The South Korean womenās movement: āWe are not flowers, we are a fireā
Male violence politicizes and radicalizes
In 2016, the infamous āGangnam murderā instigated outcry among women. A 34-year-old man named Kim Sung-min stabbed a 23-year-old woman (whose name remains under a publication ban) to death inside a gender-neutral washroom at a karaoke bar. Kim Sung-min waited inside the washroom, allowing several men to enter and exit before a woman came in. In court, he explained, āI did it because women have always ignored me.ā This is a similar explanation to those offered by other āincelsā (involuntary celibates) who have perpetrated violent murders, but in South Korea, government authorities explicitly denied the misogynistic motive, despite Kim Sung-minās own testimony.
In response to the murder, women flooded the streets outside Gangnam Station and the surrounding area of Seocho-dong in protest. Many of these women did not consider themselves feminists at the time, but the nature of the murder and misogynist motivation politicized them.
By 2018, āmolkaā (the secret filming of women in washrooms and change rooms, or up their skirts in public) had become a widespread problem in Korea. Interviewees told me this is in part because Korean men lack the confidence to directly sexually harass women in the street, so their attempts to access women sexually take place in more āsneakyā ways. Though there are laws against this form of voyeurism in South Korea, the police rarely enforce them. The situation reached a tipping point when a young female student was charged for photographing a nude male model at her art school. According to the women I interviewed, the man would routinely leave the classroom naked, so students were forced to see his genitals. Finally one female student took a photo of the man in class, posting it online to decry his behaviour. She was arrested, put on trial, imprisoned, and forced to apologize to the man, who said the images of him exposing his genitals publicly had caused him āpsychological damage.ā The woman was initially fined the equivalent of 18,000 euros, but the flasher insisted to the court that the woman be sent to prison, and she was jailed for 10 months.
Considering men use spy cameras with almost total impunity, this incident sparked a wave of molka protests. Hundreds of thousands of mainly young women came together, incensed that the laws around voyeurism would be used against women, not men. To date, 360,000 women have participated in protests against spy cams. These demonstrations consist of highly structured processions, political chants typed up on flyers and distributed among the crowds, and enlivening stage speeches that often begin the chants, which the protestors join in on, reaching crescendos that sound like battle cries. At some rallies, women go on stage to have their hair publicly cut short; other times makeup collections are ceremoniously thrown in garbage bags.
