Netflix’s ‘A Virtuous Business’ is the sex-positive K-drama we need

A Virtuous Business follows four different women in the fictional town of Geumje in South Korea. In pursuit of stability and independence, they meet each other through an in-home sales business for adult toys and lingerie. Alongside main character Han Jeong-Suk (played by Kim So-Yeon) are her counterparts: Lee Ju-ri (Lee Se-Hee), a spunky and outspoken single mother and shop owner; Oh Geum-hee (Kim Sung-Ryung), a struggling mother to four children with a husband reckoning with a criminal record; and Seo Young-bok (Kim Sun-Young), the bored university-educated housewife to a well-to-do pharmacist. Their different stages in life are reflective of a care network that transcends age, class, education, and interests. 

Leading up to 1992, the year in which the show takes place, South Korea experienced uncomfortable shakedowns in its democratic processes and economy. The four women of A Virtuous Business presumably grew up in the throes of military occupations and violent seizures, ultimately arriving in 1992 when their country entered rapid globalization under the U.S.-abetted chaebol structures and monopolies. Starker social classes were forming due to an increase in matriculation to national universities, which yielded a job market that favored educated Koreans to reproduce and raise families, while poorer families found work under them as maids or babysitters. Meanwhile, movement building towards social reproductive rights was only gaining in response to class stratification.

The four main women of "A Virtuous Business."

Netflix

Yet in the world of A Virtuous Business, there exists an autonomous care circle within Geumje—even if there may not yet be words and policies for how the women take care of each other. In the second episode, Lee jumps in to offer help with Han’s son Min-ho so that Han can make her appointment to sell her products. Lee takes Min-ho to her hair salon after school, where he befriends her own son and the two boys bond over women’s magazines and kids’ games. Care is also seen between adults, such as when Oh tends to Seo’s husband and folds his clothes in the hospital after his car accident. As with all tender K-dramas, the care is in these details. 

This one-to-one care evolves when all four women get into the in-home sales business; Seo, who went to university for English literature, is considered the most educated of the group. Gathered around plates of fruit and rice snacks in her two-story home, she regularly teaches her new work colleagues translations for words like “dildos” and “erections,” as well as how to properly spell them in Korean. Of course these moments bring levity, but they also hint at Seo’s own regard of herself as an equal among women of different educational backgrounds and wealth. Although class distinction remains, A Virtuous Business shows that any woman’s reason for making money is valid and deserving of support.

The concept of care seems simple; we need to nurture, feed, nurse, assist, and love each other, or our livelihoods shut down. Yet in its essentialness, care as policy and discourse is fraught with sexism, racism, and classism. In the United States, care work is seen as a job for women of color, particularly in lower income brackets. I am reminded of Premilla Nadasen’s book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which traces the rise of the American care economy and the perpetual blurring of lines between production and social reproduction. Though the book covers the institutionalized, hierarchical system in which some people’s struggles translate into other people’s profit, it also elucidates the resistance among low-wage working women who have envisioned alternative ways of providing care. Short of one’s means to afford child care, the small-town working woman sees how she can offer her time and space for another underpaid housewife or single mother. This precedes politics: she envisions and actualizes egalitarian care relations in the here-and-now. 

Female friendships, childcare, and mutual aid are core to "A Virtuous Business."

Netflix

Here in the United States, I am a middle-class working woman in a long-term relationship, but I am still scared of raising a child. I’m afraid that I did not spend enough time nurturing proper care circles in pursuit of my own individualistic ambitions. What good is my income if I cannot name friends and colleagues who will be there for me in unanticipated moments? What good is my income if I, myself, don’t know whether I am of use to friends and colleagues who need me? Our American mainstream circles of care are lacking a care network that transcends age, class, and interests. In fact, our care industrial complex attempts to individualize our family dynamics and upbringing. With capitalistic solutions that have invited women into workplaces but still require private money to fulfill our basic needs, we have turned child care into a luxury and social reproduction—or how we maintain social structures and systems—into poor women’s work. In the midst of my upward climb, I hadn’t made the time to think about what my care circle looks like, until A Virtuous Business asked me to.

A Virtuous Business is a comforting watch because it puts care at the forefront and imagines equitable social reproduction as the future. Autonomous care circles can be found in women of all backgrounds; the only requisite is the love of surviving. Perhaps it presently feels difficult to ask anyone in my beloved community for help because I simply never asked. But while watching A Virtuous Business and its characters willingly lean on each other for their time and labor, I sense that we have been made to feel alone in our family-rearing journeys. The most subversive thing I could do as a Korean American woman is acknowledge that alternative systems of care can exist outside of the American one. I can abstain from the loneliness in our parental and relational decisions.