What South Korean pop star IU’s Sexualization of “Childhood” Reveals About Our Repressed Fantasies
The Guardian article reporting the controversy: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/09/k-pop-star-iu-song-sexualising-jose-mauro-de-vasconcelos-my-sweet-orange-tree
21st-century pop fans have been long aware that one of the surest ways to provoke often-profitable controversy is via intimations of childish sexuality. My grade school years saw Britney Spears’ schoolgirl uniform in the 1999 “Baby One More Time” video, and the more recent generation of teen fans will be more familiar with Miley Cyrus’ “downward” spiral from Disney star to twerker in the (in)famous 2013 VMA performance with Robin Thicke. South Korean singer-song writer/pop star IU has been engaged in her own version of this provocation in her recently released album “CHAT-SHIRE,” one of the songs from which, titled “Zeze,” was alleged to sexualize the eponymous five-year-old protagonist of a much loved children’s novel in Korea, José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s My Sweet Orange Tree.
The first piece of evidence supporting the accusation is the portrayal of Zeze on the cover of the album “CHAT-SHIRE”: Zeze is depicted wearing fishnet stockings, waving his legs towards his beloved Minguinho (name of the Orange Tree). The second is supposedly in the lyrics themselves, or to be more exact the intentions behind IU’s lyrics which she made public to her fans during her album showcase: “I wrote [the song Zeze] from Minguinho’s point of view. Zeze is innocent but yet also cruel. As a character he is full of paradox. I found this very attractive and sexy.” The Korean publisher for the translated version of the novel lost no time after the interview in issuing a statement on Facebook proclaiming their “regret” that IU had “chosen to sexualize a character that had warmed the hearts of many readers” (the publisher retracted their statement 5 days later, acknowledging that they should have taken in account the fact that readers could have “various ways of understanding the same text,” perhaps embarrassed by its own authoritative stance on what can be considered the “right” kind of reading). Amidst much clamor about the extent to which art can go in defying morality, IU apologized through her SNS account for “those who had been hurt listening to her lyrics” and her “inadequacy as a lyricist.”
The Album Cover: You can see the controversial representation of Zeze on the left corner (wearing the red hat and fishnet stockings)
Aside from the hysteric response IU’s album has induced for the past two weeks — there is an online petition going on for pulling “Zeze” out of the market, with over 30,000 signatures — IU’s case differs significantly in a crucial aspect to that of Britney’s sexualization of Catholic high school girls or Miley Cyrus’s demolition of Hannah Montana. Both Britney and Cyrus were able to capitalize on the fact that their status as teen stars allowed leeway into a gradual reconciliation of their previous Disney sparkles image with the emergent adult one. IU’s image radically differs because she caters to a totally different audience. She may be older than Britney and Cyrus from when they were first accused of childish sexuality (Cyrus was 20, Britney 16; IU is 22), but unlike Britney and Cyrus, whose fan base was assumed to be mostly girls of their own age (hence the anxiousness of parents who were worried that their daughters’ role models may be giving them the wrong idea of what growing up meant), the bulk of IU’s fans is assumed to be male fans with spending power. The IU controversy therefore needs to be considered in terms of pinpointing what exactly constitutes IU’s public image as a celebrity. How does IU advertise herself? What does she symbolize for her thousands of fans? What kind of image does she identify with in order to promote herself? How is it related to her commercialization of so-called “pedophilia” in the figure of Zeze?
IU’s collaboration in summer 2015 with singer/comedian Myung-soo Park in the hugely popular reality show Infinity Challenge may provide us with an answer. In her performance of her song “Léon,” IU dressed up as Mathilda of the eponymous movie (released in 1994, the movie still enjoys popularity in Korea), with Park as Léon. Starring Jean Reno as the stolid assassin Léon and Natalie Portman as the orphan Mathilda, the movie had audiences uneasy over the prospect of a 40-ish hitman taking a 12 year old girl alone in the world under his wing and teaching her to be a killer: director Luc Besson’s version of “Daddy-Long-Legs.” Even worse, Mathilda had many a viewer squeamish in a vain attempt to ignore the sexual potential of her precocious dress and manner which draws in both viewer and Léon alike (the original screenplay had Léon and Mathilda be lovers — not surprisingly it was scrapped in the process). The appeal of the potential I think is less a product of an overtly “perverse” desire (read pedophilia) than a gentle poke at a socially sublimated one: the allure of what we might call the “corrupt innocent.”
Our titillation with Mathilda stems from her embodiment of both innocence and corruption. Her family has been murdered by a corrupt NYPD cop (Gary Oldman); she must be strong in order to avenge her family; her premature brush with death accelerates her mental (and by conjunction her bodily) growth and precipitates the loss of her childhood innocence, the loss of which is represented through her budding sexuality and increasing callousness to violence. Our initial discomfort may originate from our belief that at age 12, she is too young physically to be corrupt (read old) so mentally — the injunction that denies the sexuality of children below a certain age is apparent in our rape laws, which stipulate that consensual sex is impossible for children below a certain age. Coincidentally (?), New York statutory rape law stipulates that first degree rape must involve children under 11.
Yet the disjunction between the “purity” of her physical body as opposed to her “sullied” mind converges as the movie progresses, since with each passing minute Mathilda’s body “matures” irrevocably, her fall into adulthood already scripted onto an inevitable future. Guilty pleasure (on the part of the audience) springs from the ambivalence surrounding the straddling of what is framed in online debates as mutually exclusive positions: the covert acknowledgement of the lamentable yet predestined loss of innocence, and the pleasurable capitulation to the guilt-laden gratifications of the maturing body. A metaphor: Mathilda (and lU)’s appeal can be likened to how we feel about freshly fallen snow. We want to be the first to sully its pristine surface — yet after the first few stomps we ruefully look back upon our footprints and wonder, what a shame the whiteness had to be ruined so! Our guilt in having tainted what may have remained pure is tempered by the pleasure of being the agent with the power to deflower. The guilt is further assuaged by the knowledge that if the snow was not stomped on by us, it would have been by someone else, or ruined anyway by the ravages of time.
I see IU as capitalizing on her projected image of the “corrupt innocent,” the child perpetually in-between innocence and experience. IU’s explanation in her SNS apology that “the Zeze in the lyrics is a different character altogether, inspired by motif of the novel” should be taken seriously. She isn’t sexualizing a five-year-old, she is sexualizing what he represents for her, a child condemned to grow up faster than he should due to his physically abusive father, a child on the threshold between innocence and experience: “Why must children grow up?” he asks. The Alice in Wonderland motif that is apparent from the album title (“Chat” is French for cat, an obvious reference to the Cheshire cat) reinforces the “corrupt innocent” motif that holds not only the album but her celebrity status together. By the same logic, the sideline debate as to whether her music video “Twenty-three” is “pedophiliac” or no is irrelevant. The white milk bottle against her provocatively parted lips, the droplets of milk running down her red sweater as she arches her neck back, showing off her white decollage to her advantage — all this is intentionally staged as to be read as both childlike (she wants to remain a child) and adultlike (she desires sexual initiation).
Screen capture from music video “Twenty Three”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42Gtm4-Ax2U The link to music video. The milk bottle scene starts at 2:04.
“Yes I see how IU is capitalizing on repressed desires,” you might now be thinking, “but does that exonerate her (or her producer) from the responsibility expected from a public figure? By creating such work, isn’t she just stimulating what might have laid latent?” Consumer economics have long given up on the conundrum of whether consumer desire originates from the existence of a product (the producer, the artist) or the idiosyncratic desires of the consumer. It is like the chicken and egg problem: was the chicken first or the egg? One thing is certain: one cannot exist without the other.