Loving Korean

The answer to your question is simple, but I would also like to address a more general issue concerning Koreans and weight, and it might not be what you expect. The previous question we answered, “Do Korean men like black women?”, was a similar type of question. It is similar because it assumes that there is some culturally influenced preference for specific type of women that majority of Korean men have ingrained in their personalities by their upbringing.

There isn’t.

I would also ask you to please don’t give too much notice to people talking about their personal experience. Even if all their friends and acquaintances told them the exact same thing, that is way too few people to make any conclusions about a whole nation, and they are in no way a representative sample since we carefully choose people who surround us and they usually all come from very small geographical location. Even scientist make mistakes when trying to make conclusions about human behavior and they are trained to avoid bias and other pitfalls of such research.

So the answer to your question is this: while many Korean men, like many men around the world, prefer slim women, there are still plenty who don’t care, and Kimchi Man even knows those who prefer their women heavy.

Since Koreans have the lowest obesity rate among all of the OECD countries (page 6) I can understand you may be worried that Korean guys might not be eager to enter a relationship with heavy or overweight women or that if they do start a relationship they might be judgmental. While everyone has a right to their own preference when choosing a partner, making someone feel bad for their weight makes him a jerk, not a Korean.

And let’s not forget, there are heavy and overweight Korean men as well.

Now I would like to address another thing. I have seen many foreigners living in Korea criticize Koreans for their seemingly unnatural obsession with weight. It’s hard to deny this. Recently I read that, besides not being allowed to eat for 24 hours, Korean female stars are not even allowed to drink water before performance from fear they might not look starved.

But I don’t for one moment buy into the story that Koreans are more obsessed with weight than us. They are just, for the reasons I won’t go into here, more successful at keeping their weight down and are certainly more comfortable about discussing other people’s weight openly.

In Western Europe, sales of weight-loss products topped $1.4 billion in 2009. The weight-loss industry in North America is worth over $50 billion and Americans spend over $1.6 billion a year on weight-loss supplements.

Does that sound like people who don’t care about their weight?

I sat across from girls who were so worried what the food might do to their thighs that they put food in their mouths with such slow motion and tiny bites, all spiced up with victim expressions on their faces, that you would think someone was spoon-feeding them their own barf instead of the delicious food. Women wonder about their weight so often that sentences like “Does this dress/pants make me look fat” have become a part of our laughing stock. Aren’t we westerners bombarded with weight loss product, tips, advice and miraculous teas, barriers and such? Which magazine, talk show or advertisement aimed at women hasn’t talked about weight loss, multiple times? Just because our culture teaches us that it is polite to pretend we don’t notice other person’s weight, doesn’t change the fact that we do.

I think this obsession with weight comes from our seeming inability to comprehend that food is what constitutes our bodies and as such should be chosen with utmost care instead of obsessing about the amount. This is a change in attitude we must all partake together, and stop pointing fingers at each other claiming one nation is too fat and another one too thin, and stop taking the moral high ground.