Article must be read to be discussed as a great deal of the observations are made through deconstructing pictures and videos.
Article has some NSFW images!!
https://medium.com/@metropolitician/k-pop-is-neo-confucian-pornography-81acf43db4f9#.h7dgqp7c2
The points or variations of this article's points could be made for a great deal of Japanese exports as well. Just something to think about on your next trip to a thread that critiques your beloved misogynistic country's entertainment...
Article has some NSFW images!!
https://medium.com/@metropolitician/k-pop-is-neo-confucian-pornography-81acf43db4f9#.h7dgqp7c2
She had a nuanced argument that the values were Confucian in a general sense of how ideology and belief is generally utilized as a means of social control, but this is usually never applied to something like K-pop since most people seem to equate Confucian with conservative in terms of the girls are dressed too sexy for the average Confucian gentleman. But this forgets the greater role of Confucian ideology, which is to keep women in a lower class/power position in relation to men.
The trend nowadays is to reduce the apparent obvious, in-your-facedness of the videos sexuality, since these videos can only continue escalating the arms race of lewdness in the Korean context so far.
The case of the Korean K-pop idol photographer Rotta is both the most exemplary, explanative case-in-point and also smoking gun of the exact crossover point between what is generally considered pornography and what is considered art. K-pop functions and finds protection within the latter category.But is occasionally dips into and borrows the semiotic grammar and even vocabulary of the former, which is pornography.So is this pornography? My contention is that it is, in the strict sense of the word (and the formal, David Edward Rose definition that will come below). But then again, 1) as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, so is a lot of K-pop itself, by that very definition I will present in the next paragraph, so I really fail to understand where all the fan outrage is actually from, besides the fact that most of the critics seem to be pretty fucking stupid. If youre not into the pornographic aspect of Rotta, then you must not be into half the videos in the K-pop genre, because, as I said, pornography and many K-pop videos actually speak the same semiotic grammar and vocabulary.
Confucianism is a frame of thinking  or a filter  that focuses cultural formation into Confucian-shaped directions, but make no mistake, Confucianism-as-frame-and-filter is also a useful ideological disciplining tool that allows the dominant class (upper class socially and politically connected men) to use women as both the excuse and means to keep everyone in society in line and in place.
Neo-Confucian techniques of self-cultivation of the mind and body applied only to men. Women in the Neo-Confucian view were incapable of achieving sagehood and therefore had neither the need nor the ability to strive for transcendence of the self and body. While men produced their selves through the mind (study of the classics) and body (maintenance of the family body through ancestor worship), women were occupied with maintaining and reproducing the family body through the corporeal bodies of the family. The triumvirate of bodymind- ki was a Neo-Confucian concept of the male body. Neo-Confucianism emphasized the corporeal for the female body, the very aspect men were supposed to transcend.
Women in the mainstream K-pop imagination are actually, if you think about it, meta-arguments for the subjugation of women in their hypersexualization and their representation as merely possessing power or social agency through their bodies. Women only have value in terms of being possessed of sexual currency and the power to atrract men. I wont even go into the extreme heteronormativity of K-pop cultural texts. I dont have the time or the space. Lets just agree that the deeply Confucian values of womens place in society vis a vis innocence-as-a-function-of-womens-virtue (as reproductive vessels) or their social utility-and-place (as inferior sex objects) may appear to be liberal or empowering in the video and songs in which they appear and may even buck short-lived social conventions, but these are not really arguments of liberation, equality, or even the notion that women have any value at all besides as objects to be fucked when they are young and clean, virtuous vessels of reproduction after their fuck-utility has ended. These videos celebrate putting women back in their places, and these are places that were long ago decided by Korean, neo-Confucian ideology to be merely vessels to receive their penises and house their sperm. Whether Virtuous or Vixen-like, whether it is argued through fantasies of Innocence or pornographic pleasures, the subject-position of women, whether represented as virtuous mothers or slutty entertainers of men, is the same, actually, since the result is the same  as a passive cum receptacle is a cum receptacle.
Neo-Confucian values related to the use-value of women as subjectless bodies (Kim, 100101) in Korean society are simply being presented in the updated-yet-repressive, Neo-Confucian sense that womens bodies are still mere semen receptacles for men, with the update being that their utility as cum receptacles is no longer merely as vessels of reproduction (because this isnt the year 1500 anymore), but of sexual gratification as well.
The points or variations of this article's points could be made for a great deal of Japanese exports as well. Just something to think about on your next trip to a thread that critiques your beloved misogynistic country's entertainment...