By Oh Young-jin
City Editor
The title may sound sexist but, if you bear me out for a while, it will be made plain that this column is not.
From the title, you might be able to deduce that I want to talk about two celebrity men in trouble ― golf genius Tiger Woods and movie star Lee Byung-hun ― but I want to turn the tables, looking at these unsavory episodes from women's perspective.
Watching one woman after another come out to claim that she has slept with Tiger is like witnessing a magic show in which countless rabbits emerge from the magician's hat. I lost track after three ― not the rabbits, I mean the women.
Lee is being sued by a former gymnast who claims the actor ended his months-long relationship with her even though it had started on the premise of marriage.
Their stories are not the first of their kinds and, certainly, will not be the last.
For the public, it can be interesting, as with any case involving celebrities, to follow up on each new development in their plight from a third-person perspective.
It would be equally easy to dismiss them after a while and get back to other more pressing daily tasks. You may call it a temporary act of voyeurism or something like a mild diversion from the conventionality of vanilla sex to the perversion of S/M.
But one constant factor in the sagas of Lee and Tiger as with other previous cases of male celebrities in trouble is the role of the victim: the women.
This is more apparent in Lee's case than Tiger's.
Noted for his prominent six-pack and being the darling of women both young and old for his on-screen image of a suave guy, most of Lee's fans are women. Now, the 39-year-old heartthrob is falling from grace.
Lee finds himself pushed to the point of having to defend himself by writing on his Web site about his innocence. It is hard to know what he claims he is innocent of.
It seems undeniable that he was close to the woman ― just look on the Internet and you'll find numerous photos of the two together.
Legally, however, there seems little chance he'll be punished. The old law that made it illegal for a man to have sex with a woman under the pretence of getting married has been abolished.
Of course, this legal trouble may tarnish his public image: his most valuable marketing asset.
For Tiger, to a lesser degree, women are typecast into the role of the victim. It is well illustrated by one photo in which one of the self-alleged Tiger lovers raises a sign over her head, which says that she didn't take a half-million-dollar offer to talk about her affair with Tiger.
Mass media are partially responsible for strengthening this image of the women. Based on my experience in this field of work, I believe that this stereotypical depiction is out of an old habit in the industry that has been male-dominated and is slow reaching a consensus on gender equality.
In the victim's image imposed on women, I see elements of Madame Bovary in Gustave Flaubert's eponymous novel, and Lady Chatterley in D.H. Lawrence's ``Lady Chatterley's Lover.''
Madame Bovary is a woman who sees herself as a victim of fate, getting married to a mediocre husband, Charles. To escape from what she sees as the inescapable yoke of fate, she engages in a series of escapades, having affairs and going on an expensive shopping spree.
Perhaps, the Bovary complex is related to Tiger's women. This can be seen as the mentality of ``groupies'' who are willing to throw themselves underneath the unstoppable Tiger juggernaut even for bragging rights later.
It would not implausible to think that Lee's estranged girlfriend may have gotten intimate with the actor more easily than usual, wanting to share Lee's fame and fortune. The court will likely have the final say about it.
The absence of satisfaction is also seen in Lady Chatterley, who is also portrayed as a victim silently suffering, while living together with her husband who is paralyzed.
I have no intention of defending Tiger's escapades or sympathizing with Lee's legal trouble because they are of their own making, but these cases can serve a higher purpose for women, if they take them as an opportunity to double their efforts to remove the stereotypical portrayal of women as victims.
After all, women are still fighting to be equal with men. They have to shed the image of victim, which often makes them seem the weaker of the sexes, in order to earn gender equality to the truest of its meaning.