South Korea

I have recently spent some time in Korea and feel, as everyone who briefly visits a foreign country feels, that I have a number of penetrating insights into the people and culture. I will however spare you these insights and instead share with you some details of my Facebook feed.

Since going to Korea, all the adverts in my Facebook feed are in Korean, which means that people’s birthday good wishes and ever so fascinating musings on the true meaning of Brexit are interspersed with videos about completely different things. And very interesting they are too.

There are adverts for Seoul, washing machines and televisions, but you can imagine these. More strikingly, I have seen a few adverts for paternity leave in Korea. Following up on one charming video showing fathers delighting in looking after babies and small children, I found out that the Korean Ministry of Employment and Labour runs the papanet4you.kr website, which pushes paternal involvement in child care and child-rearing. So, for example, here you can see that Korea is comparing its take-up of paternity leave with Nordic countries, asking the question “Why hesitate to leave” and answering it with information on what holds fathers back from taking paternity leave – and what the state is doing to change that, e.g. “Through the gender equality corporate culture campaign, it announced that it plans to positively solve the social gaze which obstructs the paternity leave of men!”. Not that long ago I would have guessed that Korea had similar social mores to China, but having been there I am now not at all surprised to find that paternity leave is being promoted.

I have also had adverts for a product that removes smells from clothes. The smells it mentions are pets, cigarettes, sweat and pork belly. The woman in the advert is wearing a lot of clothes so I can imagine that the product is very useful for her.

I have had also seen an advert in which a woman finds a spot on her face and responds by putting on one of these:

The odd thing is that the spot was on her forehead.

There is also this vibrating thing, which does not need to be on the wrist and, it seems, can be placed in many different positions on the body.

I am relying on Google Translate for the finer details. This is not quite foolproof. For example, in the “Father psychological support” section of the papanet4you website I saw this:

I decided not to watch that video.