"Flowers of Fire," Week Four: “My Body”

How much can South Korea teach us about the broader feminist movement?

This is the fourth and final installment of our 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. Previously, we discussed the first three parts of the book, “Where Did All the Girls Go?”, “#MeToo, #WithYou,” and “My Life Is Not Your Porn.”

Patrick: Leah, despite the grim subject matter, this has been so much fun. I’m grateful to all who have joined in the comments or silently lurking along. Hopefully we can do it again sometime.

Leah: Next time a less depressing book though! I promise.

Patrick: In a lot of ways, this last part felt the most recognizable. Unrealistic beauty standards, imbalanced expectations on the homefront, fights over abortion, gender pay gaps—much of the ground covered in this section will be familiar to American readers, but here it’s all on steroids.

Leah: Here’s where I really missed a few of the specific-to-South Korea factors that never quite made it into the book. We heard about sexual harassment in school, but I think it’s hard for a reader of this book to understand the cram school dynamics. We got post-work drinking (and harassment) culture, but not the narrow focus on chaebol jobs. And we got relatively little on how living across a DMZ from your sundered countrymen whose leader wants to kill you shapes society.

The book left me wanting to know a lot more about South Korea, specifically, and less interested in seeing it as a particularly vivid example of a universal women’s struggle.

Patrick: I think for me this chapter really underscored how South Koreans suffer from a culture that is hanging onto traditional Confucian patriarchy and Western-style consumerism. On one the hand, a stultifying and limiting ideal of how a woman should act; on the other, an unrealistic standard for what she should look like. A culture with an intensely meritocratic rat race as well as a large gender gap. Comparatively low rates of female labor force participation and the lowest birth rates in the world. It’s an unsustainable combination—literally.

Leah: It also left me grateful for one of the strengths of America’s multiculturalism. If the states are laboratories of democracy, our many (conflicting!) cultures offer many experiments in what beauty/professionalism/femininity look like.

South Korea has been homogenous enough to enforce a no-eyeglasses norm for women, even when they struggle to see without them. In America, that would be hard to do! I’m always going to see some women who are oriented to a very different ideal than I am. I get the chance to see different ways of living and evaluate them. Meanwhile, in South Korea, you get a campaign to strip a Korean archer of her Olympic medals because she competed with short hair.

Patrick: Yes, 100 percent! I didn’t expect to come out of this book discussion with a greater appreciation for good old-fashioned American individualism, but the straightjacket of what it takes to just enter the public eye as a Korean woman as described in these pages… sheesh.

Leah: The narrowness of South Korean appearances is grim. Plastic surgery is common; girls in school wore medical masks (even pre-Covid) if they weren’t wearing enough makeup to be “presentable.” Even though it’s a culture of hyper visibility, it reminded me of these two panels on mandatory hijab from Persepolis:

Patrick: Well, and it goes beyond appearance, too. American pluralism—while perhaps not as quickly as some of our more vocal feminist friends would like—has increasingly allowed for non-traditional ways of divvying up the responsibilities of home life. Meanwhile, Korean moms refer to themselves as playing “dokbak parenting,” referring a card game in which one person ends up with all the losses.

Leah: We haven’t touched yet on South Korea’s unusual history of abortion—alternately banned or aggressively encouraged. In 1978, 2.75 abortions were performed for every live birth. By 1979 nearly half of all married women had had at least one abortion. It feels like this isn’t something that can just be gotten over. The government spent a lot of time and effort encouraging parents to see their children as a threat to home and nation!

Patrick: No news story about South Korea’s bottom-of-the-barrel fertility rate today should be allowed to be published without stressing this history. Again—a robust two cheers for America’s libertarian streak, even as it verges into hyper-individualism at times, which has protected us from that kind of grim legacy of direct state coercion.

Leah: The book presumes a universality to these movements that I don’t think the text supports. Near the end, the author is frustrated with South Korean feminists who won’t embrace other “gender minorities” (trans-identifying males) as sisters. As we discussed previously, for South Korean women, being victimized by men’s spycams in supposed single-sex spaces was already a common occurrence. It beggared belief that the author didn’t see a reason that many South Korean feminists didn’t feel comfortable with a broad gender movement.

Patrick: And that was another reason this chapter ultimately made me feel a little more hopeful about the U.S. avoiding a “4B”-style breakdown (and, not coincidentally, slightly more offended by feminists here comparing their situation to the downright depressing gender relations we’ve spent the last four weeks reading about.) It’s of course hard to generalize, but if I hard to characterize the median position in the U.S., it might favor keeping women’s sports and locker rooms safe for biological females, prosecuting sexual violence, allowing for a variety of ways of expressing femininity, and encouraging a soft sort of gender egalitarianism (recall that men, while they don’t do as much housework as women on average, do a lot more housework than their father or grandfathers!)

Where do you see hope at the end of this book?

What in America’s culture are you newly grateful for?

What would you nominate for a future FD book club and who would you like to discuss it?

Don’t forget to register for our closing Zoom discussion of Flowers of Fire, which will take place on Tuesday, March 11th, at 1:00 PM Eastern. Leah and Patrick will be joined by FD featured authors

Eliza Mondegreen

,

Spencer Klavan

,

Rachel Lu

,

Nadya Williams

, and FD Editor

Serena Sigillito

. All are welcome, whether or not you've been able to read along with us.