"Flowers of Fire" Book Club, Week Two: “Where Did All the Girls Go?”

Should women fight fire with fire?

This is the second 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. Last week’s introduction and Part One, “#MeToo, #WithYou,” is available here.

Patrick: And we’re back! This week’s section was a little shorter, which gives us the chance (I hope!) to dive into some of these dynamics in a little more depth. I thought we set up this chapter nicely by talking last week about the ways in which South Korea’s accelerated development path set them up for more acute gender cleavages.

Leah: What stuck with me from this chapter wasn’t just the accelerated social shifts, but the substantial, gender-based wounds in the country’s recent past. I was already familiar with the “comfort women” abuses under Japanese occupation in World War II, but not with the subsequent, state-run prostituting of Korean women to American servicemen.

I think this section was less tightly focused, with Jung trying to cover a lot of history briefly before spending more time on contemporary fights against domestic abuse and revenge porn. The fight to take down Soranet—a site that hosted everything from upskirting photos to gang rape videos—reminded me strongly of the recent, ghastly French case of the repeated rapes of Gisèle Pelicot by her husband and the men he recruited to violate her after he drugged her. He recruited his fellow rapists in a chatroom called “à son insu” or “without her knowledge.”

I think it really points to the danger of the internet as a place to connect people with predatory impulses and then bind them into an increasingly coarsening and violent community.

Patrick: In a sense, the Internet acts like a technological shift that increases the returns to scale for something like upskirt photos. Instead of a guy privately ogling someone on the subway, he can now take a photo, upload it, and participate in a perverse sense of community. It goes from gross on an individual scale to mass-produced, self-replicating objectification.

So then it’s not surprising when some of the women try to mirror back the online abuse they received somewhat fascinating, particularly that some men were apparently thin-skinned enough to really be bugged by the 🤏 meme for it to cause actual anger and unrest.

Leah: This was a really grim part of the book.

Patrick: Yeah, I realize I'm allowing my anti-Big Tech biases to shine through a little here, but part of me also wonders if things would be better if Korea wasn't one of the world leaders in average amount of time spent online!

It also reminded me of a bit in last year’s “Saturday Night,” which features the female SNL cast members rehearsing a sketch in which they are dressed construction workers, cat-calling a scantily-clad Dan Akroyd. The joke lies in the fact that, of course, it doesn’t work to role-reverse sexual comments, because women don’t have that implicit physical power over men.

Leah: I understand why there’s a kind of power in simply showing men how little they like being treated the way they treated women, but a real weakness of the mirroring that the women of Megalia engaged in is that they’re rooting their community/sense of solidarity in carrying out acts they know to be evil.

And yes, I think they justify it a little in thinking it doesn’t have the same sense of threat behind it when a woman does it—a woman who catcalls or mocks a man might make him uncomfortable, but he’s not worried she’ll follow him into an alley and overpower him. But one of Jung’s notable quotes (from a sociologist) is:

“Beyond such a radical message that ‘women are also humans,’ [these women] left the earth-shattering message that ‘women can hurt men, too.”

It’s a pretty hollow victory! It reminded me of nothing so much as Shylock’s big monologue in The Merchant of Venice which begins with the appeal to common humanity in “Hath not a Jew eyes?” but ends with mutuality in the form of mutual threat, “If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Not much to build fellow feeling on!

Patrick: No. And this sense that these practices and actions are just too ingrained to attack on an individual level stretches into the home, too. I found it interesting to hear her write about some of the opposition—the fact that when South Korea criminalized domestic violence in 1997, traditionalists opposed the law with the saying that “Rain and wind can come into a home, but law can never.”

This idea—that family law was encroaching on the pre-political institution of the family—is something that Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World touches on directly (though more about child-raising than spousal conflict.) Even today, you see shades of it in debates over parental rights and whether the law can or should say anything about what happens within the four walls of a home.

Leah: Almost no one wants the State Panopticon peering deeply into the family. Programs like Child Protective Services are meant to be an intervention of last resort (and, in practice, like other forms of policing, they tend to both over- and under-surveil the most vulnerable). But trusting this kind of intervention is hard in a pluralist society, when you know you don’t agree with your neighbor about what constitutes good parenting or abuse. There needs to be someone who can help get a wife or a child out of a dangerous situation, and when a nation or a neighborhood can’t agree on what danger is, it won’t be able to build or sustain these kinds of trusted institutions.

Discussion Questions:

• When have you measured your power by your ability to hurt someone back? How did that power change you or your circumstances?

• Should a state take a “broken windows” approach to so-called minor acts of sexual aggression like upskirting photos?

Next week’s discussion will focus on Part Three of Flowers of Fire, entitled “My Life Is Not Your Porn.”

Registration is now open for the book’s closing Zoom discussion, which will take place on Tuesday, March 11 at 1:00 PM eastern. Register today!