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Everybody who has seen more than a few North Korean movies will know that North Korea's actors and actresses are a bit plump by present-day Western cinema standards. This is not to say that they are obese, but they clearly have a certain excess of body fat when compared to modern Western celebrities.
If anything, they are somewhat similar to what pre-modern Korean painters thought to be beautiful. As old pictures confirm, they cherished plump faces and round figures. They were not alone in this attitude: most of the women who are presented in Western European paintings in the 16th and 17th centuries would not be hired by any self-respecting model agency nowadays. Slimness (quite moderate by modern standards) only began to be glorified in Western painting 150 years or so ago.
This is not very surprising. Like it or not, people use their bodies as status symbols and the ideas of beauty keep changing in line with the ways the rich and famous change their lifestyle. As a (moderate) leftist, I may find such facts rather discomforting, but for millennia, most people have done what they could in order to confirm that they had access to prestigious resources of all kinds.
It is widely known that people in South Asia tend to cherish fair skin while dark skinned people are somewhat despised. In countries such as India and Thailand, whitening cosmetics sell extremely well. I have even come across some cultural anthropologists who have extensively theorized about this fact, though it seems rather easy to understand for any old-school historian: only people who did not need to work all day in fields under the burning sun could possibly have fair skin. In Northern Europe, the fad for tans has very similar roots: one has to have money to spend time on beaches (probably in distant places) to have beautiful tanned bodies.
One should not therefore be surprised that for millennia plumpness has been seen as a sign of beauty in nearly all cultures. Serious obesity could be laughed at or despised, but a certain amount of body fat was extremely welcome. Such fat was a social advertisement; it indicated that its bearer had enough money to purchase a good supply of calories.
Only after dramatic improvements in agriculture in the last century or so was food to become relatively cheap and abundant and thus available in large quantities for the vast majority (at least in the developed world) did people begin to value slimness. The underlying assumption has remained the same, though: one usually needs a certain amount of money, education and time to be slim and fit.
Thus, one should not be surprised by North Korea's attitude toward fatness. Repeatedly I have encountered confirmations that the rather chubby faces of North Korean cinema stars are rather representative of North Korean ideals of beauty in general. One North Korean refugee recently said in an interview with a South Korean researcher that ''people in North Korea like to appear a bit piggish, a bit chubby by South Korean standards".
This is applicable to both women and men. A protruding belly has been a sign of earthly success for most of human history and nowadays it is sometimes called a ''cadre's belly" in North Korea. It is assumed that a middle-aged man should be slightly fat in order to look like a cadre (a member of the ruling bureaucracy), a person of power and prestige.
As a matter of fact, I expect that what appears to be the excessive fatness of all the Kim family sovereigns is less controversial in North Korea than we might think. No doubt, the Kims are quite fat by Western or South Korean standards, but for many North Koreans their obesity is a sign of power and prestige.
It is remarkable that even now, things have not changed much, even though the younger generation of North Koreans are widely influenced by South Korean movies and TV dramas, they still tend to believe that a bit of a paunch is not something to be ashamed of. Sometimes this produces bad results: the younger generation of North Korea's new rich tend to overindulge on sweet and fatty food, thus obesity amongst them is gradually becoming an acute medical problem.
Such attitudes are liable to change in due course, especially after malnourishment disappears from North Korea. Once good food becomes readily available in adequate quantities for the large majority, slim bodies are likely to be seen as attractive and charming in North Korea as well.
Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. You can reach him at anlankov@yahoo.com.
