There were many memorable moments during the first full week of the 2018 Winter Olympics, but the most indelible image might not be from the ice or the slopes, but rather, from the stands; it’s simply impossible to ignore the North Korean cheerleaders who have descended upon Pyeongchang.
First of all, there are 229 of them. (For comparison’s sake, North Korea only sent 22 athletes to actually compete in the games.) They are all, by design, about the same height, age, and weight. Dressed in matching tracksuits, traveling in double-filed lines, and always chaperoned (even on bathroom visits), they fill the stands anywhere North (and, sometimes, South) Korean athletes compete, clapping and cheering to their own meticulous beat, waving flags featuring the Korean peninsula, occasionally donning creepy masks of a generically attractive man. It’s understandable why they have captured more headlines in the last week than most Olympic athletes will in a lifetime; why the New York Times spent a night with them, why Newsweek is tracking their down time in Pyeongchang, why fans and photographers flock to their side wherever they go.
It’s understandable — but is it defensible? Is all of this ogling just what North Korea was hoping for when they decided, at the last minute, to send a contingent to South Korea? Jenny Town, the managing editor of 38 North and the assistant director of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, thinks this is all playing right into North Korea’s hands.
“The media loves the bizarre, they love these caricature images of North Korea, so there’s this over-obsession with trying to figure them out,” Town told ThinkProgress. “It really steals focus away from the better storylines.”
Not only has North Korea and its cheerleaders sucked up a lot of attention the past week, the coverage they’ve garnered has been quite fawning; if you’ve been a casual peruser of Olympic headlines (the way most fans across the world are), you’d think that North Korea and South Korea are approximately one Olympics closing ceremony and a handshake away from turning the DMZ into an artifact of the past.
Of course, as it always is, the reality behind the proverbial pom-poms is much more bleak.
Take the women’s hockey team, for example. Just a couple of weeks before the games began, the North and South Korean governments agreed that not only would North Korea send athletes to the Olympics and march under a united flag with South Korean athletes, but the North Korea and South Korea women’s hockey teams would combine to form one unified Korea team for the first time in Olympic history. The entire thing was considered a “political win,” despite the fact that the team was clobbered in its three losses, scoring only one goal. But, one must ask, who exactly was this a “political win” for?
“It’s not being well received in South Korea, because in some ways it’s seen as giving concessions to North Korea,” Town said. “The way it was done did not earn them goodwill domestically. These athletes, this was their moment to shine, and it was taken away because of a foreign entity.”
Indeed, the South Korean administration did not communicate with the women’s hockey team at all before the decision was made, even though the decision meant that some of the South Korean hockey players who had been working so hard to make the Olympic team would no longer get to participate. Additionally, the administration did a very poor job selling the decision publicly, noting it was made because the women’s hockey team wasn’t a medal contender.
Rachael Joo, Assistant Professor in American Studies at Middlebury College and the author of Competing Visions: Media Sport and Transnational Koreas, told ThinkProgress that this was an example of the way the government disrespects women’s sports.
“Women’s hockey, it’s thought of as an easily sacrificable sport,” Joo said, noting that the government did not devote a lot of resources to the women’s hockey team to begin with.
In other words, sexism is at play in the decision to treat the women’s hockey team and its players as propaganda instead of athletes, just as sexism is at play in the fawning over the North Korean cheerleaders — as Town said, if there’s one thing that unites people all over the world, it’s that, “People like to be cheered on, and they like pretty women.”
And, of course, the topic of sexism provides a perfect transition into the most prominent North Korean figure to show up in South Korea in decades: Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un.
Kim Yo Jong, who was — and remains — a mysterious figure in the Kim family, came for the Olympics, but also spent time in Seoul meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. She was the first member of the Kim family to ever come to South Korea, so it was naturally a big deal. And, while the Kim regime is often portrayed as more evil and tempestuous than savvy, sending Kim Yo Jong was a masterful move. After all, nothing can soften an image like a soft-spoken woman with, as the New York Times described her, “light makeup and modest, even prim, clothes.”
According to the Washington Post, Kim Yo Jong and her “sphinxlike smile” captivated the people in South Korea, and the Western media. The Post even went as far as to call her the “Ivanka Trump of North Korea.” The South China Morning Post said it was an attempt at “lipstick diplomacy.”
Of course, while everyone was looking in the direction of Kim and the cheerleaders, and praising the “political win” on the ice, South Korea was footing a $2.6 million bill for North Korea’s visit; North Korea state-sponsored hackers continued to target South Korea, according to a Wired report; the United States continued to threaten nuclear war with North Korea; North Korea geared up to potentially fire an “honorary” missile on Saturday; and, oh yeah, the Olympics continued to wreak havoc on the economy and environment in South Korea.
Maybe it’s time to re-think why we’re so enamored with the cheerleaders.
“North Korea is getting way more attention that it should,” Town said. “And for not much. Just for showing up.”