After watching Nishimura Riki grinning ear to ear at the end of the concert and telling the fans "We're of one mind," It just feels so creepy... Like a cult.

There were two things that inspired me to make this blogpost – one was the insane (and fun!) drama with Stray Kids Hyunjin and Felix and Bang Chan and JYP’s female employee and how some STAY (and then Bang Chan himself) reacted to it. The other was this video of Jake and one of his bands’ female employees. Fans wrote over and over in the comment section that they wished they had this proximity to Jake. (Original source for video is already tagged: the stupidly gorgeous DaniMaria)

So let’s jump straight into what I promise will be a crazy ride:

For all major Kpop companies, the staff is at least two thirds female and for some it is even three quarters female. Here a link on that.

I would not have thought anything regarding this, because I would have assumed (before I read some of Stephanie Choi’s research) that that is simply because… secretaries are overwhelmingly female unfortunately, because it’s a female-coded job cause most bosses are straight men. While it is true that the majority of Kpop company staff with real power, so the higher echelons, are still men, the “women as secretaries to straight men who hold the actual power” is not the only reason for this situation. (Apart from that: I’ve also anecdotally experienced quite a lot of CEOs/bosses in several industries that I have worked in myself that had male admin side-kicks, and in several cases officially these bosses were straight. Inofficially, they absolutely were not - but their wives may not have known that. Some others were homosocial – their only use for women was f*cking. They simply look down on women and could never admire or even truly like a woman. So of course their sidekick and most trusted employee was still a man. Their mirror image. I thought the documentary on SM and his role in Kpop was interesting – he didn’t come across as straight to me. And he had a hot younger man as his permanent side-kick. No judgment, of course.)

But back to Choi’s research: she found and also was on the receiving end of this, that many fans severely resented all female staff of Kpop companies and of idols. Because of fans’ anger about male idols having any contact with women, in any capacity, male idols asked Choi (an anthropologist) to meet them at completely bizarre hours because fewer fans would be around: 2am or 3am. That of course is absurd and funny, because well, in general when a man asks a woman to meet him in the middle of the night, it sure as hell ain’t for anthropological research interviews…

The almost "groupies"

Choi also got access to Kpop pre-recording sessions that TV stations have with bands. These are usually organised to discuss the real recording sessions at TV studios and such. I didn’t know this before I read Choi’s book, but Korean fans have access to these if they can prove that they are official fanclub members and have bought x amount of merch (so have spent x amount of money on the idol…). Choi got access to this not through her fandom and merch purchases (she is however also a fan herself – and I’d argue that unfortunately that does in some cases cloud her judgment), but through connections. (Her sister-in-law’s former co-worker, who now works at the TV station.) The fans from the fan club who coordinate the fans attending were quite upset by this. The other fans use a Korean term that is somewhere closer to the English term “groupie” for women who gain access through connections. The underlying issue to these fans is that the access has not been gained through spending money. So access like that, just like sexual access (dude finds you hot, let’s you skip the line) cannot be bought. This puts fans who spend money, but do not have connections and/or who are not hot at a disadvantage. Choi actually knew the boyband at whose pre-recording session she was … errr… intimately (well, not sure whether in that way, but what I mean is: extremely well). She saw one of them several times per week one on one. To give him English lessons according to her. He would not greet her at the pre-recording session, but instead came as close to her as physically possible to acknowledge to her and only her that he knew her. Bodyguards complained about her presence, for reasons that she did not see as legit, but I can understand. The bodyguards were annoyed that someone who was clearly a fan (she took pictures of the idols) had gained access through connections.

Fans were even angrier at foreign ('visibly not Korean ancestry') women who worked for the idols, suspecting that these had only moved to Korea to be closer to their idols. Fans explicitly demanded that these women were removed from employment for that reason. Instead what the Kpop companies did was tell these women that they had to become ghosts: be absolutely invisible to fans. Here’s the kicker: fans were right.

I guess fans simply were correct in their suspicions regarding female Kpop employees because they simply asked themselves: would I like to apply myself? The answer was “yes” and their projections … turned out to not have been projections in most cases.

Why my face became stuck in permanent "Jackson Wang" meme mode

I was full-on stuck in JACKSON WANG FACE mode with what came next: Choi found in her interviews with Kpop company employees that while some of these women applied to the company that has signed their preferred idols, others do not or applied to leave that company and instead work at another company. Why? Because they said that it is harder to keep up “he will one day be my boyfriend” and romantic/sexual parasocial relationship delusions when in direct proximity to the idol. That could be because he clearly wasn’t lusting after that specific employee. It was also in some cases because the fans turned employees found it too upsetting to see how fake the idol's behaviour was. How much of it was their real personality, but a fake persona. The real person could be much less kind. Gentle. That explicitly their smiles were not real. Etc. In some cases, it was because the Kpop fans-turned-Kpop-company-employees were annoyed seeing “their” idol be tired or even abused by the company. So they instead applied to another company and then traded intel on their respective idols with other fans turned employees who do the same. As I said: my face became just plain stuck in Jackson Wang face mode!

Male idols told Choi in her interviews with them, that there are those male idols who are annoyed by fans turned employees – others prefer it. Why? Because acting like the fake boyfriend of a completely smitten fan-turned-Kpop-employee comes easily to them. Any bias of a Kpop fan turned company employee… will according to her interviews with male idols… be able to get her to privilege him and work more for him than the entire band. He’ll get the better costumes from the fan turned stylist and give worse looks to the other band members e.g. - that was one of the examples a male idol gave. This is why some of them love this arrangement of fan-turned-employee. The term the male idols used for how they behave for many employees?! FAN SERVICE! I kid you not.

South Korea is the OECD country with the largest gender wage disparity. However, Choi’s findings provide an additional rationale for Kpop employees large gender wage disparity: proximity to idols is part of the payment. Labour is provided in part in exchange for access.

Now, keep in mind that Choi also interviewed the female Kpop company employees who are tasked to assess whether a boy who may be 12 or 13 years old and in some cases Choi documents even only 8 or 10 years old, will later be able to be put in the rizz line of a new boyband. How they do that according to Choi (and what something that Jake mentioned on his own trainee life has to do with that) will be the topic of a next blogpost. Also keep in mind that Choi found that some fans try to hop from nugu to nugu boygroup – explicitly and knowingly in order to be able to get their “fake boyfriend bong hit" harder. Once the boybands get more successful, they do not need to provide the one on one fan service quite as hard. And these fans hop on to the next nugu group. And the snake eats itself. The great Kpop ouroboros.

basically, earlier jungwon went on live saying how he and the other members don’t like all the “enhypen is 7” stuff and asked the fans to stop saying that those who don’t support them as 6 are fake engenes and stuff. i was so happy he said that because engenes have genuinely gotten out of hand, going as far as commenting “enhypen is 7” hashtags on non-enhypen videos (earlier i was doing a youtube workout. a YOUTUBE WORKOUT. and there were genuinely so many engenes spamming comments). also side note the “enhypen is 7” and “bring heeseung back” hashtags are cringe but OMFG PLS STOP SAYING “i want dada back” that makes me gag 🤧 i thought if engenes heard it from enhypen themselves they’d come to their senses a little but boy i was so wrong 😭 (see pictures)

Hee really happy 😁 look

Duckfacenoo out here acting like he escaped tiktok as if he doesn't spend 70% of his time mastering 15-second cringey dance challenges.

"I almost ended up living my life as a TikToker... hahaha."

Cringenoo for the love of god look in the mirror. You didn't escape the tiktok life; you just got a bigger budget for it.you’re not an idol who happens to do tiktok, you’re a tiktoker with a high-end styling team and light team.

Hee-neverlikedthem got his botched nose but duckface got the worst one, I can't decide please vote

Cringe-noo prolly cried over free jelly