Potential customers are put off by unequal sex ratios, and Duo already has more female customers than male ones. So what gives?
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.
I know, I know—I’m not even divorced yet, and I’m already looking at marriage agencies. But the reality is that Duo’s latest campaign ads are just impossible to avoid on Korean public transport at the moment. And their obvious emphasis on attracting female customers, for a service ostensibly about providing those women with as many romantic encounters with male suitors as their finances allow, should give everyone misgivings. For it’s not like correcting an excess of male customers is the motivation.
This concern may still sound odd. “Sweet,” I’d wager, is what usually comes to mind when most people see Duo ads. Indeed, I only paid attention to this one at all because I happened to be reviewing my translations of a lavishly-illustrated, feminist Korean book about paintings of nude women, as any normal person does on the subway. The connection is, I looked up for a moment, and had to do a double-take. Literally, only because I was rereading that book, was I immediately struck by how unlike those paintings the ad was. Actor Lee Shi-won/이시원‘s look back at the viewer doesn’t exactly scream pandering to the male gaze? Nor did all the other Duo ads on the subway carriage I could see, some of which just had Lee alone, and only one of which had model Noh Seong-Su/노성수 looking back with her.
Source: Duo.
Then my stop was coming up. And you don’t exactly need to have read Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements to be realize what the ‘relative sizes‘ of Lee and Noh in these ads signify in the ads I saw once I stood up:
But so what? What is the issue exactly, about Duo prioritizing women?
Well, the last time I checked in 2020, Duo had more female than male customers then, at a ratio of something like 6 to 4 or 5.5 to 4.5.
I don’t know if this ratio was affected by the pandemic. But regardless, more women competing for fewer men clearly disadvantages them. That extra level of competition also incentivizes charging women more for the same services offered men. Which indeed Duo, and most of the over 1000 other registered agencies out there, do so with a gusto.
Moreover, Duo, already experiencing massive drops in sales in the mid and late-2010s, almost made none at all in 2021 thanks to the pandemic, as marriages and childbirths, still inexorably tied together in Korea, dropped precipitously. Which, once again, was something the subway carriage wasn’t subtle about reminding me:
So, although Duo clearly retains the financial resources for its latest massive campaign, I speculate that its latest campaign may actually represent a somewhat desperate attempt to double down on financially discriminating against young women. And, given Duo’s position as a industry leader and model, I have concerns about what this doubling-down will have on Korean dating, gender roles, and marriage norms.
Not convinced? Really, it’s only a matter of degree. Please see my in-depth investigation from 2020 for a plethora of evidence on how that sexual discrimination has in fact been occurring for decades. And don’t let me forget the influence on body-image either: just a few months ago, one agency focusing on wealthy clients, with nearly half a million customers, came under fire for its strict financial criteria for admitting men, but only requiring a members’ vote of 3.6/5 on appearance alone to admit women. I also invite readers to consider that demanding women pay more to date men than men to date women,* and deliberately skewing their sex ratios to justify this, is yet another form of “pink tax” that perpetuates the gender gap.
*(I realize that the norm in Korea is for men to pay on dates; no social issue that is interesting isn’t complicated!)
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