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.
This is a really good point! The writing style is really journalistic in a narrative kind of way - setting up striking scenes and simple narrative arcs with clear heroines and bad guys.
The long working hours and after-work drinking are clearly bad for men and their role in the family and for their health. Clearly those factors impacted the women more severely as they started to earn their way into more professional roles, and their children must have fared even worse. The prosecutor Seo is mentioned once as having a child, but no further details about where it was, who was caring for it while she worked long into the nights and weekends; I thought that a striking omission.
I noticed that as well. There was no mention of who was caring for her child though there was mention of her physical health being seriously threatened. I wanted more of the story outside the narrow through line of the legal battle narrative, a more complete picture of what the work culture costs families and how families are adapting and coping.
Feminists should face a "me too" movement, for pushing girls into the sexual revolution, abortion, and the rapes that abortion *enabled*. (Think of Plato's "ring of gyges" (popularized by Tolkien!) that enables men to do whatever evil they like without scrutiny... That's what abortion is! ); We should abolish abortion, if nothing else to stop rape!
I’ve been thinking in my prayer a lot about how we see what we want to see. We can see ourselves as victims, we can see things as black and white. Bringing it back to our topic, if you’re looking for a macho pig, you’ll find one.
I’m NOT saying that I’m seeing that in the case of South Korea. I was shocked at what I read. But it makes me wonder how many feminists in the west can’t understand levels of misogyny because they insist that they are facing the worst possible situation with themselves as victims. How can American women model 4b and equate themselves to the women in SK?
I just finished Malcolm "Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point" which looks at many areas of biology and social life where just such things happen, from viral panemics to rumors to social movements. He notes the role of "super-spreaders" who shed much more virus than most others, and "influencers" online who for sometimes obscure reasons "go viral" by analogy. Each case is an interesting puzzle. He also takes back some of the conclusions of his 2005 book "The Tipping Point" which came to understandings that turned out to be untrue or incomplete. He is quite a good writer, deeply researched but also in a journalistic style as is the current book under study.
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.
This is a really good point! The writing style is really journalistic in a narrative kind of way - setting up striking scenes and simple narrative arcs with clear heroines and bad guys.
The long working hours and after-work drinking are clearly bad for men and their role in the family and for their health. Clearly those factors impacted the women more severely as they started to earn their way into more professional roles, and their children must have fared even worse. The prosecutor Seo is mentioned once as having a child, but no further details about where it was, who was caring for it while she worked long into the nights and weekends; I thought that a striking omission.
I noticed that as well. There was no mention of who was caring for her child though there was mention of her physical health being seriously threatened. I wanted more of the story outside the narrow through line of the legal battle narrative, a more complete picture of what the work culture costs families and how families are adapting and coping.
Feminists should face a "me too" movement, for pushing girls into the sexual revolution, abortion, and the rapes that abortion *enabled*. (Think of Plato's "ring of gyges" (popularized by Tolkien!) that enables men to do whatever evil they like without scrutiny... That's what abortion is! ); We should abolish abortion, if nothing else to stop rape!
I’ve been thinking in my prayer a lot about how we see what we want to see. We can see ourselves as victims, we can see things as black and white. Bringing it back to our topic, if you’re looking for a macho pig, you’ll find one.
I’m NOT saying that I’m seeing that in the case of South Korea. I was shocked at what I read. But it makes me wonder how many feminists in the west can’t understand levels of misogyny because they insist that they are facing the worst possible situation with themselves as victims. How can American women model 4b and equate themselves to the women in SK?
I just finished Malcolm "Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point" which looks at many areas of biology and social life where just such things happen, from viral panemics to rumors to social movements. He notes the role of "super-spreaders" who shed much more virus than most others, and "influencers" online who for sometimes obscure reasons "go viral" by analogy. Each case is an interesting puzzle. He also takes back some of the conclusions of his 2005 book "The Tipping Point" which came to understandings that turned out to be untrue or incomplete. He is quite a good writer, deeply researched but also in a journalistic style as is the current book under study.