"Flowers of Fire," Week Three: “My Life is Not Your Porn”
South Korea's epidemic of spycam porn
This is the third 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. For previous installments see last two, “Where Did All the Girls Go?”, and week one, “#MeToo, #WithYou.”
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I think my Dworkin-levels hit a personal high reading this section. There are pretty ghastly descriptions of sextortion (including of minors) and self-harm in this week’s “My Life is Not Your Porn.”
Patrick T. Brown: Yeah, this one was not of the faint of heart. It would be all too easy to become paranoid about using public restrooms after this chapter.
Leah: And for women in South Korea, it’s not paranoia. There really is an epidemic of spycams taking video of women and girls in bathrooms, changing rooms, schools, apartments, etc. It’s at the point where there’s a specific word for the practice: molka. There’s also a whole shadow society and economy of swapping molka videos.
Patrick: What’s absolutely crazy to me is that this was a sufficiently widespread problem that the Korean government passed a law requiring smartphone camera to make an audible click as far back as 2004! And—like we talked about last week—it shouldn’t have taken a woman trying to fight back by making a spycam video of a male nude model in an art class to get prosecutors interested in throwing the book at perpetrators.
Leah: How does something so wicked become so prevalent? How has the US escaped it (so far) despite having cameras in every pocket and the ability to buy spycams from all over the world? It left me wondering if it’s a replicating behavior, like school shootings, and we’ve never had splashy enough incidents for ordinary people to think “this is something I could do…”
Patrick: I had the same thought. It wasn’t even like it was all a bunch of angry incels sneaking in cameras disguised as toilet paper rolls and coffee cups. She talks about the culprits being K-pop stars, firefighters, Olympic swimmers, even pastors and judges.
In a way, it’s the unholy consummation of two trends we’ve talked about already: a society drenched in tech, as we discussed last week, blended with the hyperspeed modernization of gender roles we talked about in Week One. Would women have to shout “my life is not your porn” if the best technology available to would-be lechers were Polaroids?
Leah: In the coming years, I think we’re going to run into more arguments about deepfake pornography as a kind of “safe and ethical” pornography. If the women are artificial, can you experiment with more violent, more degrading material and say it’s ok because no real women were harmed in its making? I’ve heard arguments already for artificially produced child sex abuse material working from the hypothesis that pornography saps men’s drive to experience their desires if they can fantasize in 4K detail.
Patrick: No, I cannot imagine it will perform a great service for gender relations when every college freshman in America has the ability to upload the face of the cute girl he can’t stop thinking about in English Lit onto a AI-powered personalized porn video, even if she never finds out.
This is much less about desire for women than hatred of women.
Leah: Well, and I don’t think the excerpts we see from molka forums bolster that view. A number of men are upfront that this is much less about desire for women than hatred of women. As one man writes, of watching spycam feeds from public toilet stalls:
Did you feel hurt when the above-average-looking bitch who just walked into the subway looked down at you as if looking at a cockroach, and turned her head in 0.1 second?
... Then watch the toilet molka.
... When you feel like your mind and feelings are hurt because women treat you like shit, go witness the basic barbarity they try to hide with all the prettying-up.
To be honest, this doesn’t just read like an anti-woman catechism—it’s just plain anti-human if you think women are degraded by using the bathroom… just like all of us do!
Patrick: See, this is where I wasn’t entirely convinced by Jung’s take. It reminded me a little bit of the initial wave of #MeToo reporting, when we all learned about Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and Louis C.K. doing things that ranged from incredibly inappropriate to absolutely criminal. You would see writers on the left and right making versions of the same argument that Jung makes here: #MeToo wasn’t about sex, it was about power.
And well, okay, it was about power—but it was also very much about sex, too. Obviously some Korean men were fueled by a feeling of superiority over being able to peep at women in situations of biological necessity. But we shouldn’t discount the sexual thrill, either—particularly since, per Jung’s reporting, the more popular posts featured details about the victim’s background, college, biography, etc.
The idea that you’re catching a revealing glimpse of the kind of girl you may see walking down the street, or chat with on the subway… it’s a distorted and degrading grasp at intimacy, but I wonder if some of the demand for this kind of content itself stems from a lack of healthy relations between the sexes, even non-romantic ones.
I wonder if some of the demand for this kind of content itself stems from a lack of healthy relations between the sexes, even non-romantic ones.
Leah: We’re both interested in the questions of how you safeguard (and, when necessary) restore a high-trust society. The ubiquity of molka made me really doubt this is possible in South Korea in this generation (or maybe the next, too). It’s definitely the most I’ve felt that 4B refusal was a proportionate response to what women faced.
Patrick: As I understand it, South Korea has less robust protections for freedom of speech online than we do (not that that’s always a good thing!). I wonder if it would be within the realm of political possibility there to place the onus on the uploader to verify consent before uploading any explicit imagery, rather than running to catch up after it’s already been spread to servers around the globe.
But in the here and now, the work of the all-female team of content moderators who are responsible for pruning the endless flow of molka would make a fascinating, if gut-wrenching, documentary. Even if they can’t succeed in taking the images down altogether, at least they’re able to get South Korea’s internet infrastructure to block them domestically. Is that, realistically, the best we can hope for?
What do you think the road back from this level of broken trust could look like?
Does government have a responsibility to take dramatic action (such as curbs on tech or free speech) when such drastic invasions of privacy are commonplace?
Next week’s discussion will focus on Part Four of Flowers of Fire, entitled “My Body.”
This section was so incredibly bleak. I had no conception of how widespread the problem of spycams was (is?) in South Korea, nor had I heard of the popularity of livestreams of sex slaves being subjected to violence and rape.
Somehow, I think I had gotten the impression that the rise in young male anti-feminist incels in South Korea was a reaction against the South Korean feminist movement in the wake of #MeToo. I hadn't realized how incredibly misogynistic (and truly, truly so--not in the flippant way that word is so often used) the culture was. I can't imagine growing up never, ever feeling safe from voyeurism and exploitation, even in my own home with the blinds drawn. It makes me so much more sympathetic to South Korean women who embrace 4B.
I was also shocked by the leniency that child pornography is met with in the South Korean legal system (and muted response from the culture at large). I often criticize the sexual culture in the US for seeing consent as the only determiner of sexual ethics, but at least we still uphold that bar, as low as it is, and still retain a broadly shared sense of repulsion at the sexual abuse of children.
I’m kind of glad I can follow this vicariously via sub stack. I’m not sure I’d have the stomach for this with three little girls and chronic sleep deprivation.
I would not discount the authoritarian politics culture of East Asia as being a major contributing factor to the prevalence of spy cams and the software to easily sift and target footage. China alone has generated huge demand for this kind of surveillance (and probably utilised a lot of South Korean manufacturing and market capacity) of ordinary citizens for ‘social cohesion’. South Korea is not that far out of an autocratic regime that fosters low trust society. The complete liberalisation and democratic reformation of South Korean politics and economy in the 1990s coincided with the rise of the internet and the beginning of the tech boom. I’m not surprised that the demand and normalisation of surveillance metasised into a particularly misogynistic bent. If the state has the right to spy on its citizens for “social cohesion” it’s only natural that men have the ‘right’ to spy on women for “social cohesion”..
That’s my theory and it’s probably mostly wrong. That’s enough of that rabbit hole for one day.