Estimated reading time: 4 minutes. Source: @kimminseoyoung

Writing about feminism for 10 years, I’m no stranger to double-standards. What I’m struck by whenever I encounter a new one though, is not just by how many there are that every woman already knows about and has to deal with. More, it’s by how much my male privilege had left me so utterly, blissfully unaware of them. That girl-pants don’t have proper pockets for instance, I had no idea about until I saw this comic in 2014—despite having a wife and two daughters. Likewise, if this newsreader’s glasses hadn’t become national news this week, I’d have remained clueless that many Korean cinemas were “notorious for not allowing [only] female part-time workers to wear glasses on duty.” And, if I hadn’t already been following awesome feminists on Twitter, the Korean magazine industry’s surprising prudishness about women’s sexual subjectivity would have completely passed me by too:

Source: @kimminseoyoung

Her tweet reads:

I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a copy of the magazine I was interviewed in at the COEX library. But the pages with my interview were sealed with double-sided tape. When I contacted the magazine about it, they said that it was a measure to prevent minors from reading because of the sexual contents. But there were no sealed sections in other parts of the magazine, or in other magazines.* #Womencan’ttalkaboutsex

Min Seo-young (Twitter; Facebook) is an outspoken feminist webtoonist and sex columnist that I’ve been following since her interview by Ilda in July last year (google translation here), smitten by her loud frustration at the social pressures that force Korean women to act chastely and demurely. Later, in an interview for Brunch in December (translation), she added that she rejected one stereotype that only victims can be feminists, and pointed out that chafing against double-standards kind of forces women to become feminists anyway.

This would definitely qualify as one of those double-standards, so I decided to buy a copy of April’s Cosmopolitan to read her interview for myself. Alas, they were all long gone. And frankly, I can’t tell from her tweet if she meant just her interview was sealed off, or if she meant things like the ‘Super Hot Sex Games’ were too (*so I’ve just asked her to clarify; I’ll update this if she responds). Whatever the case though, I can confirm from all my hard work that Playboy Korea and Maxim were still available, with no sealed sections to ward off minors from their equally salacious, equally traumatizing content.

And besides which, Seo-young already posted a picture of part of her interview herself:

Source: @kimminseoyoung. See here for an easier to read image.

Copyright makes me wary of translating whole interviews or articles sorry, but I will indulge myself a little with this one:

“…[If men hear] I’m a writer about sexual matters, they joke ‘Ah, so you like sex? Shall I give you some source material?’…I’m kind of stuck with being looked at that way. But then I reply to that sort of thing: ‘Just because I like sexual things, that doesn’t mean I’m going to have sex with you!'”

Sounds like something minors should see. Not be protected from! ;)

If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)