Abstract
South Korea, which has, for a long time, prided itself as a mono-racial nation, is experiencing a significant shift in its demographic from racial homogeneity to multi-raciality. Such change is fueled by the rise in interracial relationships between Korean men and non-Korean women. In this article, I address the question: How are Korean masculinity and national identity reconceptualized through interracial relationships? I build on feminist theories on race and eroticism to critically examine the YouTube videos uploaded by couples comprised of Korean men and white women. These videos garner hundreds of thousands of views and become spaces of lively debate about issues of masculinity, nationalism, and femininity. I argue that the viewer responses to the videos mobilize misogynistic binaries that pit supposedly problematic Korean women against the supposedly ideal white women. I demonstrate how misogyny in Korea is being rearticulated to conform to the nation’s demographic shift.
In 2019, marriages between Koreans and non-Koreans comprised 10.3 percent of the total marriages in South Korea (hereby Korea) (Statistics Korea 2021). Even amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, which severely hindered individuals’ transnational mobility, such unions comprised 7.6 percent of all marriages in the nation in 2020. This is surprising because Korea has always characterized itself as racially homogenous. Many of these marriages comprised Korean men marrying non-Korean Asian, North American, or European women. Media reflect the rise in such marriages and relationships. In particular, the media disproportionately represents interracial relationships between Korean men and white women. An increasing number of popular Korean television programs, such as Return of Superman, Video Star, and On and Off, positively depict Korean male celebrities in relationships with white women. 1 Concurrently, on YouTube, couples comprised of Korean men and white women upload detailed videos about their relationships, and tens of thousands of viewers consume their videos, subscribe to their channels, and leave comments that praise these couples for their “perfect” relationships. Throughout Korean history, the country’s identity has been closely associated with its racial purity. However, the government data and media depictions indicate that the country is no longer mono-racial; it is multi-racial.
Interracial relationships are not new to Korea. However, most such relationships throughout Korean history involved Korean women and foreign men (Lee 2007; Park 2015). These women were called derogatory names and ostracized because they defied Korean patriarchal ideology that espoused mono-racialism as a foundation of its masculine and national pride (Lee 2008). However, the interracial couples that involve Korean men are being portrayed in twenty-first-century media as idealized and lauded. Why are interracial relationships suddenly garnering popularity and support in Korean popular discourse? What does this sudden change in tone mean for the nation’s identity and its patriarchy? I address these questions by examining the YouTube videos uploaded by interracial couples, comprised of Korean men and white women, where they share details of their relationships. I also analyze viewers’ reactions to these videos.
These new media spaces and discourses are essential because they reflect and profoundly influence the gendered behaviors and perceptions among Koreans in real life (Jeong and Lee 2018). In the Korean context, user-generated sites, such as YouTube, are the primary sites of “ongoing struggles of gender power relations (Kim 2017, 817). Hence, by exploring the YouTube videos, I critically examine how contemporary Korean masculinity and national identity are changing with regard to race and gender. I contend the YouTube videos and the viewers’ positive responses to the videos are one example of a broader change occurring within the country, which is marked by a shift from the nation’s long-held mono-racial national identity and the patriarchal pride it derived from such identity to a multiracial national identity, that is nonetheless still mired in its form of patriarchal ideology (Ahn 2015; Jun 2014).
Furthermore, I argue that the popularity of interracial relationships for Korean men is closely correlated to the rise in their misogynistic sentiments towards Korean women. The online discourses appraising these couples do so by critiquing Korean women as ungrateful feminists who are inferior to Western white women in appearance and character. In that regard, these videos serve as “manospheres” where individuals unite in believing that feminism has undermined men’s social status (Preston, Halpin, and Maguire 2021). As I will demonstrate later in this essay, these online discourses not only conceptualize white women as the racially inflected sexual and gendered “Other” to the supposedly feminist, and thereby problematic, Korean women but also go further to portray them as the ideal partners who will help Korean men symbolically achieve cosmopolitan upper-middle class masculinity by performing femininity that abides by the cult of domesticity. Here, the cult of domesticity refers to a gender norm that positions men as leaders of their households and women as those who serve them in return for protection and material comfort (Winter 2004). It is a gender ideal deeply influenced by class because it requires some degree of financial stability. The nation’s turbulent history has shaped the Korean version of the cult of domesticity.
I use the feminist theoretical framework of racialized erotics to examine online discourses on interracial relationships. I analyze ways in which the YouTube videos of heterosexual Korean men’s erotic desires for white women perpetuate racial and gendered stereotypes that pit white women in opposition to Korean women. Such discourses create binaries, not just of white women versus Korean women, but also that of “good” versus “bad” women and feminists versus non-feminists. These binaries critique women who do not conform to the patriarchal expectations of women to be submissive and grateful to their male partners. In that sense, the multiracial and cosmopolitan Korea, as some individuals imagine and talk about online, is based on misogyny that pits one group of women against another.
Racialized Eroticism and the Cult of Domesticity
Erotic desires are inexorably entwined with the politics of race. Some people problematically interpret erotic desires only as personal preferences and trivialize the systems and structures that influence the formation of individuals’ erotic desires (Paasonen 2011). Critical analyses of racialized erotic desires are imperative because such studies challenge the idealization of erotic desires that argue they bring disparate people together rather than facilitate the entrenchment of differences (Holland 2012). Critical analyses of racialized erotic desires in Korea provide insight into how they formulate binary categories of women that not only bolster but also create perceived differences among women of different races and ethnicities. Nagel’s (2000) concept of the “ethnosexual” is beneficial as a framework for analyzing YouTube videos and viewers’ reactions to the videos. The term refers to how ethnicity and sexuality rely on each other for power and meaning. In similar veins, “ethnosexual frontiers” are spaces where individuals of different ethnicities forge sexual links with the ethnic “Other” while navigating the perilous power dynamic of their ethnic and sexual identities. While Nagel’s theory is based on the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality, it is applicable to the relationship between race and sexuality. In that regard, I define the YouTube videos of interracial couples as digital frontiers where the couples’ and the viewers’ race and sexuality, as well as their class identities, develop their significance in tandem.
Korea’s first systemic and large-scale “ethnosexual” encounter with the West occurred with the entry of Western missionaries to Korea in the 1800s. For most of its premodern history, Korea relied on a Confucianism-based cult of domesticity that focused on women’s filial piety to the husband’s parents and extended family. During the late 1800s, Western missionaries brought their Christian-based cult of domesticity, rooted in the idea of a nuclear family, to Korea. Despite different conceptions of the family unit, the two cults of domesticity could blend effortlessly because they shared similar traits. They expected women to be all-sacrificing, docile, and subservient to their husbands (Choi 2004). In effect, both types of the cult of domesticity focused on reinforcing men’s power in heterosexual relationships and marriage.
The image of ideal womanhood was essential in Korea after the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945). As the nation tried redefining its national identity, women’s gender performance became especially central to defining Korean nationhood. Patriarchal values placed upon men’s firm control over women’s sexuality informed Korea’s pride in being a “pure” nation comprised of citizens of the same race who survived the colonial period and reclaimed their country (Ha 2012; Kim and Kim 2014). Men focused on creating and maintaining a cult of domesticity that tried to ensure that Korean women were cossetted in the domestic sphere by partaking in heterosexual marriages with Korean men (Choi 2009). However, such ideals were only available to women from financially stable backgrounds. For instance, in the aftermath of the Korean War, some working-class Korean women engaged in sex work for a living and catered to U.S. soldiers stationed in Korea (Lee 2008). Such sexual engagement with foreign men effectively banished these Korean working-class women from the cult of domesticity. From a Korean patriarchal perspective, these women became irredeemably “damaged” to be assimilated back into society. Hence, they were ostracized from the rest of society while they were sex workers and even after they left the sex work industry. In effect, Korean womanhood in the aftermath of the Korean War was starkly divided into domesticated upper-middle-class women who could abide by the cult of domesticity versus working-class women, some of whom had to resort to sex work and remove themselves from the cult.
Until the late 1990s, most Korean women from the upper and middle classes abided by the cult of domesticity because it provided them with financial stability. Middle-class women could also conform to these feminine ideals because their husband’s income was enough to sustain their families (Kim and Finch 2002). However, everything changed for middle-class families during the 1997 Asia Financial Crisis. Many men lost jobs and were no longer reliable breadwinners during the crisis. Middle-class homemakers who gave up jobs to abide by the cult of domesticity returned to the job market in droves (Kim and Finch 2002).
For the generations of Korean women who grew up during the financial crisis (women who are now in their thirties and forties), marriage became secondary to the primary goal of pursuing one’s own sources of income. They witnessed first-hand that they could not rely on the cult of domesticity and the male breadwinner. Due to a dearth of Korean women willing to sacrifice their careers for marriage, working-class and middle-class men, particularly from the countryside, turned to international marriages with Southeast Asian and Eastern European women out of necessity (Kim 2014). Men in such marriages would reaffirm their masculinity by claiming that their foreign wives, especially their white wives, were better than Korean women because they were traditional and subservient. Such narrative became mainstream in Korea through documentaries and media depictions of international marriages (Shim 2012).
In such context, women become tools to dictate the masculine hierarchy. Men who “possess” desirable or “good” women experience a rise in their masculine status. In contrast, those who form relations with undesirable or “bad” women experience a downward shift in their status. For instance, Cheng (2021) claims that white women are perceived as icons of desirability among some Korean men. Hence, those who have sex with white women are admired rather than criticized as traitors. However, according to Cheng, Korean men’s idealization of white women does not mean that these women are treated with respect. Instead of being treated as precious subjects, white women are objectified as sexual objects to be conquered and possessed to prove Korean men’s virility and Korea’s national power. These women are colloquially nicknamed “white horses” whom Korean men should “ride” and sexually “conquer” (Cheng 2021). In other words, “the emergence of the Western Woman as the new subject of desire and dominance represents a new commodity frontier for men in the emerging economies of the East” (Kim and Fu 2008, 513). The women that Korean men in this research desire are objectivized and perceived as the “new commodity frontier” for Korean men to seek as substitutes for supposedly ungrateful Korean women who are irredeemably spoiled by feminism. Intimate relationships fundamentally shape men’s conception of their masculinity and masculine power (Lamont 2015; Preston, Halpin, and Maguire 2021). Likewise, heterosexual relationships are essential in shaping Korean masculinity and patriarchal national identity (Suh 2017).
Method
YouTube is more than a media production, distribution, and consumption website. Those who utilize the website “participate in practices and collectivities that form around matters of shared interest, identity or concern” (Burgess and Green, 2009, 77). In other words, individuals with shared interests use specific YouTube videos as hubs to form collectivities. Hence, in this essay, I examine the YouTube videos on interracial relationships as spaces of collectivity for certain like-minded viewers. I analyze how the video uploaders and the viewers interact with each other to create a gendered and racialized rhetoric surrounding Korean women and white women.
During the data collection process, I utilized purposive sampling, a non-probability sampling based on specific characteristics shared by the samples (Lacy et al. 2015). I chose purposive sampling because, as Etikan, Musa, and Alkassim (2016) argue, purposive sampling reveals shifts in cultural sentiment that may not be apparent through probability sampling. YouTube utilizes two functions to aid users in finding videos they might be interested in watching: hashtags and video recommendation algorithm. Uploaders use hashtags to make their videos more searchable for viewers. Many interracial couples use the hashtag “AMWF” in the title of their videos and in the descriptions for their videos. AMWF uses the first letters of “Asian male” and “white female” to refer to couples of those racial backgrounds. Among the videos that used the hashtag “AMWF,” I selected the videos that featured Korean men and white women. I analyzed the videos and viewers’ reactions to the videos. Most of the videos I sampled for this research were uploaded between 2019 and 2020, with a few uploaded post-2020. I analyzed these videos during 2022 and 2023.
I collected the demographic information of the couples from the “How We Met” videos that all of the couples uploaded to their YouTube page. There is always some limitation associated with deriving demographic information from intentionally curated YouTube content. However, I attempted to mitigate some of those risks by analyzing the videos uploaded by couples with a sizeable following and viewership. In Korea, many famous YouTubers had their careers sabotaged by acquaintances who revealed their lies to the rest of the fan community. Due to such risks, Korean YouTubers with substantial followings are discouraged from lying about their demographic information.
Based on the information the couples provided in their videos, all of them were in their twenties to mid-thirties. They had a college education, with some in the process of attending postgraduate schools. 2 The women were from various countries, including Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the United States, and Russia. Most couples first met while the women were studying in Korea as exchange students or while the men were studying in the women’s home countries. I share similar backgrounds with some of these individuals since I am a Korean who studied and lived in Korea and the US. Although it is hard for me to deduce the women’s class backgrounds due to my limited knowledge of the education system and social norms in their countries of origin, some of the Korean men (specifically those who met their partners while studying in the women’s home countries) appeared to come from middle to upper-middle-class families, seeing as studying abroad is a costly endeavor reserved in Korea for families with some wealth. However, the couples, most of whom were married or living together and trying to form their nuclear family unit, seemed to be experiencing lower middle-class lifestyles. Many had unstable or low-income jobs, such as freelance musicians, graduate students, freelance teachers, and tour guides, and lived in cramped apartments.
In total, I analyzed fifty videos uploaded by fifteen interracial couples-turned-social media influencers, many of whom had more than a hundred thousand subscribers to their YouTube channels. Alongside the fifty videos uploaded by interracial couples, I analyzed ten videos about Korean men’s interracial desires, all uploaded by different user names, which did not use the “AMWF” tag but which the YouTube algorithm recommended based on my viewership of the hashtagged videos. All sixty videos I analyzed had at least a hundred thousand views, with some amassing over a million views. I also examined the top twenty comments for each video that garnered the most “likes.”
I utilized content and discourse analysis because of the opportunities these methods provide for nuanced data analyses. Qualitative content and discourse analysis are essential to examine the deeper cultural meaning behind media content and how their viewers receive it (Breeze 2011; Macnamara 2005). Furthermore, content analysis helps provide “an empirical basis for monitoring shifts in public opinion” (Stemler 2000, 1). Since one of the main objectives of this article is to highlight the shift in cultural perception about interracial relationships in Korea, I combined purposive sampling with content analysis for this research. In particular, I observed who was filming (the Korean man or their wives), who was being filmed, what language the couple spoke to each other, and the topics of their videos (pranking, romantic, recording of daily life, conversational). Furthermore, I used an inductive approach to analyze the videos and the viewers’ comments regarding those videos. I aligned the comments based on their “likes.” I examined some of the most-liked comments for each video to analyze these comments’ tones (positive or negative) and why they used such tones (adherence to mono-racial nationalism, jealousy, patriarchal ideology, cosmopolitan mindset). I analyzed the videos and the viewers’ comments for recurring themes. I found three binaries that the videos and their viewers utilized most often: grateful versus ungrateful women, “real” feminists versus “fake” feminists, and Korean men as icons of the nation’s superiority versus Korean women as entities that bring shame to the country.
Misogynistic Binaries: Grateful White Women versus Materialistic Korean Women
The most prevalent theme I observed in the videos and the comments juxtaposed Korean women’s supposed ungratefulness and materialism with white women’s supposed innocence. For example, an interracial couple comprising a Korean man and a Russian woman uploaded a video entitled, “What is the reaction of the Russian wife who received her first surprise birthday present after marriage? (ft. hidden camera).” The video amassed more than eight hundred thousand views. It begins with the husband facing and talking to the camera in his car: This weekend was my wife’s birthday, but I had to work all day, so I wanted to do something special for her. My wife’s grandfather sent me $300, and my mother sent me $300. I’ll buy my wife a winter coat with the money I received from them and some money I saved. But before I show her the coat, I’ll give her this four-dollar box of chocolate as a birthday present to see how she reacts.
3
The Korean husband’s power as a breadwinner remains intact throughout the video due to the tactful performance of gratefulness and docility that the wife expresses. According to a video the couple uploaded, the couple live in Korea and the husband works as a freelance tour guide while the wife is a graduate student and a part-time English teacher. The couple is not financially stable enough to rely on the husband’s income. Furthermore, in the video, the husband buys his wife’s expensive winter coat with money that his extended family sent him.
According to the traditional cult of domesticity, women should only work outside the domestic sphere for self-fulfillment; once they start working for financial reasons, their forays outside the domestic sphere become unrespectable, and the family loses their class status (Geschwender 1992). Nonetheless, the husband’s breadwinner masculinity in the video remains unquestioned. The wife’s over-the-top performance of gratitude helps erase discrepancies between the couple’s lived reality and the aspirational cult of domesticity.
The video implies that women who express gratitude for small gifts are the ones who genuinely deserve expensive gifts. Although the video does not explicitly juxtapose the Russian wife to Korean women, many viewers interpreted the video as a critique of Korean women’s ungratefulness. One of the commenters wrote, “Wow, she sheds tears of joy just because of a winter coat. That’s amazing. If it were a Korean woman, she would have complained about the shabbiness of the gift.” 5 The comment amassed dozens of “likes.” The husband who uploaded the video attempted to diffuse such contentious discourse by commenting, “There are many beautiful Korean women as well.” Still, no one “liked” or agreed with his comment. Instead, the viewers continued to juxtapose Korean women with white women. One commenter stated, “Korean television dramas ruined Korean women,” while another said, “Korean women all make bad wives. They always complain that they are the only ones whose husbands did not buy them Louis Vuitton bags. On the contrary, the Russian wife in this video has a kind heart.” Another commenter said, “She is so cute! She thanks you for a four-dollar chocolate. If you gave that to a Korean girl, she would have chucked it in the trash.” Some commented about their experiences: “I also bought my white (paegin) wife a twenty-dollar nightgown and was surprised by how grateful she was. I was so thankful that I married her.” 6
Even though the figure of a Korean woman is absent in the video, the comments to the video indicate that the viewers were interpreting the video through their preconceived notions of Korean femininity. In other words, while Korean women were physically absent in the video, they were metaphysically present through the video’s content and the viewers’ comments that inserted hypothetical Korean women into the scenario portrayed in the video.
The video mentioned above was not the only one where the Korean men tested their white girlfriends and wives and filmed how they reacted to cheap gifts. It appeared to be a popular YouTube video trend for interracial couples. The Korean male YouTubers would test their wives or girlfriends by giving them cheap “fake” gifts before giving them expensive presents such as winter coats, jewelry, or even a luxury apartment. For instance, one video entitled “I pretended that I forgot our anniversary and then gifted her with a giant bouquet” amassed over three hundred thousand views. 7 As the title indicates, in the beginning, the boyfriend pretends to have forgotten about their relationship anniversary but then brings out the gigantic bouquet and gives it to his girlfriend. The camera focuses on the girlfriend’s face throughout the event to capture her shifting emotions. One comment stated, “I can tell she loves the flowers. Korean women would take the flower for granted and then demand a “real” present on top of the flowers.” Another viewer agreed, saying, “Korean women would be so disappointed if you just give them flowers.” The rhetoric in the comment sections of the interracial couples’ YouTube videos painted Korean women as ungrateful and materialistic while portraying white women as innocent women who knew how to be grateful for even the slightest romantic gestures from their Korean boyfriends and spouses.
Although misogyny in Korea did not begin with the introduction of the internet, it escalated gendered disputes into a full-blown gender war because the technology made it easy for individuals to voice strongly worded opinions without fear of reprisal or public shaming. For instance, Jeong and Lee (2018) claim that Korean men openly malign Korean women on digital forums in ways they cannot do in real life. Hiding behind the relative anonymity provided by the internet, the users idealize white women and characterize them as “physically superior and sexually desirable” than Korean women (Jeong and Lee 2018, 710). The misogynist online forums compare white women and, to a lesser extent, Japanese women to Korean women. Jeong and Lee observe that in Korean misogynistic forums, users refer to Korean women as “Kimchi-nyeo.” The term defines Korean women as smelly and fermented like Kimchi. The term implies that, like the pungent smell of Kimchi and the hard-to-get-rid-of stains it leaves behind on anything it touches, the Kimchi-nyeo’s supposedly “bad” qualities negatively impact the men in their lives and the Korean nation at large.
Although, in online discourses, foreign women are coveted and deemed superior to Korean women, they are nonetheless sexually objectified in these misogynist discourses. While idealizing white women, some men call them “white horses” (Baekma) and refer to Japanese women as “Sushi women” (Sushi-nyeo) (Jeong and Lee 2018). White women are imagined as horses that any competent man can ride, while Japanese women are referred to as fresh and expensive food items that could be devoured by men with means. Likening women to objects that can be “ridden” and “devoured” without their agency to refuse evokes the irrefutable sexual power some men desire to have over these women’s bodies and sexuality.
The videos and viewer responses indicate some young Korean men’s anxieties about their economic insecurity and desire to recuperate their power within the domestic sphere (Jeong and Lee 2018). The YouTube videos’ viewers derived satisfaction and reassurance at women being satisfied with affordable presents. Until the mid-1990s, various structures helped Korean men secure their positions as breadwinners who could support themselves and their families. When Korea was undergoing a financial crisis in the 1990s, women were laid off from work earlier than their male counterparts because of the assumption that men were breadwinners who were providing for their families and loved ones (Cho 2004). The government at the time created public service announcements that encouraged women to do everything to ensure that their husbands and fathers maintained their patriarchal powers within their households (Cho 2004). Such campaigns discouraged the deconstruction of patriarchal power because it was assumed to be the primary source of men’s energy to work and provide for their families as breadwinners.
In the twenty-first century, Korean masculinity is still tied to one’s ability to provide for one’s family. However, the ideal of breadwinner masculinity is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. The government does not overtly prioritize male workers over female workers. Furthermore, there is a rising unemployment rate in Korea. In July 2020, unemployment among individuals ages 15 to 29 reached an all-time high of 25.6 percent (Koo 2020). Many young men cannot be breadwinners and maintain their patriarchal power in the family and society through their financial resourcefulness. Instead of problematizing how masculinity is tied to the burdensome notion of the breadwinner, some individuals, as indicated in the YouTube comments, blamed women for challenging masculinity by asking for expensive presents that men could not provide. Korean women are portrayed as selfish women who demand too much from men who do not feel they can satisfy their demands. Hence, the commenters characterized white women, who displayed gratefulness for small gifts, as the racial and gendered “Other” who were superior partners and categorically different from the supposedly ungrateful Korean women deemed to be the cause of Korean men’s gendered sense of insecurity.
In the YouTube videos and the viewers’ comments, a gift from a husband to a wife is conditional rather than unconditional. According to these online discourses, white women who are grateful for Korean men’s companionship and can perform a cult of domesticity to make Korean men feel like they are traditional patriarchs and breadwinners in upper-middle-class families are the only ones who are worthy of gifts. The gifts are conditional in that they are direct exchanges for women’s gratitude that supports the notion of men as breadwinners and providers for their women while women should be eternally thankful to their husbands and boyfriends. These online discourses primarily blamed “fake” feminism for ruining Korean women.
“Real” Western Feminism versus “Fake” Korean Feminism
In the comment sections of the interracial couples’ YouTube videos, the viewers attempted to formulate ideal femininity centered around men’s needs. For example, in the video's comment section, where a Korean man and a Swedish woman discuss how they became a couple, a debate ensued among the Korean commenters regarding the evils of feminism. A commenter stated, “I think I had the wrong image of Western (sŏ-yang) women. I assumed Western women, such as European women, were headstrong feminists. Recently, I observed many relationships between European women and Korean men. […] These women are calm, quiet, and adept at catering to men’s desires.” Others responded to the comment in agreement. One commenter responded, “Could it be that Korean feminism is fake? Go to any espresso shop in Sweden; the women there are timid and speak in whispers.”
Misogynist discourses all over the world blame feminism for supposedly ruining women. In that regard, these online discourses are not unique in expressing distaste for feminism. For example, some Middle Eastern and Asian cultures have construed feminism as a Western influence that local women should avoid (Nader 1989). Such discourses create stereotypes of Western women as promiscuous, selfish, and headstrong to suggest that Western feminists exhibit depraved femininity that local women should not follow (Le Espiritu 2001). These discourses assume that feminism is a Western creation rather than a movement and ideology that existed throughout their culture.
In contrast, the comments on the interracial couples’ YouTube videos characterized Korean women as feminists while defining Western white women as non-feminists. For instance, a popular YouTube channel by a Korean man who uploads “informational” videos about women from various countries uploaded a video entitled “Latvian Beauties Serve Men as if They are Gods,” a male voice narrates the supposedly positive qualities of Latvian women. The video garnered more than 2.4 million viewers. Although viewers from different parts of the world may have watched the video, since the video has lengthy narration in Korean and does not provide subtitles in other languages, most viewers were presumably Korean or foreigners fluent in Korean. In the video, the Korean male narrator says, You all agree that Latvian women are hot, right? The census data shows you can find the cause for Latvian women’s beauty. Latvia has a disproportionate number of women compared to men. There are few eligible bachelors, so women have to try hard to woo men. This kind of environment can be partially credited for Latvian women’s hotness. In Latvia, there is also a “Go Blonde festival,” where hundreds of blond beauties wear pink clothes and walk the streets.
The comments in response to the video went further in their critique of Korean women. One commenter argued, “In Europe, Korean women are known as international whores. They cannot do things independently and only know how to appeal to other people’s emotions for help. It is a disservice to Latvian women to compare them to Korean women.” One of the viewers responded by saying, “Korean women have less value than dead people; their existence is a detriment to society.” In these sentiments, Korean women cannot be productive members of society and are only burdens to society.
Some young Korean men blame Korean women for exploiting men, supposedly burdened by the pressure to protect and serve ungrateful Korean women through mandatory military service (Kim 2017). For example, some men insist that women who do not marry and bear future generations of Koreans should be forced to partake in mandatory military service because these women are selfish (Han, Lee, and Park 2017). The phenomenon of some women in Korea going on “marriage sabotage” and “birth strikes” to critique the pervasiveness of patriarchy and misogyny in the country has been interpreted by some men as perfect examples of selfish Korean womanhood (Cho 2004). In such discourses, procreation is designated as a woman’s task and duty to her nation, while men’s commitment to the country becomes that of protection. Rather than exploring why some women might choose not to marry or have children, misogynist discourses propagated through online forums blame Korean women for being ungrateful and selfish.
Kang states, “People from multicultural backgrounds are acceptable as long as they remain subservient – as wives and children – and serve as instruments of national survival” (Kang 2020, 101). I extend Kang’s argument to suggest that white women who have intimate relations with Korean men are not just defined as instruments for national survival but also as mechanisms through which Korean patriarchy can control white and Korean femininity. The underlying message in the discourses that compare white women to Korean women is that the latter are no longer appealing as intimate partners because they deviate from the cult of domesticity. Korean media formulate images of white women as exotic “Other” who represent everything Korean women supposedly lack (Cheng 2000).
The YouTube videos of interracial couples I analyzed in this essay are part of the media that formulate idealized discourses of white women. These media highlight positive aspects of interracial relationships. The viewers who consume these media formulate idealized notions about interracial relationships and reinforce their negative assumptions about Korean women. They share their beliefs and ideas with other like-minded individuals in online spaces, such as YouTube comment sections. The strongly worded comments that the viewers leave in relatively public online spaces serve multiple functions. They serve as both scathing critiques of the current address of Korean femininity and a warning to Korean women to disavow feminism and revert to the cult of domesticity if they want to form intimate relations with Korean men.
Anti-feminism is rising in Korea, with many women feeling compelled to claim that they do not espouse feminist beliefs (Choo 2020). The viewers’ comments under the YouTube videos on interracial relationships are part of the cause and the outcome of the virulent misogyny and anti-feminist sentiments that are making feminism unpopular in Korea. Feminism, instead of being viewed as a movement that would help people of all genders to live in a more equitable society, is interpreted by misogynist online discourses as a way that Korean women are pursuing their privileges without bearing the duties of being citizens of the nation. In that respect, these discourses define Korean men as emblems of national pride while defining Korean women as burdens that men are forced to shoulder.
Nationalism in Interpreting Interracial Relationships
The men in interracial relationships become icons of Korean masculine desirability and success, as those who are no longer “forced” to choose Korean women as intimate partners just because they have no other options. In the YouTube video’s comment section, many viewers utilized discourses of nationalism to interpret Korean men’s interracial relationships. For instance, a commenter commended one of the Korean men, who uploaded a video with his Belgian girlfriend explaining how they met, by saying: “You demonstrated the superiority of Korean men to the world. Your relationships must be formed by destiny. Thank you for making this great video.” Another commenter told a man who uploaded a video of his relationship with a white American woman, “You guys should get married and solidify a symbolic Korea-US alliance through your marriage.” In these comments, one Korean man becomes representative of Korean men as a group and, more broadly, of the Korean nation. Hence, their success at forming intimate relations with white women becomes a source of pride for Korean men and Korea. Korean viewers’ nationalistic pride and power are reaffirmed through a Korean man’s sexual relationship with a foreign woman, which Nagel (2000) refers to as an ethnosexual relationship.
The premise of this nationalistic pride is that in these relationships, Korean men are presumably culturally influencing and sexually dominating white women rather than being influenced or dominated by them. For instance, a commenter said: “You guys look great together. You should never let go of such beauty as your girlfriend. You should make her fully Korean. Show her the good side of Korean masculinity.” The Korean boyfriend is given the power and the responsibility to mold his white partner into a Korean. Here, the expectation is that white women are being molded into the form of Korean-ness acceptable to patriarchy and antithetical to Korean women. None of the commenters entertained the idea of the Korean men being molded by their white girlfriends and wives into the “perfect” Belgian or an American. Rather than a partnership between two people who love each other, the viewers interpret these relationships as dictated by one partner’s influence over the other.
In these discourses, Korean men become active agents who have many options for intimate partners; they do not have to “settle” for Korean women whom they deem unsatisfactory because they are desirable and can become intimate with women of other races and turn these women into the “ideal” Korean subjects. In her research, Sealing Cheng (2000) argues that Korean men talk about their sexual relations with foreign women with pride. Some of these men view sex with foreign women not only as a fulfillment of their personal racialized sexual fantasies but also as a form of national conquest: Laced with implicitly masculine assumptions, the revival of anticolonial and anti-imperialist language serves as fodder for a developing Korean nationalist discourse in defense of manhood, national identity, and national autonomy. One way in which their sense of male inadequacy is fulfilled is by exercising their power through sexual domination (Kim and Fu 2008, 511).
I suggest that some men’s attempts to equate interracial relationships between Korean men and white women with Korean national triumph are synchronous with their attempts to recuperate the residual sense of emasculation that they have and continue to feel regarding the long history of interracial relationships between Korean women and foreign men (Lee 2020). Until the twenty-first century, Korean women had more opportunities for such relationships than Korean men. For instance, in 1973, Korea earned 269 million dollars through tourism; 40 percent of this money was made through Kisaeng tourism (a form of sex tourism that foreign businessmen engaged in when they traveled to Korea for work) (Norma 2014). At the time, the government promoted Korean women as tourist attractions for foreign men. The government continued sanctioning sex work that serviced foreign men, including sex tourists and the United States soldiers stationed in Korea (Park 2013). In a sense, Korean men were both the mediators and “victims” of the interracial relationships between Korean women and foreign men. They were mediators because the men in the government commoditized Korean women for national gains. However, they were also “victims” (for lack of a better term) in that they felt emasculated as they had to stand by while Korean women were being “dominated” by wealthy foreign men. Some viewers of the videos about interracial relationships attempted to break away from such a historically contextualized sense of emasculation and victimhood by claiming contemporary interracial relationships with white women as a victory for the nation and Korean men. In that regard, the YouTube videos featuring interracial couples comprised of Korean men and foreign women become racial-sexual digital frontiers where race underpins sexual power dynamics to reproduce patriarchal gender and class norms.
Conclusion
Individuals’ interracial erotic desires should not be trivialized as simply their personal preferences. Individuals' choices regarding their intimate partners are enmeshed in their gendered and racialized circumstances shaped by social systems and cultural influences (Mitchell and Wells 2018). Furthermore, how others perceive interracial relationships is indicative of the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions that are pervasive in the observers’ cultural contexts.
The popularity of the videos featuring interracial relationships between Korean men and white women should be analyzed in relation to the history of interracial relationships in Korea. Historically, Korean women were subject to more interracial relationships than Korean men, which led to some men feeling a sense of emasculation and disempowerment (Schober 2014). The interracial relationships between Korean men and white women are giving the former an agency that many of them rarely experienced in the interracial dating scene. Whereas Korean women in interracial relationships were seen as traitors to the nation and their children were ostracized from society at large, the Korean men who form intimate relations with white women are upheld as cultural ambassadors who are promoting the positive aspects of Korean culture and masculinity to the world (Lee 2022). They are lauded as having succeeded in finding ideal women as intimate partners. The online discourses portray white women as solutions to Korean women who are not conforming to the cult of domesticity.
Six out of one hundred children born in Korea are from interracial relationships (Lee 2021). This indicates a fundamental shift in the Korean demographic that challenges the country’s long-held national and patriarchal pride in being a mono-racial nation. The YouTube videos and the discourses surrounding them show how Korean national identity and patriarchy are being reconfigured to legitimize the demographic shift, primarily led by Korean men in interracial relationships with non-Korean women.
Superficially, the mediatization of interracial relationships and the popularity they garner may seem to imply a dramatic shift from mono-racial nationalism to multiculturalism and multiracialism. However, further observation reveals that the idealization of white femininity and interracial relationships function to perpetuate misogyny and nationalism by objectifying women and assuming white women will become fully assimilated and embody “better” versions of the Korean cult of domesticity. Further research into the politics of interracial relationships in Korea will offer critical insight into the complex relationship between race, gender, and ethnicity in contemporary Korea. In particular, further examining the online discourses on interracial relationships will provide critical insight into how digital technologies shape the rhetoric surrounding race, gender, and feminism in the Korean context.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
