HiteJinro, a South Korean manufacturer of beer and soju, has stopped releasing a nude calendar, in response to the "current social atmosphere" โ presumed to mean #MeToo and the global feminism movement.
The 2019 calendar instead shows seasonal food paired with the brand's products.
Over the past year, previous calendars have been shared across social media in anger at how they portray women.
์์น ๊ฑธ๋ฆฌ๋ผ๊ณ ๋ค์ ์ฌ๋ฆผ. ํ์ดํธ์ง๋ก ๋ฌด๋ ค 2018๋ ๋ฌ๋ ฅ์ ์ฌ์ฑ ์ฑ์ํํ ์ฌ์ง์ ๋ด๊ฑธ๊ณ ํ์ฅ์ ์ฅ์์ฐ ๋ฆฌ์คํธ์ ์ค๋ฅธ ์ฌ๋์. ๋ค๋ค ๋ถ๋งค ํฉ์๋ค
In 2018, South Korea grappled with its own #MeToo movement โ the year saw protests about the country's spycam problem, beauty standards, and violence against women, as well as individual cases of alleged sexual assault by powerful figures.
์์งํ ๋ ์ ์ ์ ๋ ์ ๋ง์๋ ํธ์ด์ง๋ง ๋ฏผ๋งํ ๋ฌ๋ ฅ์ ์ซ์๋๋ฐ
"I don't drink, but I hate that calendar."
Anna, a 25-year-old activist from Cheongju who asked for her full name not to be shared, said that a lot of women in South Korea have grown up with sexualized nudity and the calendars being normalized.
"When I was a child, I occasionally followed my mother when she had dinner with her colleagues. I saw HiteJinro calendars there," she said. "The picture in the calendar was not just a 'sexy bikini photo,' it was more than that. Women who are nude or semi-nude, barely covering their nipples and their body parts, were shown on those calendars. I still remember feeling shocked seeing those pictures. My mother hid the calendar from me, but adult men near our table watched that calendar from January to December, over and over.
"The shocking part is that the place where I went with my mother wasn't a prostitution house or bar for adults. It was just an ordinary Korean restaurant that serves meals and drinks, where children, family, and lots of people usually go to. It's not that every single restaurant in Korea had that calendar, but most of them do."
While HiteJinro's move has been popular, others have pointed out that brands' tendency to advertise alcohol using women generally is a problem in itself.
#MeToo movement progress in South Korea! https://t.co/jAauEjfXk2