#34: The Blanket

All the world's a stage, and men and women merely players etc.

I’ve been thinking about values lately, and how often my stated values have been challenged, and compromised, in the past few months. My vegetarianism, my anti-consumerism, my anti-workism; these are all values I hold, and yet have “failed” to live out in Korea, at different points. This bothers me, as I spend a lot of time thinking about ethics, morals, beliefs in the abstract. Much of my thinking and writing relates to morals, and how to live out my values. Probably the core of my work as a writer is to know what I believe so I can better honor those values in my daily life. 

Here’s a little poll for you; do you think that a bartender putting a blanket on your lap is nice, or not? Vote yes or no . . .

The thing about my sister E is that she has a strong moral center. She is much better at living out her values than I am. Generally our pattern is to have the same beliefs, only she strictly adheres to her values through action, whereas my actions have some moral wiggle room. Perhaps it’s about how conscientious we are, or her tendencies towards perfectionism. I wonder sometimes if the reason I write about my values so much is that I need to excavate them, make them concrete, because they are all too malleable in the abstract. I am prone to forgetting my values just when I should be relying on them. Maybe if you’re the sort of person who is good at instinctively honoring your values, at acting them out in the real world, at lining up your actions according to your beliefs, then you’re the sort of person who doesn't have to endlessly navel-gaze, and write lengthy essays about ethics just to know what your ethics are. The point is that I trust E’s instincts, when her beliefs are challenged, as I generally come around to her initial point-of-view. Most recently this scenario played out when she was visiting me over the holidays.

the titular character

The Scene: a bar. The Characters: me, E, and a sweet bartender named Do Han. It’s New Year’s Eve, and I am at a tiny wine bar in Busan with my sister. Do Han speaks perfect English, and he’s having a slow night. He asks us to come sit by the bar so we can chat more easily. We acquiesce. (For context, both of us are wearing short skirts/shorts with tights.) We sit, he hands each of us a soft blanket. 

Me: CUTE! He wants us to be warm and cozy and honestly, this is kind of romantic, like a K-drama. 

E: what the fuck.  

My thought process was aww, how sweet, I have a fluffy blanket and if I’m out at the uncharacteristically late hour of midnight, I should get to be cozy, and here I am in Busan, of all the gorgeous places, with my best friend, and it’s almost the new year, and the calendar is about to reset, and I’m so ready to leave 2023 behind, and march into the new year, where perhaps I will become a new and altogether better person.

The blanket was just, in other words, a blanket.

My sister, meanwhile, was staring at me with unmissable horror in her eyes. “WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” she mouthed, pulling me out of my romantic daydreams of the new year/new persona, built around wearing black dresses and eating large quantities of vegetables and giving up watching TV, for good. My sister had remained in the bar, in the present moment, where her real-life values were being tested. 

She interpreted the gesture of the blanket quite differently. She was not cold. She did not ask for a blanket. She was not uncomfortable, she was not worried about her modesty or lack thereof; she hadn’t been thinking about her body or clothing at all, in fact, until the bartender handed her the blanket. To her the blanket was a metaphor for repression, for a man looking at her outfit, at her body, and making a decision for her about what she should do in order to make herself, him, or others more comfortable. I thought it was funny that we had such different reactions to the bartender’s gesture. Later that week when we were out for dinner with friends, I used it as an anecdote to illustrate charming cultural differences. Our friends laughed and explained what I already knew, that it’s customary in Korea to offer women something to cover their laps when they’re sitting in short skirts. They’ve had quite a few scandals involving up-skirt photography and illegal, covert videoing, so the blankets are offered to protect the women from the gaze and cameras of perverts. It’s just a custom, not a judgment, just a courtesy. 

My sister stubbornly, quietly refused to be convinced. We left it there, with me laughingly in the middle, unwilling to be too critical of my newly minted host country’s culture and traditions just yet. I forgot about the incident, in fact, until this weekend when my friends brought it up again. We were at a brunch spot, and there was a heap of soft blankets in muted pastels, just waiting to cover the bare legs of female diners. I stared at the blankets, and something clicked, belatedly, into place. My values, a month late and a dollar short. 

I understand that it’s a custom in Korea. That it wasn’t personal, that the bartender was not necessarily enacting any personal belief system against us, that women shouldn’t sit with bare legs. That it was intended to be a thoughtful gesture, that it was meant to be kind, that his reasonable defense might well have been that the blanket was about our comfort, our peace of mind. That we were just two female guests and he happened to be a male bartender, and it was all cultural and traditional and purely meant. I don’t mean to make the sweet Do Han a symbol of oppression, the hands and face of misogyny.

But in fact, entire systems of oppression do have human hands to carry them out in society. A country-wide tradition is still, in practical terms, enacted by real people in real situations. It finally occurred to me that any gesture that is only for women, for women’s bodies, is inherently unequal. It was the knowledge that the blankets were there for only the female diners that convinced me that my sister was right. Was this blanket meaningfully different from our youth, from the constant looks from adults surveying our female bodies head-to-toe, and running to talk to our parents if they deemed our skirts too short, or our tops too tight, or our hair too messy? Because we were women, because we were wearing what we chose to wear on our female bodies, we were given more cloth to cover up the exposed parts of our bodies—isn’t that how “patriarchy” (sorry) has always shown up in our lives? 

I’m lucky to have my sister, who instinctively honors her values and understands metaphors. To me, Angie the person, it was only a nice gesture on a cold night. To my sister, and to Angie the writer, the blanket is of course never just a blanket.

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Thanks for reading! Happy Lunar New Year:) XOXO Angie