"Flowers of Fire" Book Club, Week I: #MeToo, #WithYou
How America's cultural reckoning sparked a tidal wave of protest across South Korea
Today, we’re proud to present the first installment of our four-week long book club discussing Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women' s Rights Worldwide, by Hawon Jung. This installment focuses on the introduction and Part One, “#MeToo, #WithYou.”
: Patrick, I know we’ve both had this book on our reading lists for a while. Why are you interested in South Korea’s gender wars? How do they relate to your own hopes and fears about America’s future?
: Leah, it’s so much fun to be able to do this with you. Major thanks to Fairer Disputations for making this possible.
To me, last year’s election rhetoric really emphasized why sex and gender are becoming real fault lines in American politics, even though the overall gender gap in voting was broadly in line with prior years. But so much survey work—shoutout to Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute, who has done great work on this—has shown diverging attitudes among younger men and women. Coming into this book, I was sort of envisioning South Korea as exemplifying this trend on steroids. Which it sort of is… but the situation there is also, as this first part points out, much more complicated than mere political polarization along male-female lines.
Leah: Yes. Reading through the eruption of South Korea’s own #MeToo movement, you get a strong sense of both the unusually flat global culture and the real differences it disguises. It’s wild that an American hashtag could spark movements all around the globe, and it’s easy to assume they’re all basically the same movement.
Patrick: Tom Friedman was right! (Just in a very different way than he presumably envisioned.) I mean, even our Dobbs decision led to an abortion rights backlash in countries like Spain and France.
Leah: Even though there’s pushback in America against elements of “rape culture,” it’s clear that what South Korean women are up against is something else entirely. Their #MeToo movement involved (among other things) pushing back against abuse of teenaged girls by their teachers in all girls schools that became hunting grounds. These were schools where there wasn’t just one predatory teacher, there were multiple abusers, and their systemic sexual abuse was an open secret among both students and staff.
Patrick: One thing this discussion reminds me of is a recent piece by Nobel prize winning economist Claudia Goldin, who posits that declining fertility in advanced economies isn’t driven just by economic advancement, per se. Rather, it’s the pace of development that matters. And South Korea did essentially speed-run its entry into modernity in a way that didn’t seem to allow gender roles time to catch up.
Leah: We’ll definitely be returning to that theme as the book unfolds. In the chapters we’ve read so far, the author reports the experiences of women who have only just entered into certain lines of work and describes the blatant, unrestrained harassment they encounter. Senior women in their fields are expected to sit near the most senior man at an event and play up to him like an escort, making sure he’s having a good time and has someone pretty to look at.
“It wasn’t just a matter of making laws have teeth, but of changing the law and changing the expectations. And going from a ‘rape is legal’ culture to one where rape is actually treated as serious and sociopathic is a hard shift to make in a few years.”
Patrick: Yes, those stories felt truly surreal. It’s not like some of the cultural practices that enable the abuses and assaults Jung details are unknown in American society. Still, on net, it feels like Korea’s culture adopted many of the West’s vices with too few balances, in a way that left women particularly vulnerable. You see this in the intense focus on testing that gives teachers a place of almost unchecked authority; the all-consuming work culture that requires alcohol-soaked hoesik ("a virtually mandatory after-work drinking session...[that] lays a fertile ground for sexual harassment of all kinds") to unwind from; its tendency towards hyper-consumerism and unrealistic beauty standards (Jung calls it the “world’s capital of plastic surgery.”)
America’s flaws, as Vivek Ramaswamy so recently inadvertently reminded us, tend to lay less in ruthless meritocracy than excessive libertarianism. So the cultural reckoning #MeToo provided in South Korea may well have been a more needed systemic critique than the more ad hoc version that we saw here.
Leah: I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that rape, as we tend to understand it in America, was legal and understood to be legal in South Korea until the last few years. To legally be rape, women had to have faced “overwhelming violence or intimidation.” In some cases, courts conceded there was violence yet acquitted men of rape because, essentially, some hypothetical woman could have endured a degree of danger and pain in order to escape. If a woman lost her rape case, her abuser could sue her for false accusation and had an easier time convicting her.
So it wasn’t just a matter of making laws have teeth, but of changing the law and changing the expectations. And going from a “rape is legal” culture to one where rape is actually treated as serious and sociopathic is a hard shift to make in a few years. Not least because there are so many living, recent rapists!
Patrick: Right, the legal system in this section felt like a place where the gender revolution that was occuring in the country was especially incomplete. But that’s another place where the parallels break down between South Korea and the U.S. “Flowers of Fire” was only published in 2023, but it already feels out-of-step with the anti-woke moment we’re experiencing now. The overly-simplistic slogan of “believe all women” has evolved to a more complicated place, something beyond just dividing men and women. Just ask Blake Lively.
Jung recounts how a student’s poem alleging abuse leads to an 89-year-old literature professor having his poems taken out of textbooks and honors rescinded—without even ever having been named publicly, much less charged, by his alleged victim. Does it advance authentic justice to skip over due process, or let whisper campaigns dictate who is and isn’t worthy of public praise? Even the most well-justified popular revolutions are hard to keep from overcorrection, and as I think we will continue to explore, not all of the male backlash to South Korea’s #MeToo was entirely unjustified.
Leah: It makes you wonder what the alternative would have been. Once women began telling their stories, they didn’t stay on Twitter and in reported exposes. Women gathered in public places, telling stories of abuse, one by one, for more than a day. It was an eruption. And thus, it was disruptive.
After some cataclysms of human evil, there are truth and reconciliation hearings, rather than trials, because there are too many perpetrators and victims (and, in some cases, culpability is too mixed) to know how to live alongside each other if you pursue justice under the law. One question is what alternate ways of surviving a moral revolution were available to South Korea… or to us.
Discussion Questions:
What felt most familiar in the story of South Korea’s feminist awakening? What was most surprising?
Much of South Korea’s #MeToo movement happened off line, both in mass marches and with personal, public recountings of assault. How does a movement of solidarity change when it goes from solely online to “IRL”?
Are there other examples of American cultural movements sparking unpredictable backlash across the globe that come to mind? What do these examples tell us about American soft power?
Next week’s discussion will focus on Part Two of Flowers of Fire, entitled “Where Did All the Girls Go?”
This is really fascinating and depressing. The overall effect for me was a sort of kaleidoscoping of multiple eras of experiences of women in the American workforce that somehow were condensed into a much shorter time span. So, most of the elements described felt familiar to stories I've read/heard about women in the US workforce. Think Mad Men, for instance. And yet, to see all of these elements overlap and coexist was strange, different.
But also, I'm yet again reminded of the difficulty in most cultures in world history (past or present) of recognizing why rape is wrong. Without a Judeo-Christian ethic of the dignity of human beings and their bodies, arriving at anything resembling genuine human dignity and the valuing of persons seems quite difficult.
I would have liked to get a deeper and more nuanced sense of South Korean culture, and how people (ideally all sorts... women, men, older people, younger people, etc etc) feel about the cultural changes. The book's presentation was so dominated by the adversarial paradigm (women pushing back against a patriarchal culture!) that it was hard to get much sense of the contours of the cultural conversation and how it's developing. But I've only read this first section. Maybe that will come through more as the book proceeds.
One assumes that the more egregious abuses will ebb as people get more used to professional women. When having female colleagues becomes normal for men, they'll probably start treating them more like colleagues. Rough going for the first set, of course, and time doesn't necessarily take care of the less-casual abuse case (in which a powerful man takes advantage of his position more covertly). But I expect the groping and public harassment will fall to a minimum. Where will that leave South Korea though, in terms of workplace culture, family life, expectations for women generally? Traditional gender norms and modern professional mores seem to have crashed together without much mediation. The book mostly frames what's happening as a feminist quest to overcome "a patriarchal culture" but there's a lot of complexity there that they may just barely be beginning to explore.