There are a lot of aspects to White Girl worth talking about. They’re just things I observe, and are signs that my standards of female beauty have become somewhat Koreanized. Otherwise, why would I be so weirdly attracted to a woman who, in my previous life before Korea, I would have dismissed as pale and kinda unhealthy looking? It’s because in Korea, being pale and generally unhealthy looking is actually a certain aesthetic. It’s the combination of the fact that most Korean women have never regularly exercised (soccer, field hockey, swimming, basketball, softball, etc.), enabling the phenomenon known as “skinny fat”, also known by the more medical term “thin obesity”, in which a given very, very skinny woman is actually medically obese (was that 25% of their weight being body fat?). In Seoul, more than any place else I have been in the world, many skinny women walk down the street with the fat on their bones flib-flabbing from side to side. Eww, right? Add to that the extremely pale skin of some of these women (preserved by the constant use of parasols), and the idea that if they do any exercise at all, they’ll get huge Arnold Schwarzenegger legs and Sarah Connor arms – you get that delicate, pale, dependent look of doe-eyed femininity. And I hate to admit it, but – I kinda like it sometimes.

I know it sounds and can even look gross, but I can’t do anything other than admit it. I know many of you will not want to blow up the pic below, but this girl is sooo ghetto fabulous – pale, not-so-great skin, yellow soles, and brown spots on exposed joints – man, I just had to snap a picture or two as she strutted by with her Princess Diana attitude. These are the princesses who would never date a foriegner, and are best found with thug-ajussi dudes who hang in the Jongno or Yungdeungpo. These are the Korean round-the-way girls, and they are their own kind of lovely.

For those of you who don’t know, 다리 (da-ri) means “legs” in Korean. And in everyday Korean speech, you get the concepts of 무다리 (mu da-ri or “radish legs”) for a person with wide legs (especially calves), “long dari” for people with the desired long and apparently “western” style of legs, and also “short dari”, which points to the opposite, undesired situation of having short, Korean-style legs. Korean women are known for their leg-lengthening tricks, such as wearing high heels all the time, wearing extra high heels below their jeans that have their bottoms sweeping on the floor, the (thankfully dead) platform shoe fad, wearing jeans as low as possible, etc. It’s been explained to me that Korean women have extra-long torsos and shorter legs. Well, I could buy that, from my own observations.

But there’s another kind of legs worth making note of; these are the “dongnae dari” (동네 다리), which is a term I coin here literally meaning “neighborhood legs”. The more nuanced meaning would be something like “neighborhood” or “around-the-way girl legs”, but I leave that to you to chew on. All I have to say is that I got a place in my heart for all kinds of girls and legs and whatnot. You see the coiffed and sexy and smooth Kangnam girls walking around looking like a million bucks, but then you see the neighborhood girl walking into the local Red Mango strutting her stuff and flipping her hair and throwing attitude like she thinks she is in Kangnam and not a little round-the-corner joint. She thought she was fly; I had to agree, although she was fly in a fish-n-grits, sweaty, jukejoint kinda way. If such analogies can be made…

Please excuse the varicose veins. Did I mention fish-n-grits? Hehe.

Don’t flame me for this one. Just goooo with the flow and indulge the few of us out there who have a grittier set of tastes…