Hong-Chi Shiaumovies; while Jung reports being an avid fan of the crime drama CSI and dreams of being
a detective fighting petty crime and bringing criminals to justice. Both claimed they would
like to follow another career if given the chance, perhaps as a detective or a martial arts
master, based on the belief that sacrifice to brotherhood can make a man’s life more com-
plete. In recalling their childhood dreams, both suggest their flowery looks are accidental
and have served simply to advance their current careers, with their manhood remaining as
complete as other male stars they idolize, such as martial arts stars. They secretly harbor a
lifelong yearning to build a brotherhood of men with whom they have real camaraderie.
These claims comprise an adroit use of rhetoric: on the one hand demonstrating that they
genuinely crave male groups and male bonding, while on the other helping clarify that
they have never intended to dodge compulsive military service and remain hugely inter-
ested in the establishment of alliances necessary for national defense.
These Korean male celebrities, in encompassing flowery, soft, and smooth qualities, can
only afford to appear in this kind of representation because these are combined with more
traditionally masculine traits serving to reassert their manliness throughout the East Asian
popular cultural scene. This is accomplished in particular through several recurring themes:
visually and ostensibly these Korean male celebrities are to some extent more muscular and
taller than their Taiwanese and Japanese counterparts. For example, none is of a particularly
slim build or as short as Satoshi Tsumabuki, who stands at 5’8”. Another convenient refer-
ence to traditional masculinity is their body physique—the natural formation of chocolate
abs. Furthermore, the flowery soft masculinity was presented simultaneously with the new
idealization of the soldier and of martial virtues such as courage, honor, and loyalty, as seen
in the extremely popular Korean films such as JSA: Joint Security Area and T’aegukki.Conclusion
In conclusion, the Korean masculinity represented in Taiwan’s Men’s UNO strategically creates
a dialectic that encourages Taiwanese readers to be consumers of feminine-style products while
allowing them to maintain the qualities that have traditionally been gendered masculine. As this
multimodal analysis demonstrates, Korean male celebrities on Men’s UNO encode two seem-
ingly contradictory types of masculinity: traditional and metrosexual. Through ten specific but
hybrid contexts, this study develops the concepts of soft masculinity and metrosexuality during a
time when the modern national self becomes de-emphasized. Men’s fashion remains a commer-
cial site as an advertising venue where male grooming products for men demonstrate a “push–
pull” effect—a “push” to make men more aware and critical of their faces and bodies in order to
promote sales while, at the same, respecting the “pull” of values identified as traditionally male.
Driven by relentless consumerism, the objectification and commodification of male bodies
in the men’s fashion scene, as examined in this study, pose unique and significant challenges to
conventional, normative Korean masculinity and Asian masculinity as a whole. One focus of this
study that engages the intersection of metrosexuality and the Korean soft masculinity concludes
that the site of Men’s UNO cast homosociality as a form of localized male solidarity so as to
address to the two central anxieties with respect to the notion of metrosexuality: feminization
and homosexualization, as suggested by Shugart (2008). The normative masculine privilege
is sustained and secured through explicitly articulating and referencing to local homosocial
male-bonding activities and relentless breadwinning efforts, which are well localized to us as
Asians, Taiwanese, or Koreans. In the context of Men’s UNO, the metrosexual features— translated
as the “new urban male” (duhuixinnan)—mingling with such soft masculinities encourage men