OK, so I switch on the TV this morning as I’m drinking my morning coffee. I usually don’t bother, but I woke up before the alarm. There are women parading around in their underwear on the Shopping Channel, which must have been where SK left it when she came to bed last night.
The models are mostly Korean, which in and of itself is interesting, because 5 years ago, and still to a large extent today, you would never see a Korean woman modelling underwear, in catalogues or on TV. That sort of slutty thing was for foreign women to do – no self-respecting Korean woman would allow herself to be photographed almost! naked!, and certainly no advertiser would presume to ask. Tantamount to pornography, that. Imagine how her family would feel. Ruin her chances for marriage, it would. So, if you did see women in Korea modelling underwear, in catalogues or on posters in department stores, it would always be western women, or Russians.
I watched for a few minutes, for, uh, edification, and soon realized that this wasn’t actually a bra-and-panty ad I was watching. The girls would model-strut forward, smile wide and vacant as if they were gazing on the Face of God, and hold up to the camera these flesh-coloured, plastic, crescent-shaped objects. They’d shift their weight to the other leg, cock the other hip, switch hands, and then grin some more, all the while holding this thing towards the camera like an offering at a shrine.
I thought at first that the crescent-shaped things were falsie-related. There’s a huge market here for padded bras and other non-surgical breast ‘enhancements’. But after a few minutes of, uh, cultural research, a brief computer animation revealed what these things were actually (my Korean’s not good enough yet, sadly) Vibrators. Breast-vibrators. Under the breast, crescent-shaped, vibrators. I can only assume from the animations that the theory is that vibrating the boob at a high frequency somehow stimulates breast expansion.
Yeah, right.
Well, at least judging by the glazed, pseudo-orgasmic grins on the faces of the models, it feels pretty nice.
I’m sure I didn’t dream it…