I have never managed to connect with South Korea despite several visits. I suppose that the fact these have all been business visits and mostly in winter when it is cold almost beyond belief has not helped. Also, I have only been to Seoul which is a huge traffic-jammed place. I don’t like Korean food, and I find the formality – the concierges come out from behind their desk to bow when I enter my hotel – frankly, exhausting. I have long considered the best place in Seoul to be Incheon airport, otherwise known as the way out.
One noticeable thing is the sheer sculpted beauty of the young professional women. I spend a great deal of time in the Far East, and I have long become used to seeing beautiful women. A man gets used to all that (honestly darling!) but the Korean women crank it up quite a few notches. In fact, it is so extreme it verges on the hideous. If anyone can be hideously attractive, that is.
The perfection on display, the perfect profiles, the remarkable cleavages (rare in Asian women) and some parts not fully on display (more of that below – no pun intended) can be explained easily. Plastic surgery.
It is reckoned that one in three South Korean women have had plastic surgery. South Korea is top of the world’s plastic surgery per capita league, and it shows. The Korea plastic surgery 18th birthday package is a common ‘coming of age’ or graduation present from parents to their female offspring. Once you know you cannot help noticing.
The two most common plastic surgeries for young women are the double eyelid surgery and the rhinoplasty, better known as a ‘nose job’. On a very slow Uber ride across Seoul, I studied the young women from the taxi at close quarters as we crawled along (for research purposes, your honour), and it seemed to me that every one of them had a nose job. The Asian nose is rather large; not protruding like those of westerners, but flat and taking up a larger area of the face. But not on the faces of young Korean women whose noses look pinched and petite. They also have larger than normal eyes, the result of eyelid surgery.
As we crawled along, and I was able to tear my gaze away from all this false perfection, the other noticeable thing was the sheer number of plastic surgeons on the high street. This was especially prominent in Gangnam District, the prosperous area of town. In some places it seemed that whole tower blocks were dedicated to the nip, tuck and nose job so festooned were they with plaques advertising plastic surgeons.
While it is all, quite literally, attractive in the sense that it is hard not to notice these young ladies, it is not endearing. Despite and in addition to the plastic surgery, each young female face seems to be stuccoed with about a litre of makeup. These young women may look good on your arm, but would they pass the Jerry Hall test? You know, the one where a woman must be a cordon blue chef in the bedroom, or something like that. Somehow, I doubt it.
After eyes and nose, facial contouring, boob jobs and liposuction are in the top five common plastic surgeries. But somewhere down that list and very popular among Korean women and, one imagines, Korean men is the vaginoplasty. It probably ranks as one kind of ‘job’ or another, but some things are better not said.
Vaginoplasty results in a ‘tightening’ of the slippery slope with the aim of attracting, satisfying or keeping a male partner. I know of no statistics to show that men leave women because they cannot fill the space available to them. But I also guess if you are as insecure as to need to have your nose trimmed, your eyes wide(r) open and a rack like a kitchen work surface, I also guess you will not take any chances with the tunnel of love.
But where does it all lead, you may well ask?
Presumably Korean women want to be more attractive to men but with all this faux perfection on display, men must find it bewildering to choose. Whether it leads to more sex, again I have no statistics to offer. But one outcome is not more babies.
Korea, despite investing $200billion in incentives to couples to have more children, remains the country with the lowest birth rate in the world.
I suppose the last thing you want, having spent a fortune to trim your flaps, is an object bigger than a coconut to go and ruin the effect on its journey from womb to daylight.
No, I just cannot take to this place.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
This piece was first published in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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Where will it all end? Read the novel Cloud Atlas (stick with it, it’s not an easy book to get into as it seems the stories it tells are unrelated). Unless my memory is playing up, in a 22nd century Seoul instant plastic surgery is as prevalent as fast food (NB made of humans). Whilst when written the novel was Sci-Fi, it’s now morphed into the dystopian genre. The book incidentally is better than the film which abbreviates.
Just out of interest, do the men make any effort to be more attractive? Or is it like good old Blighty, where they walk around like man – babies, fat beer guts overhanging their half mast trousers or trackie bottoms? Unwashed and covered in tattoos or piercings. Maybe one of the reasons why there’s not so much jig-a jig going on either in Korea or here, is that the men don’t bother or care what they look like. It seems a bit much to blame the women for wanting to look their best, even if in your eyes it’s not ‘the done thing’.