To celebrate International Women’s Day this March, Tokyo College’s “Gender, Sexuality & Identity” collaborative research group will host a special webinar event with MURATA Sayaka, author and winner of the 155th Akutagawa Prize for her novel Convenience Store Woman (2016). Through discussing Murata’s writing, experiences, and inspirations, the event hopes to generate reflection on society’s gender and sexuality “norms” and how they shape our world.
A rare wholesome greetings card I found for my daughters when they were little. I’ve kept some spare copies ever since.
It reads: “Like a powergirl, always be confident! Spread/Brace your shoulders, be strong/cheer up! Yay!”
Sadly for you, I’m not about to give up those precious spares any time soon—they’re reserved for any granddaughters I might have one day. But it isstill possible to grab a print of “우리는 할수 있다!” by cartoonist Jen Lee, the first Korean version of the We Can Do It! poster. Rest assured, my framed copy always gets a lot of attention from my cats at my sophisticated cocktail parties!
So again, Happy International Women’s Day, Powergirls! We/You Can Do It!
And (cough) Happy Birthday to me too!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
A few years ago, at a department dinner at my university, a coworker asked me what feminism was, and why it was even needed.
Honestly, I was just too stunned to answer.
Not because I didn’t have an answer. I’m used to giving catchy one-liners to curious teens, or trading barbs with men’s rights activists who are really just sealioning.
But because he was genuinely asking.
Once I realized that, I was just at a loss. I just could not understand why someone in their late-50s, and so well-educated, would need to ask.
Stammering to come up with any sort of reply at all then, I was saved by our meals arriving, our conversation mutually forgotten. Still, later I regretted how a real opportunity for education had been missed. As someone who proudly mentions the f-word in their elevator pitch (no, not that f-word!), expressly wanting people to ask me more about it, I really should have had some responses already prepared for that kind of encounter.
So, I remembered our conversation again last summer while casually listening to a random episode of the BBC Woman’s Hour podcast, realizing any one of its short segments on those title topics would have sufficed to start explaining “why.” Ever since, I’ve been mentally storing and seeking out these and many anecdotes, factoids, and stories like them, every day finding both more of a need for them and more of a responsibility to use them.
The need is because I’ve been really putting myself out there professionally, socially, and romantically in the past two years. Mostly, I’ve been loving it. But this sort of thing keeps happening:
In his work in the city Sammy found himself among Republicans for the first time in his life. Nothing in his background or higher education had conditioned him to expect that anyone but a bandit, sociopath, or ignoramus would ever want to be a Republican. But these coworkers weren’t ignorant, and they were not bandits or sociopaths.
The responsibility is because, as mentioned in my last post, the Korean manosphere, for one, has a very real and growing influence. Ignoring them, dismissing them, writing blogposts that they won’t read, aren’t exactly helping to counter that. Rather, a political gender divide continues to grow globally, and is especially wide in Korea.
I also feel a responsibility because I recently listened to a (2017) podcast episode about conservative intellectuals by The Point Magazine, in which co-editor Jon Baskin stresses the need for engagement:
“…where[as] on the left, they think these aren’t real ideas, they’re so obviously ridiculous that no-one can even believe them…they must just be there to bale power, you know, power dynamics or privilege. And you know, I think we take it as…besides just a matter of sort of honesty, intellectual honesty, we take it as a matter of political responsibility to try and actually meet these ideas. It seems to me the more politically responsible thing to do is to actually meet these ideas which obviously are convincing to many people, and take them as arguments and treat them as such.”
And I feel even more of a responsibility because I’ve mingled and networked enough that I’ve reached a tipping point. That now, I don’t just abstractly know, but also feel in my gut and see right in front of my eyes how my wide range of privileges—male, cishet, White, native English-speaking, middle-aged—work to ensure I’m more likely to be listened to. And, crucially, much more likely to be listened to over a drink in a bar, with someone with shared interested or some other connection, than randomly read by them.
No, it’s not like I’m going to take advantage to proselytize at every cocktail party I’m invited to. Nor be taken advantage of by people who had no intention of listening. But when opportunities for genuine dialog are offered, how to make the most of them?
“And that Insta had links to 4 more studies that came to similar conclusions.”
“Interesting. I’ll have to read them. But although there’s absolutely no excuse for anyone slut-shaming anyone, you know there used to be legit evolutionary reasons for both men and especially women to want to restrain female promiscuity, right? And, just got to say, Korean women are still too scared to go to gynecologists for vital health checks for fear being labelled sexually active. And in 20+ years, there’s only been a handful of ads in Korea that portray womenas sexuallyassertive too. And looking for those is kinda my thing. So, yeah, for sure, I will read those studies, I swear. But not going to lie, I’m already a little dubious about their methodology and results.
“Huh, I guess you have you have a point about the gynecologists. I walked into a skincare clinic once, and ended up in a gyno hidden inside instead, and got kicked out. Crazy!”
“I know, right? Hey, cool jacket by the way. Where’d you get it?”
Woman texting friend on her phone: “WTF did I just listen to???”
Well, you know how one of the first pieces of advice about networking is to keep introductions and pitches short and to the point? To prepare for meeting lots of people, to have a maximum 10-second spiel prepared that says who you are, what you do, and what makes you worth remembering? It’s all about just extending that skill really.
(And intersects with improving my writing skills too. You may scoff, but you should see what I cut these days!)
So, I’m taking notes from good communicators I know on social media, especially those who make reels. Off the top of my head, here’s some of those who post (mostly) sexuality, feminism, and/or Korea-related content specifically, whose insights I very much rely on to be able to write about those subjects at all here:
• Professor Neil — Excellent at responding to the sort of ‘self-evident’ truths about women and so on presented by the manosphere, and quickly ripping them to shreds.
•Will Hitchins — Like Professor Neil, but funnier and in Australian ;)
•Jae-Ha Kim 김재하 — As well as her must-read commentary on Korean social issues on Twitter, she has such biting critiques of sexism in Korean pop-culture, and recommendations of what dramas do well, that you can’t not follow her. Make sure to subscribe to her Substack newsletter especially.
• CedarBough Saeji — I’m very biased because “The K-pop Prof” is a personal friend, lives 5 minutes away, and is the only one in this list I’ve met personally, but still: it’s an objective fact that much of what I say above Jae-Ha Kim, I could also say of CedarBough. Alas, her focus is more on music and K-pop, and her academic writing leaves little time for a Substack ㅠㅠ
• Macken Murphy —“Macken Murphy is able to condense vast chunks of information into engaging and digestible episodes.” (The New York Times) Focusing on dating advice, attractiveness, and relationships through an evolutionary perspective, ironically Murphy first came to my attention through his poor communication skills though, my jaw dropping during an episode of the Sisyphus 55 podcast at how eerily similar his speaking style was to my own, and realizing just how convoluted I can sound. But he’s vastly improved since then, making him a perfect role model for me personally. And he’s especially good at shutting down the incels etc. that unfortunately gravitate towards science-based speakers like himself, who selectively go through their work to find supposed rational, ‘scientific’ justifications for their misogyny.
• Follow the River North, formerly based in Korea at I’m no Picasso — E. the baker in rural Texas may be very surprised to be included here. But feminism suffuses whatever she writes, and, just in case she doesn’t already know, I also consider her to be one of the most frugal and direct yet also most moving writers I’ve ever encountered—whatever she writes about, she always packs a punch. If you haven’t already, again make sure you all subscribe to her SubStack newsletter.
• Alexander — Description: “MSc Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience. Research interests in attractiveness & dating. YT – alex.datepsych.” Pinned post: “Redpillers and blackpillers seething as some of their golden cows get knocked down with data. Had a very good interview with Connor Tomlinson here.” Enough said.
• Ibagua Kihanovief — In my own words, discovered through her “handy riposte to anyone who claims that feminism is unnecessary in Korea,” whom I’ve already sung the praises of here. All of her work is in Korean, but she often includes English translations.
• Professor Michael Flood “Researcher on men, masculinities, gender, and violence prevention. Educator and advocate. Tweets my own. I strive for content-rich and evidence-based tweeting,” and great at respectfully responding to, interacting with, and ultimately shutting down the sorts of people and opinions I’m increasingly encountering myself.
• thetinmen — “”Widening perspectives around men. Uncomfortable conversations and ugly truths; the unpopular other half of gender equality, and men’s mental health.” The old me would hesitate to include them, as most of what they post I disagree with. But like Sammy said in Closing Time, they’re really not all the “bandits, sociopaths, or ignoramuses” you might expect. And while I think many of their messages are indeed ultimately flawed, they aren’t easily dismissed, and are well-presented and put together.
Brazenly learning tips and tricks from them to win alt-right friends and influence incels may sound a little calculating, especially if said alt-right friends and incels read this later, but to me it’s still fundamentally all about just learning communication skills. And besides which, strategizing and weaponizing those skills is what the alt-right already does:
And after all that, here finally are the descriptions and times of those segments of that BBC Woman’s Hour episode. Sorry not sorry that just posting a link seemed seemed insufficient, and I hope you and your future conversation partner likewise get inspired and talking by them, wherever you are on the political spectrum. Enjoy!
From 1:20-19:25:
“A woman who was stalked by her husband and then placed into witness protection with a new identity to escape him, says she feels like she’s the one being punished. She’s complained to the police about the way her case was handled after being told she failed an assessment and was no longer being supported by them in her new life. She spoke to our reporter Melanie Abbott, and says she felt completely cut adrift. We hear her story of how she had to uproot her two children and start a new life with a new job in a new town, while her husband is free to live wherever he likes. Academic Rachael Wheatley from the university of Derby tells Anita how she is training police to be better at dealing with stalkers and how victims need better support.”
From 19:25-29:35:
“A new report by the Trade Union Congress has highlighted a gender pension gap between what men and women are living on in retirement. The estimate it’s currently running at 40.5%, which is more than double the current gender pay gap. Nuala talks to Nikki Pound from the TUC and financial expert Sarah Pennells Consumer finance specialist at Royal London – pensions insurance provider about the issues facing women and possible solutions.”
And from 35:15 to 45:50:
“Writer and Podcaster Jackie Adedeji speaks to Nuala about her new Channel 4 documentary UNTOLD: My Big Boobs, a look into the impacts of having big boobs and the rise in breast reduction surgery. Sarah Ditum also joins to discuss the cultural trends of breasts through the years.”
(Alas, the linked video can’t be watched in Korea. Sigh. But for a change, it’s not the Korean government’s fault—the video is only available in the UK.)
But for all her flair, I think it was a little misdirected.
“I am very interested and concerned about hatred and discrimination, which hang as prevalent and thick in Korean society as air.”
Basically, she criticizes the controversy for being only the latest example of the ‘feminist check’ tactic the Korean manosphere engages in these days. Whereby they: go bananas over any alleged instance of a small penisfingergesture; dig deep to find evidence that those responsible have even the slightest of feminist leanings; then shrilly demand the company responsible fire them and remove the offending gesture.
This is more pernicious and impactful than it may sound to outside observers. Emboldened by the term “feminism/페미니즘/女性主義” more accurately meaning radical feminism in Korean, to most men and women alike, virtually anyone even only indirectly advocating for sexual equality can get tarred with that brush. And when that happens, say, for wearing t-shirts incels don’t like, companies are only too eager to throw those real or alleged “femis/페미” under the bus, all for the sake of appeasing the manosphere.
So I share her ire, and don’t want to get too hung up on semantics. It’s just that, precisely because the manosphere can be so loud and proud about what they doing, why they’re doing it, and who they’re hurting, with absolutely no subterfuge necessary, perhaps “bullshitting” isn’t the best way to describe the process.
Or, perhaps I only say that with the benefit of hindsight.
Because as if to prove her point, an even more bullshit controversy, over nonexistent government plans to switch the genders of emergency exit signs, is emerging as I type this a month later.
As you’ll see after her column, it’s a much more blatant example of what she describes. Especially when you contrast it with a real example, which there was a clear need for, made nationwide to the caregiver figures in subway escalator signs in the late-2000s. And which, to the best of my knowledge, did not result in any harm to anyone’s sense of manhood—no matter how deeply the Korean manosphere seems to feel threatened if the same ‘concessions’ were made today.
Left: the offending gesture, which is visible for precisely 0.1 second. Full screenshot source: 원정상 @YouTube. (For the record, I just thought it was too good a screenshot not to steal—I don’t know the YouTuber’s stance on the controversy.)
몇달 전 대학 때 친하게 지낸 남자 동기를 만나 들은 질문이다. 질문을 받은 뒤 처음 느낀 감정은 당황스러움이었다. 그동안 받아본 적 없는 질문이었기 때문이다. 페미니스트냐 아니냐를 따지는 게 무의미할 정도로, 나는 스스로 페미니스트가 아니라는 생각을 해본 적이 없던 터였다.
This is a question I was asked a few months ago, when I met a male classmate with whom I was close to in university. My first reaction was embarrassment. Because it was a question I’d never been asked before. I’d never thought of myself as *not* a feminist, to the point where it was meaningless to consider whether I was one or not.
“나는 페미니스트지.”
“Yea, I am a feminist.”
“왜 너 자신을 그렇게 규정해? 네가 생각하는 페미니즘이 뭐야?”
“Why do you define yourself like that? What do you think feminism is?”
“여성과 남성은 동등하고, 성별에서 오는 각종 차별을 없애야 한다는 거지.”
“I think it means women and men are equal, and so all kinds of sexual discrimination must be eliminated.”
“그건 인권 차원에서 당연한 거 아니야?”
“Isn’t that only natural from just from a human rights perspective though [So a feminist one isn’t necessary]?”
친구는 페미니즘의 방향에는 동의하면서도 페미니스트에 대해서는 부정적 생각을 가진 듯했다. 친구는 내게 “너의 정체성을 어느 하나로 규정하지 않길 바란다” “역차별당하고 있다고 주장하는 2030 남성들의 이야기도 귀담아들어달라”는 말을 남겼다.
Although my friend agreed with the general direction of feminism, he seemed to harbor negative thoughts about feminists themselves. He continued, “I hope you don’t define your identity as just this one thing,” and “Please listen to the stories of men in their 20s and 30s who claim they are being reverse discriminated.”
최근 게임 업계에서 일하는 여성 작가들을 향해 잇따르고 있는 ‘페미니즘 사상 검증’ 사태를 지켜보면서 당시 대화를 떠올린 건, 페미니스트를 옥죄는 사회 분위기가 전방위적이라는 생각 때문이었다. 친구의 질문 의도가 ‘사상 검증’일 것이라곤 생각하지 않는다. 다만, 이런 질문이 나와 동등한 위치에 선 사람의 ‘순수한 궁금증’에서 비롯된 것이 아니라 누군가를 검열하고, 억누르고, 일자리를 겨냥하고 있다면 말은 달라진다.
While watching the recent ‘feminist check’ [lit., ‘verification of feminist ideology’] that has been taking place against female writers working in the game industry, I remembered the conversation at that time because I thought that the social atmosphere that oppresses feminists is omnipresent. I don’t think the intention of my friend’s question [was malicious], to confirm that I was a feminist [and then target me on that basis]. However, if these questions do not arise from a place of genuine curiosity [and willingness to engage in dialogue] expressed by a person standing on equal footing with me, but instead is a form of sealioning aimed at censoring, suppressing, or targeting someone’s job, the story is different.
지난달 말 남초 사이트와 게임 업체 넥슨이 한 행동은 전형적인 ‘사상 검증’이었다. 남초 커뮤니티는 넥슨의 게임 ‘메이플스토리’ 홍보 영상에 등장하는 캐릭터의 손가락 모양을 두고 ‘남성 혐오’라고 주장했다. 근거는 빈약했다. 해당 영상을 작업한 하청 업체의 한 여성 직원이 자신의 사회관계망서비스 계정에 올린 페미니즘 옹호 발언이 전부였다. 전형적인 확증 편향이었지만 넥슨은 별다른 사실관계 확인 없이 해당 영상을 비공개하고 업체 쪽에 법적 대응을 예고했다.
At the end of last month, the actions taken by the manosphere sites and forums, and then the game company Nexon’s responses, were a typical example of the feminist check process. The manosphere claimed that the shape of the finger of the character appearing in the promotional video for Nexon’s game *MapleStory* was ‘man-hating.’ But the evidence was actually quite weak. A female employee of the subcontractor who worked on the video uploaded it to her social networking service account, and all she said was her defense of feminism. It was a typical confirmation bias, but Nexon made the video private without verifying the facts and announced legal action against the subcontractor she worked for?
이후 해당 작업물을 그린 이는 40대 남성 애니메이터라는 사실이 보도됐다. 주장의 근거가 사라졌으니, 남초 커뮤니티가 사과했을까. 아니다. 애초 사실 여부는 중요하지 않다는 듯, ‘언론의 보도가 거짓’이라거나 ‘남페미는 문제가 아니냐’며 방향을 틀었다. 그사이 해당 여성 직원은 개인 신상 정보가 털리고 온갖 욕설을 듣는 등 사이버불링을 당했다.
However, it was later reported that the person who drew the work was actually a male animator in his 40s. Now that the basis for the claim has disappeared, did the manosphere apologize? Not at all. In the first place, it seemed as if it didn’t matter whether it was true or not. And then they changed direction by saying, “The media’s reports were false,” or “Aren’t male feminists the real problem here?” Meanwhile, the female employee suffered cyberbullying, including having her personal information stolen and receiving all kinds of abusive language.
퓰리처상을 받은 영국의 저널리스트 제임스 볼은 책 ‘개소리는 어떻게 세상을 정복했는가’에서 ‘진실이든 거짓이든 신경 쓰지 않는 사람들이 만들어내는 그럴싸한 허구의 담론’을 ‘개소리’(bullshit)라고 말했다. 개소리꾼의 개소리는 거짓말과 달리 자신이 원하는 결과를 얻기 위해 최소한의 진실조차 중요하지 않기에 거짓말보다 해롭고, 팩트로 대응해도 힘을 잃지 않는다고 했다.
In his book Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World (2021), Pulitzer Prize-winning British journalist James Ball said that ‘bullshit’ is “a specious fictional discourse created by people who do not care whether it is true or false.” He said that unlike lies, this, the most bullshit of bullshits, is more harmful than lies because even the minimum amount of truth is not important to achieve the results one wants, and it does not lose its power even if it is responded to with facts.
“업장에서 왜 사회운동을 하냐”(허은아 국민의힘 의원), “악질적인 점은 실수가 아니라 의도적이라는 데 있다”(이상헌 더불어민주당 의원), “의도를 가지고 넣었다면 조롱”(류호정 정의당 의원)이라는 정치인들의 반응은 ‘개소리’ 기세를 더 강화할 뿐이었다. 정치권의 메시지는 ‘사상 검증을 하지 말라’ ‘페미니스트가 뭐가 문제냐’여야 했다. 기업은 개소리꾼의 개소리를 수용할 것이 아니라 무시해야 했다. 언론은 ‘집게손 논란’이라는 제목으로 개소리를 앞다퉈 보도하지 말아야 했다.
The politicians’ responses—“Why are you engaging in social movements at your workplace?” (People Power Party Rep. Heo Eun-ah), “The malicious point is not that it was a mistake, but that it was intentional” (Democratic Party Rep. Lee Sang-heon), “If it was put in with intention, it would be ridiculed” (Justice Party Rep. Ryu Ho-jeong)—only added to the bullshit’s momentum. Instead, the message from the political world should have been, “Don’t engage in a feminist check,” and “What’s the problem with feminists anyway?” Companies should have ignored this bullshit of bullshits, not blindly accepted it, and the media should not have rushed to report it under the title ‘Claw Hand Controversy.’
‘페미니스트는 남성 혐오론자이기 때문에 그런 집게손가락 모양을 넣었을 것’이라는 ‘개소리 담론’에 기업, 정치인, 언론 등이 동조한 결과는 ‘일터를 잃는 노동자’다. 2016년 ‘소녀에게 왕자는 필요 없다’는 글이 쓰인 티셔츠를 입었다는 이유로 교체된 성우처럼, 과거 에스엔에스에 페미니즘 관련 글을 올렸다는 이유로 2023년에 계약 해지된 게임 ‘림버스 컴퍼니’의 그림작가처럼 말이다.
The result of companies, politicians, media, and so on agreeing with the bullshit discourse, that “feminists must have put that index finger symbol because they are male haters,” is workers losing their jobs. Just like the voice actor who was replaced in 2016 for wearing a T-shirt with the words “Girls do not need a prince” written on it, the illustrator of the game Limbus Company whose contract was terminated in 2023 for [retweeting tweets that used derogatory terms for men].
개소리를 하며 ‘사상 검증’을 정당화하는 이들에게 말해주자. 너희 주장은 개소리라고. 페미니즘이 뭐가 문제냐고. 너희들이 페미니즘을 알긴 아느냐고.
Let’s tell those who spew bullshit in the name of feminist checks: Your arguments are bullshit. What’s the problem with feminism anyway? Do you guys even know *anything* about feminism? (END)
Now fast forward to mid-January 2024, when multiple media outletsreported that in the name of gender equality, the government was immediately replacing the ‘male’ pictogram in some of the emergency exit signs nationwide with more obviously ‘female’ ones. Some outlets added that it was at the behest of women’s groups.
I’m sure I don’t need to outline the absurdities of such a plan. Nor that (most of) the multiple, eminently justifiable criticisms, did not necessarily stem from misogyny.
But more often than not, feminists became the target anyway.
Because at best, the new design was actually just one of many possibilities considered for updating the signs, to replace the existing ones only as per needed (so, no extra cost at all). Whereas at worst—and it’s unclear which applies, frankly—it was a complete fabrication of the media.
As were the supposed women’s groups that were demanding it:
직장인 A씨(29)는 “새 픽토그램을 보니 긴 머리에 치마를 입고 가슴 부분이 튀어나와 있었다”며 “여성 중에 이런 기호를 원하는 사람이 실제로 얼마나 되겠냐. 오히려 여성을 희화화한 듯하다”라고 말했다. 한 누리꾼은 “누군가 일부러 논란을 만들었다고 생각될 정도”라고 했다.
한 여성단체 관계자는 “어떤 기사에선 ‘여성단체 등이 요구해왔기 때문’이란 식으로 설명했던데, 그런 요구를 한 단체가 어디에 있나. 괴담 수준의 터무니없는 얘기”라며 “오히려 성 고정관념을 고착화하는 그림이다”라고 비판했다. (Kyunghyang Shinmun)
Office worker A (29) said, “When I looked at the new pictogram, I saw her with long hair and a skirt and her breasts sticking out,” adding, “How many women actually want this symbol? “In fact, it seems like a caricature of women.” One netizen said, “It almost makes you think someone created controversy on purpose.”
An official from a women’s group said, “In some articles, it was explained as ‘because women’s groups have been making demands,’ but where is the group that made such demands?” “It is an absurd story at the level of a ghost story,” he criticized, adding, “Rather, it is a picture that perpetuates gender stereotypes.”
The deceit involved can be staggeringly blatant and obvious. I’ve even caught out with one bullshit story myself. When, after ‘reporting’ on a literally non-existent controversy over Berry Good member Johyun‘s cosplay above, then getting the sought-after inflamed response from the manosphere, the media added insult to injury by blaming the entire controversy on the reports of a single female reporter, who criticized Johyun for her overexposure despite praising male nudity in previous articles.
Only, her article on Johyun wasn’t published until several hours after news about about the controversy first appeared. (And ironically, her article wasn’t at all like it was described; in fact, they it was just as clickbaity as everyone else’s, and provided no basis to label her a feminist.)
But still: these three cases alone are insufficient evidence of systematic misogyny by Korean journalists and the media. I do strongly suspect though, that a thorough investigation by academics, media-watchdogs, and/or feminist groups will undoubtedly reveal that such an agenda exists. Likely, many such investigations have already been conducted, so I’ll follow this post up with those at a later date.
In the meantime, Korean or otherwise, I will never, ever trust any news source that makes claims about unnamed women’s and feminist groups.
As part of my own 2024 agenda though, I try to highlight the positive where I can, and can’t end on that note.
So, with my apologies for the crappy quality of my digital camera back in the late-2000s, finally let me remind you of when, in a bid to challenge antiquated gender roles and encourage more equitable childcare between parents, subway-caregiver signs with a female figure were gradually replacedwith an androgynous one. They were only replaced as per needed, so they didn’t cost extra money, leaving even the most vitriolic of incels struggling to oppose them without exposing their misogyny. Which is probably why I haven’t actually seen one with a female caregiver ever since.
Only, doing my due diligence, I’m sorry to report that today I learned my experience isn’t at all universal (let alone my nonexistent experience of female spaces). That the initiative stalled, and that as of 2019, many Seoul subway stations still have almost entirely female caregivers in their signs. Most ironically and symbolically perhaps, in Gangnam Station, where 100% of them are of women:
An ad at my local Busan subway station, which I’d never given a second thought to until today. I had no reason to—with a title and image like that, I’d assumed it was for some kind of beauty app or filter.
Then my aging eyes finally noticed the “딥페이크/Deepfake,” and I did a double-take:
It reads:
당신의 얼굴 괜찮습니까?
딥페이크로 인한 성 범죄가 매년 증가하고 있습니다. 성폭력처벌법 제14조의 2에 의거해 타인의 얼굴이나 신체 등을 허위 영상물로 만들거나 배포하면 5년 이하 징역 또는 5천만 원 인하의 벌금에 처하게 됩니다.
Is Your Face Okay?
Sex crimes caused by deepfakes are increasing every year. Pursuant to Article 14-2 of the Sexual Violence Punishment Act, anyone who creates or distributes a false video of another person’s face or body is subject to imprisonment for up to 5 years or a fine of up to 50 million won.
This text, a bland rehashing of the law, feels like a real missed opportunity.
The issue is who this ad is aimed at. The “Is Your Face Okay?” headline seems aimed addressed to victims, and indeed a Korean friend assures me that it is. However, surely most victims aren’t unaware that deepfakes are illegal? Surely, more of a concern would likely be feelings of embarrassment, shame, that they themselves were to blame for them in some way, and/or worries about the impact on their jobs and livelihoods? So, the priority should be giving victims assurances that these are not at all the case, and that they could receive all the help, support, lack of judgement, and legal aid they needed at the Center.
In their absence, a more creative alternative is that the headline is a double entendre intended to mean “Aren’t You Red-faced/Ashamed?” to potential perpetrators, then letting them know what might happen if they get caught.
Which applies? Unfortunately, there’s no further information about it on the Busan Gender-based Violence Prevention Center’s website, nor does Googling/Navering yield any results.
So, without disputing the Center’s good intentions for a moment, again I’m forced to defer to my friend’s judgement. In which case, I think the poster really misses the mark.
Organized again by Rhea Metituk (rhealm@gmail.com) of the KOTESOLWomen and Gender Equality Special Interest Group, at the moment there’s absolutely no agenda other than everyone being welcome to join, that it won’t be recorded, and that you can rest assured that Rhea will be graciously but ruthlessly ensuring the KOTESOL Code of Conduct is followed by all participants. So please do get in touch with myself or Rhea if you’d like to be on the list to receive the private Zoom link closer to the event, and we’d appreciate any ideas for discussion questions before the day. Thanks!
See you there!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
For sure, the patriarchy harms men just as much as women, and 3x more Korean men than women attempt suicide overall. But this dramatic reversal among Korean 20-somethings is truly shocking.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Photo by Brandon Wong on Unsplash.
Not going to lie—when first reading the following tweet, this old Korea book geek felt a frisson of recognition. That warm feeling, and wanting to quickly joke about my overwhelming confirmation bias, is what initially made me want to share. Thinking about the horrifying content only came later:
Feeding into what I would learn from Under Construction and other sources about the strength of egalitarian and democratic ideals in Korea, which the education system promoted even during the height of its various military dictatorships, that point really stuck with me 20 years ago. It’s been in the back of my mind when thinking about Korean workplaces and marriages ever since.
Then I read the tweet again, and it finally hit me what so little change in two decades actually meant—”Women in their 20s are collapsing into dystopian depression.”
That’s from what the link was to—an interview of Professor Kim Hyeon-ah (김현아) of Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, author of My Daughter Was Quietly Falling Apart (딸이 조용히 무너져 있었다; 2023), about her struggles with her bipolar daughter who self-harmed and attempted suicide.
Through it, I learned that although men still comprise the bulk—three quarters—of Korean suicides overall, as myself and probably everyone reading would expect, the (translation) “number of female suicides has increased by 64.5% since 2015, compared to 19.7% for men. Also, that as of 2020, mood disorders such as depression were twice as common among women as among men, and were especially prevalent among those in their 20s.”
Only, those suicide statistics, by being generalized to all women, annoyed more than clarified.
You see, by coincidence I’d read yesterday that the smoking rate for Korean women was now 4.5%. Which was a huge red flag. Because as I demonstrated in my series on that a decade ago, the taboos surrounding female smoking in Korea meant rates varied hugely by age, with the rate for 19-29 year-olds then coming to 23.1%, and rising quickly. So quickly in fact, I’d estimate that their rate is now closer to 33%, and will try to confirm that in a much-needed follow-up to that series for you soon.
With that in mind, while a 64.5% rise in suicide rates for Korean women is of course terrible, as is a 19.7% rise for men, it doesn’t sound so dramatic considering the much, much lower figures for women overall. With not unlimited funds available for suicide prevention measures, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that, put that way, both policymakers and the public might be swayed into downplaying the changing gender dynamics of the problem. That perhaps specific age and sex-based policies aren’t necessarily the best use of resources.
I’m absolutely not blaming the reporter here, or claiming any sort of agenda over a few statistics that should have been presented differently. But it did mean an age-based breakdown of those suicide statistics was absolutely necessary, which I found in The Korea Bizwire:
When analyzed by gender, the highest rate [of self harm and suicide attempts] among males was among those over 80 years old (125.9 per 100,000), followed by those in their twenties (105.4), teenagers (69.1), and those in their thirties (65).
Among females, the highest rate was in those in their twenties (284.8 per 100,000), followed by teenagers (257.8), those in their thirties (119.9), and those in their forties (86.3).
And on that note, my apologies. This was supposed to be a light post, expressing my joy at finding something so similar to something meaningful that I once read 20 years ago. Then, joking at this curmudgeon’s ever-growing confirmation bias, and admonishing him to constantly seek sources that challenge his outdated views. Only now having done precisely that…I simply don’t know what to say.
Most suicide victims worldwide being men, I am just too shocked. Not just that the rate for Korean women in their 20s is higher than than that for men at all, but that also it’s almost triple. For the first time ever, this issue makes me genuinely scared for my daughters, whom I don’t live with any longer and don’t see day to day, and one of whom will be doing the university entrance exam this year.
(Also available as an in-person lecture at 6PM, Monday, November 13 at The Institute of Fine Arts, 1 East 78th Street, New York.)
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes. Image source (cropped): NYU The Institute of Fine Arts newsletter. NSFW images follow.
For the sake of shorter, more impactful and easy-to-remember announcements, I’m posting about notices about webinars and virtual lectures (that I’m able to attend) separately from now on.
Sorry that this one comes so last minute, but as far as I know registration for the webinar is available right up until the event itself:
“As part of the Institute of Fine Arts’ (Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, X/Twitter) ongoing tradition of inviting contemporary artists to speak about their practices in the Duke House Lecture Hall, this year’s Artists at the Institute Lecture Series invites four artists who explore the body as a site of confrontation. The body is continuously subjected to political, social, and aesthetic judgments both within and outside of the art historical canon. Whether it be through the ongoing battle with reproductive rights or the modification of the body in digital and social media, this phenomena proves to be omnipresent. Contemporary artists are constantly grappling with conceptions of corporeality, and each artist brings a diverse approach to what this means to them. This year’s series is committed to uplifting the voices of women working in representational practices across a range of media, styles, and backgrounds. Through feminist, cross-cultural, and art historical methods, these artists challenge the contours of corporeal form, transcending the limitations and restrictions that have bound the female body to the canonical canvas, and imagining how such liberation might transform aesthetics.”
Sources: NYU Institute of Fine Arts Instagram & Newsletter.
“For our second installment of Artists at the Institute, Visions of Corporeality, lecture series we are excited to welcome Misha Japanwala. Misha Japanwala (b. 1995, London, England and raised in Karachi, Pakistan) is a Pakistani artist and fashion designer, whose work is rooted in the rejection and deconstruction of shame attached to one’s body, and discussion of themes such as bodily autonomy, gender based violence, moral policing, sexuality and censorship.” (Instagram, homepage.)
“In our second installment of this series, Misha will touch upon what it means to be a Pakistani woman familiar with the historical objectification, commodification and control exerted on marginalized bodies by societies and systems enveloped in patriarchy.”
And as a reward for those you still reading, please click here to register for the next virtual lecture I’ll be announcing tomorrow: “Remedy, Mobility, and the Feminized Consumption of Beauty in Post-Authoritarian South Korea,” a virtual talk featuring So-Rim Lee from the University of Pennsylvania, and presented by the Korean Studies Research Network. In South Korean time, that event will be on Thursday, November 16, again at 8am.
My TBR pile is glorious, and it is teetering. So, I really should have known better than to even glance at the New Book Networks feed…
Assuming I can actually find the space then, this latest, slightly pricey candidate is all due to Tuesday’s interview of Dr. Gitte Marianne Hansen and Dr. Fabio Gygi, editors of The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (NIAS Press, 2022). Specifically, the section from 28:35-31:10 where Dr. Gygi talks about Chapter 6, in which his colleague, Dr. R. J. Simpkins, shares his findings from months of observing and talking to buskers and street performers near a Tokyo train station. Like me, listening will probably immediately remind you too, my beloved tribe (*hugs*), of Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World by Leslie Kern (Verso, 2020; see my review here). You also get how tempted I am right now then, as I almost seem to hear the soft serenade of “지금 택배로 주문하면 11월 24일 출고” sweetly whispered into my ear…Oh! Aladin, you tease…
Ahem.
With no further ado then, sorry for any mistakes in my transcript of that section of the podcast below. And please don’t worry about giving offense if you’d rather jump ahead to a reviewer’s excellent summary below that instead!
“Well, I think this is a wonderful chapter, because Rob, the author, was actually playing as a street musician himself, and that’s how he entered the field, and he’s been there for quite a long time, and it’s a wonderful ethnography, and very detailed. But towards the end he realized, ‘Well, I’m only talking to men. I know a few female performers but it seems to be a very different experience for them.’ So he started to focus a little bit more on the differences, and one of the things that he really found was that it’s all about space-making.”
“So, it’s a public space, you’re exposed to the gaze of the passers-by, but as a musician or performer you have to create…you have to take this public space and turn it into something else, like a concert venue or a venue for self-expression. And this of course takes on a very strong gender dimension. So men felt very much at ease, you know…especially the more rock-type musicians who would just start to play…there would be a good vibration and people would sort of assemble. But women working as performers felt very much exposed in a very different way. Now, you have to imagine, during commuter rush hour it’s mostly men…it’s salarymen who come back from work, often in a state of inebriation, and there would be a lot of sexual harassment, there would be a lot of unwanted attention, or rather boundary-breaking attention, so people would come, they would listen to a song, and then they would try to chat you up or get close or break the sort-of boundaries that you have created. And so there was a much greater sense of vulnerability, and what he sort-of concluded from that is a public space is also to a strong degree male-coded, it’s the male gaze that defines what is happening.”
“So if you expose yourself to that, you have to be aware of the gendered dynamics of the space and so his artists chose very different and very creative strategies [to deal with those]…Reyna(?) for example performed in a mask to deflect from the fact that she was a female performer, and so it is very important to understand that this public sphere itself is gendered…not something we would normally, you know, have a good understanding of.”
These difficulties and dangers are underscored by co-editor Dr. Hansen then going on to note that this was the most difficult subject in the book for any of the contributors to research. Because, unlike with other venues and performances, the rules of engagement (and enforcement) were not set. My personal additional takeaway from that being, those rules were also more open to exploitation and abuse by those with (male) privilege.
For the busier feminist book geek among you though, as promised here is an excellent summary of Dr. Simpkins’ chapter by Dr. Kai E.Tsao, taken from her review in Feminist Encounters:
“Simpkins observed and interviewed music performers at a Tokyo station, and his chapter demonstrates that the musicians’ experiences of dis/comfort, im/mobility, security and threat, as well as their coping strategies, are all gendered. Male musicians considered their experience, occupying and transgressing in public space, as performing their authentic self and self-realisation. This sentiment was not shared by the female musicians. Instead, they performed ‘charm’ and created a ‘non-threatening atmosphere’ to navigate social interactions in a station space with a predominantly male presence. Public space around the station is coded: compared to their male counterparts who ‘naturally’ hung around to interact with their supporters, female musicians were much more cautious about the risks of inviting passers-by to take an interest in their performance. This makes me wonder: how is the performance of invitation gendered? How might female musicians be perceived if they invited an audience in a space where they were ‘not supposed to be’?”
And which also makes me wonder, what are the Korean parallels? Where are those spaces?
Frankly, I can’t really think of any. In fact, the only place I ever encounter buskers and street performers at all is the main drag of Gwangalli Beach close to where I live, which ironically I don’t visit very often because it’s always jam-packed with happy, 20-something, heterosexual couples (sigh). That very different audience composition to a busy Tokyo subway station then, as well as the very public and open setting, would likely mean performances there were almost completely devoid of the (negative) gendered dynamics described above.
Maybe various Korean laws are responsible for making them much less common than in Japan?
Or maybe not? Are there buskers in, say, Hongdae in Seoul? In Nampo-dong here in Busan, which I haven’t visited for years? Performers in busy Seoul subway stations? Please do let me know then, if know of any similar Korean spaces to what Dr. Simpkins outlines in Tokyo, and your experiences of them. And how do think the gender dynamics play out in those?
Less than 20 years ago, Korean women could get assaulted for publicly smoking. Less than 2 days ago, a short-haired woman in Jinju did get assaulted for the same, real reason—openly defying restrictive gender norms.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes. Image sources (adapted): @TheKpopProf on X/Twitter and @cottonbro at Pexels.
An academic friend has asked for help for her students, who are having trouble finding participants for surveys they need to conduct as part of their coursework.
If you’re eligible, both surveys are completely anonymous, and each should just take just a few minutes to complete.
The first is about how women feel about the way women and young girls are portrayed in anime/hentai. Your nationality is not important, but it is open to women and non-binary participants only.
The second is about smoking habits and perceptions of men and women smoking in Korea, and is open to all Korean smokers, although Korean ability is not required.
Alas, I don’t think I’ve written anything much at all about anime. But back between 2010-2013, I did write the long series below about the gender politics of smoking in Korea, prompted by an incident in the news about a young woman getting physically attacked on the street for openly doing so. So I can certainly understand what prompted the line of questioning in that survey, and am very interested in learning from the students about how much things have changed in the last 10 years.
Fortunately, cases of women getting assaulted in Korea for smoking now seem like ancient history. But then it was never really about smoking, was it? The real reason female smokers were assaulted back then was for openly defying restrictive gender norms and roles. And, sadly, as more and more women are brave enough to do so in other aspects of Korean social life, it seems the rates of assault against them are only increasing in response. Most recently, with a woman in Jinju this week being attacked for having short hair.
I really didn’t intend to sound so cynical. And I’m not—preventing such crimes starts with undermining the attitudes behind them, and determining how prevalent they are helps towards that. So, thanks in advance for your help with the surveys, and please feel free to share them with your networks!
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an 18th Century woman of letters, had a keen eye for ignorant European male travel writers who projected their sexual fantasies onto Turkish women, and why they waxed lyrical about women’s suffering under barbarous Turkish men. Her skills at exposing hidden agendas, and at highlighting women’s shared experiences of misogyny, rather than stressing exoticism and difference, remain just as useful and necessary today.
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes. Photo, right, by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash.
Or not? Perish the thought. Still, while this particular tome does make its central point that orientalism “is profoundly heterogeneous,” I can concede it’s also very academic and literary and critical-theory heavy, requiring a lot of concentration. So, if you’re actually just trying to impress fellow bibliophiles and geeks on the subway in the mornings with it, or beat crippling insomnia in the evenings when that fails to elicit the companionship you seek, much of it will simply fail to stick.
But of the two parts that did stand out to me, which I’ll highlight in two separate posts, I wasn’t expecting the first to make me feel so…uncomfortable.
Specifically, it was the second chapter on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’sTurkish Embassy Letters, a collection of her reflections on her travels through the Ottoman Empire between 1716 and 1718, published in 1763 just after her death. In those, she criticized European men’s writings about Turkish men and women for presenting the former as barbarous, and using the alleged civilized treatment of women in Christendom as evidence of that, compared to their supposed abject misery under Islam in Turkey. In other words, they presented a false dichotomy between a feminist West and patriarchal East that, well, you could probably see faint echoes of in my own first attempts writing about Korea nearly two decades ago.
Image: Young Woman Reading, 1880 by Osman Hamdi Bey (Turkish, 1842–1910).
Mercifully, the offending posts have long since been deleted. I don’t think I could ever have been accused of projecting my sexual fantasies onto Korean women like Montagu’s male contemporaries did Turkish women either, let alone doing so while acknowledging they had no knowledge on which to base those fantasies whatsoever, as we’ll see.
But that false dichotomy? Stressing the differences between the men and women ‘over there’ compared to ‘here,’ rather than emphasizing shared experiences and potential solutions to, say, overcoming the patriarchy?
That’s definitely something to be remain wary of. In particular, when so many negatives of women’s position in Korea are genuinely objectively worse than in the countries interested English-speaking readers tend to hail from, it’s deceptively easy for any Korea-related news to simply confirm one’s preexisting prejudices and stereotypes about Korean men and women, or to pander to those if you want your work to be read. And I’m just as open to temptation as anyone.
So, to help maintain that awareness, let me highlight the relevant passages from the second chapter of Critical Terrains for you here. Starting with the first mention of the letters on page 31:
Then on page 32, introducing the crucial additional theme that for all her proto-feminism, Montagu was also very elitist and aristocratic, both in her concerns and in the Turkish women she most interacted with. But for more on that, you will have to read the chapter for yourself sorry!
Then on page 38, on one of those European men waxing lyrical about what goes on in the fabled harems, despite never actually visiting one…
Continuing with yet another man doing the same:
Continuing past the page break into page 39:
Continuing:
Continuing:
Page 40, which I especially liked for its point about Turkish and European women’s shared experiences:
And finally from page 44 (NSFW image coming below):
If you’ll please bear with me a moment, Orientalism, I find, is a bit like the Theory of Relativity. (Hey, I did ask you.) As in, like my physics professor once pointed out back when I was studying to become a professional astronomer (it’s a long story), Einstein’s theory, for all the creativity, originality, and genius behind it, is actually quite simple to understand after a couple of lectures or good YouTube videos. Which is my somewhat arcane excuse for why, wanting to learn more about Lady Montagu, I consulted my other books exclusively devoted to Orientalism, and discovered to my horror and shame that I actually only had two: Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said (1993), and The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse by Irvin C. Schick (1999). Alas, Said didn’t mention Lady Montagu at all (perhaps it’s time to finally purchase Orientalism?). But Schick did…
…and then I finally noticed a certain similarity of cover theme with that of Critical Terrains. Potential accusations of hypocrisy by authors and/or publishers and a certain blogger aside though, and how much that extends to the genre as a whole or not (Culture and Imperialism actually has quite a bland cover), obviously both covers were used to sell more copies of both books. Or, to put it crudely, there was an agenda behind the choice to put naked Oriental women on both.
Which finally brings me to how, even 150 years after the publication of Montagu’s letters, Schick explains that the British public, industry, government, and press, for a wide variety of reasons and agendas, were all just too fundamentally committed to their own agendas—an alternative, collective ‘truth’ about the Orient so to speak—to really care less about what its men and women were actually like. Which is also why, sadly, Montagu’s letters ultimately made little impact:
Is contemporary Korean dance always as hypnotic as this? Have I been wholly misjudging it all these years?
Actually, if you’re at all knowledgeable, please reserve your answers for the comments. Better that most readers approach the video with no preconceptions like I did, puzzled at the notification from an unfamiliar YouTube channel on my phone. Better still, that first they turn off the lights, get close to their screens, plug in their headphones or ear buds, are slightly sleepy, drunk, or high…and be ready for their jaws to hit the floor:
The choreographer and performer is Jinyeob Cha (차진엽) founder of Collective A, an interdisciplinary dance performance group, and who is probably best known for having been the director of the choreography for the opening and closing ceremony of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games. But the reason I personally was subscribed to her channel was because in March 2022, London Korea Links wrote about her and Collective A’s performance there of “MIIN: Body to Body,” in which Cha:
“…examines perceptions of beauty and femininity beyond societal norms and traditions.”
“Accompanied by a hypnotic soundscape created by two acclaimed musicians based in Seoul, Eun-yong Sim, from Korean Avant-rock band Jambinai, and haihm, an electronic musician, six female dancers flit between precise, discreet, feminine poses and aggressive, erratic movements to embody all aspects of a woman.”
“Miin (미인) is a Korean word meaning ‘beautiful person’, but is more often used as a synonym for ‘beautiful woman’. This work challenges the meaning of ‘beauty’ and encourages women to embrace their bodies as they are without succumbing to unrealistic expectations.”
She’d slipped my mind though, because this was the first upload on her channel in a year. There seems to be little information specifically about the “원형하는 몸: round1” (“Body Go-round: round 1”) performance in English available too (or at least that I could find), which is surprising because it was actually first performed in 2021. What I could find then, was a quick explanation in the blurb to another UK performance in September 2022, that explained it was:
“…a genre-bending, mixed reality, dance spectacle inspired by the process of melting to evaporation in the water cycle.”
“Looming above the stage, a giant ice formation slowly melts as performers respond to the process of circulation and transition through dance. Each drop shaping the sound and visual landscape of the stage influences the interaction of each body in the space.”
And in Korean, a blurb from the tumblbug page used to raise funds for it, that at least hints at feminist themes:
차진엽 작업의 중심은 한 인간으로서의 인간성, 여성으로서의 여성성을 둘러싼 몸의 안과 밖을 연결하기 위해 몸을 둘러싸고 있는 세상에 관심을 두며, 몸/몸짓 을 통해 끊임없이 존재에 대해 질문한다. 이는 곧 예술행위를 통해 자기 자신의 본질적 가치를 찾아가는 여정이며 collective A의 궁극적인 모토이다.
The center of Cha Jin-yeop’s work focuses on the world surrounding the body in order to connect the inside and outside of the body surrounding humanity as a human being and femininity as a woman, and constantly questions existence through body/gesture. This is a journey to discover one’s own intrinsic value through artistic activities and is the ultimate motto of collective A.
And finally, a in-depth making-of video on her channel, in which she likely expands on those themes at some point:
Only “likely” though, because of her background (so…very likely!), and because I haven’t had the chance to watch myself yet sorry—powerpoints for tomorrow’s lectures beckon. But please do let me know if you’re interested but can’t speak Korean, and I’ll watch properly and translate the relevant segments as soon as I can. (I’m interested too!)
In the meantime, why not check out more of her performances on her YouTube channel? ;)
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
It seems my blog is devolving into rambling book recommendations about life, the universe, and female sexuality. Sorry not sorry!
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes. Photo by John Cahil Rom at Pexels.
But seriously, longform Korea-related content is coming soon.
In the meantime, you may recall one of my most recent longform posts was on how we talk about biological, sex-based differences. Like men’s slightly better ability to mentally manipulate 3D objects, or women’s to endure long-term pain.
I’d recently been forced to confront beliefs about those I’d held for nearly 30 years, and found them wanting. In the process, I learned so much from so many sources in so short a space of time, that I just had to share.
Naturally then, almost no one read it!
So, not going to lie—my first of six goals today is highlighting it again for anyone who may have missed it the first time.
To help persuade you, the spark was a passage in Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (2019), about how gender role expectations and social pressure prevent most girls and women from devoting themselves to their passions, whereas boys and men are giving much freer reign to obsess. So, more of their numbers going on to dominate in and excel in various stereotypical male fields like chess or coding was no simple consequence of those sex differences alone. Also, I read elsewhere that, despite the differences being very real, and many of them undeniably innate, people’s brains were remarkably pliable too, requiring surprisingly little training to overcome them.
And if that sounds interesting, let proceed with my second goal—availing myself of the opportunity to not only recommend Invisible Women, but also Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon (2023), which I’ve recently ordered because reviews (Undark, The Atlantic) indicate it discusses many of those themes. Let me recommend The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality by Randy Thornhill and Steven W Gangestad (2008) too, which I’ve also just ordered because it’s actually what Eve first reminded me of, and because it’s easily the most thorough, most challenging and demanding, but also most rewarding tome I’ve ever encountered on its subject. (Much more academic and narrowly focused than Eve though, see here for a positive review, here for a negative one, and here for the authors’ response to the latter.)
Which is all quite the introduction to why today’s title quote jumped out at me from “Haven” by Alice Munro, part of the short story collection Dear Life (2012), which I’ll give the full passage it’s from in a moment. All that explanation felt necessary to fully convey the connection I felt though, and why it brought me the frisson of joy it did, which I wanted to share—my third goal today.
But before I do pass it on, frankly it feels more important to explain how I came to be reading Dear Life in the first place. Which was actually because I first read the lesbian classic, The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952; renamed as Carol, 1990), and specifically because this passage from Chapter 10 really resonated with me:
Therese watched Abby’s fork cutting the scaloppine into small bites before she picked up any. “Do you take trips a lot with Carol?”
“A lot? No, why?” Abby asked.
“I should think you’d be good for her. Because Carol’s so serious.” Therese wished she could lead the conversation to the heart of things, but just where the heart of things was, she didn’t know. The wine ran slow and warm in her veins, down to her finger tips.
“Not all the time.” Abby corrected, with the laughter under the surface of her voice, as it had been in the first word Therese had heard her say.
The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was stranded on the brink. Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.
I return to it often, because—please bear with me a moment—I’ve lived in Korea for most of my life, where house parties are just not a thing. Compared to what I remember of social gatherings in my 20s in New Zealand then, those I’ve been to here have tended to be quite structured, where most people already knew each other. Yes, I’m generalizing, and, now that I’m in my late-40s, maybe it’s just that I don’t get invites from the cool kids anymore. But add that Koreans generally don’t strike up conversations with strangers in coffee shops or on the subway either, least of all bald middle-aged white men they assume can’t speak any Korean, then I do so miss the opportunities parties gave for meeting interesting strangers and having deep conversations. Having the type of encounters that render evenings so memorable and magical for being pregnant with possibility, with friendships, romances, careers, and hopes and dreams hinging on what’s said—or not said—in a moment, before fracturing into a multitude of unreachable, mysterious alternate timelines and what ifs ever after.
Everyone has books and films that are merely good for them, until a passage, moment, scene, glance or you name it renders it great instead. For Carol the book, the above passage is that tipping point for me. And I type it all out here, rather than being content with photographing the page in the book for you, in my fourth goal, or rather hope, that somewhere out there are others who feel exactly the same way about it, and that one day we’re able to make a connection through them googling it :)
Alas, I haven’t actually watched the film yet—ironically, the better adaptations are, the less enthusiastic I am about watching, because I know what to expect. My fifth goal then, is to ask those that have watched, does that scene get included? How are the inner dialogue and tension conveyed? Please let me know!
Which finally brings me to the blurb to Dear Life then.
Thank you for reading this far. And, if you have, you’ll see why I was instantly sold on it:
And here’s the specific passage from “Haven” which precipitated this whole post. For context, the main character, a girl in her late-teens, has to live with her uncle and aunt while her parents spend a year abroad. Her uncle, perhaps not so much patriarchal as deeply controlling, has a sister (Mona), a gifted classical musician, and an unusually tall woman, whom he resents for vague, largely undisclosed reasons. So much so, that the main character only learns of the very existence of her aunt by accident:
Some of my ideas had changed during the time I had been living with my aunt and uncle. For instance, I was no longer so uncritical about people like Mona. Or about Mona herself, and her music and her career. I did not believe that she was—or had been—a freak, but I could understand how some people might think so. It wasn’t just her big bones and her big white nose, and the violin and the somewhat silly way you had to hold it—it was the music itself and her devotion to it. Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.
And earlier in the same story, for even more context, and the obvious parallels with the inexplicable hatred all too many obsessive middle-aged male fans of, say, American football share, with anything whatsoever teenage girls like:
“…They’ve got too much sense, your parents. Too much sense to join all these people who are fussing and clapping and carrying on like [classical music concerts are] just the wonder of the world. You know the kind of people I mean? They’re lying. A load of horse manure. All in the hope of appearing high-class. Or more likely giving in to their wives’ hope to appear high-class. Remember that when you get out in the world. Okay?”
I agreed to remember. I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people thought that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it. so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra—I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it.
But I didn’t go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.
Did my providing a photo of the blurb, rather than my typing it out à la the passage from Carol, foreshadow my ultimate disappointment with the book though? Or did my adorable cats distract?
Because in so many of the stories, the characters just didn’t feel fully-formed, particularly in the senses that we could predict their actions and know what they were feeling. While the promised “unexpected turns” were very real then, I tended to find them jarring. And those “quiet depths”? Only the results of our own imaginations, which we’re forced to project into the voids that are the characters’ back stories. What does—can—a reader take away then, with say a married female character having a sudden tryst with a random man, when we know so little about ther, let alone her husband or the state of their marriage?
But I realize grandiose, evocative blurbs are ripe for criticism, and easy to feel duped by. I also realize the book is critically acclaimed, that I’m in a minority of bibliophiles in disliking it, and that having to fill the blanks with one’s own imagination would actually be a draw for many people. (Before I’m pigeonholed for having supposedly blunt, direct, and altogether much too shallow tastes though, its a draw for me too actually. But I do have limits.) So my sixth and final goal is to please hear from and engage with anyone who has read Dear Life themselves. Until then, I’m forced to google for definitive analysis instead. And find vindication in my charges of overprojection, or should I say unconcious need to compensate for those voids, in the very first hit being a two-hour long video. No, not about the book, which would be reasonable. Just about the first, 28-page story:
To be fair, I haven’t watched it yet. I only have a suspicion that the length is the result of overanalysis. And I know I can go on and on myself sometimes (cough). So, I will watch, and will be happy to learn something, and/or proven wrong about my dismissal of the book.
Or not. I write today, only to connect. To seek further conversations about Dear Life, or my takes on any of the half-dozen books I’ve mentioned.
So whether rants or raves, please do get in touch. About any of them!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Photo (cropped) by Juliana Malta on Unsplash.
Without further ado, let me introduce Erica Stevenson of Moan Inc. (lovethe name), who “dives into the mythology, philosophy, [and] history [of] the ancient Greeks & Romans” through “videos uploaded every Tuesday & Thursday (sometimes Sunday).” Overall, she “aims to show [her] viewers that the ancient world isn’t as tough or complicated to study as one may think,” and seeks to act “as the middle man between the myths we are told as children and the university lecture space you all try to avoid.”
I highlight Erica’s YouTube channel for you here, because despite—as far as I know—never explicitly aiming to give ‘ancient modern’ women or goddesses their due, or analyzing the ancient Greek and Roman worlds through a feminist lens, in practice she seems to do a hell of a lot of both. She’s also funny, has an infectious enthusiasm for her subject, and invites a lot more female than male experts to appear in her videos, which I’m guessing from all the memes is quiteunusual. For instance, she recently collaborated with one of yours and my favorite book reviewers, Willow Heath of Books and Bao:
What originally brought her to my attention though, was her enthusiasm for a recent biography on Plato, due to the author’s rare acknowledgement of the difficulties in making any definitive, factual statements about someone for whom so little information was actually available. Which, indirectly, mirrors some of the ways I compensate for my background in writing and researching the subjects that I do (8:51-10:57):
(Update, January 2024: To my chagrin, Erica Stevenson seems to have quietly deleted the original review video, possibly because she interviewed the author himself a few months later, which I include below. I’ve decided to keep this post up though, as the points she was making still stand!)
My transcript:
Moving into what I thought of the book itself…I loved it. Right, to keep this as short as possible, I thought it was absolutely fantastic, and the reason why I thought that this study was so good is because…something that I worry about when reading non-fiction, [and] something that I’ve heard a lot from non-fiction authors, is that publishing houses…push authors to write more definitively, and to write clearer. So, by that I mean, you know I spoke to Tim Whitmarsh about this, that with his book, about atheism in the ancient world, there were lots of sentences he wanted to keep very nuanced, that the publishers, the editors were kind of like, “You’re going to need to hammer that down.” To be a bit more clear, to be a bit more certain, because for a wider audience, they don’t want to have to read your silly “This might be…,” or “This could be interpreted…”. You know, they just want facts basically, to leave the book with a solid story, as opposed to you over-complicating it with so much nuance in there. And lots of other authors have mentioned that to me, so, whenever I go into non-fiction I’m always trying to see like “Errrr….How much did the editor have a say in this? How much did the publisher have a say in this? Are we going to get any real nuance here…what’s gonna haaappen?”. And with this book we did not have that problem, at all.
I don’t know who Robin Waterfield works with, but they allowed him to leave all of the questions in the book, right? He makes it very clear after any ‘facts’ he puts forward about Plato, that there’s no real way of knowing that, and the reasons why we can’t know those things. Or, what other people have latched onto in order to claim that that was a fact about Plato. So, it was really fantastically well-done. There are so many wider references, there’s a huge index sort of, you know, sort of thing at the back, which you can then check what ancient works he gets things from, what other scholars did he get things from. You know, all of that was just done so well, and that’s obviously so necessary for a study like this when absolutely nothing is certain.
And which would seem a strange place to end this post on. Sorry. But, well, in a previous version, three times as long, I went on to explain the epiphanies this led to when I first watched the video in July, the confidence that gave me, the exciting plans I have for my writing now, and how enthused I was about fulfilling those. Only then I realized I was actually sabotaging those plans, wasting the better part of a day writing about my least favorite subject instead—myself:
Ahem. So, lesson learned, I’ll wisely shoehorn this ending here. And have another post up for you up very soon!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
Turning Boys Into Men? The Performance of Gender for South Korean Conscripts, Part 8
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Photo (cropped) by Jim Flores on Unsplash.
Am I just projecting when I say Koreans too? Or that it’s mostly Korean and Japanese women, and especially young women, that suffer from this “involuntary consent”?
But first, I want to acknowledge that, of course, everyone has had the experience of being asked by bosses, relatives, and/or professors for unseen, undervalued, and usually unpaid labor, which social pressure prevented them from refusing.
There’s nothing specifically Korean or Japanese about this. Nor is expecting it of women the exclusive purview of Korean or Japanese men.
Korean academia, for instance, remains notorious for all the verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and demands for personal errands professors inflict on their grad students. I want to convey my curious mix of relief and rage too, over learning that it’s not just me that notices it’s mostly female students that have to run those errands. And, as discussed in Part 2 of this series, I’ve already noticed the welcoming of prospective students that my female students are expected to do in the freezing cold every winter.
In Japanese society, where people are conventionally inclined to avoid conflict and prioritize social relationships over their own self-interest, the attitude that can lead to unforced but involuntary consent is ubiquitous. Japanese American anthropologist Dorinne Kondo has captured how Japanese people, especially women—herself included, as she became enmeshed in Japanese society as a “daughter” of her host family over the course of a two-year homestay in the 1980s—avoid saying no in their day-to-day lives. Similarly to the young Japanese women who become involved in AV, Kondo was not overtly coerced but nevertheless pressured to involuntarily agree to do things for others such as teaching English, fulfilling her duty as a filial “daughter,” and taking on the role of a ‘proper’ Japanese citizen. Her frustration grew as she felt herself becoming “trapped by social convention.” Kondo then realized that there was a profoundly different way of thinking about the self in Japan: individuality was valued only insofar as social relationships were not compromised. Under such circumstances, she “had no choice but to comply.” Kondo’s ethnographic moment vividly recaptures why [former AV actress Kozai Saki] could not say no or walk away when she faced her won dilemma. Her resistance would have deeply upset relational others at the filming site. Each time she convinced herself that everything would be fine if she would only yield to their demands.
(page 51; italics in originals)
But really, it released a cascade of thoughts. Next was that the biggest problem for vegetarians and vegans in Korea is not so much finding ingredients or suitable restaurants, but all the pressure bosses, coworkers, and family members will inflict on them to eat meat for the sake of avoiding causing awkwardness and inconvenience for everyone. And then, all the parallels with how to determine consent in the K-pop industry.
But if you’re still reading, I’m guessing it resonated with you too, right? If so, please do take a moment to let me know what it reminded you of, either in the comments or on social media. But I’ll be glad to have just gotten you thinking. And thanks for reading!
p.s. (My bad that the titular quote actually comes from a must-read interview of the author!).
The Turning Boys Into Men? Girl-groups and the Performance of Gender for South Korean Conscripts Series:
One of these Korean men is not like the others? 🤔 Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably already well aware of the emasculation and feminization of Asian men in US popular culture—which my image search for a “Korean man” at Unsplash above almost seems to be rubbing in.* But a few brief mentions towards the end of a book I just finished, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back by Julia Serano (2022), suddenly reminded me of a powerful passage about that from the novel Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017), which I want to share with you.
But first, to set the tone, here’s two of those mentions from Sexed Up, starting with (p. 153, Chapter 7):
…hypersexualized stereotypes are projected onto Asians (particularly East Asians). While there are occasional examples of Asian men being depicted as dangerous or predatory, they are more routinely depicted in an emasculated or desexualized manner, likely as a result of Asians more generally being stereotyped as “feminine” relative to other ethnicities.
…within white-centric gay male dating scenes…men of color often encounter sexual exclusion, or else find themselves pigeonholed into particular sexual roles (tops, bottoms) in accordance with previously discussed racial stereotypes (Black people being perceived as “masculine” and “aggressive,” and Asian people as “feminine” and “submissive”).
Which suddenly brought me to the titular passage from Little Fires Everywhere, at the top of page 267, Chapter 16 (in the top-right of the last picture; apologies that my camera skills weren’t the best on the subway that cold day in March!). For context, much of the novel revolves around Chinese immigrant Bebe Chow fighting to regain custody of her baby daughter that she put up for adoption when she was destitute. Mark and Linda McCullough are the girl’s adopted (Caucasian) parents, and Edward Lim, the angry, articulate, powerful Asian-American man, is Chow’s pro-bono lawyer:
I’ve since learned that the book was also made into a mini-series in 2020:
Has anyone seen it? Do you know if that scene, and/or the racist tactics used by the McCullough’s lawyer are included or conveyed somehow? Please let me know!
*(In fairness to Unsplash, the inclusion of a Caucasian woman was just random—once a search request starts running out of hits, Unsplash starts offering increasingly less related photos rather than just empty space. Personally I just find that frustrating, but I guess Unsplash judges that users may realize they could use some of those other photos instead.)
Don’t claim women are “naturally” inferior to men in any intellectual endeavor, argued pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, unless you first grant girls the same opportunities to master it as boys. Today, that includes not chiding them as “unfeminine” for being chess geeks. Or, for not taking things seriously when they’re not, and want to learn the game in their own ways.
Very few girls and women have ever made it to the ranks of the top 100 chess players. In fact, at the moment there aren’t any at all. For some pundits, including alltoo many of those top players, this is all the evidence they need to argue that women are “naturally” inferior at the game to men.
Alternatively, some people place a lot of weight on the fact that there’s only one female chess player for every nine males. Yes, some truly exceptional girls and women do make it to the top 100 players sometimes, they’d have to concede. (Most notably, Judit Polgar, who became a grandmaster at a younger age than Bobby Fischer, and who was once ranked #8 in the world.) They may even admit that the proportion that do, compared to all female players, is actually quite comparable to the proportion for male players that do too.
But that only further begs the questions of why more girls and women aren’t attracted to chess in the first place, or why they don’t stick with it.
Yes, there is rampantsexism in the sport. But surely no more than many other sports, and not enough to account for such a massively lopsided sex ratio? Maybe the main reason it doesn’t appeal is because, overall, they really are worse at some of the various attributes required for success in chess?
I frame the arguments like this because, until I started writing, I didn’t realize their connection. For whereas I’m a decent human being, and so have always rejected out of hand the notion that women are naturally inferior at any intellectual activity or profession whatsoever (or that any sex is, for that matter), the reality that there are indeed many various, incontrovertible, very specific skills and attributes in which men tend to perform better than women, and vice-versa, has also made a great deal of sense to me. Only, until today, I didn’t realize my own cognitive dissonance—that those slight differences in performance could be seized upon to justify those arguments that girls and women don’t belong in chess.
But also until today, I didn’t realize their awesome rejoinders, which is what I’ll cover here:
That there’s far, far more to becoming a professional chess player than, say, being able to mentally rotate a three-dimensional object while doing a math test.
That those methods girls and women tend to favor, despite what you may hear, are in no way less effective than those boys and men do.
That a dominance of boys and men in any intellectual field, is not, ipso facto, evidence of their natural superiority in it. Because the barriers to girls’ and women’s participation in it can be far more insidious and subtle than most men, including myself, are aware.
And that our brains have an enormous plasticity. To the extent that, once girls and women do fully participate in hitherto, naturally “masculine” intellectual activities (or boys and men in “feminine” ones for that matter), they are fully able to overcome those initial sex-based differences.
Here goes…
What do I Mean by Biological, Sex-based Differences?
So, despite that introduction trashing them, why do I also say those biological, sex-based differences still make a great deal of sense to me?
Well, first and foremost, because they jibe with my own experience as a chess nerd as a teenager, when I spent most of my free time at clubs and tournaments instead of driving lessons and dates. In between, I’d pore over my books into the small hours, rather than bothering with minutiae like completing homework, or doing more than the bare minimum to pass my high-school classes. Rest assured, I also noticed the almost complete lack of women playing chess, let alone girls my age. But I just took it for granted.
So today, whether posited as a misguided explanation for their relative absence as we’ll see, or just as a reasonable observation to add to the debate as to why that is, when chess trainers, professional players, and commentators alike routinely mention an obsessiveness they see in boys interested in chess but which seems almost non-existent in girls, I can’t help but nod in agreement.
Indeed, it’s a point made so often on chess YouTube or Twitch, I can’t pinpoint a specific clip to link to sorry. But desperate googling reveals a similar observation has been attributed to former world snooker champion Steve Davis, about why his sport is likewise so overwhelmingly male-dominated:
…[when] once asked to explain why men dominate snooker, even though it doesn’t require great strength…he gave a controversial but great answer that applies to snooker, chess and many other fields of endeavor.
He said, essentially, “Men are the idiots of the species. Men have a certain obsessiveness that women lack. We happily spend hours, months, years to become great at things that are a complete waste of time (like hitting balls into holes with a pointed stick).”
The Quora commenter who posted that continued:
Women COULD become elite chess or snooker players, but it requires a degree of obsession and an insane amount of work/practice that most women don’t see the value in. Women may enjoy playing chess or snooker, but not enough to devote their lives to it. And devoting your life may be exactly what it takes to become a champion.
But this also made sense because of my intellectual baggage. Specifically, in the form of the book, The New Sexual Revolution by Robert Pool (1993), that I picked up during my halcyon, impressionable first years at university, thinking women would be impressed by the title and cover. (Hey, this line of thinking did work eventually.) From it, I learned for the first time about multiple science, evidence-based examples of men and women tending to approach various tasks differently. Or, in many cases, having incontrovertible advantages over each other when performing the same task. An example of the former is that men usually navigate by streets and grids, women by landmarks. And of the latter, that overall men have demonstrably better greater spatial ability, as well as the ability to shoot moving targets, both of which prove to be independent of prior exposure or later training. What science says about those differences three decades later though, and their implications, I’ll get to soon. But crucial is that then—as now—Pool’s own speculations from those seem perfectly reasonable (pp. 61-62):
The male advantage in spatial ability probably has greater practical implications than other sex differences because it is one of the largest differences and because spatial ability is important in many jobs….Researchers have found…that the high school students with high spatial ability are the ones who are most successful in geometry, mechanical drawing and shop classes….the skills learned in those classes are important for careers in science, engineering, drafting and design, and studies have shown that high spatial ability is related to success in such diverse jobs as automotive mechanic, architect, and watch repairman.
The sex difference is spatial ability may spill over into mathematics, where males have a medium-sized edge….
Later still at university, those lessons would be reinforced by my finding myself in lectures about gynocentric feminism, which was presented to me as a school of feminist thought which was likewise concerned with highlighting sex-based differences, and positively revaluing what its advocates considered the ensuing core tenets of ‘femininity.’ In hindsight though, it was a much more fringe than my sympathetic professor suggested in the late-1990s, and was already well on its way out even then. But, you could also say it was just a twist on the nature-vs-nurture debate really—that all things being equal, would or do men and women gravitate towards different activities and professions based on these differences, and regardless that those dominated by women shouldn’t be undervalued—and which is still very much ongoing. Perhaps most interestingly and controversially at the moment, in the fact that even in Scandinavia, it is women who are still overwhelmingly plumping for caring, nurturing professions like teaching and nursing instead of those related to STEM. (Just because Jordan Peterson is oneofthemanypeople pointing this out, doesn’t make it untrue.)
To be clear, although Pool’s book was clearly formative, and I’ve been very receptive to the notion of fundamental, sex-based differences ever since, I’ve never been naïve either. Not about how absolutely no level playing field exists for entry into and success in hitherto “naturally” male-dominated interests and professions like chess, snooker, coding, engineering, and so on.
Or at least, I thought I’d never been naïve.
There’s More than One Way to Skin a Cat
Because today I learned that in addition to all the other, more obvious barriers and hurdles that discourage girls and women, that this extends to them even displaying the necessary character traits to succeed too. That it’s not that they don’t also want to geek out over the things only boys are “supposed” to like, necessarily. Just that if they do, they’re much more likely to be criticized for their obsessiveness. Whereas among boys and men, that same obsessiveness tends to be seen as a virtue instead.
See what I mean from this passage from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (2019), the inspiration for this post. If you’ll please bear with me, it’s five paragraphs long. But totally worth it for the aha! moment in the final two (pp. 95-96):
In 1984 American tech journalist Steven Levy published his bestselling book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Levy’s heroes were all brilliant. They were all single-minded. They were all men. They also didn’t get laid much. ‘You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space,’ Levy explained. ‘Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,’ one of his heroes told him. ‘How can a [default male] hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?’
Two paragraphs after having reported such blatant misogyny, Levy nevertheless found himself at a loss to explain why this culture was more or less ‘exclusively male’. ‘The sad fact was that there never was a star-quality female hacker’, he wrote. ‘No one knows why.’ I don’t know, Steve, we can probably take a wild guess.
By failing to make the obvious connection between an openly misogynistic culture and the mysterious lack of women, Levy contributed to the myth of innately talented hackers being implicitly male. And, today, it’s hard to think of a profession more in thrall to brilliance bias than computer science. ‘Where are the girls that love to program?’ asked a high-school teacher who took part in a summer programme for advanced-placement computer-science teachers at Carnegie Mellon; ‘I have any number of boys who really really love computers,’ he mused.55 ‘Several parents have told me their sons would be on the computer programming all night if they could. I have yet to run into a girl like that.’
This may be true, but as one of his fellow teachers pointed out, failing to exhibit this behaviour doesn’t mean that his female students don’t love computer science. Recalling her own student experience, she explained how she ‘fell in love’ with programming when she took her first course in college. But she didn’t stay up all night, or even spend a majority of her time programming. ‘Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won’t.’
Beyond its failure to account for female socialisation (girls are penalized for being antisocial in a way boys aren’t), the odd thing about framing an aptitude for computer science around typically male behaviour is that coding was originally seen as a woman’s game. In fact, women were the original ‘computers’, doing complex maths problems by hand for the military before the machine that took their name replaced them.
While I don’t know anything about coding, I’ve been dying for a chance to flex that I’m still a pretty damn good chess player. (And single; 진짜 뇌섹남 인데…) So, although chess too is not all it appears, and there are many ways to fall in love with it (a common sentiment is that it’s equal parts an art, a sport, and a science), I like to think I have some rare authority when I say that I still can’t see any real alternatives to its mastery other than long hours spent practicing, studying, and committing thousands of games, opening variations, tactical motifs, positional themes, and endgames to memory.
But then I thought again about how I did those, and took Perez’s point about staying up all night not being all it’s cracked up to be. Because in hindsight, much of what I worked on when I did was completely useless, even counterproductive, and made my schoolwork and non-existent social life suffer. At university later, it meant I failed easy classes, and am still suffering the consequences through my student loan repayments today. So, someone more mature and self-disciplined than I was back then, and more well-rounded, with actual friends and mentors to talk about learning, training, and—heaven forbid—topics unrelated to chess, would undoubtedly have made far more progress in chess in a fraction of the time that I did, let alone in many other aspects of their life.
Historically, Women Literally Couldn’t be Geniuses, Despite Ticking all the Boxes
Still wanting to flex how smart I am though (did I mention I’m single?), I want to causally convey how there must surely be a reason why chess is still considered a symbol of high intelligence, even genius too, at least in the West (I concede that Go is more complex. Or baduk as it’s known here, which all the geeks in Korea who would be playing chess are playing instead, damnit.). Also, to smoothly segue through that into the fact that we are indeed so wedded to the notion that related skills, talents, and traits are only virtues when possessed by men, that even the histories of the concept of “genius” and of the word itself contain this bias, especially in the last two centuries. As Christine Battersby explains in her pioneering 1989 book, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (pp. 8 & 11):
Starting from the persistence of sexual prejudice in art and literary criticism today, [in this book] I move back in time to explore the way our modern notions of creativity are modeled on notions of a male God creating the universe, and the devious tricks used to represent all creative and procreative power as he attribute of males….
Women’s inferiority had been rationalized by the writers in the Aristotelian tradition as a deficiency in judgement, wit, reason, skill, talent, and psychic (and bodily) heat. Women had been blamed for an excess of passion, imagination, sexual needs, and for vapor-induced delusion and irrationality. But if we look at the aesthetic literature of the late eighteenth century, we will see that the greatest males (the natural “geniuses”) were being praised for qualities of mind that seem prima facie identical with Aristotelian femininity. I discuss the new qualitative distinctions that were developed, that used different types of passion, imagination, frenzy, and irrationality to account for the difference between geniuses and females. A man with genius was like a woman—but was not a woman….the revalued “feminine” qualities of mind were appropriated for a supermale sex….
Why does it matter that, whereas ordinary males have been blamed for effeminacy, in (male) geniuses femininity has been transformed into a virtue? I hope this book will make clear how women have been presented with contradictory evaluative norms against which to measure their attainments.
Or indeed, this very accessible 2021 lecture:
“Hard-wired” Differences These Ain’t
Remember those incontrovertible sex-based differences Pool discussed in 1993 though? To follow this audacious history of belittling, denying, and hiding women’s genius by pointing out the verdict of 2023 is…that these differences very much still exist, feels churlish, almost rude. But here’s the rub: they’re easily overcome. As Andrew Curry explains in, given my own 30-year fixation with those differences, an even more eye-opening—I want to say shocking—article at Nautilus:
George M. Bodner, a professor of chemical education at Purdue University….stresses it’s important not to perpetuate the myth that a gender gap implies all men are better than all women at spatial cognition tasks. Stereotypes about spatial ability can have an insidious effect. “When women hear myths, such as the idea that they have ‘poor spatial ability when compared with men,’ they often believe this will be true for themselves, and it often is not true,” Bodner says.
Had [Sheryl Sorby, a professor of engineering education at Ohio State University] been a little less stubborn, she might have left engineering altogether. Instead she went on to earn a bachelor’s and then a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Michigan Tech, and was later hired as a faculty member. As Sorby took more engineering courses, she got better at spatial cognition tasks, until eventually she found herself teaching engineering graphics, the very course that almost derailed her as an undergrad. “The brain is pretty plastic when it comes to spatial skills,” Sorby says. “I have improved my spatial skills vastly as an adult.”
That initial experience never left her, though. As a professor, she noticed talented young women struggling the way she had. So she set out to find a solution. “The fact that there are these gender gaps is a challenge, but it’s not a death sentence,” she says. “I know it’s something we can fix.”
With her colleague, Beverly J. Baartmans, she developed a spatial visualization course to help her students develop their spatial cognition skills.
That course was just 15 hours long, and even improved men’s abilities as well, despite being given a biological head start. And, because I can’t even begin to convey the magnitude of what this brain plasticity implies for future sex and gender roles, let alone playing chess? I can’t think of a better way to end this post than recommending you head straight over to Nautilus to read the rest of the article!
Well, we don’t, actually. But for those who want to learn more about why not, and laugh themselves silly in the process, Nipple War 3 (젖꼭지 3차대전) is available for streaming on indieground until July 30!
“Nipple World War 3″ it should really say, otherwise the “3” makes no sense. After appearances in over 30 film festivals though, the misguided English title has stuck, so I’ll roll with it.
It’s very crude and slapstick too. But I’m not complaining about that either.
For there’s nothing subtle about the absurd double standards regarding male and female nipple exposure, in Korea or anywhere else for that matter. But it’s only relatively recently it’s become a real issue here, as explained by Jo Yeong-joon in hercolumn about the 2021 film yesterday at Oh My Star:
2019년쯤이었나. 여성 연예인들의 노브라가 사회적인 이슈가 된 적이 있었다. PD 출신인 백시원 감독도 당시 방송에서 이 문제를 다루는 방식을 놓고 상사와 의견을 나눈 적이 있었다고 한다. 당시에 상사는 두드러지는 여성의 젖꼭지에 모자이크를 처리하라고 했지만 취지에 옳지 않다고 생각한 감독은 극 중 인물처럼 적극적인 행동을 하지는 못했지만 속으로 불편함 감정을 느꼈다고 한다. 이 영화 <젖꼭지 3차 대전>은 그런 사실적 상황 속에서 태어나게 되었다. 코미디적 연출과 다양한 상황을 제시하기 위해 결과적으로 많은 부분이 각색되고 픽션화되기는 했지만 당시에 경험했던 사회에 만연해 있던 은근한 성차별에 대해 들여다보고자 한 것이다.
“Was it around 2019, when female celebrities not wearing bras in public became a social issue? [The ‘no-bra‘ movement?] Director Baek Si-won, a former producer, said that the ‘problem’ of a woman not wearing a bra came up in a program she was working on at the time; after discussing with her boss about how to deal with it, she followed his instructions to use mosaics to cover the women’s prominent nipples. But she was uncomfortable with doing so, and, although she didn’t object quite as actively as the characters do in her short film, it was from that real example that Nipple War 3 came about. Indeed, although much of the film is heavily dramatized and fictionalized for the sake of comedic affect, and for presenting a wider variety of scenes and situations, the intention in doing so was to better highlight the subtle sexism and double standards that were—still are—experienced every day in Korean society.”
영화는 연예인의 젖꼭지가 도드라지는 방송 화면을 모자이크 하라는 마정도 부장(정인기 분)에 맞서 자신의 의견을 피력하는 용 피디(최성은 분)의 모습을 다루고 있다. 영화의 구조도 그리 복잡하지 않다. 서로 다른 의견을 가진 두 사람이 총 세 차례에 걸쳐 부딪히는 것이 뼈대의 전부다. 대신 각각의 지점이 (영화의 표현을 빌리자면 세 번의 대전) 던지는 문제의 화두는 모두 다르다. 갈등의 중심에 놓인 매개는 여성의 젖꼭지 하나이지만, 감독은 이 과정을 통해 여성의 특정한 신체 부위가 드러나는 것에 (실제로는 여성의 자유와 권리, 평등을 보장하는 일에) 반감을 가지는 이들의 주장이 얼마나 차별적이고 비합리적인지를 드러내고자 한다.
“[As can be seen the opening scene above, which has English subtitles], the movie deals with Producer Yong (played by Choi Seong-eun) who disagrees with her manager Ma Jeong-do (played by Jeong In-gi) when he asks her to mosaic out a female celebrity’s prominent nipples under her t-shirt. From then, the film is structured around people with different opinions having an argument (having a ‘battle,’ to borrow the parlance of the film) a total of three times, each on a different aspect of women’s nipples—the central characters if you will. Through this variety of situations and arguments, Director Baek wants to make that it clear that only allowing men to expose certain parts of their body is extremely discriminatory and irrational, and ultimately fundamentally undermines their guarantees of freedom, rights, and equality.” (My emphasis and slight embellishments—James)
I’d just love to translate the full column. But unfortunately copyright is a thing, translation apps and plugins are more than adequate, and the reality is that if you don’t understand the Korean yourself, then you’ll struggle to make much sense of the film dialogue either, which has no Korean or English subtitles. (Sorry—I’m disappointed too.) I would like to highlight just a few more points from her column though, just in the remote case that you’re not already convinced to watch the film whenever and in whatever language you do get the chance:
Part of the the reason for Yong’s clash with her manager is because of the ambiguity of the Korea Communications Commission’s regulations. While they do say male and female genitalia [and pubic hair] are strictly forbidden, the criterion for excluding female nipples—and only female nipples—are far more open to interpretation. In the film, this is highlighting by showing a screenshot of topless African women from a previously-aired documentary, but one of Venus’s nipples in the famous Sandro Botticelli painting being mosaiced in another. Not only are—James here again—these examples probably real, but they also raise the element of racial hypocrisy and double standards, which are by no means confined to Korea.
Amidst all their handwringing about some women not wearing bras for their health and/or comfort, few self-appointed guardians of Korean morals seem to recall that even exposing navels on TV was technically banned when singer Park Ji-yoon‘s song Coming of Age Ceremony (성인식) was released in 2000, resulting in said body part sometimes getting mosaiced (or—James—I’m guessing, covered in a mesh, like in the second video below.) Similarly, singer Kim Wan-seon had the same problems with her ripped jeans in the late-1980s and early-1990s.
The film is absolutely not intended to inflame Korea’s “gender wars.” It’s a comedy. The men are not at all universally portrayed as dogmatic, conservative sexists, nor the women as universally progressive and beyond reproach. In particular, Ma is clearly very much in a bind, Yong is somewhat stubborn and self-righteous, and her male assistant is completely sympathetic and helpful to her cause.
Tired of feminazis pushing their nipples in your face? Don’t understand the big deal? Recall that female newsreaders couldn’t even wear glasses on Korean TV until 2018…
Honestly, with this topic I feel a personal connection to my first few years in Korea, in the early-2000s. Which I realize sounds…let’s generously say “somewhat odd.” But that’s when I was single just like now, but unlike now coming home after midnight a lot. And often when I did, I wouldn’t be sleepy, but would be somewhat at a loss with no computer, no 1500+ books, nor yet to be invented smartphone. So I’d turn on the TV to suddenly find…Las Vegas cabaret shows featuring topless dancers. Naturally, their breasts would be misted over. Only, there was so much dancing involved, so many breasts, and so many cuts between different dancers and different cameras, that the hapless censors (misters?) just couldn’t keep up. So,the misted circles would quite literally be chasing the dancers’ breasts across the TV.
If I’d had a cat, its eyes would have popped out of its head. But it’s probably best I didn’t then—I probably would have injured it, rolling around on the floor laughing too much. And, having just arrived from New Zealand, where I’d rarely had to think about censorship at all, I’ve continued laughing at its hypocrisy and ridiculousness ever since.
Much kudos to director Baek Si-won for continuing that tradition then, while also providing some much needed social commentary that won’t make any viewer feel like they’re being made fun of—or laughing too much to care even if they did.
It’s tough impressing guests at my cocktail parties these days.
By definition, all of them are already bibliophiles—why else would I invite them? But that also means some guests don’t so much as bat an eyelid at my paltry 1500+ tomes, no matter how strategically I arrange their titles.
Hitherto my main trump card, and source of cultural capital, suddenly being exposed as neither smart nor well-read has become a real source of concern. And, when I do sense a guest’s moment of realization is finally arriving, my cats, trained to pose for Instagram, can only distract them for so long.
(From 28:10) “Into the Twentieth Century, I write about the culture of…Japanese modernism, as expressed in these two icons, the mobo and the moga, and the era of what’s called ‘Erotic Grotesque Nonsense.’ One of the arguments I make in the book, is that if you went to Japan in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s, you would recognize a lot of the forms of entertainment, because they were…at least originally, they came from other parts of the world, particularly North America and Europe. But they also looked different. Scholars call this ‘vernacular modernism.’ Where [something is] part of a global movement, but is articulated in very specific ways in specific places and for specific reasons. And so, even though these people look like flappers and dandies…and they evoke some of the same moral panic, they also were challenging very specifically Japanese norms and were fulfilling particular Japanese needs.”
I hear your thoughts, all half-dozen or so of you still reading: what grown adult only hears of vernacular modernism for the first time in their late-40s? How can I even call myself a man? Have I no shame at all??
“How could he string me along like that? I really thought he would have more books…(Sigh) Men can be such pigs…”. Photo (cropped) by Killian Pham on Unsplash.
But I’ll be way ahead of any guests voicing the same, already reaching for their raincoats and umbrellas. For I’ll use a cunning trick on them I’ve learned from a local book club I recently joined.
In those meetings, which are twice a week. we read our own books silently for an hour, then have a quick bathroom break, then go around in turns quickly summarizing our books, before finally posing a related question to the other members to answer. The ensuing discussions generally last until we’re kicked out of the various coffee shops. And—you guessed it—the most interesting and lively conversations tend to spring from questions that actually have no relationship to people’s books at all. So too, given how obvious my need for constant validation is, you can also guess that a not inconsiderable amount of my free time between meetings is spent preparing the most popular questions. Then, on procuring related books I can bring along to feign they just spontaneously came to me from my casual, cursory hour’s reading.
So, I will distract and impress my more discerning cocktail party guests not with big words, but by posing the first titular question: How were Korean new women and modern girls different…to their equivalents in other countries? Other than so many of their new fashions, beauty products, consumer goods, new education and employment opportunities, new beliefs about family life, sexuality, and women’s rights, being so closely associated with, forced by, enabled through, and/or utterly tainted by the Japanese colonial regime that is?
“Interesting questions James,” my guests will reply, stumped. “We misjudged you. Let’s bring your cats back for some more cute photos, then brainstorm some ideas. Oh, you already have a whiteboard and markers set up in the next room you say?”
Yes, I’m vastly overgeneralizing. But I know you too are intrigued by the prospect of learning the extent of the similarities and differences between Korean women and their Taiwanese and Manchurian counterparts in the 1920s and ’30s, let alone between those living in other colonial regimes. Indeed, the party will only just be getting started.
Left: “The various types of ‘girls’ in the 1920s to 1930s”; scan, 예쁜 여자 만들기, p. 245. Right: Actor Hideko Takamine, Japanese White Powder Foundation advertisement, 1930s; via The Flapper Girl.
Unfortunately, my desire to learn from my guests’ answers will be so genuine, that I’ll quickly forget all my pretensions to aloofness and sophistication. So, when we move on to the next question, I’ll be quite unable to restrain my joy at recently (re)discovering an exceptional background source, and wanting to repay by sharing. Namely, albeit again vastly overgeneralizing, one that elaborates on how Korean women’s rights were put on the backburner in the first half of the Twentieth Century for the sake of focusing on liberation from the Japanese, then in the second half for the sake of democratization—which has basically informed just about everything I’ve ever written about Korean feminism here for the last 16 years. That is, Colonial Modernity in Korea, edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (1999), and more specifically Chapter 7. “The Price of Legitimacy: Women and the Kunuhoe Movement, 1927–1931” by Kenneth M. Wells. Fortunately, much of the chapter is available via Google Books, including the following four pages (192-193, and 203-204) that will surely persuade you to buy your own copy:
But only embarrassed by myself to myself, because clearly I’m already way past being worried about my reputation among you, my dear readers. And glad to have had the opportunity to recommend a book too you, or more generally to have shared something useful and/or interesting. Because no matter how long I sometimes take to get there, that, after all, is always the point.
“Pretty weird guy, but…yeah, that does sound like a good book. I must order it post haste.” Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.
On which note, so what if, technically speaking, I haven’t actually had a single guest in my home since moving in six months ago? Or that my toasting my cats with Pepsi lime zero and cheap whiskey every other evening for, say, not vomiting over my meager possessions that day, doesn’t exactly qualify as my hosting “lavish cocktail parties” either? These are mere minutiae in the pursuit of great art. Or, indeed, of great books!
Knowingly or unknowingly, how do you think you react differently to people depending on their sex?
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Photo by leah hetteberg on Unsplash.
“When you’re communicating with someone, but don’t know if they’re a man or woman, you feel a little guarded. You can’t help it. Until you can resolve their identity, your conversation is stilted and awkward, because you just can’t be yourself. ”
Or something like that—I can’t remember when and where I read it, but it resonated with my experience of chatrooms in the early days of the internet, or phone calls before Caller ID. Over the next decade, as realistic-sounding, AI-based chatbots become increasingly common in customer service roles, along with all their inherent gender biases and stereotypes, I expect younger generations will also experience the same moments of confusion and hesitation I did.
Or will they? Is it just me that sees sex first, and reacts to that? Do moments of ambiguity mean I actually behave and talk fundamentally differently around men and women, once their identity is resolved? I’ve often wondered. So, I was interested recently when I was listening to a New Books Network interview of Julia Serano, a transsexual woman, about her, well, new book, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back (2022), and learned that it was her experience that people reacted to their perception of her sex before anything else. Listen from 15:40 to see how, or read below:
“When I was about to begin my [male to female] transition, I really didn’t know what personally to expect, other than I figured there’d be this period of time where I’d be in, like, a gender limbo, when people wouldn’t be able to figure out if I was a boy or girl. And I had a couple of instances like that, but much to my surprise, almost always people would make the determination that I was male or female [for themselves]. It’s just that their determinations often differed from other people in the exact same room. So I describe a lot of anecdotes I had, including…having a conversation, for instance, where someone who knew me as male before I transitioned and wasn’t aware that I was transitioning, introduced me to…another man, who—he was very flirty with me. And I could tell, because of what I was going through at the time, that he was reading me as female, but, like, my friend didn’t pick up on that…because from my friend’s perspective, we all obviously knew that we were [just] three guys talking together. And there’d be a lot of situations like that where people would read me as one way or the other, and they’d really believe whatever their initial determination was, that’s what they believed and that’s how they viewed me, and it was really hard a lot of times to convince people in the other direction.”
“….The conclusion I came out of [those experiences], is that first and foremost, we don’t really see people—we see men and women. And that’s kind of how we’re socialized to see the world, and becomes really unconscious…and, you know, the fact that we automatically categorize people as male or female, obviously this has implications for trans people, and for non-binary people—it creates a lot of obstacles in our lives. But more generally, if we categorize people [like this], it really shapes a lot of the assumptions that we place on people, and it results in us filtering out other aspects of their person…like once I transitioned, there were aspects of my person that people couldn’t really see any more, that they used to react to.”
The title of the book, not to mention its description, is actually a little misleading—the book is no prudish, anti-sex tirade. Instead, it’s more her observations and thoughts about sexualization, objectifiction, sex and gender roles, socialization, pornography, and so on based on her experiences before and after transitioning. In other words, fascinating, and more than enough to decide I couldn’t wait for a paperback version to come out.
As for my own answers to the various questions I’ve raised? Actually I completely disagree with Serano that we’re socialized to see people’s sexes first. Women, in particular, who didn’t immediately register someone as a man, and weren’t more wary of the potential danger a man represented, were more likely to be a victim of violence, and less likely to pass on their genes. Also, with the exception of asexuals, our well-documented, subconscious reactions to other’s heights, signs of youth, indicators of wealth, and other attractiveness criteria demonstrate that most people can’t help but immediately consider others as potential mates or rivals, even if we don’t consciously frame them as such.
Or, very, very consciously once suddenly becoming single again, at a frequency that surprises even myself…
But I stress that to acknowledge these gut reactions, usually so short-lived to even notice them, doesn’t mean they aren’t easily overcome. Nor should they ever provide excuses for boorish behavior. For instance, I’m acutely aware that many men dominatewomen’s personal spaces, whether through being unaware or through deliberately taking advantage of their male privilege to do so. So, when I’m around women, I constantly try to check myself from manspreading, and so on. Also, befriending mostly women for most of my adult life, because of reasons, I’ve often questioned if I talked and behaved differently around them, and if there were subjects that I wouldn’t broach with them that I would with men, and vice-versa?
Recently starting to make more male friends again because I suddenly have a social life now, I’m leaning towards that I actually treat everyone pretty much the same. Which is to say I don’t actually have ‘friends’ so much as “like-minded folks [that] fill very specific needs,” at varying levels of closeness, with whom their sex is only one of many factors influencing how I behave around them and what we talk about. And which in my experience is much less important than nationality—at least amongst Westerners.
So, although I haven’t met any yet, I don’t think I would feel compelled to ‘assign’ any openly genderfluid or non-binary people at all. And, to those I am fortunate to meet, I can only apologize in advance for not lacking the restraint to want to immediately ask you all these questions too. Including the most important one:
Wasit necessary for Jane Austen to avoidconversations between men in her novels? Well??
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes.
The Quora commenter who posted that continued:
Because today I learned that in addition to all the other, more obvious barriers and hurdles that discourage girls and women, that this extends to them even displaying the necessary character traits to succeed too. That it’s not that they don’t also want to geek out over the things only boys are “supposed” to like, necessarily. Just that if they do, they’re much more likely to be criticized for their obsessiveness. Whereas among boys and men, that same obsessiveness tends to be seen as a virtue instead.
Still wanting to flex how smart I am though (did I mention I’m single?), I want to causally convey how there must surely be a reason why chess is still considered a symbol of high intelligence, even genius too, at least in the West (I concede that 
The Grand Narrative 
