ICYMI, K-dramas have been turning the male gaze on men 

Any conversation around Michael Bay’s 2007 flick, Transformers, is eventually distilled down to one standout scene—a young Megan Fox limbering up to the hood of a yellow Camaro to fix its engine. In response, the camera makes a leisurely voyage across her exposed midriff, effectively becoming a stand-in for the gaze of every male member in the audience. The feisty, car wrench-slinging Mikaela Banes could have had a backstory—there’s a hint of her father’s previous criminal record putting her on the path to crime—but we’ll never know because, at that moment, her role in the story is sliced down to one purpose: to be looked at. 

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” reads a popular excerpt from noted cultural thinker John Berger’s book, Ways Of Seeing. His words serve as a succinct summation of the male gaze, a term first coined by filmmaker Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Under the male gaze, the camera adopts a heterosexual, distinctly voyeuristic perspective as women serve as the object and men become the bearer of the look. While recent female characters have been gifted more by way of a backstory, Margot Robbie could only essay her breakthrough portrayal of Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad while outfitted in a strategically ripped crop top and fishnet stockings. 

Much of what ails the depiction of female characters on-screen has been attributed to the debilitating gender divide behind the camera—last year, the percentage of women working in key behind-the-scenes roles,f such as directors, writers, editors and cinematographers, was restricted to 34%. And yet, the true impact of having more representation at the helm can be measured in Birds of Prey that course-corrects the costuming misdeeds of its prequel while reclaiming the narrative with its female authorship. If deconstructing the male gaze falls on a gendered curve, how does the world of K-dramas—an industry traditionally monopolised by female writers—measure up? We went looking for answers to The Fangirl Verdict, the go-to authority on K-drama commentary with an eight million-strong readership. In an email conversation, the anonymous writer behind the portal unpacked the reverberations of the female gaze in the industry. 

Men written by women, for women: How K-dramas are turning the male gaze on men

In the popular 2016 drama, Descendants of the Sun, a military soldier makes plans to meet up with a female doctor he’s been courting while working out at the gym. The otherwise inconsequential scene is made memorable by the fact that he happens to be shirtless during the exchange, and the camera responds by lovingly lingering over his movements on the workout bench. It is the kind of throwaway, gratuitous scene that has been employed on women so frequently in cinematic history that, as an audience, we have been desensitised to its presence. And yet, K-dramas have been conspiring to reverse the tide by employing every trope, trick and cliché in the book on its men. Just ask Gong Yoo—yes, that salesman from Squid Game—whose crisp white shirts are often rendered see-through when he spontaneously steps into fountains and other water bodies. 

Looking at men through a distinctly female gaze is a reflection of a bolder attitude towards women’s sexuality for viewers as well as writers, The Fangirl Verdict tells us. “Before the aughts, shirtless scenes were more matter-of-fact—the men just happened to be shirtless in that particular moment. However, when the 2010s came around, the shirtless scenes became significantly more gratuitous with the camera often panning the male lead’s torso with a distinctly appreciative gaze,” she explains. 

With a higher volume of female voices in the writer’s room, it also stands to reason that on-screen displays of affection are treated with greater sensitivity and care. Unlike the bedsheet-ripping, tables-being-knocked-over archetype propagated by mainstream television, the camera doesn’t treat women as an object to underscore the sensuality of a moment. Instead, it delves into the emotions attached to the experience. “With K-dramas, the thrill is always about the emotional journey, and physical intimacy is consistently treated as secondary,” The Fangirl Verdict affirms and adds, “It’s not uncommon for the camera to linger appreciatively and indulgently over the male lead. But no matter how the scene is framed, the focus will be on close-ups of the lead couple’s faces with extra attention given to their eyes, so that we can interpret how this physical intimacy stems from their emotional intimacy and what this milestone means to them both.” Since the show has spent the majority of its duration teasing all the ways in which two people yearn for each other, she believes that physical intimacy is simply designed as an extension of that as opposed to a superfluous scene thrown in as a “reward”.

The female gaze in K-dramas: Women written by women, for women

It would be easy to confine the female gaze to the reverse objectification of men, but it would also do a great disservice to the larger movement. Beyond a tit-for-tat subversion of what was earlier considered the norm, the female gaze implies looking at the happenings of the world from a female vantage point. But while the K-dramas of today offer a diverse portfolio of richly nuanced female characters to choose from, The Fangirl Verdict believes that it has been a journey. “The Seasons dramas that are foundational to Hallyu—Autumn in my Heart, Winter Sonata, Spring Waltz and Summer Scent—were all written by women. However, the female leads were so wholesome that a real person would never be able to achieve those levels of perfect understanding, kindness and patience. This stems from the fact that Korea has traditionally been a patriarchal society, and those beliefs and attitudes were broadly held by both, men and women,” she notes. However, she believes the narrative has been gradually updated, thanks to the changing attitudes in Korea around the role of women in society. 

Freed from the constraints of the male gaze, what does the female lead in a K-drama look like? Well, just about anything she wants to look like. She can be an everygirl, like Choi Ae-ra of Fight My Way, who doesn’t roll out of a bed with a bouncy blowout, lives in the same designated ‘house’ shirt while indoors and isn’t immune to a smeared-mascara, snot-dripping-from-nose bout of ugly-crying. Or she can be a strong woman without being an emotionless robot, like Yoon Se-ri in Crash Landing On You. While the prolific entrepreneur cuts an imposing figure in her family of billionaires, it is her unlikely friendship with a ragtag bunch of North Korean soldiers that is counted among the lasting motifs of the show. 

Under the steady stewardship of female writers, men are allowed to cry, women can step beyond the hair-fluttering-in-the-breeze stereotype and the tomboy can fall for the prince charming without being confronted with the standard ‘how did you ever get so lucky?’ incredulity from her peers. Further proof can be found with the oddball Eun-chan of Coffee Prince, an iconic drama of its time that resisted an Ugly Betty-esque transformation for its female lead. Indeed, apart from a brief glow-up for an art gallery opening, the plucky barista maintains fidelity to her diet of polo T-shirts and cargo shorts. “The show doesn’t treat her temporary makeover as the right or better way for her to be. She is ultimately happiest and most comfortable in her own skin, and this can be credited to the fact that the show was written by women and directed by one as well,” The Fangirl Verdict concludes.

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