The “Other” Woman: Rejecting Idealized Femininity in K-Dramas
Image by Amber Lee. Adapted from Key Blue, ca. 1934, by Joseph Schillinger (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Schillinger) and screenshot of Oh Hae-young from Another Oh Hae-young, 2016.
In the 2005 K-drama My Name is Kim Sam-soon, the titular character, Kim Sam-soon, sits on a swing installed by her deceased father in the garden of their home. She remembers crying to him as a child about her ugly name, begging him to change it. Smiling, her father had told her that her grandfather chose her name. Why would she want to be named anything else?
Over a decade later, in the 2016 K-drama Another Oh Hae-young, Oh Hae-young’s mother cries when she realizes she should have been more careful in choosing her daughter’s name. As a result of the extremely common name that she shares with a “prettier” classmate, Hae-young has suffered a lifetime of constant comparison and insecurity. “Change your name,” our protagonist Hae-young tells her classmate when they meet again in adulthood. “You’re too pretty for a common name like Hae-young.”
The age-old question “What’s in a name?” holds a clear answer for both Hae-young and Sam-soon. Their names, reflecting their self-doubt and the pressure to be someone else, are symbolic of how each fails to live up to her own ideal sense of self. For Sam-soon, the desire to rename herself is an attempt to shed both her old-fashioned name and her self-image as an old maid who is unattractive and undesirable. For Hae-young, the name is a reminder that there is a literally “better” version of herself out there, and that everyone—especially men—will always react in disappointment when they realize they have the “wrong” Hae-young.
But who actually is this ideal woman? There is no denying that, across the board, Koreans must confront notoriously high standards for appearance, education, and financial success. For Korean women in particular, there is an even stronger emphasis on satisfying patriarchal expectations. The ideal Korean woman is beautiful, chaste, well-educated, and affluent, all qualities needed to be romantically desirable to men. Upon marriage, she must also be a “wise mother and good wife.” For Sam-soon and Hae-young, the ideal woman is represented by the flesh-and-blood figures of their romantic rivals, in whom the idealized self has come to life.
Neither My Name is Kim Sam-soon nor Another Oh Hae-young is explicitly feminist in its critique of this idealization, but as products of mainstream culture, both shows reflect the lived experiences of Korean women within a patriarchal society. Both stories revolve around the central conflict of a woman rejecting the pressure to become an ideal self, but considering the decade between the airing of the two shows, we must examine how Hae-young continues rather than simply parallels Sam-soon’s journey. Their differing trajectories reflect Korean women’s changing perceptions of the “ideal woman.” In South Korea, the women’s rights movement experienced significant backlash with the election of current president Yoon Suk Yeol, who decried feminism and promised to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality during his 2022 campaign. The country’s gradual population decline has also spurred efforts to control reproductive behavior through policies that specifically target women. Despite social progress, Korean women continue to deal with the real, material limitations that a patriarchal system has erected around their personhood. How do they negotiate these pressures, and what do they actually desire for themselves instead? Sam-soon and Hae-young’s stories provide a clue.
An early arc of My Name is Kim Sam-soon follows Sam-soon as she attempts to change her name to Kim Hee-jin and thereby discard her identity as a non-traditional heroine. Unlike other K-dramas of the 1990s and early 2000s, Kim Sam-soon defies the archetype of the traditionally demure, flatly beautiful, and morally deserving romantic heroine. In both career and love, Sam-soon is crass, loud, and full of desires, and her characterization is revolutionary for a time when women were still expected to be married before 30. Yet she is also indicative of the period’s feminist efforts. Korean feminist organizations in the 1990s and 2000s led movements to abolish the patriarchal hoju (family head) system and spearheaded other public legislation campaigns that addressed sexual and domestic violence. Kim Sam-soon reflects this sociopolitical climate through matriarchal characters like Sam-soon’s and Jin-heon’s mothers and newly independent women like Sam-soon’s sister, who divorces her cheating husband and embarks on a second romance that places her on more equal footing with her partner. Yet these same characters are also the main source of social pressure for Sam-soon to lose weight and become attractive so she can get married. The women of Kim Sam-soon arguably reflect the conflicting social politics of the era, when gender equality became a growing concern even as patriarchal norms and expectations remained pervasive.
Sam-soon (episode 1, My Name is Kim Sam-soon) defies the archetype of the traditionally demure, flatly beautiful romantic heroine.
In Another Oh Hae-young, Hae-young is similarly crass and loud, going so far as to declare that she is the “crazy one.” Her parents view her as an embarrassment, but unlike Sam-soon, her behavior stems from a specific trauma—being left at the altar. Unlike Sam-soon, she is not pressured to get married; instead, Hae-young must endure the humiliation of having marriage and romantic happiness taken away by a man who tells her he can no longer bear to watch her eat. Nevertheless, the plight of both characters underscores the singular importance of marriage for women in Korea. As in Kim Sam-soon, Hae-young’s mother is the dominant figure in the family, and like Sam-soon’s mother, she continues to hope for her daughter’s marriage, even asking her husband if it would be okay for them to send out wedding invitations twice in one year. Yet unlike in that earlier show, Hae-young’s mother assures her daughter that the family could always move back to the countryside together, implying that marriage is not the be-all and end-all of her daughter’s happiness.
Sam-soon and Hae-young both show how defying ideals of femininity does not necessarily immunize women from the desire to live up to those same ideals. When their romantic rivals arrive on the scene, the audience sees the sheer gap that exists between our two heroines and the idealized woman. Sam-soon’s desired name, Hee-jin, is also the name of her love interest’s ex-girlfriend, who is everything Sam-soon is not: beautiful, thin, wealthy, pedigreed, and full of fateful tragedy (she had left her ex-boyfriend, Jin-heon, to receive cancer treatment in the United States). For Sam-soon, her old-fashioned name bespeaks qualities often ridiculed in South Korean society—the dowdiness, loudness, and crassness that the name connotes are ajumma-esque qualities assigned to women after they exceed the age of heterosexual desirability. In contrast, a name like Hee-jin feels modern and youthful but still in line with Korea’s ideals of femininity—sweet-tempered and pretty. Indeed, Hee-jin is painted as a natural successor to the romantic heroines of classic K-dramas such as Autumn in My Heart (2000) and Winter Sonata (2002). In earlier dramas like those, she would have been the candidate more worthy of the male lead’s love.
As any longtime K-drama watcher can attest to, women are frequently their own worst enemies in such narratives, which flatly assign to them moral qualities of “good” versus “bad” the better to pit the women against each other. Going as far back as traditional Korean folklore, this good–bad binary is explicit in stories like The Tale of Chunhyang or The Tale of Simcheong, each of which features a chaste, humble, and virtuous young woman tested by significant trials, whose enduring fidelity or filial piety eventually rewards her with both material wealth and romantic love. On the flip side are stories about the gumiho, the mythical nine-tailed fox that takes the form of a woman who seduces and then kills men by eating their livers. In modern television, early hits like Star in My Heart (1997), Winter Sonata, and Stairway to Heaven (2003) created a template romance between a romantically inexperienced and kind-hearted heroine and a dashing hero. Together, they must face various trials, including villainous acts by antagonists like the secondary female lead, whose unrequited love for the hero is reason enough for her to go to dramatic lengths to destroy the main couple’s relationship. As her designation suggests, however, this character is only the “second female lead” because she comes second, and her moral badness is a narrative necessity to make her undeserving of the hero. Part of this badness stems from the openness of her desire for the hero, as opposed to the shy and demure heroine who must prioritize the needs of everyone else before she can attend to her own feelings. Desire itself is cast in a moral light, where a flagrant display could be considered immoral, especially if it comes at a cost to others. In these early K-dramas, the scandal of sexual desire also means that it remains undepicted.
Kim Sam-soon is unafraid to flip this on its head. Sam-soon is not Jin-heon’s first love, nor does she hide her desire and participate in the prudishness of previous dramas (Autumn in My Heart famously has its main couple sit on the same bed for an entire night without an inkling of sexual desire from either side). Sam-soon and Jin-heon have their first encounter in the men’s bathroom; a few episodes later, Sam-soon, stripped down to her underwear, wakes up in Jin-heon’s home after getting appallingly drunk and mistakenly assumes they have had a one-night stand. Many of their interactions are charged with sexual tension, a far cry from the chaste romances of earlier dramas.
Hee-jin’s relationship with Jin-heon, in contrast, remains shrouded in the pink glow of childhood sweethearts. Hee-jin’s status as a recently recovered cancer patient provides a kind of chaste pathos and fragility that make her similar to Song Hye-kyo’s Eun-suh, the leukemia-stricken female lead of Autumn in My Heart. To avoid Hee-jin becoming too sympathetic, the K-drama could have transformed her into the antagonistic second female lead. But the show does not hold Hee-jin’s beauty and past against her, nor does it portray Hee-jin as completely toothless. Sam-soon also plays a not insignificant role in the demise of Hee-jin’s relationship with Jin-heon. Similar to Hee-jin, Sam-soon maintains a complicated interior and is not just flatly good. Instead, Sam-soon tells Jin-heon point-blank not to return to Hee-jin, thus subverting the gendered expectation that a heroine prioritize everybody else over her own desires. Jin-heon’s acceptance of Sam-soon refuses the good/bad moral binary and rejects idealized femininity as the precondition for romantic bliss.
In fact, Sam-soon’s real obstacle is her own desire for an idealized feminine self, and the turning point of the drama occurs not through the fulfillment of romantic love but in her learning to love herself. By the end of the show, we see Sam-soon let go of this desire for a “Hee-jin” version of herself. She stops dieting, she decides against legally changing her name, and she opens her own pastry shop despite her fears of failure. The show even baits us with a conventional fairy tale ending: Sam-soon cheekily narrates that she and Jin-heon got married, had triplets, and enjoyed a life of domestic bliss, before telling us that none of this actually happened. Instead, we end with Sam-soon’s acknowledgement that she cannot know the future; perhaps she and Jin-heon may even part ways one day. All she can do is stay true to herself, love to the best of her ability, and walk forward one step at a time. Sam-soon’s emphasis on herself, rather than on her relationship with Jin-heon, testifies to the emergence of a selfhood that is independent of how her love interest, or the rest of the world, perceives her.
In Oh Hae-young, Hae-young’s foil is also named Oh Hae-young, a prettier, more popular classmate to whom our Hae-young has had to play second fiddle all her life. While pretty Hae-young does not quite share the chaste fragility of the heroines of older K-dramas, she still possesses an aura of feminine perfection and tragedy—a misunderstanding forces her to leave the male lead, Do-kyung, at the wedding altar. When Do-kyung later hears that an Oh Hae-young from an identical high school is getting married, he naturally assumes that his ex-fiancée has moved on with another man. In a fit of revenge, he ruins the wedding, not knowing that it’s actually a different woman: our female lead Hae-young.
As with Kim Sam-soon, Oh Hae-young parallels its two female characters through their names. However, unlike Sam-soon, Hae-young never wishes to change her name or move toward an idealized femininity. Free of the self-criticism and enforced self-improvement that women in Korea must constantly endure, Hae-young possesses a self-esteem that reflects social progress in the decade since Kim Sam-soon. As early as in episode three, Hae-young confesses to Do-kyung that “the other Oh Hae-young was really great, [but] I didn’t want to become her. I still love myself, and wish the best for myself.”
Hae-young makes it clear that she would have been satisfied with herself had she not been constantly compared to pretty Hae-young as a result of their identical names. The drama emphasizes how the real source of Hae-young’s insecurities is the external pressure imposed by society. The shared name reflects society’s projection of idealized femininity upon ordinary women, and at the level of plot, it even becomes the reason for Hae-young’s ruined wedding.
Despite realizing his mistake, Do-kyung is unable to own up to his actions. However, his own abandonment at the altar allows him to empathize with Hae-young’s experience. In this way, Oh Hae-young makes Do-kyung an equal emotional counterpart to Hae-young. In Kim Sam-soon, Jin-heon primarily operates as a source of romantic validation. While his character usefully corrects the idea that women’s value depends only on their romantic desirability, Jin-heon is nevertheless disconnected from Sam-soon’s interiority. We never get the sense that he truly understands her insecurities or that he is an integrated part of her emotional journey toward self-love. But Do-kyung establishes an early solidarity with Hae-young that is separate from any romantic feelings; he understands her heartbreak in a human-to-human connection that transcends heterosexual dynamics. This plot point hints at what is actually necessary in a fulfilling romantic relationship in a post-Kim Sam-soon world. That’s not to say Do-kyung and Hae-young have a chaste, purely platonic love—far from it. But the drama itself accepts the sexual desires of both characters as part of a natural order, without giving it the kind of comedic emphasis that Kim Sam-soon does.
Oh Hae-young also rejects flat moral binaries in favor of a more nuanced study of femininity. Pretty Hae-young receives significantly fuller characterization than Hee-jin, as the show makes it clear that pretty Hae-young’s performance of idealized femininity is itself a defense mechanism against parental rejection. Her fear of being disliked is so intense that she does not allow herself to fall short of perfection; her confession that she herself was jealous of our Hae-young, who grew up with ordinary but loving parents, is part of pretty Hae-young’s own journey toward healing. Pretty Hae-young shows herself to also be a victim of gender expectations. While she appears to have attained an idealized femininity, she remains unhappy and isolated, unable to be truly vulnerable in her relationships. In fact, she leaves Do-kyung at the altar because she realizes that he has seen through her facade and thus pities her. Unable to love her own true self, pretty Hae-young must reject Do-kyung’s love, for accepting it would also mean accepting what he has recognized: that her idealized self had always been a facade.
Our Hae-young’s own moment of catharsis comes not when she accepts and loves herself—unlike Sam-soon, Hae-young has already achieved this to a significant extent at the outset of the show—but when she achieves empathy for pretty Hae-young. As our Hae-young reads a letter from pretty Hae-young, who confesses that her own jealousy had made her intercept the one love letter our Hae-young would have received (“You grew up so peacefully with the warm love of your parents, I didn’t also want to give you the love of one boy. It felt like it was being stolen from me”), our Hae-young realizes that the feminine ideal does not exist and that all women suffer in their efforts to achieve it.
The two Hae-youngs come to know and value each other (episode 16, Another Oh Hae-young).
Oh Hae-young continued a journey that Kim Sam-soon started, giving us a protagonist who not only deconstructed the idea of the perfect woman but also recognized what was needed for self-actualization. Simply loving yourself was no longer enough; solidarity with other women in recognizing the falsehood of idealized femininity is necessary for actually dismantling its pervasiveness. Nearly a decade later, in 2024, there has yet to be a clear, single successor to Sam-soon and Hae-young. But perhaps multiple successors already exist in the myriad of “friendship” dramas that have emerged following Korea’s #MeToo movement since the late 2010s. Centering around a diverse cast of women and focusing on their respective journeys toward career and romantic success, these K-dramas—including Age of Youth (2016), Because This is My First Life (2017), Be Melodramatic (2019), Search: WWW (2019), Work Later, Drink Now (2021), and Thirty-Nine (2022)—reflect a changing television landscape in their shift away from the typical melodrama and romantic comedy. By making their women characters friends who mutually support one another, reflecting real-life friendships among women, these K-dramas continue Sam-soon and Hae-young’s journeys; the solidarity that Hae-young realizes at the end of her drama provides the starting point for these shows. There is no idealized woman to compare themselves to. Instead, the dramas make explicit the gender issues only implicitly touched upon in Kim Sam-soon and Oh Hae-young, such as when Yoon Ji-ho in Because This is My First Life is forced to seek a new job and new housing after her coworker’s attempt to rape her goes unpunished, or when Hwang Han-joo in Be Melodramatic is told to act “cuter” for men at work so that they will comply with her work requests. These recent K-dramas highlight the gender discrimination and violence that women experience every day, unflinchingly locating the source of these problems within the patriarchal system that created the specter of the ideal woman.
The three friends Ji-ho, Ho Rang, and Soo-ji drink together in episode 3 of Because This Is My First Life.
Such cultural recognition has real material implications. One of South Korea’s chief concerns is the country’s gradual population decline; efforts to address it have led to a number of highly publicized policy mishaps. In 2016, the government had to shut down and apologize for a website that tracked the number of women at childbearing age in each city district and region. This year, in 2024, a government-backed think tank, the Korea Institute of Public Finance, proposed a policy to enroll girls earlier in school to increase future birth rates, arguing that the age gap would make men and women more attractive to each other once they approached marriageable age. While response from the general public was one of disgust and ridicule, it remains concerning that such gendered proposals, calculated to reduce women to their reproductive potential, exist at all. These proposals suggest that sociopolitical norms in Korea have not kept up with women’s changing self-image.
The realm of popular culture provides an important site for contesting the entrenched values of patriarchy. K-dramas like Kim Sam-soon show how a woman can free herself from internalized patriarchal expectations and accept her own full humanity. Oh Hae-young goes one step further, portraying the need for solidarity among women within a society that relentlessly pits them against each other. Subsequent dramas give equal weight to the diverse experiences of modern women, showing not only solidarity among women but acceptance of their varying trajectories toward individual happiness. If Sam-soon and Hae-young each embodied the modern Korean woman of their respective times, these more recent dramas suggest that there is no longer one defining identity as a woman in Korea—even the seemingly “ideal woman” is a woman, walking her own path toward what she alone can define as her true self. Ə