everybody hanbok!

The sheer ridiculousness of what pop culture can produce occasionally pulls me out of my sulking, teeny-bop-hating shell, and makes me smile.  A couple years ago, I could blame Girls Generation for doing this.

Gee has to be one of the cutest and simultaneously creepiest videos I’ve ever seen.  The song is super catchy, and the choreography is spot on.  Still, every move these girls make looks so practiced, especially their facial expressions and cutesy little hand gestures (called aegyo, which, I realize, are more common in countries like Japan and South Korea than in the U.S., but still, it’s weird).  They could be made of plastic, so the fact that they start out as mannequins is disturbingly accurate.

why no, Im not wearing makeup

They also spend the whole video acting like spoiled little girls, but wear stylish, skin-tight clothes with four-inch heels.  I grew up surrounded by Korean females of all ages who had the tendency to dress their age, but act like little girls when teased; this behavior was pretty much standard.  Still, seeing girls dress like women and act like children is just… wrong.

Having said that, I was pretty excited to find out that the odds of making it into one of these groups seems pretty high.  Some of them seem to change members on an annual basis.  Of the 41 major all-female singing groups that South Korea has churned out in the past four years, there were 212 current and past members.  That’s 53 potential members per year.  That’s literally about a one-in-a-million chance, but that’s still better than the lottery.  The only requirement seems to be glasses-cracking cuteness and a fathom worth of legs.  In fact, if we average their height at 5′ 4″, the cumulative leg length of these female hearth-throbs would span more than one fifth of a mile (22%).  Bad news, North Korea.  South Korea is officially WINNING.

80% of all their photos are 100% leg