To tantalize you until my next post--Hello is now working ;-)

Problem with Hello

Hmm, Hello is absolutely refusing to post my pictures of today's event. This is more than annoying, because tonight I have (had) the time to write, and I'm lonely until tomorrow late morning. I can't write until I select my pictures, posting them to my blog. There's an update coming up, but I hope this Hello problem is resolved. Is anyone else having problems with Hello? I'll probably take this post down if/when the Hello problem is solved.

Belittling One's Wife: A Cultural Difference

Jodi over at the Asia Pages had a fascinating post about Gyongsang men belittling their wives (Gyongsang is the most conservative region of the country):

"Every day, I try to do my best to help out everyone I can--everyone except my wife. I don't care what happens to her."

I'm finally figuring out how one is supposed to respond to such comments. You don't laugh (like I did with the flower statement) and you don't say "Oh, don't say that, that's not true." Instead you continue to pour praise on the man to help him save face. I watch the other women do this all the time and I'm finally figuring it out. Instead of reacting the way I have been, the women down here will say: "Oh I think your wife is a very lucky woman to have such a helpful husband like you. Really, I think you are a wonderful man and she doesn't realize how fortunate she is."

And the more he belittles her, the more praise he seems to get.

(At least this is what seems to happen....

This struck me at the time, and I remember thinking what strange creatures those Gyongsang men were.

While having a class with my elementary teachers yesterday, our newly married, token male was asked by the curious ladies if his twenty-something wife was beautiful. "No," he firmly answered. They then teased him by saying "she's beautiful!"--and he answered forcefully each time, "No, she isn't." He also said he was comfortable now that she was on vacation. I was shocked. And the most shocking thing about it was that the ladies were going completely goo-goo over him. After some hesitancy, I told the class I found this shocking, and said that, ordinarily, a newly-married man would never say his young wife wasn't anything other than beautiful. The man, and several ladies promptly told me that it was cultural custom not to praise one's wife in public like that, because other people would think the man was a self-aggrandizing sort. Frankly, that's one custom I don't care for. It's based on a misogynistic view of women that views them as the property of a man. I was glad when a few of the women said that this custom was held to more particularly by older folks. Anyway, after I said my piece, the man allowed that his wife was a "little" beautiful. This was said with a smile, and I gathered that he thought she was pretty good looking; Korean men in his age bracket love to tease.