It can be a real challenge sometimes finding the insider knowledge I use to pretend I’m smart, let alone knowing what to make of it. Fortunately, I can rely on these sources to provide both!
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, plus 15-minute video. Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.
Without any further ado, the first blog is Connecting the Data Dots by Ssen Kim, which has many excellent short posts in English.
So last winter, while preparing this semester’s Korean Gender Studies class, I realized I just had to use them. But as the day of this week’s lecture on the birthrate approached, a crisis loomed. While I found the topic very interesting, and you will when you read that post too, I started considereing it from the perspective of my already disengaged young students. Still scarred from growing up during COVID, and barely older than children themselves, would they find the topic of why Koreans aren’t having children completely irrelevant to them? Arcane even?
From banking to taking care of babies, it can be a real headache living and working in Korea as a foreigner. So much so, it’s usually objectively easier to let a Korean partner deal with any bureaucratic issues. And very, very possible to fall into some decidedly traditional gender roles in the process.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Photo by Elle Morre on Unsplash.
Heartache, I expected from getting divorced. Backache? Not so much.
Every Saturday morning though, I have to contort myself like Houdini to clean my apartment’s tiny bathroom, lest I be judged on it later that evening. I have to vacuum and mop my floors often too, desperate to avoid the distinctive, single middle-aged guy smell my friend’s girlfriends all point out when they come over to break up with him. And in particular, I absolutely have to wash my dishes after every meal, because I have to do them in a kitchen sink that was expressly designed for the 155-160cm height of the average Korean woman of over 40 years ago. Let three meals’ worth pile up though, and it’s not just my lack of self-discipline that I’ll be wincing at.
Seriously, walking around my apartment like a hunchback every day gives a whole new meaning to feeling single. As a cishet, ostensibly middle-class, able-bodied man, it’s quite the novelty being a victim of the many gender norms literally built into our homesand cities.
Perhaps that’s why during my latest recuperation on my hard living room floor, I was finally persuaded to reach over and pick up Sociology of Everyday Life in New Zealand, ed. by Claudia Bell (2001), heading straight to the chapter “Negotiating Housework,” by Ruth Habgood (pp. 52-69). Amongst many other gems from the book I wish I’d seen earlier, this part really stood out:
I went on a date through Bumble recently. Yes, even I manage to pull that off sometimes. And no, don’t worry—this post is about Simu Liu.
You see, for the benefit of those blessed without ever having used dating apps, most give you the option of using prompts to get conversations going with nervous matches. You can come up with your own, or use one of the app’s suggestions. My suitress chose one of the latter—”What’s the last thing that made you smile?”. Commence instant mad pacing of my apartment. How to sound smart, sexy, and sincere in response, and all in just the one initial paragraph Bumble allows before—if—you get a reply?
Then it hit me—she’d recently lived in Canada for a number of years. I was 1/3rd into Liu’s autobiography, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story (2022) for a bookclub meeting soon. That was the connection. I could say how, never having watched any of his work, nor particularly wanting to, I hadn’t been all that enthused about the club’s choice. Only then, that the story of his parents falling in love and moving to Canada was just so damned wholesome and nice, that I couldn’t help but smile while reading it. That I was seriously annoyed at how much I was enjoying it.
I know, right—seducing by just being yourself, and saying the actual truth? And it worked? Who’d have thought?!
Little did I know, the next few pages would begin to outline the ‘Tiger Parenting’ he received, which was really just plain emotional neglect and physical abuse. And, in the first of two excerpts from the book I want to share with you, I especially remembered what he wrote at about the period his parents “graduated from spanking to full-on hitting” when he was 12. Which was also when his hormones were appearing, he was a Chinese boy growing up in Canada, and he needed emotional support more than ever (Chapter 9, pp. 104-5):
“I came out of the whole experience [of my crush] with a lot of anger…at myself for being completely ill-equipped to deal with my feelings, and at my parents, who I felt had trapped me into a life I no longer wanted. They had given me neither the emotional maturity nor the social wherewithal to have any shot with girls.”
“And then, of course, there was the total mindfuck that came with growing up Asian and male, in a society that saw us as nothing more than a bunch of derogatory stereotypes. Asian men were frequently depicted in Western media as awkward, nerdy and completely undatable—pretty much exactly what my parents were trying to make me into. I know this is a lot of really heavy stuff to put into the psyche of a twelve-year-old, but it definitely affected me, and it definitely affected every Asian boy that grew up in a Western country. The double whammy of being teased on the playground with ching-chong noises and then seeing ourselves ridiculed on the screen robbed us of our natural confidence. Without proper guidance from our parents, who were not terribly concerned with our self-confidence, most of us grew up feeling like we weren’t worthy to be loved or desired; like whatever we were was not enough.”
“Disillusioned and embittered, I began to pull away from my parents, my upbringing and my heritage. I started acting out, talking back and refusing to do homework. I didn’t want to be a math genius, or a scientist, or a sidekick—I wanted to be Thomas MacDonald, the mediocre-yet-charming leading man who got B-minuses and called his parents by their first names. I didn’t want to be Jackie Chan or Jet Li—I wanted to be hot stuff like Justin Timberlake, the kind of guy that dated Britney Spears and had bras thrown at him onstage.”
“Obviously, my parents were not down with my newfound rebelliousness.”
“‘Look at everything we’ve invested in you,’ they spat. ‘You’re a spoiled brat who’s squandering all of our effort and money, and wasting time on useless things. You’re nothing but a loser!'”
“’Fuck you! I don’t want any of it.'”
“WHAP!”
Update: It’s a point made many times before. But just two days later, its continuing relevance was demonstrated to me by blog mentorJae-Ha Kim 김재하, who covered a very similar same issue in the post “Does Racist Vintage Art Get a Pass?” on her SubStack K-Culture with Jae-Ha Kim. I’ll post two images from that to demonstrate what I mean, and encourage you to read the (non-)controversy in full:
Next, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, let me pass on what the second excerpt from We Were Dreamers immediately reminded of before I give Simu Liu’s words themselves: this paragraph from “Dropping Out” by Daniel Pinchbeck, (pp.102-3), in the autobiographical story collection Personals: Dreams and Nightmares from the Lives of Twenty Young Writers, edited by Thomas Beller (image source: Amazon):
“For one Wesleyan history class, I read the works of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist. Bourdieu wrote about the concept of ‘cultural capital’—how cultural experiences acted as a boundary between the elite and the lower classes. I saw how the high price of the Wesleyan degree was a prime example of ‘cultural capital.’ The purpose of Wesleyan and other, similar colleges is not education so much as it is a way of signifying one’s membership in a certain class. An elite liberal arts degree is an indoctrination in high expectations, not hard actualities. I still maintain a sharp awareness of how the machinery of privilege works, how certain universities create an elite that reinforces itself through school connections, and the alumni’s shared, smug belief in their own entitlement.”
I first provide that because, unlike when I read the following by Liu, in the cold light of day it feels I was projecting to a certain extent, and a little unfair to connect his classmates with it when they were guilty of no more being driven and ambitious whereas Liu (and I!) were not. But no matter. If it provides an opportunity to pass on where I first learned what cultural capital was, a concept that has been very helpful to me over the last nearly 30 years (sigh) and so am very happy to share, then I’ll gladly take advantage (Chapter 14, pp. 160-161):
“On my first day of classes I could immediately tell that I was dealing with a vastly different breed of student. Incumbent Ivey [School of Business] kids were not at all like the dumb, borderline illiterate eighteen-year-olds that I’d wiped the floor with during my freshman year—these guys read the Wall Street Journal every morning and monitored the stock market religiously. They were alphas, who strode around campus with the absolute conviction that they were the literal white knights at the vanguard of a capitalist society just ready to be exploited for all it was worth, and they were ready to make it go their way. Most of them came from considerable wealth—some were scions of multibillion-dollar corporations.”
“You could mock their American Psycho–level douchery and harp on their arrogance, but there was no denying that these were men and women with goals. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about me.”
I too lament that gender gap, but also found the image amusing, so am sharing it for that reason.
I don’t really mean to imply anything more meaningful in it beyond that! Indeed, just a quick perusal of other Korean books on feminism I’ve recently bought, showed that that same buying pattern didn’t apply to those.
If that leaves you dissatisfied though, let me also take this opportunity to link to what I somehow found next: “A new variation of modern prejudice: young Korean men’s anti-feminism and male-victim ideology” by Han Wool Jung, in Volume 14-2023 of Frontiers in Psychology. Probably the most comprehensive, crucially open-access article I’ve ever encountered on the subject, it should keep you—and me!—occupied for several hours at least.
TIL that many simple, everyday things like monkey bars in playgrounds, and standing desks, were originally born out of eugenic concerns with white people’s postures.
What surprises might an examination of Korean “figure correction” services also provide?
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.
Full disclosure—I’m not actually answering that question I pose. Or at least, not for now. Sorry. Instead, this meta post is about reveling in the asking. Then, passing on to you the mind-blowing BBC podcast episode about the “posture police” that helped me remind me of the value of that, plus a myriad of sources to help come to some answers. I’ll also give a shoutout to my favorite fashion history YouTuber.
But first, how I got to them, starting with the visceral unease I felt when I first saw the ad below. It was just too much, even by Korean standards. It simply begged commentary.
Or did it? What was there to say exactly?
I’m not at all against the “체형교정,” or “figure correction” services this clinic provides. Actually, I could do with a consultation for my back myself.
But that figurehead-like ‘after’ shot, the model’s impossibly high heels conveniently hidden? That however uncomfortable and painful that pose looks to hold for more than a moment, it’s still presented as an ideal?
For readers unfamiliar (long-term readers, please bear with me a moment), those manufacturers’ pseudo-scientific justifications for their ensuing schema for women’ bodies, developed only to disguise that their flaws were wholly invented, somehow became the accepted wisdom for how women viewed themselves. Which I saw uncanny parallels to in the Korean craze for inventing various “lines/라인” for women’s bodies 10-20 years ago. Then, it was
astonishing to see how brazenly companies would compete for their new, eponymous lines to sink into in the public consciousness. Venus lingerie claiming that women’s breasts were a “V-line” for instance, Yes lingerie that they were a “Y-line.”
Hanging over this trend was the inconvenient fact that most women neither needed nor wanted exciting new names for their body parts, which would invariably be found wanting compared to those photoshopped versions in the ads. Hence most lines, mercifully, were quickly forgotten. But some did indeed stick, a V-line neck becoming a standard offering by cosmetic surgeons today for instance, and just a few days ago my female students told me that their summer plans included working on their “bodylines.” In fact, in the 2020s, it seems just about everything to do with a woman’s body has become a generalized “line.”
But these subjects, I’ve already covered in depth. You could argue I’m merely projecting too, and overemphasizing mere semantic similarities.
Either way, I could have just tweeted the ad, and all those links.
For both you long-term and hopefully new, interested readers though, who I need to provide extra value to if I’m (very) belatedly going to transition this blog into a paying, subscriber-based newsletter, simply linking to stuff you’ve probably read before felt woefully insufficient.
But again, what to add though? An in-depth look at the growth of the figure-correction industry? Now ubiquitous, but which I’m not sure I’d even heard of 5 years ago? Interesting to learn more about, for sure, but probably lacking English sources. So, not really worth, as a busy divorced dad, the huge time investment I’d need to spend on all the translations.
“For liposuction and fat transplantation, Model-Line Clinic, Busan.”
Hence I sat on this post for a year, leaving it half-finished. And, frankly, dozens like it before and since, for the same reason that I didn’t feel I knew enough about the subject to add that value, so fresh research was needed first. All culminating in my recent hiatus.
Then finally, in just the last two weeks, they all suddenly starting making sense again.
All of which I was too daunted by to even begin to parse here. But just thinking about them all together for the first time now, persuaded me to buy 운동하는 여자: 체육관에서 만난 페미니즘 / A Woman Who Exercises: Feminism Meets the Gymnasium by 양민영 / Lee Min-yeong. Which I’m finding surprisingly well-suited to my Korean level, and has already thrown me headfirst into an equally deep dive on the sexualization of Korean (female) basketball players’ uniforms, which I’ll link to here once I emerge.
More specifically, the breakthrough is my suddenly beginning to see the links between all of those. A grand narrative coalescing as it were, rather than feeling overwhelmed all the time. That maybe just through osmosis, I do know my shit. That I’m worth $2-$5 a month, if only I can put those thoughts into words on paper on a regular basis. And, crucially, stop with all the navel-gazing already!
On that note, may I first present the “The Politics of the Body,” the 16 June episode of the BBC 4 radio show and podcast Thinking Allowed, hosted by sociologist Laurie Taylor. The ultimate impetus for this post, his interview of Beth Linker, Associate Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, about her new book Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America (2024), which I will happily throw money at once the paperback comes out, is a fascinating examination of aspects of everyday life we take for granted—which nicely dovetailed with my sense there was—is—something to be said about those figure correction ads.
Beth Linker’s full interview, from 1:45 to 16:50, I can’t possibly do justice to with my transcripts of brief sections. But hopefully they’ll suffice give a taste.
First, from 5:45-7:10:
Laurie Taylor:
“Then you actually get posture exams in the early 20th-Century, [they] became mainstays in the military, workplace, and schools…and there’s a thing called the ‘American Posture League,’ which was formed in 1914. Tell me about the League, and what beliefs it promoted.”
Beth Linker:
“Yes, the American Posture League was formed by Jessie Bankcroft, head of public schools in New York City…the first order of business was to standardize posture…they developed tools by which to measure posture…, so they used what’s called a schematograph—an overhead projector where you get posture tracings. Eventually they adopt camera technology. And they begin to use this technology in the military, in public schools, and universities to physically examine every person, and then, they develop grading systems for everybody’s posture. Standard grades then became A, B, C, D—D being the worst….and they also developed posture contests.”
Next, from 10:08-11:00:
Laurie Taylor:
“Slouching has been linked to an offensive discourse about so-called ‘primitive people,’ but you found out that the rise of eugenics in the early 20th-Century prompted scientists to worry that bad posture could lead to a backward slide in human progress. Tell me a little bit more about this development and about ‘race betterment’ projects.” (Source, right: Penn Arts & Sciences.)
Beth Linker:
“The white educated class, again, very much worried that, if they lacked physical fitness, that other non-white peoples would become stronger and overtake them and their better physical form. The end of that quote that you had you could hear good posture requires drill, which requires a certain kind of intellect and a will, which still puts white people as superior.”
And finally, from 16:02-16:45:
Beth Linker:
“…it was assumed that your outward appearance indicated inward ability and morality.”
Laurie Taylor:
“That’s not denying posture therapy can be a powerful tool when used to alleviate existing back pain. But…in a way, we’ve got to salvage that thought, haven’t we, from the rather long, troubled history of ‘posture panic.'”
Beth Linker:
“I am not opposed to, you know, standing desks…to anything that people do to improve their well-being. I am more trying to get us to think more critically about when we say to someone ‘Oh, you should stand up straight,” what do we mean by that, and what do we think that that’s going to improve?”
And finally for this post, let me take advantage of the opportunity to give a shoutout to my favorite fashion history YouTuber, SnappyDragon. Swayed by the image above that reigned supreme on the sidebar I had then, a year ago the model’s pose in the figure correction ad reminded me ofthebustle, leading me to the following two videos of hers. For the second, I’ll wrap up this post by leaving you with several screenshots I took before I developed my colossal writer’s block—but again, I highly recommend watching both in full.
So, I finally have the elevator pitch about what feminism is.
Pursuing equality of opportunity. For all sexes and sexual orientations.
It’s crude, but I think it’d do. In the moment, there’d probably be so little time to work with whoever might be asking, and so much hostility from some, that my priority would be getting them to acknowledge any inequality even exists at all.
First then, I’d broach that different sexes paying different prices for essentially the same product or service, or the same price for an inferior version of them, is obviously unfair.
(I wouldn’t waste any more time on anyone who couldn’t even concede that.)
I’d want to tread carefully next though. Maybe my inquirer wouldn’t know—or hadn’t deigned to know—that there are so many examples of this ‘pinktax’ out there, so named because it’s overwhelmingly women that suffer from them.
Here the old me, unsure about how to make that case in such a limited time, would probably jump the gun by explaining how just being angry about that discrimination, and wanting to do something about it, absolutely makes someone a feminist in his book.
The new me though, knows a case for that would need to actually be made first, and also how toxic that f-word is to so many people outside his circles—especiallyinKorea. So, he would confine himself to providing one or two quick examples, and consider that a solid achievement for two minutes. Surely it would be more effective to let his inquirer put two and two together themselves about them later, he’d reason, than beat them over the head with their obvious takeaways.
Take these two handy recent Korean examples for instance, courtesy of an April 22, 2024 contribution to the “중앙로365” column in the Busan Ilbo by Byeon Jeong-hee, standing representative of the ‘Salim’ Women’s Human Rights Support Center (my emphasis). Both also happen to be about issues dear to my heart, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment:
얼마 전 부동산에도 ‘핑크택스(Pink Tax)’ 현상이 일어나고 있다는 기사를 읽었다. ‘여성 전용’ 원룸이나 ‘여성 안심 구역’에 위치한 부동산 매물의 월세나 보증금이 다른 매물에 비해 비싸게 책정되어 있다는 것이다. 부동산 정보 플랫폼에서 제공한 자료에 따르면 서울 주요 10개 대학 중 원룸 월세는 이화여자대학교가 월 71만 원으로 가장 비쌌는데, 대부분 여성 전용 원룸 밀집 지역이었다. 부산에서도 부산대 인근 여성 전용 원룸과 일반 원룸을 비교한 결과, 별도 보안 장치가 추가된 것이 아님에도 불구하고 여성 전용 원룸의 월세가 약 20만 원 비쌌다는 취재 결과가 있었다. 때문에 주로 여성들이 느끼는 범죄에 대한 두려움이나 안전에 대한 불안을 이용한 마케팅이자 핑크택스라는 지적이다.
“Not long ago, I read an article saying that the ‘Pink Tax’ phenomenon was occurring in real estate….The monthly rent or deposit for real estate properties located in ‘female-only’ studio apartments or ‘female-safe zones’ are set at a higher price compared to other properties. According to data provided by a real estate information platform, among the 10 major universities in Seoul, Ewha Womans University had the highest monthly rent at 710,000 won per month, and most of them were concentrated areas of studio apartments exclusively for women. In Busan, as a result of comparing women-only one-rooms and regular one-rooms near Pusan National University, the results showed that the monthly rent for women-only one-rooms was about 200,000 won more expensive even though there were no additional security devices. Therefore, it is pointed out that it is a marketing and pink tax that mainly exploits women’s fear of crime or anxiety about safety.”
This may come as a surprise. For a long time Korea has had a reputation as a safe country, and in many respects it still is—the homicide rate is extremely low by international standards. However, it has also long been one of the few places in the world where women are actually more likelyto be murderedthan men. And, since the 2016 murder of a woman in a public toilet in Gangnam especially, the perception that Korea is a safe country for women is, I suspect, one largely only felt by short-term visitors, relying on outdated, frequently sanitized (or naive) sources.
It’s no wonder then, that among all demographics, it’s women living alone who are most anxious about these developments, so are prepared to pay extra not to have to worry about them. Indeed, so anxious that their fears are now being exploited by landlords and realtors, as Byeon points out.
I do however, completely acknowledge that she is vague about her sources, and provides none of their data. Indeed, the ‘Salim’ Women’s Human Rights Support Center, which Byeon represents, is actually an anti-sex work organization, which makes me wary of potential hyperbole in her claims (this is my unfortunate experience with such organizations). So, I’ll endeavor to find those sources and data myself for a follow-up post.
I can get lightbulbs changed if I need to, and the toilet unblocked too.
I don’t need to call Dad!
But I also acknowledge I don’t really have any doubts about their veracity, based on my deep dive into Remark Vill serviced apartments’ advertising campaign with then 32 year-old Im Se-mi in 2020 above. Because, although it first drew my attention through the cloying, traditional, initializing gender roles it portrayed (Could my interlocutor in the elevator seriously imagine a man being asked to say those things? Could anyone?), it also left me with a heavy sense of just how unsafe women felt even back then, the grim, more recent statistics in all those links above being just the tip of the iceberg of those I outlined in that earlier post.
Plus, in an equally deep follow-up the next year, I recounted what I learned from two must-read books about how adding safety features for women, real or otherwise, were often implemented entirely for financial reasons (giving the impression of gentrifying a neighborhood say), so frequently didn’t substantively improve women’s safety at all. Also, I learned how various Korean government policies often financially discriminate against single femalehouseholds specifically.
But of course my new elevator friend and I would never get that far. And I’d want to save them the embarrassment too, of getting into knots arguing that Korea’s consistently terrible gender gap…is because of Korean women choosing to have babies. We’re only talking about how much money women may or may not have to spend on safety features compared to men, and why, I’d remind them, not how much money they may or may not have in the first place. And, instead of quibbling about either, we could surely agree that is very not cool that women have to pay extra for the privilege of safety men take for granted, let alone be scammed over it (I might want to avoid that scary ‘p-word’ though). We could then talk next about what men and women should do to remedy that. In other words, be feminists, although I wouldn’t want to say that word yet either—I wouldn’t want them to realize they’ve been tricked yet.
Or, we could just move onto the next example (my emphasis again):
우리나라에서는 2018년부터 이러한 핑크택스에 대한 문제 제기가 있었다. 한 유명 아웃도어 브랜드에서 여성용 패딩의 충전량이 남성용의 절반밖에 되지 않지만 같은 가격에 판매되고 있다거나, 유명 패션 온라인 스토어에서 뒷주머니와 밴딩 처리 등을 없앤 여성용 슬랙스가 남성용보다 비싸게 판매되어 논란이 일었다. 같은 가격의 옷임에도 여성용으로 출시된 옷은 주머니가 너무 작거나 옷의 마감 처리가 허술하게 되어 있다는 취재가 이어졌다. 미용실에서 머리 커트 가격이 성별에 따라 다르게 책정되어 있는 것도 꾸준히 지적되어 왔다. 한국소비자원 사이트에 따르면 서울 지역 여성 커트 1회 평균 가격은 2만 1308원으로 남성 1만 1692원에 비해 약 1.82배 비싼 것으로 나타났다.
“In Korea, issues regarding the pink tax have been raised since 2018. Controversy arose when a famous outdoor brand said that women’s padding had only half the amount of padding as men’s but was sold at the same price. And, at a famous fashion online store, women’s slacks with no back pockets or banding were sold more expensively than men’s. Even though the clothes were the same price, there were continued reports that the clothes released for women had too small pockets or poor finishing. It has also been consistently pointed out that haircut prices at beauty salons are set differently depending on gender. According to the Korea Consumer Agency website, the average price of one haircut for women in Seoul is 21,308 won, which is about 1.82 times more expensive than 11,692 won for men.”
This last one is meaningful to me, because I recall hearing on the radio as a student in Auckland, New Zealand in the late-1990s, that hairdressers were complaining about having to charge the same prices for men and women. Which made complete sense to me then—women tended to have longer hair, and so took more time.
I’d stress this first. That this opinion was reasonable, based on the information I had available at the time. That it wasn’t stupid at all, and that I’m not about to judge someone for having an opinion that I once did.
(Only now, in my 40s, have I finally learnt it’s easier to persuade people by praising their intelligence and common sense first rather than by implying they have neither. Who’d have thought??)
Only then would I explain that when I actually asked women about haircuts much later though (another secret way to trick people into becoming feminists, I hear), did I realize how unfair differential pricing would be to them. Because have women ever really been completely “free” to get short hair cuts, and men long ones? How about right now then, after an attack on a woman in Jinju in November 2023, targeted because her short hairstyle made her look like a feminist to her attacker?
Perhaps that could lead to a discussion about everything else appearance-wise women are expected or required to spend their time and money on?
Perhaps. But the new me knows when to end when the going’s good ;)
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:
By virtue of what I research and write about, I’d say roughly 2/3rds of the books I read are by women, split evenly between white women and women of color. And of the latter, probably almost all of them are Koreans and Asian-Americans.
So, it’s been a real pleasure and eye-opener this week to read Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo (2019), which has 12 short stories about the linked lives of (mostly) black British women.
Most of it is very metropolitan, so you don’t have to be at all familiar with London or the UK to enjoy it. But I have to admit I’m especially enjoying the later stories set in Newcastle and Northumberland by the Scottish border, where I’m originally from.
Intrigued then, now I’m thinking the next one about black women I’ll read will be Mama Said: Stories by Kristen Gentry (2023), also a collection of linked short stories about mostly black women, this time set in Louisville, Kentucky. Which to be sure, is quite a leap from the UK. But what instantly sold me was actually her depiction of black men, as explained by Deesha Philyaw in her recommendation at Electric Literature. Specifically of Parker, the point of view character in the story “A New World”:
“Despite carrying the weight of several worlds on his shoulders, Parker’s brand of masculinity never disappoints. This may be the first time I’ve encountered a Black man in fiction stepping up when the women in his life have checked out. Further, Parker isn’t a Black man looking for praise or credit for doing the shit he’s supposed to do, to paraphrase a classic Chris Rock stand-up bit. Parker doesn’t want to be a hero. He just doesn’t want to be a coward.”
Please read the rest of Philyaw’s recommendation there, which also has the full story.
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.
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:
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:
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!
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, plus 15-minute video. Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.
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 
