From left: Sticky notes as protest—the exit of the Gangnam subway station was covered in messages of rage and sorrow after a woman’s violent murder; during the Tokyo Olympics, South Korean archer An San was brutalized online for her short hair.
‘End the Patriarchy’ W
HEN OLYMPIC ARCHER AN San sported a short hairstyle during the 2020 Tokyo
Olympic Games, disgruntled men started a defamation campaign. In late July, they flooded her Instagram account with misogynist insults and demanded her two gold medals be revoked. The reason, as one com- menter explained: “She has short hair … and reeks of feminism.” Despite the pressure, An held firm.
In an inspiring moment seen around the world, she released her final ar- row in a shoot-off and hit the center ring, garnering a third Olympic gold. Online attacks are familiar to
women everywhere but are especially epidemic in South Korea, where fem- inists fight a bitter backlash that has rocked the world’s 10th-largest econ- omy. Hawon Jung, a journalist and author of a forthcoming book on the #MeToo movement, says, “South Ko- rean women are among the most edu- cated in the world, with 80 percent of them going to college. But at the same time the country has one of the worst records on women’s rights in the world.” This includes the largest gen-
16 | SPRING 2022
der pay gap among the 38 member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop- ment, a sex crimes industry, designa- tion by The Economist’s glass-ceiling index as the worst place to be an em- ployed woman, and one of the world’s highest female homicide rates. Despite such grim statistics, femi-
nists have fought for change—and won. One of the earliest victories oc- curred in 2016 after a man murdered a woman in a public restroom at the Gangnam subway station in Seoul. When the press and police claimed it was a random act of violence—even though the man stated he was moti- vated by misogyny—women re- sponded en masse. Thousands protested outside the station, leaving a sea of sticky notes chronicling their sorrow and their rage. One of them was Hae-in Shim,
former senior director of Haeil (“Tsunami” in Korean), a feminist group founded by activist Kim Ju-hee. “Since the very beginning, when the Gangnam femicide hap- pened, I was there with my peers,” Hae-in remembers. “That was the
South Korean women remain undaunted in the face of an anti-feminist backlash
first time I realized I’m not alone in having this anger in me.” Jinsook Kim, a scholar at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, coined the term “sticky-note activism” for these online and offline feminist protest strategies. She describes how effective the tactics were: “Within a month af- ter the murder, the South Korean government announced measures de- signed specifically to address crimes against women. These included the expansion of a hotline for reporting violence against women, counseling services for female victims, workshops to raise awareness of and combat the problem, and the distribution of guidelines to schools and public or- ganizations for responding to crimes against women.” Two years later, the #MeToo move-
ment took South Korea by storm. “Street protests condemning the per- vasive sexual harassment and gender violence were daily occurrences,” Hawon, the journalist, says. “And throngs of women turned up in court- rooms as a show of support when high-profile #MeToo trials unfolded.” At the same time, the “spy-cam
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