global I REPORTS
porn” scandal surfaced. Men were se- cretly filming women on subway trains, in office bathrooms or even mid-sex, and then displaying the footage on the web. In response, tens of thousands of women took to the streets proclaiming, “My life is not your porn.” According to Hawon, “The monthly rallies were the largest- ever protests by women recorded in the country, and the momentum creat- ed by the protests ushered in many landmark laws to curb the image-based sexual abuse of women in cyberspace, commonly called ‘digital sex crimes.’” When a young YouTube star re-
leased a video in which she took off her fake eyelashes and removed her makeup, it went viral. She said feel- ings of ugliness she’d grappled with all her life were due to pressure to conform to South Korea’s unrealistic beauty standards. She received death threats but her video helped ignite Escape the Corset, a campaign urging women to accept themselves by de- stroying or eschewing makeup, wear- ing gender-neutral clothing and cutting their hair. Another move- ment, 4B (B translates as “no” in Ko- rean), went even further. It addressed the oppressive nature of marriage in South Korea by urging women not to wed or even have romantic relation- ships, sex or children with men. But the success of organized femi-
nist resistance—including the de- criminalization of abortion in January 2021—has led to an ugly backlash. Bae In-kyu, the leader of Man on
Solidarity, one of the largest anti- feminist groups, shows up at women’s rights protests in a Joker costume to ridicule feminists. Bae and his follow- ers, men in their 20s and 30s, taunt protestors by squealing, “Thud! Thud!,” which is the sound they say
Protesting against hidden4 camera porn in Seoul in 2018
www.msmagazine.com SPRING 2022 | 17
“ugly feminist pigs” make while walk- ing. Their goal is to terrorize women, as they did at a street protest this past summer in Seoul. A feminist activist who was at the
protest said Bae and his followers had “snuck into our private online group chat so they had all of our informa- tion, though we used fake names. They knew who each of us were and where we lived and what we did for a living. And then they actually showed up at the protest with water guns. And they shot us. We were afraid that [the liquid in the water guns] was something else, like acid.” Haeil was founded as a response to
this attack by Man on Solidarity—but also in view of the high suicide rate among South Korean women during the pandemic. When the city of Seoul set up a suicide prevention cen- ter to serve women at risk, however, men claimed “reverse discrimina- tion.” Hae-in reports, “They got re- ally upset and started committing massive cyber terrorism. They were terrorizing online communication channels and hacking their servers.
Because of that, the whole program was taken down.” Feminists stood up to these cyber-
attacks and hit the streets in the lead- up to March’s presidential elections, in which both the liberal and conser- vative parties capitalized on the anti- feminist backlash to gain votes. It was the conservative candidate, Yoon Seok-youl, who prevailed—but by the thinnest of margins. Hae-in contends that Yoon’s victo-
ry would have been more decisive if he had not stirred up women voters by pledging to eliminate the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which was established by a previous administration to address the coun- try’s severe gender discrimination. Hae-in says that following election night, women donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the progres- sive Justice Party, which had fielded a woman candidate. “This will be a long and difficult
battle, but we will not give up,” she says. “We’re here to end the patri- archy, not negotiate with it.” —LESLIE ABSHER
JEAN CHUNG/GETTY IMAGES
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
