the world is cruel but it's cool

Last winter, when Chung Soo-young saw a man rushing out of the women’s restroom at a chain coffee shop in downtown Seoul, the first thing she did was to scan all stalls in search of a hidden camera. Like many other South Korean women, Chung, 26, constantly worries that she could be secretly filmed in private moments. Her fear spiked, she says, when she saw the intruder and “realized I can actually be a victim.”

In South Korea, microcameras installed in public bathrooms for surreptitious filming are an everyday concern. Police data show that the number of “illegal filming” crimes sharply increased from 1,353 in 2011 to 6,470 in 2017.

The fear of digital peeping Toms has led women to stuff tiny balls of toilet paper into holes they find in public bathroom stalls or cover the holes with tape. Six months after her bathroom incident, Chung decided to act and put together her own “emergency kit” to thwart molka, or hidden cameras.

She started a crowdfunding project for the kit, and the response was greater than she had expected. More than 600 people bought the kit, which costs about $12 (14,000 Korean won) and includes a tube of silicone sealant to fill up holes, an ice pick to break tiny camera lenses and stickers to patch up holes.

Thinking of her kits as a “stopgap,” Chung also started building an archive of illicitly recorded videos and pictures she found online to demonstrate how serious the problem is. In September, during a search, she stumbled on a video of herself from that December day.

Once filmed, molka videos are quickly shared online. With the right search words in Korean, it is not difficult to find pictures and videos of women in bathrooms and changing rooms on file-sharing platforms and social networks such as Tumblr and Twitter. Thumbnails of such videos, tagged with an estimated age of the filmed women or the filming location, are posted with a messenger ID. Anyone can contact the seller, who is often the one who shot the film, and get gigabytes of voyeuristic videos for pennies.

South Korean Women Fight Back Against Spy Cams In Public Bathrooms

Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1530

Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Jan Massys, 1543

Judith Beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio, 1602

Judith with the Head of Holophernes, Cristofano Allori, 1613

Judith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi, 1620

Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Massimo Stanzione, 1640

Judith, Franz Stuck, 1928

Judith and Holofernes, Kehinde Wiley, 2012

Judith Beheading Holofernes, Kehinde Wiley, 2012

Plus size women in music

“This is a new meaning of family. It’s not a question of a man and a woman and children, which we grow up knowing as a family. It’s a question of a group of human beings in a mutual bond.”