Before we get to the k-pop-related content, let’s start off this particular post by talking about something that’s very close and dear to the hearts of many of my readers… the pornographic film industry.  Don’t worry – as always, the relevance to k-pop will become clear.  I know some of you might think that I shouldn’t be blogging about this and will protest that you don’t care about the porn industry but that’s all bullshit because my website stats don’t lie.  I know what you click on, you dirty cao ni mas.  Great, now that’s settled, let’s get started.

Most of you have probably heard of (if not actually seen) the 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat.  If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother because I have, and take it from me – you haven’t been missing much.  Precious few fappable cast members, laughably bad scriptwriting and acting (especially from the atrocious Linda Lovelace) even by porn industry standards, shithouse cinematography and a general veneer of grainy 70s ugliness all conspire to wreck what is a horribly dated film which definitely does not stand the test of time.  Although it was high budget for its day, faptech has since progressed far beyond the point of Deep Throat, and you could probably make a more engaging adult movie these days with your girl/boyfriend, a couple mobile phone cameras, some bright indoor lights and half a kilo of lube.

As much as I don’t like the film itself, I respect Deep Throat’s place as a watershed moment for the adult film industry.  Aside from being relatively expensive for the time and featuring an actual plot, Deep Throat did something else that had rarely been done in pornographic film up until this time – it was a film that was honest about its intentions.  Deep Throat talked about female sexual pleasure candidly and openly and orgasm as a desirable goal in an age when this was a taboo topic and strictly off the discussion table.  Many people actually learned what a clitoris was for the first time by watching this film (even though the film deliberately got the location wrong) and the ripple effect of the film sparked a lot of positive discourse about female sexual pleasure.  Importantly, the film made no attempt to hide that this was a film about sex and orgasm, and that this was why you should see it.

Before the advent of Deep Throat, most pornographic films whether softcore (nudity) or hardcore (penetrative sex) lied heavily about what they really were in order to escape the wrath of society’s more prudish elements of the time.  For example, many films that were intended to be consumed purely as fap material were prefixed by lengthy monologues and boring crap about things only very tenuously related to the film’s content.  Monologues were designed to be so boring and mundane that if someone else absolutely insisted on coming along with you to the cinema who you knew would be offended by the content (such an overly sensitive or nosy/clingy partner), after a few minutes this other person who you tried to convince not to come along in the first place (so you don’t get outed as a perv) would eventually get bored and agree with your prior suggestion that the film just isn’t their thing.  You had those few minutes to convince them that they’d be better off leaving, and usher them out of the cinema before the real action that you were there to see started.  Russ Meyer was notorious for this, padding out his early softcore exploitation films with the most inane of preambles that only the most tolerant of clingy partners could sit through.

An important stepping stone occurred prior to Deep Throat with the advent of court rulings in the US that stated that a film displaying explicit sex could be screened if the contents were deemed to have educational or scientific merit.  The effect of this ruling was an avalanche of aspiring pornographic filmmakers tacking onto the beginning of their sex films a “educational introduction”, where a person often posing as a scientist and dressed appropriately in a white laboratory coat would talk about the “scientific research” to follow, thereby allowing the filmmakers to get away with whatever sexual content they wanted to show.  The man in the white coat introducing a sex film with detached scientific calm became such a cliche that the term “white coater” became a code for any fap material of any kind masquerading as a documentary or scientific film or anything else apart from what it really was.

Finding the original white coater films of the late 60s and early 70s these days would be difficult, but film buffs may remember Robert DeNiro’s character in Martin Scorsese’s classic film “Taxi Driver” taking his girlfriend to the white coater Language Of Love (aka “Swedish Marriage Manual”) – relevant part from 1:20.

Now let’s bring it back to k-pop.

Say you were a k-pop blogger, or a member of a k-pop forum or website, and you wanted to increase your traffic/upvotes/whatever by showing what everybody who likes k-pop obviously wants to see – Hyuna’s fucking tits.   You could, if you were very honest and didn’t give a shit about what anybody thought about you, make a post something like this:

LET’S LOOK AT HYUNA’S FUCKING TITS

HOLY FUCKING SHIT CHECK THIS OUT BITCHES

I WANT TO CUM ON THEM AND SO DO YOU

SHE WILL LOOK FROTHY LIKE IN THIS PIC ONCE I’M DONE

GET READY TO PRAISE THE UNDERBOOB GODS

ALSO SHE’S PULLING HER PANTS DOWN, WHAT A COINCIDENCE SO AM I

FUCK, SHE IS HOT, LOOK AT THOSE CANS, FUCK

I DON’T CARE HOW SHOPPED THESE PHOTOS ARE

I WANT TO GIVE HER A PEARL NECKLACE

BUT NOT THE KIND SHOWN HERE, WHICH ARE JUST GETTING IN THE WAY

LET’S ALL LOOK AT THESE PICS AND SQUIRT TOGETHER FUCK YEAH

PLEASE KEEP CLICKING ON MY SHIT THANKS

Okay, so that’s the brutally honest no-shame pervert approach, but maybe that doesn’t work for you.  Perhaps one or more of the following apply to you:

• You live in a multi-person household and you have to share the computer, so when someone looks over the shoulder at your writing you have to justify it somehow.
• Your easily-offended and desperately clingy/needy partner or nosy parents are computer-savvy and frequently check your browsing history, once again necessitating a non-perv justification for any links visited.
• You’re studying gender studies at University and you find it hard to motivate yourself to write anything that isn’t k-pop related, plus you secretly like looking at tits and you’d rather the rest of the study group didn’t know lest they accuse you of “objectification”.
• You’re a lying asshole who lies to yourself about how addicted to perving you are, so you need to find a way to shut up the voices of reason in your head so you can continue to lie to yourself and others.

Any of these factors could create the need for a “white coater” approach to k-pop fapping – disguising our need to spread fap material as a need for something else.  This is where the language of pseudo-feminism can help.

Believe it or not, I consider myself (don’t laugh) a feminist.  I know this because I took the test and I passed it.  Not only this, but I’m actually a great deal more knowledgeable about feminism than many self-proclaimed feminists are.  I’ve read plenty of seminal feminist literature like Susan Faludi’s “Backlash” and Naomi Wolf’s “The Beauty Myth” cover to cover, not because I wanted to get a good grade at some fucking university course, but because I genuinely wanted to read that stuff and find out more about women’s perspectives.  I also work with a lot of women in the music business (some who embrace feminism as a concept, some who definitely don’t) who all have to deal with various “gender issues” on a daily basis.  So as a feminist, I’m completely qualified to tell you how to write like one.  Keep in mind that we’re not interested in actually embracing any feminist ideology here, so don’t get too scared – we just want to write kind of like a feminist, just enough to throw any critics off the scent that we’re really just here for the fapgods.  This is why I call it “pseudo-feminism”.  We’re going to do what a lot of other writers do, which is co-opt the style of feminist writing, while leaving out any of the actual substance of feminism (you know – properly backed-up arguments and stuff), and most importantly, leaving IN all the Hyuna images and thus all of the precious fap value.  Let’s do it.

HOW FAR CAN HYUNA GO IN OBJECTIFYING HERSELF?

Hyuna of girl group 4Minute as the “visual”, is always thrust into the spotlight, and in her case that spotlight always includes sexual objectification for the predominantly male audience that circulates around her every move in the Korean entertainment world.  It’s no surprise to see such consistent pandering to the whims of oppas from girl groups, especially those coming from a country ranking so low worldwide on the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), yet Hyuna’s company has seemingly found new ways to escalate her own sexual exploitation with each new release.  She was already pushing this line quite severely in “Volume Up” but her image has only become more explicit since then.

Hyuna upped the ante in her 2012 solo feature track “Ice Cream“, which features a chorus refrain of “cream, cream, cream” and her own glistening cleavage gratuitously covered in soap suds.  It doesn’t take much imagination to join the dots for Hyuna’s male fans, all hanging off each salacious word and gyration.

Hyuna’s agency pushed the boundaries of sexual exploitation even further on Troublemaker’s comeback “Now“.  The video featured domestic violence as entertainment, concerning in a country with a surging domestic violence problem, where such matters are routinely normalised.  The promotional photos accompanying the album release showed Hyuna sporting a trashy sexually degraded appearance, posing in skimpy underwear and acting as willing as possible for the camera.

There seems to be no lengths that her agency won’t go to show skin, sell sex and keep her male fans buying.

4Minute’s latest song “Whatcha Doin’ Today” keeps the pandering to sexual perverts at fever pitch, with several top down cleavage shots seemingly inspired by point-of-view pornographic film and Hyuna’s boobs looking more padded and pushed up for the camera than ever before as she stares submissively.

Even in rare moments of empowerment such as in the following scene from “Ice Cream” there’s still somebody being exploited and having their bodies shown for the male audience.  The k-pop video equation is always a lose/lose for women, where 4Minute and Hyuna are concerned.

It only remains to be seen where Hyuna can go next, but the agency seems to be only interested in taking retrograde steps.  Will we have strippers in k-pop in a few years?  Any hope for a revolution of sexual representation in Korea is going to have to contend with Hyuna’s image as a first port of call.

I hope you enjoyed that little bit of roleplay.  I’m quite proud of it.  Points to remember:

• Make sure you reference an article or two that backs up something you want to say, but don’t go into too much detail about the link between your point and the article, or people might discover that your argument only consists of weak catchphrases with no actual researched correlation.
• Don’t leave out any images!  You can find a way to make anything relevant with a bit of creative writing skill.  Also be sure to link to any videos, you might need to fap to them later.
• Always use words like “objectification” and “exploitation”, they sound great and will enhance your feminist pedigree, plus they essentially can’t be argued with as everyone is technically an object and all commercial activity from any k-pop performer is technically exploitation.
• References to something horrible (like domestic violence, sexual inequality etc) even if it’s unrelated to what you’re talking about will help you take the high moral ground, because it insinuates that anyone against your writing must also approve of these horrible things.  Feel free to remind them of what a bad person they are.

It’s that simple folks!  You too can now create your own “white coater” pseudo-feminist articles and posts, include in them all the pictures and GIFs you want, whore them out for website traffic, fap all you want, and nobody will ever suspect a thing!  Now all you have to worry about is getting caught with your pants down in front of the computer, or running out of tissues and screen-cleaner!