Sunday, March 15, 2009

Students work to save the economy, the Chosun reports and bloggers mock.

The Chosun Ilbo has an article about high school girls rolling up their uniform skirts to show more leg. The Ilbo has both complained in the past about Foreigners being oversexed and many photos of these girls in their short skirts. Bizarro Brian (I just like the name- if you don't, Brian in Jeollanam, I will stop) and Korea Beat quite rightly comment on the article.

However, what if there is a good and important reason, both for the shortened skirts and the reporting of same?

Skirt Lengths and the Economy

Rising skirt lengths are a symbol of youth, playfulness and women's liberation – but are they also related to a nation's prosperity?

Believe it or not, there is a long-standing theory that skirt length is linked to booms in a country's wealth: the better the economy, the shorter the skirt (and vice versa).

Possibly related: XKCD has a comic about correlation and causation and confusion between the two.
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This post is slightly longer version of the comment I left at Korea Beat in the above linked post.

3 comments:

Brian said...

No, the name's fine, no worries.

Word verification: thumbo. Is it me or have the random words been getting closer and closer to real ones?

PAKA said...

it's the same thing everywhere. when i was in high school, our sister school was an all-girls private school and they would do the same. roll up and hike up their skirts. it was the same 20 years or so ago. it's the same thing now. it's a cycle that will never change.

kwandongbrian said...

Brian,
Do we need to start googling word verification words to see if they mean something?

Paka,
I worked at a private school of last resort for bad kids (I don't mean under-privileged, troubled or the like; I mean bad) and a female teacher at the school had the job of keeping the girl's skirts long enough. That was in the mid-90s.