From cigarettes to baseball

Courtesy of Martin Bennie

When I first arrived in Korea some two decades ago, the Miracle on the Han River was still an exhausting exercise in Confucian patriarchy. A kind of systemic "No" directed at anything female that dared to deviate from a very narrow, very silent path. Not just in the systemic way academics like to talk about, but in the day-to-day life people experience.

I remember standing in Gwanghwamun with Yujin, the summer sun bouncing off Admiral Lee Sun-sin with oppressive clarity, smoking cigarettes. That in itself was a transgressive act for a woman at the time. Holding hands in public with foreigners was also apparently dangerous. She told me, with a flat, terrifyingly pragmatic sort of dread, smoke coming out of her nose: "If anyone looks at us, just keep speaking English. Tell them I’m Japanese." The implication being that a Korea woman smoking in the public square, particularly with a foreigner, was an invitation for some self-appointed guardian of the national morality to berate, threaten, or physically assault. I didn’t want to believe her at first but I caught her tone and quickly understood she meant what she said.

I realized I was a long way from home.

Fast forward twenty years, and culture has changed dramatically. So much so that it’s easy to forget where we have come from. Fake DVDs are no longer sold on the streets. People preaching their weird branch of Christianity have been removed from the subways. And American soldiers no longer patrol the late-night streets of Itaewon with their guns looking for people breaking curfew.

Since 2007, I’ve been working at Seoul Women’s University out in the northeast of the city. That provides a sort of sociological dugout to the evolving interior lives of the country’s young women. I’ve seen croptops rise. Jeans get progressively baggier. Piercings emerge. More and more tattoos on wrists. Far more visible smoking. And a growing number of people talking about baseball. Not just a few though. An outrageous amount.

While many might have an image in their head of all Korean women being obsessed with K-pop idols and the surrounding fandom culture, the moral quandary of Jungkook’s latest live, or the legal battles of NewJeans, the reality is very different.

“I am a big fan of Hanhwa Eagles,” they tell me during their introductions. So frequently, in fact, that I could no longer pass it off as simply one or two people. “Samsung Lion’s new uniform is amazing,” others say. They speak of players. Attending the stadiums. Their team’s chances at the title this season. Their hometowns. It feels like K-pop is being out-competed for brain-space by the Doosan Bears and LG Twins in many of my lecture halls. Yeah, the BTS comeback is big news and everyone’s seemingly dragging BLACKPINK’s new album. NCT and all their subunits are popular. But baseball feels like the national conversation.

It is also a statistical reality that is bordering on the surreal. According to the KBO, women made up 48 percent of spectators in the 2024 season. Think about that. Nearly half. And the 20-somethings? They accounted for roughly 30 percent of the total gate.

This provides a new challenge for me because having educated myself on the intricacies of “business gay performance,” fan labour, and streaming practices, I now have to learn about this sport that I’ve never really played or watched.

Growing up in England, football stadiums were sometimes scary. Tens of thousands of men, screaming, swearing, drinking. Atmospheres were intense. Cocaine-fueled. Of course all this added to the experience, but it wasn’t somewhere you would think about going on a date. Cricket, on the other hand, was just five days of drinking often only to see the two teams play out a draw.

The Korean baseball stadium, however, is very different. More exciting than a café but safer than a club. You can spend a few hours with your friends, sitting in the sun. Chicken and beer is readily available. Kimbap is there as well as many other healthier options. People sing, chant, and cheer. It’s a family affair. Female. Male. Very Korean.

The low-stakes narrative certainly helps; unlike the hypermoralistic, career-endingly fragile ecosystem of K-pop, where a dating rumor or change in hairstyle can trigger a period of mourning and corporate apology tours, baseball players are allowed to be visibly human. They struggle. They lose. They have bad innings, and there is a redemptive arc baked into the 144-game season.

A player who struggled early in the season might become the hero in the postseason. It’s certainly more fun than politics and less likely to end in prison sentences. The social permissiveness of the stadium also creates a weird psychological third space. You are permitted to ignore the stage for twenty minutes to discuss a friend’s new tattoo without breaking some unspoken social contract of fandom. And there’s a distinct 21st-century Korean feminine cool to a lot of baseball now. The sport filtered through a visual language of Instagram stories, reels, and photocards.

All this is fascinating to me. The same public square where Yujin once feared holding a cigarette is now populated by women in Samsung Lions jerseys. And the reality of Korean womanhood, so often flattened by Western media into a two-dimensional montage of skincare routines and pop lyrics, is actually something much different. Much more baseball-driven.