Editor’s note: The “Let’s Talk about Sexuality” series, which is intended to create a new, feminist sexual discourse, is funded by the Korea Foundation for Women’s Gender Equal Social Development Project.

 

Always being disparaged for my supposed lack of dating skills

 

Once, after a group gathering, a friend mentioned another attendee’s name and asked me what I was going to do now. ‘What was I going to do about what?’ I wondered. I looked at her in complete confusion, and she said, “He was staring at you a lot. Didn’t you notice?”

 

Of course he had stared at me and our eyes had met frequently. But I had perceived that as part of the fairly active discussion going on within the group. My friend clucked her tongue and shook her head. “It’s like you’re the editor of Quarterly Alone...”[Gyegan Hollo, an independent publication whose motto translates to “Freedom from dating”.]

 

Hmph, I knew what was implied after that ellipsis, even if she didn’t say it. She was calling me a yeonaegoja [“dating failure”] (which is a discriminatory term, by the way)!

 

Episodes like this have tended to suddenly pop up in my life, like missionaries handing out brochures in the street. Because I’m unable to recognize or properly respond to the opposite sex’s words or actions as romantic signals, I’ve been considered a mokseok [“inanimate object”] or yeonaemot ([an abbreviation for] “ignorant about dating”). Or in spaces in which there is a high concentration of romance in the air (for example, a Korean guesthouse in Europe), I’ve been called cheolbyeoknyeo [“impenetrable fortress girl”] or told, “This is why you’re single” when I didn’t aggressively pursue a potential partner.

 

I don’t even put in the effort to talk about not dating

 

Thanks to the TV show Witch Hunt (JTBC, 2013-2015), these signals are called “green lights”. In a society where flirting and dating are the report cards that prove your charm and worth, people obsessively try to find green lights in every action of a member of the opposite sex. There are memes on the Internet that show what actions are green lights, and among them are many trivial, everyday movements such as leaning towards the other person, tucking your hair behind your ear, or opening your body as if to show your belly button to the other person. That makes moving so stressful that I know I wouldn’t want to do it. Is there a neon sign in my belly button that flashes “I ★ really ★ like ★ you ♥”?

 

▲ “Omnidirection green light – everything looks like a green light”. A still from Witch Hunt, the TV show that popularized the phrase “green light”. ©JTBC

Obsession with whether the words or actions of a member of the opposite sex are green lights or not has continued even after the cancellation of Witch Hunt. In dating advice programs, Internet forums, conversations with friends, viral ads... if there are so many people who’ll insist or agree with you that a clearly poop-colored light is actually green, sometimes you come to believe it really is green.

 

I naturally have little ability to detect or correctly interpret green lights, but I also don’t really care about this fact. I think, ‘If it’s that unclear, can’t I just ignore it? Do I really, really have to become so invested in romance that I try to wring the possibility of it out of even those trivial actions?’

 

So someone might shout at me, “That’s why you’re bad at dating!” I would answer, “Yes, that must be why I’m bad at it. So please leave me alone.”

 

The world is quite disgusted with me for not dating and not even trying to. I’ve encountered claims that I’m fooling myself and suspicions about my sexual identity or orientation so often that they’ve become trite to me. And so have expressions of encouragement that come from a place of affection. “If you want to win the lottery, you have to buy a ticket!” means that I have to try in order to date. But I don’t want that “win”. And I wonder why someone would inflate dating to put it on the level of winning the lottery in the first place. I’m not Draco Malfoy (the Harry Potter character whose complaining is famously cut off with “Shut up, Malfoy”), so let’s talk about this!

 

▲ A promotional image for Sorry, I Don’t Love You: Namsachin / Yeosachin, a reality show aired in July 2017. Calling friends of the opposite sex namsachin (short for “male friend”) or yeosachin (short for “female friend” is a trend these days. ©SBS

A society obsessed with dating, but “Do people date everyone they like?!”

 

A lot of people easily fall passionately in love with anyone, get excited to find themselves in a will-they-or-won’t-they situation, or think that they must be a serious and mature participant in an exclusive romantic relationship. We are constantly being told that this is an era in which class and other limitations have disappeared, so anyone can have romance, and if they currently don’t, they have to work reallllllly hard to get it. This is a time in which “N-po generation” (a generation of people who are giving up on romance, marriage, children, etc. [because of financial and social difficulties]) discourse coexists with the claim that modern people are too frivolous and superficial and so have become incapable of love, as well as with exaggerations of the importance of romance being pushed at us from all sides.  South Korea’s society in 2018 is so invested in fiery passion that is has become a furnace.

 

Phrases related to celebrities’ love stories top the charts of most-searched terms, TV shows are filled with TMI about entertainers’ love lives, and even animals and toddlers on TV are forced into romantic stories and gendered scenarios. Wherever you go, whether it’s school, the workplace, public places, or a hobby-related gathering, people are sending out green lights or casting a romantic tint on others’ interactions. My friends with office jobs say that when they first joined their companies, it was practically a rite of passage for others to encourage them to date similar-aged coworkers. But why? The only thing people should be encouraged to do in the workplace is work.

 

This kind of atmosphere can also be seen on MBC’s current reality show Omniscient Interfering View. Comedian Park Seong-gwang and his manager have a business relationship. This show isn’t Studio of Love [a dating show aired from 1994 to 2001]. And yet, because the manager is a young woman, and because the two are still a little awkward together because they haven’t been working together long, their relationship is always presented as if there is something sweetly, awkwardly romantic between them.

 

In the Japanese anime series The Prince of Tennis, the character Tezuka has an extraordinary technique called the “Tezuka Zone”. It makes any return shot by his opponent come straight back to where Tezuka is standing. Through his consideration for his manager, Park Seong-gwang has become popular and even earned the nickname “The Nation’s Boyfriend”. Whatever he does is consumed and interpreted only once it has been sucked into a heterosexual romantic relationship. I call this the “heterosexual romantic zone”. The heterosexual romantic zone we have is at least as strong as the matrix.

 

It doesn’t end there. It’s common for conversations to be dominated by talk of heterosexual romantic love, and women who don’t date tend to have their every move blamed for their singleness. Ads for beauty products or clothes are overflowing with copy that boils down to, “You’ll get a boyfriend if you wear this,” and single characters in media who dream of dating and are envious of couples are consumed as humor. We assume that two people who seem to be of the opposite sex and are close to each other are dating, or expect that they have a flirtatious relationship that could develop into dating or a namsachin/yeosachin (male friend/female friend) situation.

 

▲ “A namsachin♥yeosachin pair”. A still from With You. ©JTBC

Recently, “Song Eun-yi’s disctinction rage incident” has become a social media meme. It is a video of Song Eun-yi [also featured on the right in the photo above] on a blind date episode of Infinite Challenge. She is asked whether she would date [fellow entertainer] Kim Je-dong, and when she says no, the room’s general reaction is, “Oh, she must dislike him.” She jumps up and shouts, “That’s not what that means at all! Do people date everyone they like?!”

 

It is a form of violence to divide all feelings toward the opposite sex into like and dislike and only interpret them according to whether they allow for the possibility of romance. This overheated environment tries to melt down diverse relationships and feelings and cast them as one big heart. All while concealing the fact that the heart is molded to fit in a frame that is heterosexual, non-disabled, non-asexual, cis-gender, and does not cross racial lines.

 

The real world is full of stories unrelated to romantic love

 

Not everyone yearns for romance and sex. Everyone differs in their desires and attitudes, ways of forming relationships, degrees of preoccupation with relationships, and the identity or sexual orientation of their relationship partners.

 

I’ve never put all of my efforts toward dating. Even during my most intense relationship or when I had a one-sided crush, I didn’t get agitated or swept up like the characters in movies and TV dramas; my everyday life continued according to its usual rhythms. Because of this, my love life has always been perceived as unfulfilling, and I’ve been called a cold partner and selfish woman. People tell me, “You’re like that because you haven’t yet experienced true love,” thus designating all of my partners and crushes as inferior quality goods.

 

Love is absolutized and sanctified. You must completely lose yourself, put everything into your relationship, and become completely powerless or transcend all your limits in the face of overwhelming emotion in order for your relationship to be ‘true love’. This ideology is strong and effective.  I used to be very worried that the fact that I hadn’t experienced passionate love would become an insurmountable weakness to me as a writer. There wasn’t much talk, though, about the fact that if I threw myself into a love affair in order to write well, there was a danger that I would objectify my partner and turn them into a tool for my personal growth.

 

Now I know that these things that are considered the only important experiences and ones that you must go through to understand - dating, sex, childbirth, childrearing, military service – are metaphors for normality in our society.

 

▲ Together with the fantasy of ‘true love’, the social forces that pressures people to date are strong.

I don’t need the approval of others if I can only get it with proof that I’ve undergone certain experiences. There are many writings and stories in the world that have nothing to do with romantic love, and that’s how I’m going to live. But if you wanted to insist, absolutely, that I have to taste the essence of love in order to write really well, then I would answer that writing pretty well is good enough for me. So please move on.

 

To each their own temperature

 

 ‘True love’ may find me someday. Maybe even tomorrow. Even then, I don’t want to consider my lukewarm and apathetic current attitude and feelings as “ignorant from lack of experience” or “immature”. Even if I experience a love like that in the future, I won’t call this time “the era when I didn’t know better”.

 

Missing an opportunity for love because I didn’t recognize it may be regrettable, but it may also not be important at all. If there are people who enjoy taking a spark so small that one could pass right by and fanning it into a flame, there are also people who don’t care whether it goes out. By this I also want to say that, just because I’m someone who’s indifferent to love, that doesn’t mean I have the right to disparage or disdain people who are passionate about love. I suspect that this social situation that feels like a furnace to me is like a warm, comfortable bath to some people out there.

 

The questions are clear. Who is driving people with different temperature levels into one place and working the bellows to form them into identically-shaped emotions and relationships? By doing so, what are they try to exploit, and what are they trying to erase? What temperature best suits my feelings or dating style?

 

The burning temperature of this society’s fervor for romance makes me sweat and hop from foot to foot. I know that during the upcoming holidays, I will be nagged about dating and marriage, and that while surfing the internet I will be confronted with articles about why I am single or love-related quizzes. Cast members on the entertainment shows I like will constantly mention their relationships, and people I know will try to pair me up with anyone who comes to mind.

 

So I will work harder to pour a little cold water on everyone.  I’ll say that it’s not required for everyone to date and have sex, and that there’s no need to spend all of your capital and energy on sprinting toward the goal of dating and having sex. I’ll say that even if you never experience overwhelming love, never try to do so, or never get pushed by other people into a relationship with someone who’s “good enough”, you can have a fulfilling life.

 

Everyone who wants to tear down bit by bit the frame that defines love, pour cold water on it, and protect our different temperatures – come and sit by me.

 

Published Sept. 25, 2018

Translated by Marilyn Hook

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/8314

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

기사 내용과 관련이 없는 글, 욕설을 사용하는 등 타인의 명예를 훼손하는 글은 관리자에 의해 예고없이 임의 삭제될 수 있으므로 주의하시기 바랍니다. 댓글 작성 시 상대방에 대한 배려와 책임을 담아주세요.

• 닉네임
• 비밀번호
• 
• 도배방지 입력