https://strawberry-peach-tae.tumblr.com/post/159754623302/how-is-this-even-legal

 

A snapshot. A brief moment. An idol departing through Incheon, playing with his fans for that last moment before he disappears into the parts of the airport where they can’t see him any more. One last minute of the game, before it’s slog your way to the trains, then to your gate to wait for your flight. One last playtime.

There are a few things you can take for granted, here. Like, Wonho (this is, in case you don’t know, Wonho of Monsta X) is hyper-aware of his fans on the public-area catwalk above him. His fans, most likely female, are hyper-aware of him. He knows without question the smallest gesture he makes will be on Tumblr and Twitter and eight hundred fansites within an hour. Over and over again. Fans will deconstruct what he’s wearing, what he’s carrying, who stood closest to him, how his eyes looked, if he’d lost or gained weight, how much his shoes cost, and what, if anything, he said to anyone. He’s lived this life for a few years now; he knows how the game is played.

What I find fascinating, though, is how he’s playing it.

Wonho is, in case you can’t tell under that shirt, built. Very muscular, and not afraid of taking his shirt off when the mood or need for fan service strikes. His group is known for aggressive, powerful songs, videos, and choreography. Yet at the same time they’re playing to traditional masculine gender roles– one of their recent videos, 2016’s “Fighter” showed Wonho in jeans and a welder’s apron and little else besides sweat, hammering away at an anvil, heedless of such petty things as, you know, sparks and fire– they’re also expending as much energy again subverting them, showing themselves as soft, vulnerable, even what Westerners would call feminine.

In their own web series, “Monsta X-Ray,” they became teacher’s aides for a day, donning aprons and helping with classes of babies and toddlers, feeding them and cuddling them and carrying them. Social media will never allow to die the images of 6′ Hyungwon clearing a kindergarten lunch table with one hand while, with the other, holding a sleepy, cranky baby who refused to be put down. (Little Siwoo was dubbed “Hyungwon’s Koala Baby.”) The segment of the group putting the children down for naps and ending up napping beside them was near-murderous in its cuteness.

Which brings us back again to the image of Wonho on the people-mover, watching his fans watching him.

It’s hard to tell, but it’s likely his eyes, behind the huge sunglasses over which he coyly peeks, are kohl-rimmed. His skin is perfect, mouth enticingly red, hair sleek. He all but bats his lashes at the observers, then touches his mouth, and smiles knowingly. Add a lollipop, and he’s the cover art for Kubrik’s 1962 “Lolita.”*

But who’s seducing whom, here?

The primary audience for K-pop is, I am aware, not women my age, who’ve been around and seen some things. It’s girls: teen and pre-teen, papering their walls with posters and dreaming about idols between high-school classes. Pop stars have always been the bridge for young people between first adolescent romantic fantasies and real life– a safe way of exploring feelings before actual humans are involved. Idols occupy a space that’s both incredibly real, and completely imaginary: they’re a kid’s first love, and her imaginary friend. They’re flesh-and-blood people who eat ramyun and play video games, and they’re perfect, untouchable beauties with unlimited romantic and sexual potential.

In Korea, however, there’s far less of the toxic masculinity we have here in the US, that says a man must be a man: guns and violence and dominance and inflexibility and no time for such pansy-ass things as “emotions.” In Korea, there is no shame in a man crying at beautiful poetry, or a letter from his mother. In K-pop, there is no shame in an idol batting his lashes and giving come-hither looks to girls. He is both predator and prey at once, and he walks the line with skill.

And sometimes, a lollipop.

 

*I should make it clear, here, that I’m not referring so much to Nabokov’s Lolita as written, but the strange symbol she has become in Western culture: no longer the broken victim of prolonged sexual abuse, but the youthful seductress, sexually experienced yet still maintaining a veneer of innocence.