#social problems

...Okay so!! I'd love it SO MUCH if ya'll could fill out a Bullying/Harassment survey of mine. I explain why I need this in the form, but to summarize, I'll be making a google slideshow about bullying/harassment. It won't be anything special, just a short slideshow meant to show people that bullying/harassment is prevalent in our society. I'll be presenting this slideshow in a classroom of my peers on Friday (less than two days!!!) so it'd mean a lot if you either filled it out, or shared it so I could get more responses!!!

Children grow up,

no toys between

their little fingers,

just dirty hands,

iron residues

under bloody

fingernails.

Instead of kindergarten,

they sew with needle and thread,

dresses, skirts,

tired fingers tying,

grinding buttons

on cheap jackets.

For hours,

hours that seem endless,

hours that weigh on tired eyes,

looking at the clock,

praying for an easier life,

while they mold

plastic and metal -

repeated so often,

it becomes their breath,

their very pulse.

Barely pay,

stomachs at home

continue to rumble,

an emptiness

that aches.

Parents too sick to work,

the child the provider,

while life slowly drips

from them,

painting pictures

of their suffering.

Just empty shells

in huge factory halls,

no soul who could

escape the cage,

build from poverty.

No children playing in the mud,

no laughter in the sun,

only the echo

of a stolen childhood

I’m sorry, but you just gave a bunch of lazy excuses for him. I agree that going to Chris Brown concert doesn’t mean Namjoon or Hoseok actively support what they did, but it does show where their priorities are.

Yes, no one can know what every artist of this planet has done, but we’re not talking about any artist we are talking about CHRIS BROWN. And even if they don’t know his whole criminal record I’m sorry, but it’s >impossible< that they didn’t knew what he did to Rihanna. Every person who was born before 2010 knows it. My father who’s in his 70s, doesn’t know how to speak english, doesn’t know a single thing about rap or R&B knows that CB abused Rihanna.

Even if they didn’t went to CB concert specifically to meet him they still went backstage, greeted him, told him it was “an honor” to mee him, took pictures and shared for the whole world to see. It’s because of excuses like these that men keep getting away with things. They don’t care about women’s dignity, they don’t care about women’s pain, they don’t care about women’s right and they don’t care about women’s suffering. It wasn’t a crime or inhumane act, to them it was simple a “inconvenience that happened”. That is a extremely sad thing to do and there’s no way to defend them. Not to mention that Namjoon spoke about feminism, women’s rights and all that shit only to be exactly like the average uneducated man that dgaf about women. This incident showe me how little he actually cared about this. Honestly? It would’ve been better if he was honest from the beggining instead pretending he cared or was in tune with that topic. Makes me wonder how much of that was nothing but PR.

Aren’t we tired of excusing men for every shitty thing they do? They fucked up bad BAD. They didn’t comitted a crime, sure, but they showed how little they actually care about the reality of women.

Part 3. WHAT IF BEING INTERESTED IN FEMINISM DOESN’T MAKE SOMEONE A PERFECT FEMINIST?

I want to continue this conversation with one comment, because there is something in it that, to me, goes far beyond the situation involving Namjoon and Hoseok.

And I want to start by saying that I understand why this comment exists⬆️

I understand why Namjoon’s actions in particular would be especially upsetting.

Because when someone publicly talks about feminism, women’s rights, and humanistic values, it is completely natural to expect them to be more informed about these issues.

And when their actions seem to contradict those values, a very uncomfortable question appears:

“Did you actually believe what you were saying?”

I think that question is absolutely allowed to exist.

But this is where I start disagreeing with the comment.

Because there is a huge difference between:

“Your actions contradict something you previously said.”

and

“Therefore, everything you said before was a lie.”

And that difference is what I’m interested in.

BEING INTERESTED IN A SUBJECT DOESN’T MAKE YOU PERFECT AT IT

If someone says:

“I’m interested in feminism.”

that means they are interested in feminism.

That’s it.

It does not mean:

“I am now a professional feminist.”

It does not mean:

“I know everything about women’s history.”

It does not mean:

“I will never do something that someone considers sexist.”

It does not mean:

“I understand women’s experiences as deeply as a woman who has lived them.”

And it certainly does not mean:

“I now have to demonstrate perfect alignment with every feminist value for the rest of my life, otherwise everything I said before was PR.”

I think sometimes we demand something very strange from people:

to become perfect at a subject before they are allowed to be interested in it.

But learning works the opposite way.

You become interested because there are things you don’t know.

You read because you don’t understand everything.

You ask questions because you don’t have all the answers.

You change your mind because you didn’t know something before.

And that is the entire point of learning.

IMAGINE SOMEONE LEARNING SPANISH

They say:

“I love Spanish. I want to learn it.”

They study.

They read.

They watch movies.

They practice speaking.

They make mistakes.

They use the wrong tense.

They translate something incorrectly.

Sometimes they don’t understand a native speaker at all.

And one day they make a really stupid mistake.

Would we say:

“See? That proves they were never actually interested in Spanish. It was all fake.”

No.

Because we understand that:

being interested in a language doesn’t make someone a professional translator.

And making a mistake while learning a language doesn’t automatically prove that they never genuinely wanted to learn it.

So why do we so often demand exactly this from people when it comes to morality?

Why does:

“I want to understand”

so quickly become:

“Then you should already understand everything.”

AND THIS IS WHERE IGNORANCE BECOMES INTERESTING

I think we use the word ignorance far too often as a synonym for simply not knowing something.

But those things aren’t the same.

Not knowing something is a normal human condition.

We all don’t know an enormous number of things.

That doesn’t make us bad people.

Ignorance doesn’t begin where knowledge ends.

I think it begins when someone doesn’t want to know, doesn’t consider learning necessary, refuses to reconsider their understanding of the world, ignores information because it is uncomfortable, or treats their own lack of knowledge as a reason to never change anything.

You can not know something and want to learn.

You can not understand something and start listening.

You can fail to see a problem and recognize it after someone points it out.

You can make a mistake and change your behavior.

That isn’t ignorance. That is learning.

And that is why I don’t think simply not knowing something automatically tells us what kind of person someone is.

The much more interesting question is:

What do they do after they learn?

AND, BY THE WAY, “EVEN MY GRANDPA KNOWS WHO CHRIS BROWN IS” DOESN’T REALLY WORK AS AN ARGUMENT

Because I am literally a living example that yes, you actually can not know.

And since I am that example, I want to answer for myself.

I LOVE Rihanna.

Several of her songs have been on repeat for me for more than a decade. She is extraordinary. Incredibly talented. That is my sincere opinion.

But I knew nothing about “Chris Brown” until I received that comment under my post about Namjoon’s Hologenetic Profile and went online to figure out what had happened, who he was, and what any of this had to do with Namjoon.

So how could that happen?

Very easily.

The culture I was born and raised in has historically been much less invested in celebrities and public figures.

And, at least in the cultural environment I grew up in, Chris Brown’s level of recognition and cultural presence is simply nowhere near Rihanna’s.

Rihanna is a global superstar whose music, image, and career have reached an enormous audience. Chris Brown’s music and fame do not occupy anything close to the same place here.

Celebrity fandom culture is relatively small here. Concerts, merch, fanbases, fan events, following new releases, tracking an artist’s personal life — none of this is nearly as widespread.

Teenagers don’t generally have posters of idols covering their walls. New releases aren’t necessarily followed. An artist’s private life is usually nobody’s business.

Put simply, artists are more often perceived as people with a public profession that happens to involve being on a stage.

Parasocial relationships are relatively uncommon, and I’m not sure social media and the growth of modern media have changed that as much here as they have elsewhere.

So yes, Rihanna is absolutely a household-name-level figure. It’s genuinely difficult not to know who Rihanna is.

But that doesn’t mean you automatically know Chris Brown.

And there is another reason his name simply never became important to me.

When violence, discrimination, abuse, or another serious harm happens, I believe our attention should first and foremost be directed toward the person who was harmed.

The victim deserves the attention.

The care.

The support.

The public solidarity.

The person who committed the act should not become the center of the story simply because they committed it.

They should be held accountable. If a crime has been committed, the person responsible should face the legal consequences that apply to their actions.

But why should the perpetrator become the celebrity of the story?

Why should their name, career, personality, motives, future, and every detail of their life become the thing we remember most?

In Rihanna’s case, I knew that she had experienced physical violence. I knew there had been a terrible situation involving her.

But I genuinely did not care who had done it.

I didn’t know his name.

I had never tried to find out who he was.

I had no interest in why he did it.

I didn’t know what happened to him afterward.

My attention was on Rihanna and on the fact that something horrible had happened to her.

The person who committed the violence was not the part of that story that interested me.

His name didn’t matter to me.

Who he was didn’t matter to me.

What happened to him afterward didn’t matter to me.

What mattered was Rihanna.

What mattered was the fact that violence had happened to her.

And honestly, I think there is something important in that distinction.

Because sometimes the person who caused the harm becomes so culturally famous that their name starts overshadowing the person who was actually harmed.

I don’t think that is necessarily where our attention should go.

I’m not asking anyone to understand this, and I’m not saying my experience excuses anything.

I’m simply explaining how it was possible for me to only learn who Chris Brown was a few days ago.

Sometimes “everyone knows” really does mean “everyone in the cultural environment I’m familiar with knows.”

AND THIS BRINGS US TO SOMETHING VERY UNCOMFORTABLE: MEN AND WOMEN DO NOT HAVE THE SAME SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

And I want to be especially careful here.

Because I am absolutely on women’s side.

I am not going to use the idea of human complexity as a way to minimize women’s experiences.

But precisely because of that, I want to be honest about this.

A man can be a wonderful, kind, educated, intelligent person.

And still not know what a certain part of the female world looks like from the inside.

Not because he is stupid.

Not because he doesn’t care.

Not because he is a bad person.

But because he is a man.

He does not experience a female body.

He does not experience female socialization.

He does not experience sexism, harassment, threats, humiliation, or discrimination based on gender in the same context or with the same frequency that women do.

And if society has spent centuries separating:

“the male world”

from

“the female world,”

then it should not surprise us that people from those two worlds can have very different amounts of firsthand experience.

A man simply does not have the same number of personal experiences that would force him to notice certain things every day.

And I think that matters.

NO ONE IS BORN WITH NATURAL KNOWLEDGE OF SOMEONE ELSE’S EXPERIENCE

That’s why I struggle with the argument:

“Why do women have to explain basic things to men again?”

I understand the frustration behind it.

Because it really is exhausting when a woman has to explain for the hundredth time why certain behavior is dangerous, humiliating, or discriminatory.

But there is something important here.

We cannot know someone else’s experience simply through our own biology.

If you are a man, you cannot automatically feel what it is like to be a woman in society.

Just as I cannot automatically know the experience of someone who grew up in a completely different culture, country, social environment, or family.

Someone has to tell us.

Show us.

Explain it.

And yes — sometimes that person will be a woman.

Because no one can explain women’s experiences the way a woman who has actually lived them can.

That is not an insult to men.

It is simply a limitation of human experience.

Because saying “men have historically been separated from many parts of women’s lived experience” is not the same thing as saying “men are incapable of understanding women.”

They can understand.

They can learn.

They can listen.

They can change.

But they cannot know an experience they have never lived without someone, somewhere, helping them see it.

AND IF YOU KNOW MORE, THAT DOESN’T MAKE YOU BETTER

Let’s say I know more about feminism than some man does.

Okay.

And then what?

Does that make me a better person than him?

No.

It means I know more in this particular area.

And if my knowledge actually has value, the most useful way to use it is not to put a crown on my head.

It is to say:

“Look. This is what I know. This is what I’ve experienced. This is why it matters. This is something you may not have seen.”

Explain.

Show.

Share your experience.

Offer another perspective.

Because knowledge is a tool for growth, not proof of your superiority.

If knowledge becomes a way of saying:

“I know more than you, therefore I am morally above you,”

then we are no longer using it to change the world.

We are simply creating another hierarchy.

And that is not what knowledge is supposed to do.

AND THIS IS WHERE I HAVE THIS VERY STRANGE ASSOCIATION WITH A LAWYER

Imagine a lawyer representing someone who has committed an awful act.

The lawyer may consider that act disgusting.

They may not like their client at all.

And yet they still perform their professional role.

We understand that:

defending someone’s right to a defense ≠ approving of what they did.

A professional role is not the same thing as a person’s entire moral value system.

I’m not bringing up this example because Namjoon or Hoseok’s situation is somehow equivalent to being a lawyer.

Of course it isn’t.

I’m talking about something else.

We are capable of understanding that a person’s contact with someone, or participation in a situation, does not always completely describe their entire moral system.

A lawyer can represent someone they consider a terrible person.

Someone can interact with a person whose actions they do not approve of.

A professional can work with people whose values differ from their own.

None of this makes questions about a specific action disappear.

We can still ask:

“Why did you do that?”

We can still criticize it.

We can still be disappointed.

We can still decide that we no longer want to support that person.

But it reminds us of something:

one action is not always a complete biography of someone’s morality.

AND NOW LET’S STEP COMPLETELY OUTSIDE OF K-POP

Because I think this brings us to a much bigger problem.

We love dividing people into:

good

and

bad.

But human reality is much more uncomfortable than that.

It exists on a spectrum.

And this becomes especially obvious when we talk about sexism.

Because I don’t think there are simply two kinds of people:

“sexists”

and

“people who have never reproduced a sexist idea.”

Most of us are somewhere in between.

Some people have gone very far in examining their own biases.

Some are only beginning to notice them.

Some have never thought about them.

Some consciously support discriminatory beliefs.

Some actively fight against them.

Some grew up in families where sexism was completely normal.

Some managed to move away from it.

Some are still there.

It’s a spectrum.

And recognizing that does not mean saying:

“Everyone is equally bad, so none of it matters.”

No.

It means recognizing how deeply the system is built into our lives.

BECAUSE SEXISM DOESN’T ENTER OUR LIVES AS ONE BIG EVENT

We grow up inside language.

Inside families.

Inside advertising.

Movies.

Books.

Traditions.

Religion.

Education.

Jokes.

Social roles.

And we absorb an enormous number of things before we are even given the opportunity to ask ourselves:

“Do I actually agree with this?”

We are told:

“Boys don’t cry.”

“Girls should be more modest.”

“Men are supposed to be strong.”

“Women are supposed to be soft.”

“It’s just a joke.”

“That’s how it’s always been.”

“That’s just how things are.”

And gradually, something that is part of culture starts to feel like part of nature.

That is why systemic problems are so difficult to see.

They don’t always look like crimes.

Sometimes they look completely ordinary.

And that is exactly what makes them so powerful.

AND NONE OF US GET A WHITE CAPE

Not me.

Not you.

Not Namjoon.

Not Hoseok.

Not anyone else.

Because we all grew up inside the system, not outside of it.

I did too.

You did too.

Even someone who understands a problem very well today once didn’t understand something.

Even someone who would never make a sexist comment today may once have heard one as a child and not recognized it as a problem.

Even someone who actively fights discrimination today may once have stayed silent.

And I’m willing to bet that almost everyone reading this can think of someone in their own life who has views about women that are far from feminist.

A parent.

A relative.

A friend.

A teacher.

A coworker.

A boss.

A partner.

Someone you love.

Someone you respect.

Someone you have known for years.

Maybe you know about their views.

Maybe you don’t.

Maybe you noticed something but decided it wasn’t important enough to confront.

Maybe you simply accepted it because they were your parent, your boss, your friend, or someone you loved.

Maybe they never even thought about the subject seriously.

And many of those people are still part of our lives.

That does not mean we approve of everything they believe.

It means something much more uncomfortable:

sexism exists around us all the time.

We do not suddenly encounter it only when a celebrity does something.

And that does not mean:

“Everyone is bad, so nothing matters.”

No.

It means exactly the opposite:

we are capable of growing.

AND THIS, TO ME, IS MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE IDEA OF A “GOOD PERSON”

I’m not particularly interested in whether someone can prove to me:

“I am a good person.”

I’m much more interested in:

“What do you do with what you’ve learned?”

You realized your joke was sexist?

Okay.

You don’t have to turn it into a public self-destruction ritual.

You can simply stop making that joke.

You realized your ideas about women were shaped by stereotypes?

Reconsider them.

Learned about an experience you had never encountered?

Listen.

Realized you were wrong?

Change your mind.

Learned that your actions hurt someone?

Figure out what you can do differently.

That is moral growth to me.

Not perfection.

A trajectory.

Not:

“I am a good person.”

But:

“Where am I going?”

Not:

“I have never done anything wrong.”

But:

“What am I doing now with what I have learned?”

AND THAT’S WHY I’M NOT AFRAID OF SOMEONE NOT KNOWING SOMETHING

I’m much more afraid of someone who doesn’t want to know.

Because not knowing is a starting point.

Ignorance is often already a relationship with your own lack of knowledge.

You can say:

“I don’t know.”

And that can be the beginning of a conversation.

Or you can say:

“I don’t need to know this.”

And close the door.

Do you see the difference?

And that’s why I don’t want to automatically turn a lack of knowledge into proof that someone lacks humanity.

Sometimes a person simply doesn’t know yet.

And then they learn.

AND I THINK THE SITUATION WITH NAMJOON AND HOSEOK CAN BECOME KNOWLEDGE

I don’t know what exactly they knew before this situation.

I don’t know how they understood what was happening.

I don’t know what they thought about Chris Brown.

I don’t know whether their perspective will change afterward.

And I’m not going to speak for them.

But I can absolutely imagine this:

this situation may have given them information they did not have before.

It may have forced them to see something they had not seen.

To understand why, for so many women, publicly interacting with this person is not perceived as a neutral event.

To learn more about women’s experiences.

To see their own actions from another perspective.

And if that happens, I don’t see it as proof that they “never supported feminist ideas.”

I see it as a person who received new information and now has the opportunity to do something with it.

Of course, only if they actually do.

And that is a question I cannot answer for them.

BECAUSE I DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO BE AFRAID TO TRY

This is probably where my strongest reaction to the comment comes from.

The idea of a world where:

the more you try to be a good person, the higher the price of your mistake becomes

really saddens me.

You were interested in feminism?

Then you should have known everything.

You talked about women’s rights?

Then you’re not allowed to make mistakes.

You talked about humanism?

Then any contradiction proves you were a hypocrite.

You tried to become better?

Then your mistake is somehow even less forgivable.

The higher you climb, the more expensive your mistakes become.

But if that is how the system works, people learn a very simple lesson:

better not say anything at all.

Don’t talk publicly about what you’re learning.

Don’t admit that you’re interested.

Don’t show the process.

Don’t try.

Because one day you will fail to perfectly match your own public image — and someone will tell you:

“Then it was all a lie.”

I don’t want that kind of world.

Because it creates a terrible incentive:

don’t explore difficult subjects unless you can guarantee that you will never get anything wrong.

And that does not create better people.

It creates people who are simply more afraid to speak, learn, or try.

BECAUSE MORALITY IS NOT A TITLE

I don’t need someone who earned the title:

“good person.”

and now spends the rest of their life defending it against every accusation.

I’m much more interested in someone who can keep asking:

“What if there’s something I’m not seeing?”

“What if I’m wrong?”

“What can I learn?”

“What can I change?”

And this applies not only to men.

Not only to feminism.

Not only to BTS.

It applies to all of us.

SO IF YOU KNOW MORE THAN I DO — TEACH ME

Not because I am beneath you.

And not because you are now morally above me.

But because you have knowledge that I don’t have.

Use it.

If you understand how a problem works — explain it.

If you know something I don’t — tell me.

If I’m wrong — show me where.

If I can’t see what you can see — help me see it.

And if after that I refuse to listen, continue denying what is obvious, and refuse to change anything — then that is a completely different conversation.

Because now the problem is no longer that I didn’t know.

The problem is that I didn’t want to know.

AND I THINK THAT’S WHY I DON’T WANT WHITE CAPES

I don’t want to be a person who proved their moral purity once and never has to look at themselves again.

I want to remain a person who can discover something uncomfortable about myself and say:

“Okay. I didn’t see that before.”

And learn.

Because we are all somewhere on this spectrum.

Some are farther along.

Some are closer to the beginning.

Some are just starting to move.

Some have already traveled a very long way.

But knowledge does not make us better than one another.

It gives us the ability to move.

And maybe that is the real value of knowledge:

not being able to say,

“I know more than you.”

but being able to say:

“I know more than I knew yesterday — so now I can do a little better.”

That is growth to me.

Not perfection.

Not a white cape.

Not proof of moral purity.

But movement.

From not knowing — to knowledge.

From knowledge — to understanding.

From understanding — to action.