SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Now, a topic that is often very distressing to people living with it. By the age of 65, more than half of men and more than a third of women experience some kind of hair loss. That's according to the National Council on Aging. So the president of South Korea wants his country's national health insurance program to cover hair loss treatment for its citizens. President Lee Jae Myung isn't experiencing hair loss himself, but he says this isn't just a cosmetic issue. He calls it, quote, "a matter of survival."
S. Heijin Lee has written extensively on Korean beauty standards. She's a Korean American professor of women, gender and sexuality at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Welcome to the program.
S HEIJIN LEE: Hi. Thanks for having me.
PFEIFFER: What was your reaction to President Lee's proposal?
LEE: You know, his proposal is so interesting. I think the important part to look at is that he characterizes hair loss as quote-unquote "a matter of survival." And this really references this idea that Korea is a very lookist society. That's not a term that we use too much here in the U.S., but in Korea, it's very commonplace.
PFEIFFER: Meaning how you look really matters?
LEE: That's right - not only really matters, but that one can be discriminated against for not looking a certain way.
PFEIFFER: And by the way, more so than just that, often, attractive people get treated more nicely. Is it - it goes beyond that?
LEE: Yes, absolutely, because in Korea, there's been a long history of photographs being attached to resumes. So literally - right? - your looks are your credentials. And that's important because women have been rallying around this for a long time. It's been decades that feminists have been pointing out that lookism is actually a very gendered problem, that women in particular carry the burden of making themselves up to a certain standard. So he's kind of invoking this idea that, you know, your looks is a matter of survival, but he's tying it to a very male problem.
PFEIFFER: Hair loss more typically comes with aging, but sometimes does also affect young people. I certainly know many men in their 30s and 40s who are starting to feel concerned about - that they can see hair loss.
LEE: Right. Yeah.
PFEIFFER: So this might be an opportunity for them to actually think about health insurance and insurance coverage, which, when you're younger, you don't have to think about, often, as much as older people. Any chance that this issue is more likely to get young people engaged in policy, political policy like insurance policy?
LEE: It's hard to say. We often think of insurance as something that affects older folks - right? - something you use. And I think he's really connecting insurance to economic survival. But I don't think he's, you know, hoping to necessarily engage the younger generations in insurance policy so much as make them feel heard and seen and maybe win their votes in the process.
But what is interesting is that there's many ways to address these quote-unquote matters of survival. The government plays a role in shaping these beauty expectations. You know, it also plays a role in providing the solutions to these expectations, right? So what I mean here is that the government benefits from its popular culture industry, which is a purveyor of these beauty standards. It provides the solutions, right? We all know K-beauty is, you know, a multibillion-dollar industry. And now it's interesting that he's not proposing to change any of those areas, but what he is proposing to do is to cover a very small fragment of a solution.
PFEIFFER: That's S. Heijin Lee. She's a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Thank you.
LEE: Thank you.
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