#unrelated to the last video btw just a tweet from earlier this week i also want here.

[squipdop]

is it too much to ask if i just want to see two guys in a mutually destructive consensual relationship making each other worse and squashing all potential redemption and driving away anyone who could ever help them escape from their self damning circle of violence and hubris

[discoursecatharsis]

Hi! I know it’s been a few days, but as a kpop stan for 5+ years, and a fan of the group involved in the Cup/cak//ke-situation, I have something to say. Hopefully, I can shed some light on what happened as well as kpop, sexuaization, and the fandom as a whole.

(I wish I could insert a Read More, because this is long).

I’m going to start by saying, I have no idea why this whole Jung.k00k & Cup/cake thing blew up. This is not the first time Cup/cake made sexual comments about the B//TS members, and for the most part stan twitter found her funny. If fans didn’t, they didn’t make a big deal out of it, unlike what happened a few days ago. I’m not on twt, so I can’t say exactly what happened and why, but I’m going to guess it was a mix of Jung.k00k being the youngest member (A 97er, so the same age as Cup/cake), a fan-favorite, and maybe a callout twt post about how people need to stop sexualizing the BT//S members that people bandwagoned on and used to justify dogpiling Cup//cake. That’s usually how shit like this happens, and while unfortunate, it’s far from uncommon.

(Personally, I don’t care about what Cup/cake said and she should not have been bullied for it, but I think there’s a major difference between someone with a platform and tons of fans saying something, and someone posting their M-rated fanfic on AO3.

For instance, just about a month ago there was a Korean rapper, SanE, who gestured at a female idol, Re//d Velv/et’s Iren3 while singing a sexually suggestive lyric. Everyone called him out for sexual harassment and on twt people were even calling him a rapist & pedophile – even though Irene is 26. However, unlike in the Jung.k00k situation, no one made mention to the R-rated fanfics, tweets, tweets and gifs that fans, both male and female, often make about Iren//e and her group members, as a means to call fans hypocrties.

Again, even though I didn’t think either situation was a big deal, I don’t think people have to be comfortable with what Cup/cake or SanE did. I did notice a difference in reactions to reactions, which I think is unfair. Anyways, it sucks that this situation happens, that Cup////cake was hurt and bullied because of this.)

The kp//op fandom has a strange relationship with purity culture. I make mention of this because I feel like it has a hand in why Cup/cake-gate even happened. It’s k///pop fans digesting skewed Korean fan-culture norms and combining it with the overall advent of purity culture in western fandoms. For instance, this week, right after Cup/cake-gate Jung.k00k, was being called a sexual-harrasser and rapist simply because people thought he was staring at a woman’s chest. I’m not even joking. You can read about what happened here and here – but long story short a fan cropped a gif so it looked like he was oogling this lady, and Korean antis caught hold of it and ran with it. And thus, Stare-gate.

And again, this isn’t the first time. Usually it’s on a smaller scale, such as Stare-gate, but a few years ago, k//pop went through Lolita-Gate. Like most witch-hunts, it started out with good intentions: a girl group was going to debut and people were raising concerns that the members (half of which were under 18, the international age of majority, and most of which were under 19, the Korean age of majority) were being oversexualized. And then these three commercials (Warning: The first two are SFW-ish, the last is definitely NSFW), all of which starred the then 16 y/o T///zuyu (the youngest of her group) dropped and shit blew up. People began having an actual conversation about the sexualization of minors, but being that the group T///zuyu was in, T//wice, was already experiencing a lot of backlash for unrelated things, fans felt like the group itself was being attacked (And it some cases it was) and the conversation steered from constructive criticism to fanwars real quick. People began pulling in other groups, not because they had actual concerns, but because they didn’t want their faves to be the only ones being talked about.

And then a former idol dropped pics that people felt sexualized minors. Even though she herself was an adult and had spent her entire childhood being the target of sexual comments, the conversation went from “These are disturbing trends in this industry” to “These people (who often were actually put in situations of being sexualized minors) are the problem”. The nail was put in the coffin when singer-songwriter I//U dropped an album where among the themes of loneliness and misunderstanding, and a certain mature, she talked about the childishly-sexual image that was her company sold her with.

(For the record, Korean idols/artists do not have the same level of autonomy as American idols/artists, and when I///U blew up she was pushed with this “little sister” type image.)

And somehow talking about this and satirizing it, made her a pedophile. While she eventually apologized, her image, as well as the image of several other people who got swept up into the issue, took a dent.

There are tons of times where stuff like this happened, some as trivial as a twenty-seven year old woman being babied, to as damaging as a teenager being called a rapist for accidentally brushed against a minor’s chest.

So this reaction to anything sexual or perceived sexual is not uncommon unfortunately. A good portion of K////pop sells itself on being sexually non-sexual, which is why these things happen all the time. Idols who dance sexually also advertise dating bans and sexual naiveté. Idols who promote innocence do so in a way that can be sexually construed. And this isn’t me trying to fear-monger and trash k///pop (I hate when people do that) but I’m just trying to succinctly describe what I’ve noticed in all my years as a hard-core stan.

Something else I’ve noticed is that, these things tend to blow up as a reaction to male (hetero)sexuality. Lolita-gate happened because people felt that these young females were being infantilized and sexualized in order to accrue and appease an older-male stanbase, however there was not a similar reaction on the flip side of the coin in regards to young males being infantilized and sexualized in order to accrue and appease an older-female stanbase. Both do happen, but I feel like when it does it’s not approached with nuance, so the issue gets lost in the talk.

Again, an example: the commercial I posted earlier with the 16 y/o gyrating in the elevator. Completely inappropriate, right? Yes. However, just recently there’s a group where a 16 y/o is singing about something innocent enough, but the breathy moans on the chorus coupled with the oral fixation throughout the video, does give it a sexual flair. And then she began promoting another song with two other girls, that is again more sensual, yet I’ve yet to hear any real backlash. Granted, they aren’t anywhere near as popular as T///wice, but they are a well-known fan-favorite. And their fanbase, especially among western stans, is mostly female. As opposed to T///wice, who early on, gained a reputation of having lots of (older) male fans.

(And even as a fan of this group L//00N//A, I can’t even mention it without being dog-piled as trying to start shit)

Or, like I mentioned earlier, I//rene. She’s very popular among guys, and sometimes gifs of her wardrobe malfunctions circulate the Korean interwebs, and that leads to a lot of nsfw discussion regarding her body. She also has a lot of female fans who do and say the same things (especially her western stans), but the anger is 100% directed at the male fans because how dare they.

Anyhow, because I dumped a lot on you that you probably do not care to read, and this was more a response to the asks I saw you had on Cupcak//e-gate – It’s complicated. The reaction that you see towards one situation is often times not the same reaction you’ll get in another, usually because fandom politics takes precedence over the actual issue.

And don’t even get me started on slut-shaming in this fandom, which either comes from outright misogynists, or misogynists pretending to be feminists. 

Oh, and yes, shipping is something often encouraged by companies. I can’t think of any group that’s debuted that hasn’t had some sort of company-pushed ship. The fanservice and bromance has definitely died down since the earlier days when the likes of TV//XQ and SU//JU had members kissing on stage and the like. A lot of it is borrowed from j///pop idol & visual-kei culture.

BTW, I know this is long, so feel free not to post it, especially considering how OT it is!

(submitted by anon)

You just submitted this long post, complete with linked sources, that you obviously worked hard on... how can I not post it?! Thank you so much for all this insight into this issue and fandom! I didn’t realize how much fandom politics and history there was behind this. It’s really interesting that reactions vary depending on the situation.