), S-line (tits-n-ass), M-line (”male” line, aka the male physique), and now W-line (boobs). (Yeah, what about my Q-line, huh? Or the oft-ignored K-line, whatever that may be? Suck it, failed wordsmiths.) And how while this practice is seemingly frivolous on the surface, it actually belies much more pernicious trends in society at large, when you have celebrities vocally espousing their alphabet-lines and therefore actually objectifying themselves as a conglomeration of “perfect” body parts rather than as whole, genuine people. You wanna know why plastic surgery is such a big deal in Korea, why actresses don’t eat, why there’s an obsession with thin? It’s because we’re all just Latin letters waiting to be objectified as a beauty ideal rather than living, breathing people with flesh on our bones and brains in our heads.

But I’m tired so maybe not today.