Fortunately, ‘My Korean Boyfriend’ is pretty bad at fetishization

Global viewers were immediately worried. “The need to call your boyfriend, who happens to be Korean, your ‘Korean boyfriend’ was always weird to me,” writes a user on the /Korea subreddit. “My man is also Korean, but other than ‘my boyfriend’ I don't specify further what kind of boyfriend he is. Like...We just happened to be dating, but when someone goes ‘look at my Korean boyfriend’ it feels the same as the Korean men who only go for foreign women.”

Yes.

There is a long, racist history in many Western cultures of fetishizing East Asian women as sexually alluring and seductive. Concurrently, East Asian men have historically been de-sexualized by Western societies, presented in media as undesirable and emasculated. This latter pattern is changing—in no small part because of the global popularity of the female gaze-driven South Korean drama and K-pop industries. South Korean men in particular are increasingly seen as the ultimate boyfriend material: not only sexy, but respectful, doting, and sensitive to the needs of their significant others. While this is perhaps a more positive stereotype, it is still rooted in a fetishization that flattens the diversity and complexity of South Korean men and South Korean culture more generally. It can feel nice to be desired, but if that desire is rooted in the fetishization of ethnic features and identity, what happens when you don’t live up to that flat fantasy? My Korean Boyfriend is an exercise in finding out.

The reality of watching My Korean Boyfriend is both more and less disappointing than one might expect. Rather than what the title and show’s voiceover narration suggests, My Korean Boyfriend is not actually about hysterical Brazilian K-drama fans storming South Korea in hopes of finding a boyfriend. Rather, it is about a few Brazilian women who are already in long-distance relationships with South Korean men and travel to Seoul for a month. The show will give them a chance to determine whether their relationships will work offline. In the era of online and social media-based dating, the transition from digital to real-life connection is a relatable one. Throw in the fact that South Korea’s foreign population is at an all-time high (though Brazilians make up a tiny part of it), presumably leading to more cross-cultural dating, and you have a hook.

If My Korean Boyfriend were a better series, it could more organically and deeply dive into issues such as interracial dating, language barriers in romantic relationships, and the difference in dating norms between South Korean and Brazilian societies. As it stands, these elements are touched on, but never truly explored due to the short and highly constructed nature of the show. I imagine the fact that this is a Brazilian production, rather than a Korean-Brazilian co-production, limited the series' ability to engage more deeply with South Korean culture and Seoul as a real place. 

As a result, the series spends more time and money on the gorgeously framed, lit, and edited shots of South Korean tourist sites than it does constructing space for sincere romantic sparks to happen. In one early scene, a Brazilian woman named Katy goes on a date with Jack, a man she had briefly met two years prior while traveling in Busan. The two walk amidst the cherry blossom-lined paths of the Yeouido neighborhood, but conversation quickly fizzles out as they realize they have absolutely nothing in common. If the series truly cared about fostering romance, the production team could have done a simple chemistry test before wasting the time of Katy, Jack, viewers, and those fleeting cherry blossoms. My Korean Boyfriend may have the aesthetics of a K-drama, but it has none of the heart.

This is probably for the best, given the fetishizing fantasies inherent in the series’ stated goal. There is a more dangerous version of My Korean Boyfriend that could effectively convince at least some viewers that life in South Korea, with a titular Korean boyfriend, is exactly like it is in a K-drama, simultaneously flattening the complexities of South Korean men and eschewing the country’s entrenched patriarchal structures that regularly lead to workplace discrimination, domestic violence, and a lack of legal protections for South Korean women. (When the show’s promo dropped, commenters on popular South Korean forum, The Qoo, offered up their male populace to foreign women: “Eugh…take them all.”) 

Instead, and thankfully, reality gets in the way of the production’s stated K-drama ambitions. Si-won, a South Korean man who treats emotional manipulation of his Brazilian girlfriend Luanny like a part-time job, is composed almost entirely of red flags. Luanny’s tolerance of his lies, manipulation, and infidelity also feels depressingly realistic. She stays with her long-distance boyfriend even when the four other Brazilian women repeatedly try to help her see she deserves so much more from a partner. (Luanny’s choice never feels rooted in a fetishization of Si-won’s Korean-ness, but rather in low self-esteem.) Meanwhile, Katy, Camila, and Mari go on a series of the kind of mediocre, forgettable dates that reality is absolutely teeming with. Some of the guys seem nice, but not in a flawless, sweep-you-off-your-feet kind of way—no matter how hard the camera movement and editing tries to convince us otherwise.

Morena, who ends the series married to her boyfriend, is the most “successful” by the show’s standards, but that was always going to be the case. She and boyfriend Se-woong, had been in a committed long-distance relationship for more than a year and had met several times in both South Korea and Brazil. At the series' start, the couple is ready to be engaged. Their connection doesn’t feel driven by Morena’s interest in South Korean culture, but is rather grounded in a mutual respect of and interest in one another’s cultures. When Se-woong is waiting for Morena to dress for their date, he asks the other Brazilian women how to call her beautiful in Portuguese. Later, Morena has a letter to Se-woong’s mother translated into Korean. In it, she promises her that her Brazil-raised grandchildren will speak Korean.

In contrast, the other four women are a few months and or messages into a relationship with their boyfriends or—in the case of Camila—are not in a relationship at all. Camila, who immigrated to Brazil from South Korea at the age of 3, is back in the country to better understand her past. She is willing to go on some dates in the process, but it’s gloriously treated as a side quest. None of these women feel particularly invested in getting a boyfriend. They just seem interested in dating, and happen to be in South Korea. Presumably, there were elements of fetishization in both directions for the Brazilian women and Korean men who mostly initially connected on Instagram, but the series begins at a point when that initial stage has passed or is passing. As a result, we get a series that seemingly unintentionally zooms in on the moment when it becomes clear that ethnically driven fetishization is not enough to build a relationship on. Does My Korean Boyfriend fetishize South Korean men? Absolutely, and it’s disappointing to watch. Fortunately, I suppose, it’s pretty bad at it.